Review: Terra – The Magic Place, Bolzano

Terra - The Magic Place

Terra – The Magic Place

In England we’d call a restaurant “B*tchshack” or “Dumb Waiter” before we’d ever dream of naming it something as corny as “The Magic Place” but today we’re not in England, we’re in northern Italy. And at the very end of a winding mountain road through the pine forests, overlooking an idyllic Alpine valley, is Terra – The Magic Place. It’s a Relais & Chateau hotel with only ten rooms, and a 2* Michelin restaurant. We came for a treat. : )

And we got a treat. Our room was a beauty, and the whole stay a real multi-sensory experience with evocative wild scents, textured surfaces and views of forest or mountain all around. The Wellness Suite includes a jacuzzi with a view and a sauna room including a huge basket of hay that fills the steamy hot air with fragrance. And with only ten rooms you often feel like you have the place to yourself. But you’ll want to hear about the meal…

Amuse bouches

Amuse bouches

It’s a many-course tasting menu with a genuine emphasis on local ingredients from the mountains and a strong theme of wild herbs running through it. We started off with five snacks, as jewel-like and beautiful as you’d expect at this level. That said, none of them were really the absolute flavour-bombs that I’d like from a snack, so more a triumph of presentation over punch.

There was a bit more of this with the first dish, rainbow trout two ways. The cured trout was a delicious piece, but needlessly wrapped in a tube of gel. The royal of trout was perfect though, warm and rich but balanced nicely with salty roe and gratings of dried trout.

After this, the flavours got bolder and better as the meal went on. Really bravely burnt brioche, starkly black with smoked eel and clove blossoms. Delicious sourdough with good butter but even better pine oil. I love pine oil with bread (or at least, now I do). An extremely splendid raviolo filled with pure mountain herbs and glazed sticky-umami-sweet. Then a piece of perfectly cooked mountain char with a hum of wild garlic and other herbs. Another raviolo, this time with berries and beetroot inside, paddling in a really deeply perfect broth of St George’s mushroom.

Dessert

Dessert

The main course of venison was a real high point. The beautiful pink piece of back had a fine gamey flavour that worked well with the sweetly herbal sauce, balanced on sturdy pieces of simple kohlrabi. The sticky shoulder was a more gorgeous and memorable bite, shaped into a ball covered with geranium petals glazed a dramatic red colour by a really splendid blueberry-barbecue glaze. Desserts are kept nicely light after all that, with an array of fluffy stones, green gel sheets, white shards and snow. Bright, fresh, mountain herb flavours come clearly through all the desserts – even the petit fours afterwards – and nicely tie together the theme of the meal.

So I loved my meal at Terra, and I can’t possibly separate the splendid cooking from the beautiful surroundings and the very sensory stay in their lovely rooms, but I guess that’s rather the point… I can’t imagine many people wanting to put in a 45 minute taxi ride each way to eat here. It’s expensive, but I’ll remember it for all the right reasons, so that makes it good value in my book. It’s a magic place.

Venison with hibiscus leaf and BBQ blueberry sauce

Venison with hibiscus leaf and BBQ blueberry sauce

Meadowsweet cordial

You need…

  • 1 litre of water
  • 250 g sugar
  • Loads of meadowsweet (about 50 heads?)
  • 1 lemon

Bring the water to the boil with 125g sugar and the lemon juice, then switch off. Strip all the flowers from their stalks and add to the water, which should end up with a thick wodge of flowers floating on it. Bring the water back to simmer point then switch it off. Infuse overnight. Next day strain out the flowers, add the rest of the sugar, boil for 5 minutes and then when cooled put in a sterilised bottle.

Review: Muse, Cheltenham

Muse, Cheltenham

Muse, Cheltenham

When we walked in and scoped out the decor, the clientele and the menus I think we both felt reasonably confident that we’d pegged Muse. There’s a kind of up-market provincial brasserie with over-enthusiastic decor and well-dressed middle age punters where the menu is typically brave and full of all the right words (including last year’s food trends) and the execution is far less accomplished than the ambition.

So we were delighted to discover… but no, it was not to be that story. We were bang on the money, and left disappointed and over £100 poorer.

The free amuse was a nicely spiced pakora nugget and a swig of watermelon gazpacho that actually had us thinking we might be heading the right way. But my pissaladiere was a sad affair of nut-brown pastry with not enough confit onion on it and a quartet of overpowering anchovy fillets. Maureen’s samosa chat had a good, spicy samosa at its heart but was then incredibly mean on the sev and bizarrely lacking the yogurt sauce. Thus, twas a dry lump of a thing.

Taking the pissaladiere

Taking the pissaladiere

Maureen picked chalk stream trout and mussels in a moilee sauce. Well, this was a big bit of trout and had been cruelly cooked to fully opaque dryness. The moilee was thin and lacked any kind of punch. Cooking down for an older English audience? Maybe, maybe not. My slow braised duck leg was pretty good, with a nice deep wine gravy and a mixture of peas and salty bacon on the side. I’d been attracted by the hasselback potatoes. Surely the idea of painstakingly cutting lots of slices through the potato is to get more crisp crunchiness? Sadly this was just a potato, that had been sliced a lot. Baby gem lettuce charred on the grill must have seemed a good idea, but here the result was a kinda wilt-y burned thing.

Two courses will be around £30 each before drinks (we didn’t bother looking at desserts). They make a pretty decent cocktail and the wine list is reasonable if not inspiring. But the cooking is just nowhere near the ambition of the menu.

Very well cooked trout and moilee

Very well cooked trout and moilee

Review: The Set, Brighton

The Set, Brighton

The Set, Brighton

The Set is a tasting menu place in Brighton that has somehow escaped my notice for a few years, even though it sets out its stall as “meat, umami and fat driven cooking” which is, frankly, my kind of thing. It was time to rectify this.

They take over a place called Cafe Rust in the evening a few nights every week. It’s a cool looking cafe, with just the kind of stripped-back quirky industrial boho antique chic that Brighton adores. The menu is fourteen courses, all small and balanced so you end up well fed but not stuffed.

And we enjoyed some really good dishes, with plenty of flavour as promised.

Tempura sea bream

Tempura sea bream

Some of the best early bites included a piece of sea bream tempura’d in a crispy and bubbly batter with a drizzle of okonomyaki-style sauce over. Lovely crunch around the full-flavoured nugget of fish. The beef bearnaise was a thin slice of raw ex-dairy cow laid over a little beignet full of warm bearnaise. This was just scrumptious.

Then they do a fun thing with bread, in this case a toasted brioche, where the butter tastes exactly like a McDonalds cheeseburger from your childhood. I think it’s accomplished with beef fat, finely diced gherkin and a bit of processed cheese, but it’s still fun and clever.

The next series of courses covers fish, shellfish, beef and chicken. The cod in lobster bisque was the standout dish: a cloud-like clod of translucent cod set in a lake of dark and massively flavourful bisque. The scallop tikka masala had a lovely gravy but the scallop was a bit overcooked. Oxtail dauphinoise combined both elements into one block of starchy, creamy, oxtail-y goodness and a side dish of tomatoes in bright herb oil was a clever pairing to lift the whole.

Oxtail dauphinoise!

Oxtail dauphinoise!

I need to shout-out the puds as well. Yuzu and chilli sorbet with rhubarb (a bit lost) was one of the great palate cleansers. The main pud was a hot pot of miso-flavoured bitter chocolate, made bravely bitter enough that it was a truly great flavour-packed indulgence rather than an over-sweet plod. Nice clean mango pavlova to finish.

This was a really strong tasting menu for £85 each, I’ve plodded through a lot less interesting and capable for the same price or more. We took the wine pairing but this wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as the menu – I’d pick a bottle if I came back. And I would come back, because The Set is properly inventive and just my kind of cooking.

Very good beef on a bearnaise bomb

Very good beef on a bearnaise bomb

Review: Cinnamon Club, Westminster

Cinnamon Club

Cinnamon Club

The Cinnamon Club certainly feels like the kind of dining room where you may spot a couple of famous faces. Partly it’s the location, in a grand building along one of the film-set roads in Westminster, not far from the heart of government. Partly it’s the restaurant, with its grand dining room and polite, excellent yet unobtrusive service. It’s all very comfortable and the food is splendid. They’ve had plenty of practise: they’ve been here more than 20 years.

We go a la carte. My starter of Anjou squab is a beautiful chewy pink breast, smoked in cloves. There’s a crispy roll of shredded leg meat, equally good and packed full of earthy spices. Two or three bright chutneys and sauces add to the flavours. Maureen’s okra stuffed with peanut and jaggery is a lighter dish, on a puddle of curry yogurt. It’s delicious and a new take on okra for me, though not quite as knock-out as the pigeon.

Squab

Squab

My main of pork belly is another smash. It’s cooked “Koorgi style” and I’ve no idea what that means but perhaps slow-cooked and then pan-fried? The meat is dark and caramelised, deep with more spices than I can identify. There’s a lovely tower of masala mash potatoes with curry leaf flavours and a green mango and chilli sambal to give some brightness. Maureen’s clove-smoked lamb is an excellent piece with a punchy marinade. The sweetcorn yogurt sauce is an interesting accompaniment, good but not brilliant.

We find room for pudding. A black cardamom brulee is just as delicious as I’d hoped, with a silken smooth creme and a good hum of smoky cardamom running through every mouthful. Coconut phirni is a light jelly tower of rich coconut with good flavours of pineapple and lime in the sambal and sorbet that come with it. Very top puds.

This is fine Indian dining, think around £55 per person before drinks for the a la carte (there is a £90 tasting menu). The wine list has a great range and we found two good bottles. For a special treat in lovely surroundings, Cinnamon Club is great, the food a true fine-dining take on unabashed Indian spices.

Koorgi pork

Koorgi pork