356 words on Food
When my parents came over yesterday, as usual, they wanted to go (and treat me) for a nice meal. So I had to find out about a reasonably nice restaurant that we haven't been to yet. After discussions at luch this week, Moritz recommended a place called Melange where he went with his parents before. It was said to be good, as in better than students would normally afford to go to
without being too posh/expensive.
And it turned out the food was rather good. The menu was nice and small but you were inclined to order almost every item because they sounded so nice – which luckily we didn't. I had a salad of lamb's lettuce with fried duck liver and a sweetish sauce as a starter. The sauce may have been a little bit too sweet to be perfect but it still was a very nice dish. There also was quite a lot of it, so I was almost stuffed before the main course. Along with the salad there was some bread which looked quite average and rustic
but was extremely nice to eat.
My main dish was duck's breast in some kind of rhubarb based sauce (plus veg and some kind of potato dish of course). I found the sauce a bit sourish – perhaps offering rhubarb in winter isn't the best thing to do. The duck was very nice though. Afterwards I couldn't resist ordering dessert as well – a parfait of almonds and marzipan which was extremely nice. It was decorated with a thin wafer of a dry but not crumby biscuit made with lots of dark chocolate, which was very good by itself.
While the food was rather good, the place had a distinct lack of atmosphere. There was too much light. And while everything looked rather new and well done, the decoration was a bit sterile. The menu looked like it had just creeped out of Word – not exactly what I'd expect in a place that tries to be a bit sophisticated. They had better had a hand-written menu if they can't make anything decent-looking on their computer.