Went here with a friend today. I realize ipse already gave us his impressions, but I do have some specific thoughts on the place…
We started with an amuse bouche of a fried sturgeon croquet with green garlic aioli and chive. Interesting, but a bit fishy for my taste.
Edamame was decent (a bit pricey at $9, though the portion was very large for 2) - but the saucing did remind both us a little of bit hot cheetos, oddly enough.
Bread service was very good - squid ink baguette, japanese sweet bun, and cheese/garlic roll. The squid ink was probably my favorite, followed by the bun. The butter selection was also surprisingly good - honey marrow butter, rendered beef fat, and some regular airy salted butter. The beef fat was honestly something I could just put over toast for a very nice breakfast, liked it a lot. The bread did come after the edamame, which was a bit strange…
The steak was disappointing. We split the 20oz rib eye - I expected it to have a lot more flavor. For context, I was at Pacific Dining Car a few months ago, had the filet there… which had more beef flavor than this rib eye, and better seasoning too. The crust on the rib eye was very salty.
Truffle fried potatoes were quite good, especially the saucing, while the creamed taro was decent but forgettable.
A palette cleanser before dessert consisted of panna cotta, cantaloupe ice, and thai basil ice - the thai basil was definitely the winner here, being sour and interesting enough to overcome my usual disdain for the herb.
My friend got the creamsicle dessert, which he tends to do - it was decent, but not as good as what Bestia offers in that vein. I got the Matcha and Rice, which was honestly incredible, probably the best dessert I’ve ever had. Beyond the plating, which was quite good, the dessert was composed as follows: rice sorbet, mint sorbet (with the mint actually tasting herbaceous and very much like mint leaves, which was a pleasant surprise), matcha mousse (also very good, not too sweet like it often can be), and concentrated passionfruit syrup globules (extremely sour, in a good way). It was surrounded by something crunchy resembling dirt, for textural contrast. Each individual part was extremely good but the flavors and textures also worked very well together. There were also some embedded things that resembled freeze druid fruit (apple?) but melted on the tongue much faster, which were interesting.
Dessert was followed by a large complementary stand of banana cotton candy. Neither of us are too fond of banana candy flavors so we mostly left that alone.
We were then presented with three mignardises - some chouquettes, resembling lady fingers in flavor, strawberry champagne chocolate, and mini mango lime macarons (mine tasted entirely like lime, while my friend said his tasted entirely like mango - very strange).
Service was attentive and the pacing of the food was very good, apart from the odd timing of the bread service.
I would come back here for that one dessert - in fact I almost want to say it’s worth a trip by itself - but I’d go anywhere else for meat.