Latest news with #Bordelaise
Tatler Asia
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Tatler Asia
Gordon Ramsay's Bar & Grill brings the classic Wellington to new heights
Gordon Ramsay's first Malaysian outpost sets a new benchmark for refined British cuisine in the city A name familiar to everyone, Gordon Ramsay brings elevated British fare to Sunway Resort Hotel with his first Malaysian venture. The restaurant's space is a showcase of both British sophistication and contemporary luxury, dominated by rich red and forest green hues and a 24 karat gold leaf ceiling for a touch of opulence. The best of British culture is celebrated here, and loudly at that. Set foot into the restaurant and it will prove difficult to ignore monochrome portraits by photographers Terry O'Neill and Arthur Steel featuring the likes of Sean Connery, Mick Jagger, Twiggy, and more. In case you missed it: Inside the first Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill in the Philippines Above Executive Chef, Giles Langford (Image: Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill) At the helm of Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill is executive chef Giles Langford who cut his chops in kitchens across the UK, Middle East, and Asia. With a background in agriculture and horticulture, his dishes exemplify a profound appreciation for premium ingredients, particularly evident in Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill's lineup of dishes. Photo 1 of 3 Beef wellington (Image: Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill) Photo 2 of 3 Beef wellington (Image: Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill) Photo 3 of 3 Their famous apple tarte tartin (Image: Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill) The menu here is much like its decor and places familiar British favourites in the spotlight. The menu's crown jewel is undoubtedly its signature beef wellington, a Gordon Ramsay classic. A perfectly seared beef fillet is brushed in English mustard and encased in mushroom duxelles and puff pastry before being served alongside pomme puree and Bordelaise jus. Its Hanwoo beef sirloin is also bound to impress, finished in the restaurant's Josper charcoal oven for added complexity and accompanied by braised Roscoff onions and black garlic puree. Dessert is not an afterthought either, with the restaurant playing host to an indulgent apple tarte tatin made with only Pink Lady apples. Photo 1 of 4 The opulent bar (Image: Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill) Photo 2 of 4 The Chelsea room, up to 10 pax (Image: Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill) Photo 3 of 4 Step into opulent dining with Gordon Ramsay's first venture in Malaysia, parked within Sunway Resort Hotel (Image: Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill) Photo 4 of 4 The main dining hall (Image: Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill) Beyond the main dining room, wine enthusiasts will feel right at home with the restaurant's impressive wine cellar and extensive wine list. Also on offer are expertly crafted cocktails that pay homage to both the classics and Malaysian flavours, making the restaurant ideal when looking for an exceptional dining experience.
Daily Maverick
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Sauces & Saucemaking: When Generosity ought to trounce Parsimony
It's the badge above the grille of a fine old Studebaker. The funnel atop Cunard's Queen Mary as she glides regally into New York City. The final flourish of paint on a Van Gogh self-portrait before he signs it. It's the thing that makes a dish complete. It's the sauce. Years spent at culinary college, taking everything in. Hundreds of thousands of rand spent on setting up your restaurant. Hours and hours boiling down the chicken stock, and the veal stock. A lifetime of expertise devoted to making a beautiful sauce, using the stocks you made earlier, boiling it down with wine, and again with Cointreau, then reducing it with cream. And that, Chef – that little drizzle. That's all the sauce I get? For all their awards and expertise, some of the top chefs today are really mean with a sauce. I mean it in both senses. They make a mean sauce, in the sense of a killer sauce that'll have you swooning. For what? For more! Because despite all their laurels, way too many of our greatest chefs are really mean in the generosity department. A miserly little drizzle of sauce on your plate and the waiter's off to the next table. My habit is to beckon them back and ask for a small jug of it. A proud chef will not mind this; in fact, they'll bask in the warm glow of approval. Because there's nothing like a sauce to set a great chef apart from an also-ran. And they know it. Why, then, be so mean with a sauce? The answer they love to trot out is they don't want to 'mask' the other flavours. Well, thank you for your consideration, but I'll be the judge of that. And that's a very convenient argument, for the chef. Not so much for the diner. My classicist friend (his favourite sauce is Bordelaise) reminds me that chefs seem to have gone into this ungenerous mode, and become more and more minimalist, 'ever since (Paul) Bocuse moved away from the heavy classical sauces of Escoffier'. (Bordelaise is made with red wine, bone marrow, butter, shallots and Sauce Demi-Glace.) I might add: and ever since restaurateurs became more focused on the bottom line than they are on increasing the girth of your bottom. We accept that you have to make a fair profit, chef, but do not skimp on my sauce. Now that we've cleared that up, in my first GastroTurf column at the end of December, when most of you were busy elsewhere, I wrote about aromatics and my appreciation for the great Richard Olney and his classic, The French Menu Cookbook. It's not too late to go back and read my column, which you can do here. Olney, an American gourmand who lived in Paris, spends pages on sauces and things related to them, though no chapter is headed 'Sauces' as such. He ventures into sauce territory by first discussing wine in cooking, beginning with the firm admonition that 'a wine that is not good to drink is useless in the kitchen'. But he quickly changes course, adding, 'but because wines are transformed when boiled or simmered, their original character completely altered, it is foolish to waste a great wine in this content'. For a wine to be used in the making of a fine sauce, he recommends a robust, richly coloured young red or a lightly acidic young white. A cream sauce made with wine and/or other liquor such as brandy or liqueur can be truly spectacular, but wine can be used much more speedily and highly effectively simply by using it to deglaze a pan in which meat has been roasted, reduced with the scraping up of all the sticky bits at the bottom of the pan, and poured over the meat. You can whip one up in minutes or spend days making one. Fast or slow, hot or cold, or for that matter room temperature. You could spend a lifetime making a different sauce every day and yet have learnt to make only a fraction of all the possibilities in the world. The B échamel. The classic French tomato sauce. The V elouté, the Espagnole, the Hollandaise, these five being the French mother sauces. For a great chef, a sauce may be the final product of many processes. To make Marco Pierre White's Sauce Diable (recommended for offal), for instance, you'll need first to have made a good beef stock from scratch, and a good chicken stock, and then make a Diable reduction, which involves reducing white wine and white wine vinegar with peppercorns, thyme, bay leaves and shallots, which is then rested and strained, and only then start to make the Sauce Diable. This requires caramelising chicken winglets in olive oil, cooking them further with shallots and garlic, adding mushrooms, thyme and bay and cooking more, adding peppercorns and the Diable reduction, simmering and then adding the two stocks, simmering for half an hour and passing it through muslin. Then it's reduced again, to a coating consistency, and then you cook diced shallot in butter, dice more butter, and mix the last two into the reduced sauce. Et voila! – Sauce Diable. A Marco Pierre White book is a good thing to have, if you're serious about cooking, because he's all about the basics, just like Olney is. In my Canteen Cuisine book by MPW, you'll find the perfect beurre blanc and Hollandaise, the V elouté and the Béarnaise. There's also your Gribiche (cold sauce of boiled eggs, capers, gherkins, tarragon, parsley and olive oil), Sauternes (a cream sauce made with sweet white wine), and Sauce Aigre-Doux, a sweet-and-sour sauce of red wine and red wine vinegar sauce with garlic and shallots and made with veal stock, and recommended for tuna. So, the stock is the thing, for very many sauces. And a stock can be frozen, so on those odd occasions when I've gone mad and opened a restaurant (it takes a certain kind of madness), I would make stocks for many hours and keep them in the deep freezer. They can be made in large quantities and frozen in portions to suit your needs. Just remember to label them. If you wondered what a brown sauce was, Olney sets it out beautifully, as ever with a touch of wryness. 'Escoffier defines Sauce Demi-glace as an 'Espagnole brought to the extreme limit of perfection that it is susceptible of receiving, after a final cleansing (dépouillement)'. In today's kitchens, demi-glace and Espagnole are the same thing except that the latter (like 'brown sauce' or 'brown gravy'), thanks to a long history of careless or mendacious execution, has acquired a bad name, with the result that, no matter what the degree of perfection, a brown sauce is now most often called 'demi-glace' in English and French alike.' Odd word, mendacious, in that context. Note that Olney was writing this in the early Seventies. 'Whatever its name,' he continues, 'it continues to be attacked by some on the grounds that it makes everything taste alike. The only possible answer is that, obviously, it should not be used in everything.' Can't you just hear the sarcastic intonation in that, the cocked brow and flick of the hair. Those careless, lying Philistines have ruined the tradition of a perfectly good flour-based sauce. Not yet quite finished his takedown of a fiendish and naïve new direction in cooking, Olney detours to remark on what even then was a movement away from flour to thicken sauces. 'There is a movement afoot, fancied by protagonists to be purist, to cast flour from the kitchen – it has been pronounced an evil presence in all sauces.' He goes on to eviscerate the ensuing flourless sauce. 'The nouvelle demi-glace is a reduction of stock or braising juices that depends entirely on the liquid's natural gelatine for its body. The degree of reduction necessary to attain this body falls just short of that for a Sauce de Viande [meat glaze]; the intellectual purity of intent is betrayed by a suffocating concentration of taste and a gluey excess of gelatine.' Take that! What a delicious condemnation of flourless saucemaking. The brown sauce he refers to, if you're wondering, is that made by sprinkling flour on the meat and vegetables that have been browned in the pot, deglazed and covered with liquid, and simmered gently until braised, then 'strained and cleansed'. The early Seventies seems to have been a good time for books about sauces. Hamlyn's Guide to Sauces and Saucemaking, by Sonia Allison, was first published in 1970. Succinctly, she places sauces firmly in three categories. 'Almost every known sauce is a variation of a basic recipe and the great classics stem either from B échamel, Véloute or Supr ê me (the white group), from Espagnol or Spanish (the brown group) or from Hollandaise and Mayonnaise (the egg group).' Every classic is here, from Maitre d'Hotel (butter sauce for white fish) to Chaud-Froid which 'literally means hot-cold sauce; hot Béchamel sauce mixed with cold savoury jelly, such as aspic. When the sauce has cooled and thickened sufficiently to coat the back of a spoon, it is then used to coat cold buffet-type foods'. Today, though, the cold sauces on your common-or-garden hotel buffet are more likely to have come out of a bottle. And that's sad. Nothing in a bottle has been made with love. Nothing mass-produced is ever as good, even if nearly, as something made with care by an expert chef. Not even Mrs H.S Balls' original chutney. Maybe, in our own kitchens at home, we can make it a project to learn how to make a range of classic sauces, thereby becoming better cooks, better hosts (what's on our dinner party plates can only improve), and the better we get at this, the better we'll be able to tell the difference, when dining out, between a sauce that the chef clearly could have cared less about, and a great one. The one that will be drizzled on your plate while you glare at the waiter as he sashays to the next table, to pour the rest of your sauce onto someone else's plate. For too long (to borrow from Richard Olney) has there been careless or mendacious execution in the pouring of a sauce. So, be like Oliver Twist and repeat after me: 'Please, chef, may I have some more?' But add: '… of your wonderful sauce'. Butter them up. You'll get more. DM
Telegraph
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
William Sitwell reviews The Peacock Inn, Chelsworth: ‘The finest pie I can remember eating'
The Peacock stands in the centre of the ancient village of Chelsworth in Suffolk. It's a 14th-century inn by the water meadows of the River Brett, recently rescued from oblivion, tenderly refurbished and, frankly, if the place only served one ale and some pork scratchings, the new owner should get a gong for his benevolence. Actually it ought to be a duty of newly moneyed locals to rescue pubs. Councils should mandate that if you want to build a swimming pool complex for the cost of an average house you need to invest in the local boozer. The cultural benefits are obvious and, as with the Peacock, it should be law that you name a pie after the local squire. Hence the shin of Herefordshire beef stewed for hours in Suffolk ale, housed in a beef fat pastry and served with Bordelaise sauce and pomme purée. And the 'Sir Gerald's pie' was staggeringly good, literally the finest pie I can remember eating. Its size was perfect, a neat, golden-topped number, not stupidly big, whose crust was firm but flaky and buttery to taste, and whose inner works were a rich hymn to the cow. The mash was smooth, topped with some truffle and with a decent dark sauce. It was a magnificent centrepiece whose conception and presentation should act as a style guide for everything else. Because the chef, who has great talent, ought to rein in his fine dining instincts to suit the surroundings. By which I mean, for example, just call those pie accompaniments mash and gravy, plate some of the other stuff with some rural earthiness and hold back on the flouncy menu writing. My pal's main course of roast partridge was a dish of ingredients stripped of their natural look and presented as blobs around the plate. No sprouts, but three leaves (tops), a rectangle of medlar jelly and a sliver of anaemic-looking bird made paler by a strip of translucent lardo laid on top. I had a taste and, with some Puy lentils hiding under the partridge, it was fabulous, but it seemed ashamed of its origins. Before all that, snacks of Scotch egg and wild mushroom croquette, both very tasty, were more in keeping, but they threw in some other freebies, including something in a half-moon cracker sandwich with a dusting of green pine essence on a bed of pine sprigs. Next were starters of sea bream ceviche, for me, a beautifully presented roundel of creamy fish under a linseed cracker that, cleverly, looked like fish skin. And for her, a raviolo, well made, cooked just right and topped with shavings of truffle. After the pie and partridge, shared pud was a perfectly smooth and round chocolate mousse with a chocolate rippled biscuit on top, which also jarred with the aesthetics of the inn, which is all beams, a newly laid floor of York stone and lots of gently lit corners and cubby holes. The manager adds to the place's bid for Michelin attention as he bounds about. He shimmers from the bar, heralding our bottle of aligoté (that lesser known white Burgundy which, when on song, can be a revelation) and virtually pirouettes before the table when he arrives with Sir Gerald's pie. I wonder how the burly farmer deals with him at the bar. 'Pint of ale, please.' 'Oh indeed Sir, and here before you I present a frothing tankard of the aforementioned beverage. And is there anything else I can provide you with?' Still, as I say, the food is fab, great value and the place is busy. This old inn has a joyous lease of life redolent of its name in all its raucous posturing plumage.
