63 Tay Street
63 Tay Street, Perth
01738 441451
Lunch/Dinner: £18-£40
Food rating: 8½/10
TASTING menus are high-risk if you ask me. They encourage chefs to show off all their latest tricks, and although balance should be built into them as customers can’t control that through their own choice, I find you usually end up eating too much, not least because so many tasting menus also come with extra titbits to ram home the message that you’re getting value for money.
So it’s à la carte for me as a rule, and 63 Tay Street in Perth was going to be no exception. I had our order all planned. For starters we’d have the scallop with dashi broth and pig dumplings, and the crab quiche. Mains would certainly feature the red deer; I was intrigued by the idea of its accompanying "corned shin". There only were two desserts, but they were right up my street: dark chocolate, lime and hazelnut ice cream (a winning trio I’d wager), and treacle tart with blood orange and vanilla ice cream.
And then I turned the page to the tasting menu, “the perfect way to experience Graeme Pallister’s passion for seasonal ingredients, served in a relaxed flow of dishes”. Each course is a "surprise, described to you as it is served". The motto is: “Just feed us Graeme.” Even though the idea of delegating responsibility for choosing dishes has its appeal, I didn’t consider it seriously until the front-of-house manager dropped in the line that “most people go for the tasting menu”. Lemming-like, I decided we’d follow suit. After all, a chef knows what’s best and most thrilling on the day. From previous experience I see Pallister as one of the country’s most reliable cooks. His mantra, "local, honest, simple" echoes my own values. So I put myself in his hands.
The first two courses gave me no cause to regret my decision. First up, a verdant wild garlic soup. The very embodiment of a superfood, it served up the healthy vitality you get from heaps of sappy, leafy garlic, a great underlying stock, an invigorating lemony sourness – then scaled further heights with silken slices of ferrous, cured wood pigeon breast, a Middle Eastern-style dukkah that featured, I think, roasted coriander seed, caraway, and nigella, paper-thin, fried vegetable crisps (Jerusalem artichoke, I’d say), and croutons of near nano proportions. This soup encapsulated Pallister’s strengths: a fresh, clean palate; intelligent layering of flavours and complementary textures; a holistic approach to each dish.
These skills were on show again in the risotto that followed, where pea purée gave a green heft to the immaculately cooked rice, which was deep with savoury stock and a lemon chilli kick that just caught the back of the throat, the cheese more a gentle Pecorino than a potent Parmigiano Reggiano. This was a captivating dish even without the succulent, golden-fried scallop that bedecked it.
Like an unappreciated Christmas present, the next course made me wish I’d asked what was on the menu in advance, even if that spoiled the surprise. Here was smoked salmon quiche, and I can’t imagine a better exemplar of its type, with its strongly smoked fish, its unctuous custard, its invigorating lemon zest tang, and to-die-for buttery, flaky pastry. But cooked smoked salmon isn’t my thing, and I never knowingly eat farmed salmon, and this was farmed, I checked. That’s the built-in risk of surprise tasting menus: you get something you don’t like.
Our next course was more to my taste: quail, the breast moist, legs properly roasted with a whiff of coriander, a two-bite black pudding pastry sitting on carrot, pak choi, lightly curried lentils, and a terracotta daub of smoky red pepper purée.
Stem ginger and honeycomb cheesecake with bravely tart roast rhubarb, came with a star A vanilla ice cream, but I don’t want ice cream with cheesecake – it’s cream overkill – and I could have done with more of the pungent shreds of candied ginger. I found myself pining wistfully for the à la carte treacle tart and the hazelnut ice cream that I wasn’t having, and resolved to return to 63 Tay Street, only this time, not for the tasting menu.
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