Please note that since writing this blog post, Diga has closed down
I’ve always maintained that it’s hard to write a restaurant review when you’re not the one paying. Even if you can see the prices on the menu, somehow the fact that it’s not your wallet that’s being dented makes it infinitely harder to judge the value for money. Still, a free dinner’s a free dinner, right? And when it’s on MegaCorp, who am I to argue?
There were around 20 of us – all members of the same project team – gathered for a celebratory end-of-project dinner. We sat on three smaller, round tables, rather than one long one, which made it feel slightly like we were at a wedding. But in a good way: it’s far easier to talk to seven people in a circle than 20 people in two rows. And I made sure I was positioned right by the kitchen, so I could keep an eye on the action. There wasn’t much action, but there was a string of waiters who were nearly as delicious as the plates of food they were picking up from the pass, and one in particular who was so scorchingly hot he actually distracted me from a conversation about cheese. Shocker.
First up, they brought us three little amuses, all at the same time, which we were instructed to eat from left to right. We started with mozzarella foam, tomato reduction and basil-y pine nuts: essentially, a deconstructed caprese salad. Light and clever. Next was a carrot puree-filled chocolate shell topped with explode-in-your-mouth hazelnuts. (Does anyone know how they make food pop, by the way?) I would have preferred Amuse 2 had it been more savoury than sweet, but it was an unnervingly theatrical little number nonetheless. The third amuse was another sweet/savoury combo: this time an almond macaron filled with a cauliflower puree, in which I think I detected a whisper of truffle oil.
Our starter was a sort of tablet-shaped piece of tuna, arranged perpendicular to a ladder of pickled cucumber strips, and topped with something creamy that was somewhat cancelled out by the toasted nuts on the top. I liked it, but others reported that the nuts overpowered the tuna. There were various other odds and sods strewn around the plate: a crayfish tail here, a blob of avocado there, a quenelle of seaweed somewhere else… There was a lot going on on the plate, but I couldn’t fault the quality of the constituent parts.
And then they started doing this only-using-half-the-plate thing. I’m not really sure why. When the main course arrived, it made me question, “is my risotto actually sliding off here?” and by dessert I was asking, “where’s the rest?”. My pictures don’t really do it justice – I think I was trying to compensate for Diga’s strange plating-up habits. It was a truffle risotto that was sliding off the plate, incidentally, which was topped with a capsicum sauce and a slice of veal. I got lucky with my veal – it was meltingly tender and flavoured with paprika. Some of my colleagues reported gristle and sinew, which is a shame because (when we asked how they cooked the meat) it transpired that it had been baked for four hours at 70 degrees centigrade. Very Heston. And a bit hit and miss, apparently. As usual, there were various extras: a rather nifty egg shell, half-filled with runny egg yolk and half-filled with a sort of veal confit; an upturned mushroom filled with more of the veal mixture; something that resembled a mini-spring roll filled with more (but different) meaty goodness; and some kind of aubergine caviar. Again, a lot going on – on one half of the plate, in any case.
Dessert was a take on tiramisu with a coffee sauce and a crispy, cocoa-y, cigar-shaped biscuit. It was all well-executed and not too sweet, but a little over-engineered.
This is the point at which I usually tell you how much all this set me back, but I can’t tell you because I wasn’t paying. So I went to Diga’s website to try and calculate an estimate. There are no prices (or even menus) on the website, but the hot waiter appears on no less than seven of the eight web pages. Which says pretty much all you need to know about Diga’s priorities.
