Truffle Gourmet, Club Street

You know the places where you hold back on the bread, saving precious space for the good stuff that you know is going come. Well, this (49 Club Street) was not one of them. I think they are trying too hard to appear swanky and in the process, make up some for the lacking substance. Place is helmed by a Takashi Okuno, formerly of L’Operetta.

These were complimentary crostinis. I don't remember much of them.

And then some pan fried polenta with caramelized apple and blue cheese. The portions were puny. Each piece was probably double the size of my thumbnails and two of them probably a little less than a mouthful, but I enjoyed the flavors. The corn from the polenta, the tart sweetness from the tiny chunks of apple and the pungent blue cheese worked. But.....I wouldn't pay what they were charging to eat them again though.

This is grilled tomino cheese with truffled honey and jamón ibérico. Pretty penny charged for the cheese which was pretty tasty actually. But this isn't exactly any showcase of what the restaurant could do since it was pretty much the ingredients that spoke for themselves. Frying cheese doesn't require so much skills.

That's their uovo fritto. Breaded and fried half cooked egg with black truffle cream sauce. I didn't quite like the fact that they had to emphasise that they had added truffle crumbs (they actually called those shaven truffle) on top of the truffle cream that's suppose to be in the dish. Especially when those truffle flavors left some to the imagination. But the egg was rather nicely done.

The tajarin with truffle left even more of the truffle flavors to imagination. The rest of it was pretty much butter and sage and the pasta was unforgivably limp. I understand that this place was rather new. But it's been a month since they've opened and if they cannot do this pasta in a month, they'll never be able to do it. Overpriced and waste of money.

Fortunately, their beef ravioli was still decent. Think there was truffle oil in there too. Couldn't really be bothered any further at this point. 

Here's a first and a last visit.