My Kind of Food

Look at the blue is the meaning of “mirazur” which is the name of a 3 Michelin starred restaurant at Menton, on the French Italian Border. Its location, perched on the cliffs above the town, gives a beautiful day time view of the sparkling blue Mediterranean Sea seen through enormous picture windows which make the wall on one side of the dining room. At night the blue is replaced by the darkness of the night, pierced by the twinkling lights of Menton town and harbour below. After my second visit I’m coming to the conclusion that the view is perhaps this restaurant’s greatest asset.

Of the chef, Mirazur’s website says:

Through his personal interpretations of ingredients and flavour combinations, Mauro Colagreco has forged a style of his own.
He has absorbed his Italian-Argentinian cultural heritage and that of the chefs with whom he trained, and now follows his intuition as he draws on the local culture on both sides of the border.

Inspired by the sea, the mountains and the fruit and vegetables grown in his own gardens, Mauro invents colourful, pictorial dishes that play with textures and bold contrasts.

Let’s keep that in mind as we review my experience of dining at Mirazur last Thursday evening as part of a party of three, to celebrate a birthday. Let’s also keep in mind that as well as holding the highest accodale of the Michelin Red Guide (3 stars), Mirazur has frequently been at the top of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list and in the penultimate list in 2019, it was ranked as the best in the world.

The welcome at Mirazur, if you’re driving comes in two stages. First the car park guy welcomes you and takes your name and your car keys, then you go down the path to the reception desk where someone else takes your name and flicks through the reservation system before asking to take coats and telling you how welcome you are. At this level and price point I think they could at least have pretended to have known we were coming. It would have been even better if they had known that this wasn’t the first visit. ‘Welcome back gentlemen’ would’ve started things off very well. This ‘being known’ is the reason I go back to a very small number of places time and time again. It moves the whole experience away from being a commercial transaction to that of an act of hospitality.

We were seated at a table where my view was of the black night outside the windows which were acting like mirrors. My two companions were able to enjoy the view of the twinkling lights down below. The sommelier arrived and took our order for water and a glass of Champagne. When the water and Champagne arrived further tumblers were placed before us with just a finger of water in each. This was a flavoured (ginger extracrin this case) water. I could neither smell nor taste anything, but I was suffering from a blocked nose. One of my fellow diners could detect a mild ginger taste and the other thought he could smell it.

After a while ‘one of the maître d’s‘ (sic) came to tell us how things would work. We’d chosen to come on a ‘roots’ day as opposed to a flowers or leaves day (all determined by the phases of the moon!) and therefore the menu (9 courses) would be based on roots from the restaurants many gardens adjacent to or not too far from Mirazur. We’d be starting with a selection of what were described as Tapas. Nothing to complain about there. All were very morish and some were really delicious, such as the cheese and onion tartlet with its crispy top and the black squid-ink tuile. The dessicated salsify wrapped around with Lardo di Colonata and sprinkled with bee pollen was spectular.

Next up was a round of bread made according to a recipe of the Chef’s grandmother. It was accompanied by olive oil flavoured with ginger and a printed copy of Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Bread

Gossamer thin slices of mild radishes served with a fish carpaccio was refreshing and a suitably light way to start the menu proper.

I recently had dinner with family and friends as part of wedding celebration in the UK. Some people had soup containing Kohlrabi, which the Egyptian waiter described as a ‘German spice’. Well I don’t think that’s quite correct but it is sometimes know as German Cabbage. At Mirazur it was used to contain a fragrant broth of seafood and root vegetables

A rare species of beetroot was up next, served with a cream sauce and French Caviar. The beetroot takes two years to mature and is dug up at the end of the first season to spend some time above ground before being replanted to grow a little more. This allegedly gives it a sweeter flavour without the typical earth taste of this particular root crop. Personally I like the earthiness of traditional beet but I have to say that this particular version was pretty delicious too.

The intesene jam-like flavour of sweet potato which accompanied a piece of squid was an interesting combination. My suspicions were though, that the squid was more chewy than it should have been and I think the quantity of sweet potato overwhelmed the delicacy of the squid.

Without a doubt this next plate of food was the star of the evening. It consisted of a firm and meaty slice of cep (porcini) mushroom with Jerusalem artichoke puree and white truffle from Alba. The jus was fantastically intense and packed with that illusive umami flavour. All of this was preceded by ‘ordinary bread’, as described by the waiter, and the most delicious carrot butter, presented in the form a carrot.

A dish, entitled, Dark Side of the Moon, came next. It was a piece of poached John Dory, covered in a squid ink sabayon and served with squid ink cracker all with a gentle background of liquorice. Dramatic to look at, there was, in my opinion, too much sabayon, which became a little cloying and the fish wasn’t quite as well cooked as it ought to have been. It was slightly tough and certainly didn’t fall apart as I pushed my fork into it. The flavours though were good.

It pains me to have to write now about the next course. This was billed as duck breast from Challons with red onion from the garden and a confit duck leg sandwich. Let’s start with the good news. The duck sandwich was succulent, full of flavour and a delight to eat. Less spectacular were the red onions, which were, how can I say it, just like eating red onions. Nothing special there. The main event, the duck breast itself, was beyond poor. Firstly all three plates of it were cold, and I mean cold, not just warm as might be expected in a restaurant rather than a farmyard kitchen. Personally I was prepared to roll with that but the texture of the duck was really awful (the result of the ghastly sous-vide method of cooking) and horror of horrors, the skin was inedible. My guess is that the skin had been coated in lovely aromatic things and then fried to give it colour and flavour before being placed in the water bath. On serving, therefore, the skin was soft and gelatinous, very difficult to cut and almost impossible to chew. We then did something I’ve never done before and which ought to be a no-no in a 3 start restaurant, we sent the duck back. The restaurant manager offered with reasonable good grace to have new portions cooked for us. They came very quickly and they were hot but the presentation of the meat and particularly the skin, was exactly the same. Indeed he told us he’d asked the chef to prepare it exactly they same way. We were told that the chef was waiting in the kitchen to know if this time it was to our liking. Conversations ensued during which it became perfectly clear that serving duck skin in the way we’d received it was entirely the point. There was, in the contention of the chef, as articulated by his manager, nothing wrong except that it wasn’t to our taste. Interesting! I’ve eaten my fair share of duck in my life in all sort of different styles of restaurants and cultures as well as at home. Crispy skin is the holy grail of duck cooking surely? Who wants to eat something with the texture of silicone sheeting?

The idea that our preferences were the problem and not the cooking quickly spread and the maitre d’ came to apologise that we hadn’t enjoyed the great duck dish, as did one of the other waiters and the chap who waved us off in the car park later. I find all of this baffling. Having googled ‘Mirazur, duck, skin’ I see that I’m not alone in my dislike of duck cooked in such a way and wonder why Chef Colagreco insists on doing it. We need a campaign to ban the cooking of meat in a water-bath. After a lot of consideration I’ve concluded it’s a waste of decent meat.

After such an experience and an already significant amount of food, the appetite disappears and so it was with a slight heavy heart that we turned to the pre-dessert of green apple granita with wasabi, yoghurt and pistacchio, which in fact turned out to be very refreshing. This was followed by a pudding of purple potato with coffee and honey. It was innovative, with the coffee flavour being dominant and just a background hint of the earthy potato taste.

Coffee and petit-fours rounded things off and while they were nice in themselves the bitter taste of the duck experience had unfortunately left us all very disappointed.

Whilst no longer the best in the world, Mirazur continues to hold the coveted 3 stars. I wonder how long that can continue.