The view from Le Petit Nice - Anse de Maldorme, Marseille

Apéritif: Anchois en Tempura, sable céleri-rave, radicchio poulpe mangue xérès

Perched high on the rocks overlooking the Mediterranean sea, Passedat towers over any other restaurant on this French coast.

Mise en bouche: Maquereau mariné à l’huile d’olive, radis

Mise en bouche: Nage de moules et épinards au vin d’Arbois

For our second visit (the first was in May 2010) we were seated at the very best table at the corner window, with a 270° view of the entire bay of Marseille, from the Cap Croisette to the left, to the Iles du Frioul peeking out on the right. Below, late sunbathers on the rocks were soaking in the last rays of the season and catching a last dip in the mistral-cooled sea, while a cormorant patrolled the waters.

Pélamide crue à la tranche, écorce de bergamote, poireau, huile d’olive, sauce soja, beignet fleur de courgette, tomate fraichement pressée au agar agar

Bar de ligne, truffe, basilique, coriandre

The most remarkable dish was the pélamide (palamita), a kind of bonito but far more delicate with its pale meat, served raw on a small leek with a twist of bergamot zest, olive oil, soy sauce and on the side a zucchini flower in tempura, plus a bowl of freshly pressed tomato slightly gelified with agar agar. this is a perfectly balanced and beautifully presented dish. The tomato brings back memories of my childhood; the taste of a tomato put through a food mill has absolutely nothing in common with bottled tomato juice, and in the summer we regular press heritage tomatoes as a cold summer soup, often with pasta and some olive oil. The perfume is amazing.

Anémones de mer en beignets légers et onctueux iodé

Dorade de Palangre grillé, jus légumes, gâteau aubergine fenouil, croustillant de riz

Passédat clearly transmits his passion for food in all his dishes, while maintaining a jeweler’s precision in the cooking and the presentation. The service is warm and competent. The view is to die for. I can think of no better way to have lunch. We accompanied the meal, like last time, with Pur Sang 2005, a Pouilly Fumé by the world master of sauvignon, Didier Dagueneau, about the most rigorous no nonsense sauvignon one will ever taste, intense ripe flowery aroma, enormous persistence and perfect balance. The wine list is excellent, with lots of my favourites, I was hesitating towards Ostertag’s rieslings or Chablis from Dauvissat, or even Thevenet’s Mâcon, but the sommelier suggested I stick to my original idea.

The menu originally included a rack of lamb as a main dish, and cheese from the superb selection available, but we really wanted to keep it 100% fish like the last time (other than dessert…), and the kitchen kindly replaced the lamb with sea bream.

mousse yeti marseillais sorbet de pêche

Glaces à la fraise, sirop grenadine, brousse du Rove

mignardises

Petit Nice, Marseille

Gérard Passedat is interested in the sea, in fish, and he even has a “bouille abaisse” menu which I must try sometime where he uses lesser varieties of fish. I believe Passédat is actively engaged in action to sustain local sustainable fishing. Contrary to popular belief, the sea here is teeming with fish that were scarce only a decade ago, thanks to conservation efforts and to the growing recognition of the ability of local small fishermen to manage their own resources. There is no better reading on the subject than L’Encre de Mer, with a website containing over 700 articles on fishing written or collected by Elisabeth Tempier, and a magazine that comes out 3 times a year (donors welcome…).

First impressions were the unobtrusive minimalist white decor and the exquisite, antiquey looking serving bowls.

“Otsumami” appeared at the top of the menu, translated in brackets as “Appetisers / Tapas”.

And so we chose a few tapas-sized serves. First up was Soy-burned Roasted Organic Garlic. Four plump juicy cloves, caramelised to sweetness and with a mild, roast  garlic savour.

Next was  Silverbeet Tsukudani, finely chopped stems sauteed with sweet soy sauce and Japanese black pepper – the latter giving the sauce a distinct bite.

There followed organic Zucchini Tempura, four modest slices in a delicate whitish crisp batter along with a mild dipping sauce.

An agreeable Agedashi Tofu served as an interlude and we finished with Vegetarian Futomaki Sushi Rolls.

Seated on a layer of wasabi mayo these were a complex mix of taste and texture centred with avocado, cream cheese, and finely grated pickled beetroot. On the side was a small saucer of  house-made, shaved pickled ginger.

This last was white in colour, delicious, and quite unlike the store bought artificially tinted stuff one often encounters in Japanese restaurants.

The wine we took was the De Bortoli Yarra Valley Chardonnay 2010 and it suited the multiplicity of dishes admirably.

Service was timely and friendly and we enjoyed it all – perhaps the highlight was the silverbeet dish.

Cost for two was $54 including corkage.

Highly recommended.

Jardin Japonesque. 3 Arcadia St. Noosa Junction, Queensland 4567, Australia. Phone (07) 5448 0724. BYO. Lunch Tuesday to Friday; Dinner Tuesday to Sunday.

Ipazzi Ristorante is a tiny new eatery in Noosa Junction, a couple of minutes over Noosa Hill from the Hastings Street resort strip. It is fast gaining a reputation as the best Italian restaurant in town.

Ipazzi, Ruby explains, means something like “We’re crazy!” Ruby runs everything front of house and Fabio, her husband, is chef.

The narrow room features well-separated small tables and is all red and white checked tablecloths with candles burning in old bottles. It looks like a full house would max out at 25 covers.

Fabio, I learn, prepares house-made pasta each afternoon and the choices on our menu are fettuccine, spaghetti and maltagliati.

We order the Margherita Pizza ($22), the Fettuccine Siciliana ($24), followed by Tiramisu ($9.50).

White domes of creamy buffalo mozzarella top the Margarita; they in turn are dotted with torn basil leaves, and both decorate a layer of sweet and tart tomato sauce. The base is thin, crusty and crunchy, its edges plump and slightly charred.

The fettuccine Siciliana is a decent-sized bowl of nicely chewy pasta. Siciliana in this case refers to an EVOO-enhanced sauce of a garlicky sofrito that features fine slices of fried eggplant, salty ricotta, fresh basil and tomato, all topped with small shards of parmesan.

Lucy tells me the Tiramisu is luscious and is fortified with what seems like a double shot of espresso.

A bottle of Shaw and Smith M3 2009 Chardonnay has notes of pear and cashew and an appealing substructure of French oak. A substantial white, it pairs nicely with our tomato-influenced mains.

Ipazzi, 28 Sunshine Beach Road, Noosa Junction, Queensland. BYO – corkage $3 per diner. Phone (07) 5412 2841.

Here are the top five we’ve tasted over the years – without excitement.

Foie gras: bland, fatty, force-fed, cirrhotic goose liver.

Caviar: salty, fishy tasting sturgeon eggs of uncertain age and erratic quality.

Buffalo mozzarella: excellent texture, usually tasteless, has to be all dressed up “like a pox doctor’s clerk” to serve.

Black truffles: earthy variation on the mushroom. Serves are so small you never get a good idea of the real taste.

Game of all sorts: especially hare. Usually stringy sinewy, rank smelling. Inedible unless hung to the point of nausea and the taste disguised by sauces and gravies.

Chevre / goats’ milk cheese. A trick or treat offering – sometimes brilliant. More often tainted or whiffy – as if a billy goat had done the impossible and produced milk.

Oh, and not forgetting a sixth: Foam. You know, a dollop of insubstantial froth and bubble looking like frog spawn and tasting, well, of nothing. Main feature it seems of “molecular gastronomy”. Otherwise known as the Emperor’s Nouvelle Cuisine.

Melbourne visitors treated us to dinner at this newish eatery. Impressive. Busy and bustling. Helpful and friendly staff. Lovely gnocchi and the best pizza I’ve had in a long time. Extensive list of wine by the glass or choose a bottle from the integrated wine shop and pay a little more than retail to drink at your table.

By Noosa standards the prices were excellent. Highly recommended.

Two kinds of Tofu

Gary Hounsell, owner of Toolangi Vineyards in the Yarra Valley recently hosted a lunch at Urbane in Brisbane to celebrate Toolangi’s 10th anniversary; your itinerant reporter was there.

Gary showed guests a selection of his estate and reserve chardonnays and pinots dating back to the 2001 vintage. In an unusual approach to winemaking he explained that in its short existence, Toolangi wines were made by different winemakers at a number of wineries, among them Giaconda, Shadowfax and Yering Station.

Standout wines included the ‘o6 Estate Chardonnay – clean and edgy with understated oak - at a blind tasting I would have picked this one as French. The ’06 Reserve Chardonnay was rich and full-flavoured with superbly integrated oak and lengthy acidity. And the three pinots – the ’01, the ’02 and the ’06, were surprisingly youthful, showing generous fruit and none of the tawny colour or age development often associated with older Australian pinot noir.

The 2006 Reserve Shiraz showed highly-perfumed raspberry-like fragrance. Medium-bodied, it displayed vibrant summer berries on the palate, combined with light, elegant tannins.

Confit duck egg

The food

As usual, I had requested an alternative, meat-free menu and Urbane chef Kym Machin came up with the goods. The Japanese inspired ‘Two kinds of tofu’ (pictured at top) came served, picturesquely, on a black slate. Both tofus, one almond and one soy, slid silkily along the tongue and were presented on a smear of shallot puree, along with edamame beans, crunchy sesame ‘pebbles’, and froths of jalapeno and apple ‘air’.

A smoked La Luna goat cheese on a little round of brioche was served in its own cloud of hickory/rosemary/juniper berry/thyme smoke captured under a glass dome.

Then there was the confit organic duck egg (pictured). The soft, unctuously textured egg sat in a smooth potato and leek veloute, the whole decorated with shavings of fresh black truffle.

I knew the wine would be classy but didn’t know what to expect from the much talked about Urbane. This grumpy old critic was impressed.

Urbane Restaurant, 181 Mary St. Brisbane, Queensland. Phone: (07) 3229 2271.

iS is fully licensed but allows patrons to bring their own wine ($4 corkage fee per bottle) and we took along a 2003 Petaluma Hanlin Hill Riesling. Despite its rather warm cellaring in our house it was in excellent condition – sprightly and lemony with just an occasional hint of that aged riesling character that we all know and love yet find hard to describe without annoying winemakers.

From the longish menu we chose Chili mushrooms – in a light sauce/marinade of butter, lemon juice, chili, garlic and finely chopped herebs; Parmesan crumbed artichokes – these were served with the stems (quite edible) attached and looked a little like chicken drumsticks – served with a truffle and lime mayonnaise; Manchego cheese croquettes – crumbed, about the size of pool balls – with a quince paste sauce, and Tempura vegetables on skewers -tiny morsels of crisp veg in the lightest of batter.

The food presentaion was attractive, the waiter was hip and we really enjoyed each dish. The bill for two, including corkage, totalled $42.

Highly recommended.

 One Sunday for a treat, I wandered down and had a big plate of Eggs Benedict Florentine: two poached eggs smothered in a creamy Hollandaise sauce, on a bed of just wilted baby spinach leaves, on grilled sourdough. I just had to have crispy hash browns on the side and, to top it all off, a flat white.

 At no extra cost the club threw in a million dollar view of the surging Pacific surf. All for fifteen bucks.

 Out of town, non-members are welcomed.

Senderens, Paris

Alain Senderens recently decided that such prices were way out of line, and that his stratospheric level of cuisine needed to be democratized, made more accessible, cutting prices by over 75% (allowing for inflation) and making it possible to enjoy his full menu for 110€, with a 40€ supplement for wines by the glass to match each course. This is not exactly tailored for the proletariat, but it is within reach of regular blogger folks who occasionally delve into the sublime.

The first impression is a fiery red visual spectacle, as you approach from the cold wind-swept Place de la Madeleine you can see the orange red lighting of the interior of Senderens. The howling wind propels us in through the entrance’s thick curtains and into the warm cozy art-nouveau wood-paneled interior. And you immediately notice the changes, the classic interior is now augmented with the orange hues of the new curved ceilings, which look like the surface of the moon upside down at sunset, and with flowery designs drawn in luminous ink on glass over the mirrors and activated by LED lighting in changing colors. There are no table-cloths; the tables are made of a thick white smooth warm polymer, possibly Corian™, with white backlit flowery motifs.

The full menu-dégustation is tempting, but our choices are driven more by the wine than by the dishes, so we ordered à la carte, where for each dish an optional glass of matching wine is proposed for a reasonable surcharge (11€ on average); a paragraph explains the match for those that might need guidance or miss the sensory experience. The wines proposed are all excellent and varied, of the 18 matching choices, 10 are French, 3 Italian, 2 Portuguese, 1 Spanish, 1 German and 1 Hungarian. Just reading the list makes you confident that you have come to “the right place”, to a place where wine is important and where they truly know about good wine. For example the Sauternes is from Château Nairac, an excellent choice and one of the rare sauternes that never get chaptalized on principle.

Salmon, suckling pig, baby lamb at Senderens

Dos de Saumon mi-fumé à la maison, concombre, pommes vertes et pistou wasabi
Riesling Kabinett, Reichstatt von Kesselstatt 2007, Mosel[-Saar-Ruwer]
Cristallin, épuré à l’extrême, à la fois délicat et charismatique, les Riesling Mosellan sont un symbole de la culture européenne du vin. Les notes fumées, dues au terroir schisteux, prolonge le saumon dans une mélodieuse délicatesse.

During my recent visit at monvínic in Barcelona, I had discovered the superb rieslings of R. von Kesselstatt, straight non-nonsense Rieslings with lots of character. This was the match proposed for the lightly-smoked salmon, superb in texture and taste, accompanied by paper-thin refreshing strips of cucumber and green apple with a light wasabi pesto. A very good match and a difficult one, full of risks: smoked salmon is not normally wine-friendly, and aggressive wasabi even less so, but here the smoking is done in-house and with a light touch, and the pesto manages to extract all the perfume and flavor of the wasabi without any of its sting. The fresh young Riesling’s acidity makes the salmon stand out; the green apple cleans the palate and finds plenty of echoes in the wine. My only nitpicky comment here is that the region name Mosel-Saar-Ruwer has been changed, thankfully, to simply “Mosel” since the 2007 vintage. A wonderful start.

Cochon de lait de Burgos, rougail de poireaux et mangue
Alsace 1er Cru Burg 2004 – J.M. Deiss
La générosité de ce vin tisse une sucrosité raffinée, riche de fruits exotiques, sur la trame d’une chair ferme presque virile, rehaussée de saveurs poivrées

Cathy chose the suckling pig and was rewarded with a superb Alsace wine from Deiss, very rich and mineral with definite botrytis flavors and a surprising aromatic development despite only being 5 years old, with some residual sugar. Nice surprise, a slightly sweet French Riesling right after a bone dry German one (one would expect the opposite) to accompany the light peppery mango flavors of the Spanish pork.

Agneau de lait de Castille rôti, aubergines aux deux façons
Langhe Rosso 2001, D. Roagna, Piémont, Italie
La subtilité aromatique et l’équilibre de ce Nebbiolo de la région d’Alba s’associent au fruité de l’aubergine corsé au massala sans étourdir l’agneau de lait par sa puissance.

The same pan-Europeanism pervades my own choice, baby lamb from Spain (one never forgets how good baby lamb is in Spain) with an Italian wine from Piemonte. A slice of tender shank and a little mound of very slowly cooked meat find a perfect complement in the baby aubergines, cooked in some magic way that makes their interior transform itself into a kind of light sponge, and very subtly flavored with massala. The wine is good but with a hint of reduction that could have benefitted from a long aeration, but it got better in the glass; at the same time, it seemed to be at its peak of development and probably destined to decline in the next years. The Rieslings were more impressive.

Chocolate and quinces at Senderens

Coulant de Samana millésimé 2007, pur cacao de Saint Domingue, noix de pécan caramélisées
Don P.X. 1979, Toro Albalá, Montilla Moril[l]es
Le charisme de ce Pédro Ximenez trouve écho dans la subtile amertume du cacao de Saint Domingue. La réglisse, le café et les noix de pécan sont autant de détonateurs de plaisir.

There is nothing like Pedro Ximenez and chocolate, that was my choice, a large splash of creamy dark vintage chocolate from Santo Domingo with caramelized pecans in a coffee sauce. Another nitpicky comment about the spelling of the wine area, they must have been thinking of morels… that’s ok…

Coing confit au fudge
Tokaji Cuvée Ilona 2003, Királyudvar
Le coing trouve, avec ce tokaji cuvée, un compagnon qui sublime son parfum

Cathy chose this classic quince and botrytis match; the wine is a superb Tokaji from István Szepsy’s joint venture winery, its tastes lingering forever and the perfume amazing, covering all the best features of noble rot, honeyed wax and citrus apple flavors.

Senderens is a great place to eat, feasting your eyes as well as your palate for about 110-140€ per person. Service is friendly and attentive – they simply will not allow you to pour your own water. When a grand master cooks without the stress of having to be 3-star every day, the result is pure laid back heaven, nothing is out of place, and everything is harmonious. Alain is past retirement age, but everything about this place including the dishes comes from him, he simply delegates the cooking now to highly skilled younger chefs. I wonder why it took me so long to try Senderens II, and I sure look forward to coming back.

I believe Mr Robotti’s quote holds pretty much true 37 years on. Sommeliers are meant to advise diners about wine selections and food and wine matching but in Australia they often end up as wine marketers for restaurant owners.  And if it’s not always the highest priced wine they suggest, sommeliers and wine waiters do have a certain knack of upselling… Never has any sommelier ever suggested to me selections from the inexpensive wines on a wine list.