Disco Spectacle at the Table
We previously wrote about our love of tableside preparations. For years, a serving art that had all but disappeared from restaurants, but tableside preparations are once again completely respectable. Pure retro or in a new, hip outfit: Anyone fancy some disco pistachios?
Crêpes Suzette, steak tartare, sole… For decades, these French-cuisine classics were prepared at the table by a waiter whose duties extended beyond merely serving beautifully arranged plates. Tableside preparations were a fixed part of every restaurant experience, until they were labeled old-fashioned and swept off the table. With the rise of the open kitchen, where guests can watch the chef’s every move all evening, tableside preparations no longer added anything. But tableside preparation is back. Sometimes in a retro version, but often in a completely new and hip guise. Here are a few examples:
Turkish disco pistachios
When you order this bar snack at Prune in New York City, don’t be surprised if the waiter sets down a plate piled with salt, sprinkles Turkish pistachios over it, pours raki over the lot and then sets the whole thing on fire. The salt absorbs the raki and ensures that the nuts keep burning until they are sufficiently roasted to eat. Perhaps while enjoying a glass of raki.
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Baked Alaska/Omelette Sibérienne
Once a brasserie classic and now back on the menu at quite a few neo-brasseries, such as New York’s Le Coucou – which, incidentally, calls the ice-cream bomb omelette Norvegienne. Here too, fire plays the leading role when the ice-cream-and-cake mountain surrounded by stiffened egg white is set alight. At Le Coucou, it is a single-serving version with pistachio ice cream and roasted cherries, with kirsch as the fuel. This flaming dessert is also regularly appearing at tables in the Netherlands again.
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Canard à la presse
In the past, a good waiter distinguished himself from a mediocre one by being able to flawlessly perform techniques such as canard à la presse at the table. In short: roasted duck served in a sauce made from its own blood. That blood is elegantly pressed from the duck’s carcass before the guests’ eyes using a silver table press, then mixed with the liver, marrow, butter and cognac into a sauce, in which the legs and breast pieces are subsequently placed. At retro brasserie Bodon in Amsterdam, gérant Kees Neve prepares canard à la presse with the flair of someone who has never been away. You can then finish the meal in retro style with crêpes Suzette prepared at the table.
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Steak tartare
Both Ron Gastrobar Paris and the renovated Café Americain in Amsterdam treat guests to raw minced beef mixed tableside with sauces, herbs, capers, onions, cornichons and raw egg yolks – a dish we know as steak tartare.
Beggar’s chicken
A Chinese dish from the Hangzhou area, whose tableside preparation resembles that of sea bass or chicken in a salt crust. At the new Bougainville restaurant run by Pascal Jalhay, the famous clay-baked beggar’s chicken from the now-closed legendary Michelin-starred restaurant Lai Sin in Driebergen is on the menu and at the table – where it is hammered open on the spot to reveal its filling. The chicken is deboned, filled with, for example, minced pork and mushrooms, and then wrapped in lotus leaves. A layer of clay is then applied, often with Chinese characters carved into it, and it goes into the oven. This keeps all the flavor and juices inside the chicken until the clay crust is cracked open at the table with a hammer.
Tableside shawarma
New York’s Middle Eastern restaurant Au Za’atar recently added an entirely new type of tableside preparation to its menu: tableside shawarma, for which the owners developed a table version of the familiar shawarma grill themselves. The shawarma cooks at your table for about three-quarters of an hour while you enjoy all kinds of mezze, after which you slice the cooked meat yourself.
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