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Spice Girl
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Posts: 1033
Location: Lisboa
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 Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2006 2:24 pm Post subject: Chefe portugues faz sucesso em Londres |
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Um Chefe português - Nuno Mendes - é responsável por um restaurante que está a fazer algum sucesso em Londres:
http://www.bacchus-restaurant.co.uk/
| Quote: |
Is this the most futuristic pub in Britain?
Cheese ice cream, apple air and a pint of lager - how an east end boozer is reinventing pub grub
Jay Rayner
Guardian Unlimited
Photograph of Bacchus owner Philip Mossop and chef Nuno Mendes by John Reardon
A few weeks ago, a news report appeared in a London newspaper headed 'Boil in the bag put on menu as haute cuisine'. According to the story, which fair bubbled with outrage, leading chefs were now serving what amounted to 'convenience food' because it had been cooked using a new method called 'sous vide', in which ingredients are vacuum-packed and then boiled 'for up to 48 hours'. A number of chefs, including Heston Blumenthal at the three-Michelin-star Fat Duck in Bray, had apparently 'admitted' to using it.
Article continues
In Hoxton, East London, a young businessman called Philip Mossop read the story and his heart sank. 'It was just sensationalist journalism,' he says now. 'And it was so inaccurate.' Nobody boils stuff for 48 hours, he says. If anything, sous vide is now used for low-temperature cooking, in a technique pioneered by the likes of Ferran Adrià at El Bulli and by Blumenthal, because it gets the most from ingredients. Mossop had good reason to be irritated. Bravely, he had just launched a new restaurant which was attempting to bring a style of modernist, avant-garde food usually found only in big-ticket Michelin-starred places, at gastropub prices - literally. His future food was being served in a gussied-up old boozer. And at the heart of the techniques being used in the kitchen is sous vide.
Bacchus is unlike any other gastropub in Britain. Sure, the makeover is familiar. The bar has been retained, as well as a little of the Victorian panelling - in another life, the Bacchus (as it was then known) appeared in the movie The Krays - but the rest is all blond wood and clean lines. The modernist menu, though, is unique. There are no gastropub staples; no lamb shanks, fish cakes or sticky toffee puddings. Instead, it is the place for scallops with green apple air, cauliflower 'cous cous' and pine nuts. Slices of 24-hour cooked pork jowl come with langoustine, leek and nashi pear and at pudding, a pear cake is served with ice- cream of dolcelatte, the great Italian blue cheese. Unlike the Fat Duck, which charges £85 for the full menu, three courses at Bacchus costs little more than £30. It is, Mossop says rather memorably, 'Fine Dining in Trainers'. It is an ambitious idea. But then Mossop, who is only 25, is a very ambitious man. He admits that, until he came to London from Burnley five years ago, he had no particular background in food, save for a few holiday jobs in hotel kitchens. He was instead an entrepreneur, who managed to make his first million at the age of 24 through the perhaps unglamorous business of waste recycling (a significant six-figure share of which he has invested in Bacchus). But from the moment he started working in the recycling business he was also eating out, at first only in gastropubs, later in Michelin-starred places. 'The first real big one was Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's,' he says now. 'I was blown away.' A keen amateur cook, he decided he would like to have a place of his own, and assumed it would have to be a standard gastropub.
'Then I went to the Fat Duck,' he says wide-eyed, as so many often are. 'And that changed everything.' Blumenthal's menu of oysters with passion fruit, low-temperature cooked pigeon and smoky bacon ice-cream, excited him like no other. 'I began doing research. I discovered that there was this man called Ferran Adrià who was doing something like this in Spain,' he says now, mocking his own lost innocence. 'That there was another place called WD-50 in New York.' He started to travel and to eat. 'I thought it was really exciting. But I also knew I wanted to do something local, not West End. The fact is I still begrudge spending £400 for two people in a grand restaurant. I find it elitist.'
What he wanted, he says now, is to serve 'avant- garde food at a reasonable price. I couldn't see why it couldn't be done. After all, it doesn't cost more to cook like this.' He already had his site, having set his heart on the knackered old Bacchus, at the end of Hoxton Street, which even its admirers would accept will never be on anybody's sightseeing tour.
The problem was finding the right chef. He met over a dozen. They did things for him with sea bass and cannon of lamb. They did reduced French-style sauces. 'It was perfectly nice, but completely uninteresting.' Then, one day, he stumbled across Nuno Mendes, a Portuguese-born chef who had worked at El Bulli, happened to live around the corner from him in Shoreditch and who was desperate to be given his own show. 'We went back to my flat and cooked for about a week. He was amazing, because of the things he could do with a conventional kitchen.' Mendes, who is 33, looks the part, too: a sail of black fringe hanging down, carefully sculpted beard, and dark eyes that sparkle when he talks about the dishes he's preparing. 'The new food is a breath of fresh air,' he says in his American-accented English after years in New York and New Mexico. 'We can play with food, we can have fun with it. But I also like making ingredients as good as they can be.'
One weekday afternoon he leads me into the small open kitchen at the back of the pub where his non-English brigade is preparing for that evening's dinner. He shows me a piece of pearly-white vac-packed cod, with a little butter and seasoning. So will he be boiling this for 48 hours like that newspaper article suggested? He laughs. 'We'll cook it for 13 minutes in the water bath,' he says. 'The texture is amazing. Sous vide for me is not about changing expectations. It's about making ingredients taste as good as they can.'
Still, it's clear this is not like other kitchens. Nothing is roasting down in the oven. There is no stockpot bubbling on the stove, only a big pan of milk for the dolcelatte ice-cream. I raise an eye-brow at the thought of a blue-cheese ice-cream. 'Really all we're doing is serving a version of the cheese plate you get with pear. Only here the cheese is part of an ice cream.' I ask him about the green apple 'air' on the menu. 'We do that using lecithin. It's an emulsifier which makes foams come up perfectly.' And then he says, 'The thing you have to understand, though, is that we're not scientists. We're cooks. The technology is simply about control and consistency.'
That evening I am served a tasting menu by the young and enthusiastic team. There is a Bacchus Bubble Bath cocktail to start, its foaming head fragrant with lemon grass. There is a taster of apple purée with a sprightly foam of yogurt and the sudden crunch of salt. Mackerel comes with tart rhubarb purée and crisp crumbs of gingerbread, building up a curious interplay of salt and sweet. A single fat scallop, cooked sous vide, has a soft, gel-like quality beneath a pillow of that green apple air. Cinnamon-rubbed pork comes with shards of tarragon-flavoured crisp caramel, and there's a small piece of fillet steak with a grain-mustard crust and luxurious buttery truffled potatoes. Finally there is that dolcelatte ice-cream with the pear cake.
Does everything work? No, not entirely. Ingredients cooked sous vide are famed for their softness. Meats can come out incredibly tender. But what they can lack - like that jellified scallop - is texture: a bit of crunch, a bit of contrast. And sometimes Mendes likes to throw one ingredient too many onto the plate, a little flowery rosewater into a sauce, for example, a dark smear of soy sauce beneath the pork. But, for the most part, it is delicious and never less than intriguing. It plays with your head in the way lamb shanks and fish cakes never can.
Mendes recognises what he does may be challenging. 'But I stand behind it 100 per cent. I'm not just trying to shock people. This is what I believe in.' Trying to get others to believe is a different matter. Already some of the restaurant critics have declared themselves baffled. Mendes is philosophical. 'We accept that some people will like it and some won't.'
Clearly there are enough people who like it. Bookings are up and they have introduced a lunch service. And last month, a restaurant critic rallied to their cause, giving Bacchus four out of five stars, declaring Mendes and Mossop complete stars and praising their 'lovely, adventurous little restaurant'. The review appeared in the very same newspaper which had run a news story declaring sous vide the enemy of good eating. The irony is not lost on Mossop, who sees it as an inevitable part of the strong reactions that a restaurant like his is always bound to encourage. For now, though, he says, they are simply looking to the future. Much like their food.
Bacchus, 177 Hoxton Street, London N1 (020 7613 0477); www.bacchus-restaurant.co.uk.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/foodmonthly/futureoffood/story/0,,1969448,00.html |
Parece que até o A A Gill gostou e lhe deu 4 estrelas num máximo de 5.
| Quote: | ...But if you insist on going out, you might like to try Bacchus, in Hoxton. The Blonde and I went with Roger and Ellie Guy, who, in the true spirit of the season, had bid a saintly sum for desperate children — or, rather, on behalf of desperate children — to go on a restaurant review with me. Hoxton is fashionable and swanky because it’s ugly, miserable and poor. It is the unlucky recipient of the most insouciantly patronising snobbery, the artistic and intellectual belief that gritty, unhappy, misshapen, thick, impoverished places are intrinsically more real and worthwhile than sophisticated, beautiful, charming, rich ones.
Bacchus is a made-over pub. It still has that unmistakably pubby shape that makes it feel like a theatre set without a performance. There are bare tables with bent-ply chairs of such ergonomically sadistic and ferocious discomfort that they must be incredibly important and valuable. The table settings are of a spartan utilitarianism. And if you’d asked me what sort of food we were about to get, I’d have said vegan stew or budget Thai.
Then the menu came. And it was as complete a surprise as I’ve had while sitting down. Scallops, green-apple air, cauliflower, pine nuts. Sweet-potato velouté, spiced onion cake, greek yoghurt foam, tarragon lemon tuile. Pork-jowl langoustine, leek, nashi pear. Get you! Sophisticated, elegant and delicate. The arty, Hoxton word would be “poncey”.
Between us, we ate pretty much everything on the menu. Happily, Roger and Ellie know an enormous amount about food and eat out in far more restaurants than I do. Collectively, we were particularly taken by the warm cod, sofrito tradicional, espuma de bacalao and honey; the lamb loin, vanilla parsnips, fig brûlée and cacao oil; and the cinnamon-rubbed pork, leeks, mangosteen, wasabi, wild rocket and salty caramel. Given that there was a bit too much spume, air and foam for my liking, the food was remarkably inventive and cleverly thought out. The flavours were at worst interesting and at best inspired.
Most of it was cooked sous vide, which is essentially boil in the bag, but boiled in a snakeskin Kelly bag rather than the colostomy you get from Tesco. This means that individual flavours are retained in a spectral brilliance, and the texture of things — particularly fish and soft meat — is winsome. It was all arranged with the elegant whimsy of a Japanese parrot’s funeral.
The only way really to describe this food is “gay”. Gayissimus. Gayomorphic. Spumingly, frothingly queer. It was proudly, poncily, deliciously, lispingly effete. It was Fotherington-Thomas reads Manley Hopkins. It was a Tom of Finland electric toothbrush. It was the Blues and Royals up the Rambert ballet. And finding it in Hoxton was like finding Tom Ford in Millets. Consequently, the place was nakedly empty, except for us and a table of scowly, sneery local conceptual-video poets, who looked like they’d been tricked into doing Doris Day karaoke.
The prices are an astonishing £24 for two courses or £28 for three, which easily makes it the best value for this quality of cuisine in London. So, apart from the room, the furniture, the location and the locals, we couldn’t have loved it more. Though I could have done without the dolcelatte cheesy ice cream. A little too graphic for my pale pink screech.
Bacchus
Four stars
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2104-2468632.html |
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Paulo Rodrigues
Joined: 18 Jan 2005
Posts: 1329
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| Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 2:40 pm Post subject: |
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Há um thread no eGgullet, onde este restaurante é o favorito de alguns... http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=96700
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É sempre preferível uma boa sardinha, a uma má lagosta. ( Ferran Adrià ) |
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José Tomáz Mello Breyner
Joined: 27 Nov 2002
Posts: 2950
Location: Estoril
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| Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 2:55 pm Post subject: |
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Cara Spice
O Chefe é Português, mas certamente não teve a menor influência na elaboração da Carta de Vinhos. Nem um Portozito na ementa.
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É bom ser importante, mas...é mais importante ser bom. |
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jms
Joined: 07 Sep 2003
Posts: 1277
Location: Porto
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| Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 3:20 pm Post subject: |
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| José Tomáz Mello Breyner wrote: | Cara Spice
O Chefe é Português, mas certamente não teve a menor influência na elaboração da Carta de Vinhos. Nem um Portozito na ementa. |
Mas, Zé Tomaz, tem dois vinhos portugueses, de Pegões! Um tinto e um branco.
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Ser gourmet é uma aprendizagem contínua.
jorge saraiva |
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PortoVintage
Joined: 24 Feb 2005
Posts: 500
Location: Porto
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| Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 3:21 pm Post subject: |
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| José Tomáz Mello Breyner wrote: | Cara Spice
O Chefe é Português, mas certamente não teve a menor influência na elaboração da Carta de Vinhos. Nem um Portozito na ementa. |
Incompreensivelmente, não tem Portos. Mas tem dois representantes lusos: Pegões Colheita Selecionada, Branco e Tinto...
De notar que não há indicação dos anos na lista de vinhos... Estranho.
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Luís Brás |
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Spice Girl
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Posts: 1033
Location: Lisboa
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| Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 3:39 pm Post subject: |
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| José Tomáz Mello Breyner wrote: | Cara Spice
O Chefe é Português, mas certamente não teve a menor influência na elaboração da Carta de Vinhos. Nem um Portozito na ementa. |
Pois parece que não... |
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Paulo Rodrigues
Joined: 18 Jan 2005
Posts: 1329
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| Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 4:12 pm Post subject: |
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| PortoVintage wrote: | | José Tomáz Mello Breyner wrote: | Cara Spice
O Chefe é Português, mas certamente não teve a menor influência na elaboração da Carta de Vinhos. Nem um Portozito na ementa. |
Incompreensivelmente, não tem Portos. Mas tem dois representantes lusos: Pegões Colheita Selecionada, Branco e Tinto...
De notar que não há indicação dos anos na lista de vinhos... Estranho. |
Por vezes, a carta que vem no site, é apenas um exemplo que difere da carta do restaurante.
Mas penso que o importante neste tópico, é o facto de um chefe português estar a ter sucesso em Londres, e não, se o restaurante tem este ou aquele vinho.....
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É sempre preferível uma boa sardinha, a uma má lagosta. ( Ferran Adrià ) |
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Spice Girl
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Posts: 1033
Location: Lisboa
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| Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2007 10:06 am Post subject: |
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Hoje no DN
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Chefe português ensaia a cozinha molecular
Hugo Bordeira
Em Londres
Gelado assado com cebola? Porco com lagostins? Bacalhau enrolado em pele de frango? Lombo de cordeiro com figos caramelizados, algas japonesas e café quente?
É pouco provável encontrar estes pratos num restaurante perto de si, já que eles só são confeccionados no Bacchus Restaurant, em Londres. Falamos de um estabelecimento que tem conquistado elogios da imprensa britânica especializada, graças à cozinha inovadora posta em prática pelo chefe português Nuno Mendes, de 33 anos.
Algumas carnes chegam a ser cozinhadas durante mais de 20 a 30 horas, numa procura cirúrgica e quase obsessiva pelo sabor certo. Talvez por isso, alguns jornais como o Guardian ou o Sunday Times já lhe chamaram pratos experimentais ou de laboratório. No entanto, Nuno Mendes prefere definir o conceito como "cozinha molecular ao estilo Michelin", onde todos os alimentos são confeccionados a baixas temperaturas e sempre num ambiente controlado.
"Este método permite retirar o melhor sabor dos produtos, que ficam mais moles e saborosos", explica. "No fundo, é uma culinária moderna com muita atenção às texturas dos ingredientes e à combinação de sabores", inspirada em restaurantes de luxo como o El Bulli (Girona) ou o Fat Duck (Londres), mas com preços acessíveis. Tudo isto é alcançado através da utilização de equipamentos adaptados de laboratórios, como uma máquina de vácuo (que permite retirar até 99% do ar de sacos ou embalagens e prolongar o tempo de conservação dos alimentos) ou um pacojet (que transforma ingredientes frescos em gelados).
"Até agora 80 por cento do feedback que temos recebido é positivo. Não é o tipo de restaurante a que se fique indiferente porque ou se ama ou se detesta." Na verdade, os pratos do Bacchus estão a anos- -luz da comida utilitária do dia-a-dia. "Muitos foram adaptados dos vários sítios onde já andei, mas em termos gerais há uma grande influência ibérica e asiática", afirma.
O estabelecimento abriu em Setembro e está situado numa rua um pouco sombria, afastada do centro. Não é, aliás, o tipo de restaurante que se espera encontrar numa zona como Hoxton, mas isso também não acontece por acaso. "Tanto eu como o Philip Mossop [sócio maioritário] queríamos abrir porque vivemos nesta zona", explica. Aliás, o espaço era um antigo pub vitoriano, com 250 anos, que agora está decorado em madeira com um estilo minimalista e até algo espartano. Por outro lado, a ideia também não é encher o olho com uma decoração faustosa nem com pratos esteticamente muito trabalhados, já que a grande aposta é feita na cozinha.
Quando deixou Portugal a caminho dos Estados Unidos, em 1992, o projecto de vida de Nuno Mendes passava por fazer o curso de Biologia Marítima. No entanto, sempre gostou de cozinhar e em 1996 decidiu enveredar profissionalmente por esse caminho, frequentando um curso na Califórnia.
Entretanto, já passou pelo El Buli e, em Londres, esteve quase dois anos no Casino Fifty, de St. James. Quando o sócio Philip Mossop o convidou para apresentar um projecto de culinária para um novo estabelecimento, apostou na cozinha molecular. Dizem os entendidos na matéria que foi uma aposta acertada.
http://dn.sapo.pt/2007/01/29/boa_vida/c
hefe_portugues_ensaia_a_cozinha_mol.html |
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Spice Girl
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Posts: 1033
Location: Lisboa
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