Ron Blaauw, and an argument for the value of fine dining
Please note that since writing this blog post, Ron Blaauw Amsterdam has closed down
Thursday night’s dinner at Ron Blaauw Amsterdam cost me €125. I’m telling you that now so that if you’re looking for a nice, average, mid-range dinner, you need read no further. But before you dismiss fine dining as an elitist pursuit, think of it this way: you can buy a dress from Primark for a fiver, or you can buy its couture alternative for €5,000. You can buy a used car that runs for €500, or you can spend more than the price of my apartment on a Lamborghini. The gap between cheapest and most expensive is a gaping canyon. Food, by comparison, is rather egalitarian: the difference between a McDonald’s and a Michelin star (in purely financial terms) is a matter of a hundred euros – maybe two. I don’t think there’s anything elitist about that.
If you’re still reading, you may remember a couple of weeks ago I went to Saskia’s Huiskamer for a friend’s surprise birthday party. She’d originally planned a smaller affair at Ron Blaauw’s new Amsterdam restaurant, so a group of seven of us decided to celebrate her 30th a second time – any excuse for dinner, eh? We started with a glass of champagne and some salty-icing-sugared macadamia nuts, before being taken to our table. Mr Blaauw himself popped over to say hello, although he clearly didn’t remember my interviewing him a year or so ago for an article I was writing about food trends in Amsterdam for the Wall Street Journal. I was too shy to remind him.
We’d ordered the four-course fixed menu, but – as you come to expect in these situations – there were several amuses before the starter arrived. There were asparagus purées with egg yolks cooked to 65 degrees that looked like mini-fried eggs… There were Dutch cheesy balls… There were Indian pastries that disintegrated in your mouth, leaving semi-dried Dutch shrimps with soy sauce and spring onion on your tongue… There were gazpacho flavoured prawn crackers (without the prawn bit, obviously) topped with concentrated tomato and basil purées… It was all very exciting.
And then my favourite thing happened. This little glass bowl arrived, whose bottom was glazed in a bright green cucumber jelly. On top of that was a lemongrass mousse. And surrounding the mousse were these mental little mini-vegetables called peppinkino (or something like that), which are a cross-breed of watermelon and cucumber. Only tiny. As you do. Loved loved loved this, especially with the semi-dry champagne.
Our actual starter was a foie gras emulsion the colour of Amsterdam on queen’s day. The lurid orange cream was a little off-putting for me, but the taste was buttery with that slight off-bitterness you get from the liver, served with slithers of citrusy grapefruit, toasty walnuts, rose meringues, and crunchy, aniseed-y cubes of fennel. An element of sweetness came from the Zomerhuizen wine, which was a combination of Gewurtztraminer and another grape I hadn’t heard of and forgot to write down (helpfully).
The second course comprised a large gamba tail with bouillabaise, saffron and tomato salsa, and baby artichokes – both quartered and puréed. (It seems there were a lot of purées going on that night.) My only criticism was that the gamba was overcooked. The artichoke was possibly the most Platonically ideal version of itself I’ve ever tasted. And the saffron-bisque combo was perfectly executed.
When food is bad it usually tastes like something it shouldn’t, which makes it a good deal easier to write about…. When food is good it tastes most purely of itself, which means I run out of adjectives. A luxury problem, granted.
Our main was lamb – it seemed to have been rolled up and slow cooked – with its own jus, a ball of polenta that was disguised as a radish and a variety of raw pickled vegetables. That last bit doesn’t sound like a good thing, but believe me when I say it was. I like it when I eat things that I would have absolutely no idea how to cook myself – and these peelings of faintly gingery, almost-Asian, crunchy textured roots entirely fell into that category. Oh, and the wine was fabulous too – the dish was paired with an Italian Alberice Schioppettino that we’ll all be looking up and placing an order for.
Dessert came in three parts: the first was an ice cream cone filled with Bailey’s ice cream (how retro and indulgent!), followed by a small, simple dish filled with a thick-set custard, various berries and herbs. Then the theatrics started: something that reminded me of those penny sweets you could buy in the 80s called flying saucers – only bigger. Off-white, round and perfectly smooth, the giant space craft was doused in alcohol and set on fire until the flames melted the casing to reveal a soupy mixture of berries, white chocolate and liqueur.
The petit fours were rather a highlight too: a plate of what looked like borrelhapjes appeared, comprising bitterballen, kaas blokjes and ossenworst. All was not (unsurprisingly) as it seemed, when the “sausage” turned out to be a sort of strawberry-jellied sweet, and the “cheese” something sweet and buttery, while the “bitterballen” were coated in crumbs of speculaas and filled with butterscotch. Most ingenious.
No, it wasn’t cheap. But since I own neither a car nor a designer dress, I think spending €125 on my own top priority is not – in the grand scheme of things – very much at all. So there.
