TLDR: Came and had degustation. Left hungry.
We had high hopes and the menu looked great. Unfortunately when they place on their menu "All courses are portion controlled for comfortable eating" your not off to a good start. After all, you would only place this on there if you had people comment about it in the past. Listen to your customers, if people are talking about your portions perhaps you should tailor to the customers more so.
Menu consisted of:
Amuse Bouche
Marinated salmon salad
Nourodji mushroom risotto
Duck breast with vegetable Tian
Assorted fresh sweetness
Overall
I'll review each dish and will only mention now the portion sizes were way too small. Comparing this to degustation at such places like Tetsuya and Pilu's the portions were 20-40% smaller, and were talking high end places where you would expect smaller portions.
The menu was $65, and it included one free drink, so lets say $55 for the 5 courses.
Time between dishes was long. 20+ minutes, which made the size and lack of food even more profound.
-=Amuse Bouche=-
Chicken pate on a cracker
Bacon rolled up with a prune inside
Cube of watermelon.
Nothing to write home about, the chicken pate tasted ordinary and the cracker was soggy as if the pate was left on for too long, also the cracker was not hand made, but store bought.
The bacon was nice and tasty with a sweet prune to offset the bacon, probably the best single dish/serving of the night
The cube of watermelon was a cube of watermelon.
Score - 2/10
Marinated Salmon salad.
The salmon, all three small pieces of it lacked it's signature taste, the rocket salad, was rocket salad, unfortunately what didn't help with the slight taste of the salmon was the salad dressing that overpowered any taste left over.
2/10
Nourodji Mushroom risotto
This was going to be a great dish, I so hoped it to be a great dish. Served in a cup made out of the risotto baked so to give it its shape and crispness, nice style points, and crispy risotto = yum. Unfortunately the actual risotto in the cup had no taste of mushroom at all. Either because the size of the dish didn't allow for any mushroom or that there was not enough mushroom used in the preparation, overall felt like fried rice in a cup made of baked rice.
4/10
Duck breast with vegetable Tian
Served with onion tomato and zucchini along with two puffs of polenta. The duck breast was overcooked, well done steak style, which is not great for duck. The polenta was ok, they added some chilli to give it a bit of flavour but was your standard style polenta., The vegetables were nothing to write home about.
2/10
Assorted fresh sweetness
A trio of deserts, mango sorbet, chili ganache tarter and fruit soup.
So they serve us half a tarte, half... not even a full one, they sprinkle on a bit of chili powder and then either side of the half a tart they serve a tiny dollop of mango sorbet (you could pick up the entire ball of sorbet with a teaspoon (given the ball was slightly larger than the teaspoon surface. And a shot glass of fruit soup. A shot glass! Whats that these days, 30ml? I know I said I would not talk about the size again but seriously...a shot glass.
The Tarte had little taste, some of the other members at our dinner table felt it was the same as something store bought. and I have to agree, I thought that maybe they just bought the premade pastry and then did the tart themselves, but I'm not so sure. The mango sorbet was mango sorbet, nothing special there. And the shot glass of fruit, the flavours were actually good, but the small amount did not really allow a true appreciation of the fruit soup, with the diced fruit pieces measuring in the millimeters, you could not truly enjoy the potential full flavours of the soup.
Final remarks:
Expensive, and disappointing, even the service could not redeem this place, having ordered a bottle of sparkling wine and having delivered to the table a bottle of sparkling water, at least they gave us the water on the house.
Would not recommend, plenty of other great places to dine at Top Ryde, give this one a miss if you want to leave felling fulfilled and hunger sated. read more