Tasted: 1/4/2014
Accompanying Drink: Tito’s Martini, dry, up.
Happy New Year! The subtitle of this review shall be: “The Plate With Potential”. It’s the sort of dish that I would order again just to see if it improved.
As stated on the menu:
TENDERLOIN CARPACCIO*
caper creole mustard sauce and red onion
Much to my glee, this item appears on Fleming’s bar happy hour menu. So, for a thrifty $6 you can bet I’ll order this every time. Now at the regular price of $16, the tone of my review may not be as positive. Tip of the day, go during happy hour to get this dish.
One thing should stand out to you immediately – crostini with cheese? Hmm, well ok. Todd English does put a corn bread loaf under his pile of perfection so I guess it’s fine to experiment with various carb accoutrements. They were pretty good actually; though I wouldn’t say they “went” with the dish, they were merely “served in conjunction” with the dish. Perhaps they were trying to distract me from the odd pile of yellow in the middle.
Everyone knows carpaccio is to be served with parmesan cheese. Nice, thick, hand-cut wafers. So I tasted and tasted and couldn’t figure out what on earth cheese they substituted. Something light and very airy. Finally I had to ask the server because I was stumped. Turns out it’s egg. WHAAA?? Egg? I’m not sure what even to say about that. And just when you think we’re stepping into the Twilight Zone, that sprig of green in the center is not arugula (clearly) – it’s chopped spinach!
I’m all for artistic expression in cooking, but ingredients should accomplish at least one of two things; they should add flavor or add visual appeal. When you have salty capers and aioli (or mustard sauce in this case), things like egg and spinach don’t do anything. They don’t taste like anything, and they don’t look as good as the ingredients that are SUPPOSED to be there (arugula and parmesan). So, I’m not a fan. My guess is that they’re trying to save money here, just a hunch.
Now let’s get to the meat. The temperature was perfect – not too hot from sitting under a heat lamp and not too cold indicating it was pulled out of the fridge. But as you can see from the picture, the cut was extremely fatty. I mean tough and fatty and a little too thick. The meat itself was the worst part of this dish, though somehow through the miracle that is carpaccio, overall it was edible. I’m hoping it was just a bad night, a bad cut, a bad delivery, whatever, and that they do not consistently offer this sort of dish to their customers. This is a high-end steak house. Big dolla. If I ordered a steak and the cut was this bad I’d definitely send it back and get the burger (which is awesome by the way).
The sauce was not strong at all – I could barely taste it, and there was no olive oil drizzle. That’s fine with me, the dish was not overly or under-dressed. Nice portion of freshly-cracked pepper was applied in the kitchen and the caper ratio was perfect.
I love onions but onions simply do not belong on this dish. I used to be open to the possibility in earlier reviews but it truly ruins the flavor of the meat. Onions vary in strength depending on the time of year and some times one little nugget will stay on your breath the entire night and overpower everything else. If the menu had mentioned the presence of onions I would have ordered the dish without, as I will next time.
So, all in all since this is a local restaurant I’ll give it another shot but I do take issue with some of the dish components and definitely the meat quality this particular time. It has potential!