Usually, I don’t like posting nasty posts and I really respect the hard job chefs are doing, but you don’t come here to read my sweet lies, don’t you? One Michelin star Relae is considered one of the hottest restaurants in Copenhagen. Nothing surprising about that – its chef and most of its team have worked at Noma at some point of their careers… When I was there (the night before MAD symposium), the place was full of foreign chefs, journalists and foodies and as I understood, getting a reservation at Relae is pretty hard these days.
What I wonder though if the Relae chefs ever taste their food before it leaves the restaurant’s kitchen and is it really the food they would like to eat? I did enjoy a “bouquet” of various herbs with pistachio sauce for the amuse bouche and the raw asparagus salad with sunflower seeds and mint was as good as raw asparagus salad with sunflower seeds and mint can get, but the rest was weird and barely edible.
How about unripe, but cooked and still warm strawberry with cress sauce and buttermilk “snow”? All the ingredients of the dish were sour, bitter, unbalanced and nothing appealing you would expect from one Michelin star dish. My main dish ( I took a vegetarian menu and I’ve had really delicious vegetarian menu before ) was romaine salad with egg yolk and nettles. It was very similar to the starter, too conceptual, no balance of the flavours whatsoever and the dried egg yolk shavings served more as a pretty decoration than an ingredient… The dessert, elderflower snow with rhubarb was quite tasty, but again, I was so missing good food that even the Steff Houlberg hotdog I had afterwards tasted delicious!
P.S. Loved my dinner at Sollerod Kro the next day (which also has one Michelin star, but worth at least 2 or 3) , will post about it soon..
