Below are some short reviews of restaurants we visited over the last few months.

Relae, Copenhagen
Christian Puglisi’s restaurant in Copenhagen is serving top quality food in a laid back bistro style, informal and unpretentious atmosphere that has a neighbourhood feel. Drawing on a core of seasonal and regional produce, but allowing a small bit of global influence, Puglisi's food is interesting and innovative. A stunning and very clever dish of cauliflower, bergamot and mackerel demonstrated a style that can have bold flavours, each holding its own ground but marrying together beautifully to create a clean finish. The same can be said for a fantastic and interesting dessert of apple and mushroom. A course of frozen blue cheese with herbs was a light and different take on a cheese course and worked brilliantly. The only let down on our 7 course tasting menu was a rather awful serving of chewy lamb with fava beans that tasted like falling into a mucky swamp. At around €100 for a 7 course tasting menu Relae represents excellent value, especially by Copenhagen standards. The service is engaging, knowledgeable and fun. Relae is an excellent restaurant and highly recommended if visiting Copenhagen.

See Relae on our list of world restaurant ratings
 
formel B, Copenhagen
There are many great restaurants in Copenhagen now and more opening each year. In our 3 visits we have been lucky enough to have eaten some amazing meals, but formel B was not one such meal. The food was dull, clumsy and very quickly forgettable. In fact, a decent turbot dish and some perfectly cooked sweetbreads were the only positives that we took away from this meal. The rest was an array of poorly executed, seen many times before, dishes. There were leaves and greens where there shouldn’t have been, badly chopped and sliced components and portioning that wasn’t quite right. Anyway, suffice to say that we will not be returning on future visits to Copenhagen and there are much better restaurants in this price range.

See formel B on our list of world restaurant ratings
 
Amuse, Dublin
We have already reviewed Amuse this year, see here, but just a quick note about a rather good lunch we have had there since. There are too many restaurants that have very good dinner and tasting menus, but offer up dull lunch or pre-theatre servings. So it is great to see Conor Dempsey, Amuse’s chef patron, doing it the right way. The lunch menu was as well executed and showed the same care and attention as on the tasting menu we had previously. Dempsey is still developing Amuse, but he is investing his resources in the right things and the restaurant continues to improve. This is a very good to see and the lunch menu, at €29 for 3 courses or €40 for 4 courses, offers great value and a great lunch option in Dublin.
  
Indaco, Ischia
In the Regina Isabella hotel in Laco Ameno on the island of Ishcia young local chef Pasquale Palamaro is serving some creative and local inspired food. His food shows a lightness of touch and an excellent palate. An opening dish of scallop carpaccio was a delicate and cleansing start to our tasting menu. A moreish, but surprisingly light serving of spaghetti with mullet roe, grilled pine nuts, lemon zest had a beautiful freshness to it. This best dish, in fact it was one of those rare perfect 10 out of 10 dishes, was pumpkin consomme, with a pumpkin gel, provolone tortellini and tiny balls of truffle. The gel bursts to thicken the consumme and all married together harmoniously with the tiny bits of truffle giving an earthiness. Desserts were a slight let down however. Porcini mushrooms with a seawater foam felt like there could be a great dish there somewhere, but wasn’t quite finished. Lemon with liquorice was missing any flavour of liquorice. The order of the courses felt a little bit wrong too with the savoury servings finishing with the smallest lightest dish. Service was quite formal, but very attentive and €90 for our 5 course dessert felt like good value. In all Indaco is a very nice restaurant, with a beautiful view overlooking the gulf of Naples, serving light flavoursome and innovative dishes and if you find yourself on the Island of Ischia then Indaco is definitely worth a visit.

See Indaco on our list of world restaurant ratings
 
Pipero al Rex, Rome
Just off the Via Nationale in the Hotel Rex in Rome, you will find the charming restaurant of Pipero al Rex. On the main the food is clever, balanced, well thought out and delivered with aplomb. An elegant serving of duck tartare was an excellent start to our tasting menu and worked beautifully with a mustard puree. A rich and warming dish of egg poached in tea with potato puree was moreish, with chopped hazelnuts adding the much needed texture that made this dish work. Another highlight was that a dish of rigatoni with broccoli, sausage and pecorino foam, but felt just slightly over seasoned. Desserts were decent, if not up to the standard of the proceeding courses and the only let down was an overly salty and quite average carbonara which was too big and rich for a 6 course tasting menu. Service was a little bit rushed and slightly conceited at times and €100 for the six course menu was decent enough value. Pipero al Rex provides some beautiful and tasty dishes that manage to both comforting and interesting, prepared by a clearly talented kitchen team in a cosy and intimate dining room in the centre of Rome.

See Pipero al Rex on our list of world restaurant ratings

We like a chef who is not just talented, but is doing something different, adding something new and interesting to the food scene and cooking food that shows a passion and care. Chef Conor Dempsey in Dublin's Amuse restaurant is a very skilled chef who is doing this.

The food in Amuse is using Asian flavours and ingredients, some dishes with a taste of Japanese, others with a touch of South-East Asia, but all with Dempsey's own interpretation. The cookery is ambitious, combining many, sometimes powerful, components on the plate. On most dishes, on the 8 course tasting menu, this is done with aplomb with the resulting dish delivering a complex, yet clean flavour. Hamachi with the fragrance and slight bitterness of bergamot, worked well with the slight heat from a horseradish yoghurt. Cod with a Kamebishi (3 year old fermented soy) sauce was another highlight - the richness of the sauce was cleverly contrasted with a sushi rice cream. The Kamebishi was more complex then a normal soy; deep umami, rich and slightly sweet, but it didn't overpower the fish. A serving of perfectly cooked Anjou pigeon with aubergine and kombucha (a fermented tea) was also another noteworthy dish. 

A very clever dessert of passion fruit 'Tom Kha Gai' was another beautiful offering; sweet, but not overly, well textured and light. Tom Kha Gai is a coconut soup, a savoury dish we have had many times in Thailand, a strange name for a dessert then, but the flavours are reminiscent of the original. The menu also starts with many quirky amuse bouches, a pre-dessert and some good petit-fours. All of these are extras and not included in the 8 courses.

A couple of courses were a let down however. Guinea fowl with courgette and coconut did not work. Another was the final course, a door-stoppingly dense dark chocolate ganache, too heavy to end an 8 course meal, served with unpleasant soapy violet.

The food in Amuse is respectful to cuisine of Asia that inspire it and the produce that it uses. Some dishes have that deep, but delicate umami synonymous with Japan, while others blend the sweet, salty and bitter balance that is the trademark of food from South East Asia. 

The 8 course tasting menu is €90, which may appear on the high side for Dublin, but when you consider the number of extras, the work involved in the menu and the quality of food, then it is actually very good value and feels generous. The service is friendly, informative with waiting staff taking an interest in the enjoyment of the diner. 

In an industry where many restaurants are following trend, copying others, or looking for something that will sell to the masses, Conor Dempsey is, maybe bravely, choosing gastronomy and high end dining and you get the sense here that he is passionate about both. Since our last visit nearly a year ago the food has progressed and the dining room feels more comfortable, so it very encouraging to see a restaurant investing in the right things and it will be interesting to see if Amuse can continue to improve. 

Amuse is a great addition to the Dublin food scene, serving fun, and clever food with some interesting Asian produce, delivered with skill and care by a talented chef. We certainly won't be leaving it a year to our next visit and, the fact we are eager to return, says a lot.

Click here for a more recent review of Amuse

We usually don't go to a restaurant for at least several months after it first opens. It takes a new restaurant time to find it's feet and iron out the creases. There are few businesses in any other industry that would be expected to run a perfectly smooth operation when they first open, so reviews of a restaurant on opening night or even in the first couple of weeks are hard to take seriously and criticism of food or service may be unfair. Visiting a restaurant which has had time to develop, polish its operation and hone the dishes gives a clearer picture of what the restaurant can offer. Even elBulli, which was only open for six months a year, was described by Ferran Adria as being a lot more organised and rhythmic near the end of their open period.

Saying that though, we broke our rule slightly when we visited Amuse on Dawson Street in Dublin after being open for only two months. It wasn't planned, but in desperation of a feed and without a dinner reservation we found ourselves in Amuse, which thankfully had a few openings. Had it been a bad experience or we had many criticisms we may not be writing this review and, instead, we would be going back in a few months, but since the experience was positive we figure a review isn't out of order.

Amuse may be described as "fusion", one of those overused culinary terms, as it incorporates both Asian and European ingredients and techniques. This is nothing new and although the term 'fusion' originated and was popularized in California around the 1970s, cultures have been fusing cuisines long before that. This is especially true when countries were colonized and two cuisines and cultures were thrown together. Due to French colonization of countries in South East Asia the French influence is still very obvious there. Cambodia's national dish of Fish Amok is steamed with egg to soufflé it, Vietnam's national dish of Pho is thought to have origins as Pot Au Feu and a consommé and baguettes are still eaten in both countries, albeit a bit sweeter. Of course, the spread and availability of spices could also be seen as one of the earliest forms of simple fusion cooking.

A lot of restaurants opening in Dublin at the moment are looking for a trend or a niche. The dining room, the setting and the theme are paramount and the food, which often isn't bad and can even be good, comes second. Amuse isn't like that though and, after a meal there, it is obvious that the food comes first and serving this style isn't a gimmick or an attempt to find a hole in the market. This is evident in the simple dining room with influential cook books, such as Michel Bras and Mugaritz, displayed on the walls. It comes across as if the chef, Conor Dempsey, is cooking the food he wants to cook and there is excitement in his food as he starts out on his venture.

We had the 7 course tasting menu and, first and foremost, a quick read of the menu showed it was actually 7 courses, i.e. it was 7 courses, not including the amuse bouche, pre dessert or coffee as many restaurants are selling their tasting menus as these days. So off to good start, before any food was tasted.

There was a lot to like in the food with many dishes showing a lightness of touch and balance of interesting flavour combinations. In the wrong hands ingredients such as yuzo, daikon, chocolate, coconut, kohlrabi (all of which appeared on savoury dishes) combined with fish, shellfish and fowl could be calamitous and it takes skill and an accomplished palate to get this balance right. On the whole the food tasted clean and was refreshing, while at the same time being moreish. The first two courses, which were the best of the night, demonstrated this well. Mackerel ceviche followed by a serving blue-fin tuna with radish and samphire. 

Other courses were also very good and highly enjoyable. An interesting serving of perfectly cooked squid served with coconut and cauliflower was interesting, but a bit overpowered by white chocolate and the dish may have worked better with scallops. A beautiful piece of hake served with a consommé that was slightly too salty. The dessert was a beautiful plate of summer fruit and shortbread that we would have gladly eaten a bucket-load of, but was served with a raspberry sorbet and chocolate pavé which were both a bit diluted and they turned the dessert into a sort of random assortment instead of dish. There was only one dish that we were not too keen on: egg yolk, mushrooms, fennel and hazelnut wasn't harmonious and a little bit cloying.  

The amuses bouches, pre-dessert and petit fours were top quality and the service was professional, friendly and knowledgeable.

Overall it was a very good start and we are really looking forward to going back in the hope that, with a bit of polishing, this restaurant could be one of the best in the city. Currently there is a slight inexperienced feel that may be because the restaurant is still new. Despite being a 7 course tasting menu a couple of dishes were still a little bit small, and we left feeling something was missing. Some of the dishes are just a little bit short of perfect and need the odd tweak.

It is great to see a restaurant in Dublin that is trying something different that isn't for the sake of being trendy. Amuse is offering something different purely on the food and this should be applauded. We left the restaurant impressed.