The Ardent Gourmet
Restaurant Review: BISTRO DU VIN
Fine food and then a fall into the abyss
May 10, 2018
Your feelings for your wife are such that you schedule two Mother’s Day meals for her, the first at Bistro du Vin in Kennedy Town.
The restaurant is not the creation of an impassioned chef trying to make a go of it. Instead, it is the calculation of businessmen (Piccolo Restaurant Group) trying to fill a perceived niche in the market. Creation. Calculation. Both approaches are legitimate. Though, in your experience, the former is more likely to shoot Roman candles. Still, if you put cost aside, Bistro du Vin succeeds quite well with one significant exception.
They have two dinner seatings, 6 and 8:30. On the phone they emphasize the need to be out by 8:30 for the next seating. Neurotic about punctuality, you fret as your taxi sludges along. Half-an-hour late, the place is completely empty. The interior exudes bistro, as though the designer distilled all the bistro interiors in France into one. You are graciously seated. Servers are immediately attentive, making you feel comfortable with a basket of excellent, warm bread, room temperature butter, and sea salt with a Lilliput spoon.
There is no corkage for first bottles of wine (which is much appreciated). They put your Rosé in a stiff, transparent plastic bag, in fact a clever wine bucket. With some grape in hand, all gyros spooled, you peruse the menu.
It is standard bistro hits, relatively simple fare, that you’d find in France. You start with a salad and seared foie gras, more challenging than cold foie gras, to test the mettle of the chef. The salad is lettuce and herbs with bits of citrus in a sharp dressing, nowhere near transformative, but competent and satisfying, a salad you’d get from a good home cook. The foie gras is perfectly seared, not overcooked (bane of foie gras), with a wafer of crisped jambon pate, rather like bacon, adjoining. It is daringly covered in a fine grating of fresh horseradish and surrounded by dashes of Dijon mustard. Almost all seared foie gras concoctions are accompanied by sautéed fruit or an agrodolce sauce of some sort to balance what amounts to a slice of fat. Bistro du Vin’s savory overlayment is improbable and high risk and it works brilliantly. EXCEPT, there is a piece of smoked eel on the plate. Perhaps the chef was feeling a bit manic, or perhaps the eel simply flopped over from another kitchen, but it just doesn’t work. It makes no more sense in this dish than it would in a vanilla crème brulee. You hope the restaurant continues with this lovely dish but removes the eel who surely would be happier underwater with his pals.
Your main course is a shared dish of pork (what amounts to two boneless chops of moderate size) over cassoulet beans flavored by smoking hay. Smoking with hay has been a culinary magic trick since at least the 1990’s, but this is your first experience. The smell is lovely and you’re pleased to see that it’s more than showboating. It works, imbuing the perfectly cooked pork with its sultry flavor.
Along with the pork you order haricot verts, perhaps the finest dish of the evening, cooked perfectly with a glaze of butter, fresh thyme, and a fortissimo of garlic. Wow!
The gods despise hubris. Dessert is a fall into the abyss, a Grand Marnier souffle for each of you. Souffles require the creative hand of an artist plus the precise hand of a scientist. In this case, the artist was there, but the scientist was off drinking. Both your souffles were significantly overcooked. Where they should have been almost liquid in the center, they were as dry at the center as on the edges, more earthbound than ethereal, more scrambled egg than souffle. The accompanying ice cream nested in cookie crumbs was good, probably made elsewhere. Had the souffles worked, sweet cream ice cream, in your wife’s view, would have been better than vanilla. Please, Bistro du Vin, work on this dish to get it right. (Perhaps you need a higher cooking temperature and a shorter cooking time.) This is an important heritage dish and uncountable chefs (and home cooks) of generations past are watching you with dour expressions.
By the time you leave, around 8 pm, the bistro is full and boisterous. Acoustics are poor and you have to raise your voice to be heard, no bad thing perhaps, but certainly not suited to most conceptions of romance.
Ah, that price was not relevant, but it is. The total bill was just shy of 1200 HKD without wine. Hong Kong is expensive, but by your lights this is just too much for a meal of good, but not exceptional, quality. Bistros in France are almost by definition reasonably priced, an everyman’s alternative to expensive haute cuisine. In terms of value for dollar (and, to be honest, quality of food), a number of French eateries in Hong Kong are vastly superior to Bistro du Vin. Vastly. Little Kitchen (possibly the finest French restaurant in Hong Kong, even without factoring price) and the wine lunch at Amber come to mind.
The setting was bistro beautiful. The service was very good though the noisy acoustics did not help to fan the embers of romance. The food was good, if not excellent, with one tragic failure. The value for dollar was low and it is for this reason, alas, that you will not return.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 3
Ambiance: 3
Service: 3
Overall Value: 2
BISTRO DU VIN
Shop 1D, 1 Davis St, Kennedy Town, Hong Kong