Le Mout, Taichung, Taiwan No.24 2014 Asia's Best Restaurant Part 1

Seems like I haven't posted here in awhile because I have been busy cooking a professional kitchen now. I only post if I encounter something interesting. Today was that interesting encounter. I went to a restaurant that is featured on Asia's Best Restaurants (http://www.theworlds50best.com/asia/en/asias-50-best-restaurants/2130/le-mout-restaurant.html). From out of the thousands of restaurants (maybe millions), these are the top 50. I expect that No. 24 be top notch, no room for error, and the attention to detail flawless, but unfortunately Chef Chen hasn't reached that perfection.

I'll briefly talk about the service and environment because I mainly focus on the food. The service was just ok. Just ok ... the waiter staff that served us went on a 3 to 4 minute monologue about what is in each dish with some pauses and umms like he or she forgot what each dish had. In addition, everyone looked like zombies. There wasn't liveliness in their service.

As for the table setting, there was an expectation for flawless set linens, but there were a few wrinkles in our table. I found some calcium deposit on the wine glass, which means they didn't properly clean their wine glasses.

Service (5/10) Just average.

Now on to the food.
Rated 5.2/10 Just Average

There were two menus available during lunch. One was the Classic Menu (4500 NT), which consisted of French classical dishes (as so said by the waiter). The other is The Tasting of Le Mout (3500 NT), which uses local Taiwanese ingredients to define Le Mout's cuisine.

I'll start with the classic menu.

Both menus have this aperitif

The first is a mini pizza, which consists of a mini pita filled with some creamy cheese sauce. The other is a tomato water jelly sphere with overcooked crab meat. I quite enjoyed the mini pizza and would eat lots of those for a snack. 6/10 Slightly above average. Would be a 8/10 if the jelly sphere didn't have overcooked crab.

I found it weird that they served the bread while we were eating or amuse bouche. I usually have restaurants serve the bread after they collected the dishes for the amuse. Anyways, this was some pretty good sour dough bread and butter.  7/10 Above Average

This is the second amuse, which was an egg custard with marsala wine, dehydrated lemon and potato (they sandwiched two potatoes in between a lemon). The wine sauce was way too sweet for my taste, which overpowered the egg and dehydrated items.  3/10 Below Average

Oyster and Pearls. I can see that Chef Chen did parody to Thomas Keller's Oyster and Pearls. In Keller's version, he uses tapioca pearls and caviar with a buttery sabayon sauce. In Chen's version, she uses large boba tapioca pearls that's hidden beneath lemon butter sabayon. An interesting dish that was pretty well balanced and uses something Taiwanese (boba). 7/10 Pretty good. Side note ... there was a tiny drop of sauce on the side of the plate, someone hasn't been checking the plates for cleanliness before serving.

(sorry, I finished this dish without taking a picture of the consomme)

Slow Cooked Beef Tongue with corn consomme, almond tofu, and dehydrated beef tongue jerky.
I quite enjoyed this dish. It is perhaps the best thing at that I've eaten at this restaurant. The tongue was cooked sous vide for 12 hours, but I found the consomme to be lacking in depth. 8/10 Good.

Poularde Farcie with Black Truffle, Baby Cabbage "Au Vin Jaune".

Oh god, I don't know where to start on how many things are wrong with this dish. They basically messed up a sous vide chicken by rolling it into a roulade with both dark and white meat and then probably sous vide it for more than an hour and holding it at the pass. By sous viding different cuts of chicken at the same temperature for a long time will cause some of the white meat to turn mushy. Also just taking the chicken out of a sous vide bag and just serving it is not good because the chicken is cold once it gets served to the customer. The truffle sauce was way too overpowering that I could only eat one or two bites of the chicken before becoming tired of the dish. 3/10 Below Average.  

One cool thing is the waitress let us choose knives to use with our next dish.

Angus Cap with Crispy Brisket, Carmaelized Milk Skin, Scallion Cream, and Jus Tranche with a side of foie gras.

My friend got this dish and just thought it was ok and the scallion cream's consistency was too much.



I got Pigeon in Oreintal Fragrance, Black Truffle Ragout and Mustard Green. This dish could have been great, but it was way tooo salty. I couldn't taste anything but salt. Also the foie gras was just foie gras with nothing special. 2.5/10 Below Average to almost not edible.























Eclair de Bleu d'Auvergne, Sweet Bordelaise Sauce and Hazzlenut Butter (yes they misspelled Hazelnut on their menu). I like this dish, but it was a balance between sweet, sour and salty. A bit too salty for me though. 6/10 slightly above average.

Riz au Lait, Citrus Orange Blossom Milk Foam.
This chocolate orange dish looks pretty, but it did not deliver because there were too many components that didn't flow together. Also, they did a bad job making the chocolate spheres. When I tried to crack the top to reveal the orange sherbet inside (I think but there were some tiny ice crystals inside the mixture, which probably shouldn't belong there), the sphere just sheared perfectly in half as if they didn't connect the hemispheres nicely.  5/10 Average

More about the other menu in my next post.