A nice recovery

After experiencing the worst service I have ever seen in a restaurant, we went in search of a restaurant for dinner.  Fortunately the Mira is just down the street, so we decided to park ourselves at Whisk.  The place was fairly busy for a Tuesday night, but manages to squeeze us in.

The amuse bouche was a prawn spring roll.  We weren't sure what the dipping sauce was, but this was pretty tasty.

Tourteaux crab cannelloni: tomato, mango, soya - the presentation was sure pretty... The crab meat was wrapped in a long agar tube.  The colorful coulis provided complimentary flavors to the crab.

Australian lamb: crispy ratatouille, eggplant, piquillos - I actually wanted to order Challans duck, but must have suffered a momentary lapse of reason while ordering.  I asked for medium rare, but I think it was the cut of meat itself that was a little tough.  The raratouille was stuffed inside a spring roll, which was kinda cool...  The quenelle of eggplant purée was alright.

Mango parfait: sago, coconut, tamarind - this dessert came in two parts, served on a plate that was separated by a winding "road" drawn with taramind sauce.  The shooter glass had coconut mousse with sago at the bottom, with a layer of mango sauce that is then topped with more coconut cream.  Not bad.

The mango mousse with shaved coconut was OK, too.  Doesn't blow your socks off, but it does the trick.

I had opened my bottle of white wine at the last place and paid corkage once, but there was still 2/3 of the bottle left and I wasn't going to take it home to drink... so we finished the 2009 Araujo Sauvignon Blanc Eisele Vineyard here.  Nose of lemon, pipi de chat, flint and toast.  Classic Sauvignon Blanc from a top winery at a reasonable price.

2005 Grace Vineyard Chairman's Reserve - lots of ripe fruit, sweet, jammy, a bit of forest, green peppers, and later on piment d'espelette. While the nose was not bad, the palate was pretty weak and diluted. While this wine was not cheap and drank better than my last bottle of Chinese wine, my experience based on these two bottles leads me to conclude that I shouldn't waste any more money on them.

All in all, I ended up having a pretty good evening.  While the food wasn't mind-blowing, it was pretty solid and enjoyable.  And they were a helluva lot more polite than the bunch of people I ran into earlier in the evening!