Basil infused rare yellow fin tuna, baby chard leaves, soy and mustard seed dressing
Ray took me to Aubergine, reputed to be the best one of the best fine dining restaurants in Canberra, for my birthday dinner.
Yay! <3
We had to have the shorter degustation (7 instead of possibly…10?) as our table was needed for a later booking. We noticed there were a number of empty tables by the time we left though. Hmm.
They’ve changed the degustation menus recently and I can barely remember what we ate, so….eh. The following description is a rough estimate of what we ate XD. But the impressions are accurate still 
I haven’t included photos of everything because some of them were just too blurry to be tolerable. Camera couldn’t focus in the dark ._.
Things started out promisingly. The water they served us with was Cape Grim, which is the purest water in the world (take that San Pellegrino!). It’s collected somewhere above Tasmania.
Then we were served a soup. It was a creamy cream-coloured soup with a brown lump in the middle. It may have been potato soup, and I think it was a meatball…
It was served in a smallish teacup espresso cup (aka short black coffee cup) on a saucer. Cute, but not that impressive. For that amount of soup I would have served it in a martini glass. It was pretty nice though. Very tasty.
After that was what I suspect may be their signature starter dish as it’s still on the menu - Basil infused rare yellow fin tuna, baby chard leaves, soy and mustard seed dressing. I couldn’t really taste any basil but the salad leaves were interesting and tasty. Found it a bit heavy on the soy sauce though. It was too salty which will be a recuring theme during the meal. Ray and I both agree that was the best dish though.
The next dish was a crustacean-themed one. Scampi and a scallop and prawn sausage on possibly caramelised onions on a bed of whipped butter. The scampi was a bit raw on the inside. I don’t mind raw scampi, in fact I LOVE scampi sashimi. But in a dish llike this I like my scampi cooked. The sausage was really “meh”. Waste of good scallop I reckon.
The (most likely) muscovy duck breast was served on top of a crepe with something inside, possibly braised duck. There was a triangle-shaped green thing which at the last moment I realised were duck giblets encrusted with a herb coating. Normally I avoid giblets like the plague but when you’re paying $80 for a meal you eat every frickn thing.
The main dish was grain-fed beef tenderloin with a pat of herb butter on top, braised beef rib (I think) and a carrot and sage sabayon with cabernet jus (probably). Notice how the sabayon, which is a whipped mousse-y sauce, is in a carrot shape and the garnish on the beef rib is a roasted baby carrot and a deepfried sage leaf. Witty.
The braised beef was a bit stringy and tasted like home-cooking of the sort you don’t like. I wasn’t very impressed by it and had to work to finish it off. The tenderloin was nice but a very dark purple colour in the middle - pretty raw. The jus I found really too salty, and it didn’t look very nice just sort of randomly splashed and swishing around the plate like that.
After that was a lime sorbet palate cleanser. It was very nice, slightly creamy but still clean-tasting. Even though it was only a palate cleanser it was one of the more enjoyable aspects of the evening. Unfortunately I have to mark it down for presentation. It was served on saucer! Maybe that circular depression in the middle is meant to hold the ball of sorbet in place…but eh. It’s like how at home if I run out of small plates I just use a saucer to eat a piece of cake or something (o.o) It really looked a bit lost.
To finish there was a vanilla semi-freddo on top of a circle of warmed chocolate mudcake. The presentation would have been very nice, see how the caramel threads mix in with the chocolate sauce on the right? Pretty. HOWEVER! The young klutzy looking “waiter” manhandled my plate and the ice-cream slipped off its base!! I was staring quizzically at the plate as he walked towards me, wondering why there was this ball swishing around on the plate. He dumped the plates at our table without even announcing what the dish was. No apologies (o.o).
Because the kitchen is semi-open, I was able to observe a bit of the kitchen from my seat. For some reason the bit that customers can see the most clearly is the sink and dishwasher. Uh, not the most glamorous part of the kitchen, hello! And the dishhand became my impromptu dessert-carrier.
Actually the waitstaff that night were all kind of curt and not particularly hospitable. Maybe they were short-staffed that night >_>. Well still that doesn’t excuse the service. No tips for them!
I made sure to fill out the feedback card.
I don’t normally care much about presentation or service, and the taste would have been alright at a cafe (except for the saltiness. Inexcusable.) Ray also felt there was too much raw stuff in all the food. The tuna, scampi and quite a bit in the beef and would have liked more variety in textures.
Rating (out of 5)
Ambience: 4
Food: 3
Service: 2
Overall: 2.5
On the whole I’ve been very harsh with my review because they say they are a fine dining restaurant and shouldn’t we expect that standard from them?
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