so, a week or so ago, we went on vacation. we visited disney world for a few days, and we went on a cruise on the disney dream. aside from certain issues with a certain 3 year old, the trip was lovely. it was my birthday, so i demanded a lot of yummy food, as is my habit. we ate all sorts of tasty stuff:
beaches & cream:
dole whips:
surprisingly good (and huge) waffle sandwiches in the magic kingdom:
a fabulous birthday dinner at le cellier (cheddar cheese soup! pretzel bread! really awesome steak! some kind of dessert i can't remember, but whatever it was, it had a salted caramel sauce i wanted a bowl of! and a chocolate moose for sophie!):
'ohana:
and some snacks we picked up for the plane:
we also ate a giant heap of delicious things on the cruise ship, most of which i failed to photograph. but the real culinary highlight of the trip was the dinner that steve & i went to at remy, the ultra-fancy restaurant on the disney dream. this is the sort of restaurant that has one seating per night, and you take three hours to eat the meal. special thanks to grandpa ben & grandma, who took care of sophie for the evening, so we could enjoy our three hour meal (a three hour meal...)! remy is named after the rat-who-is-a-chef in the pixar movie, ratatouille. i know, questionable to name a restaurant after a rat, but...for a company whose mascot is a mouse, why not? there are some (mostly) subtle nods to the restaurant's namesake throughout the restaurant - consider them a variation on the hidden mickey...
when you arrive, assuming you are more or less on time, they know who you are, because they only seat one table every 10 minutes or so. you are escorted through the fancy wine area (they make a point of showing you some of the wines mentioned in the movie, valued at $25,000 or so each - needless to say, we didn't order those. of course, i took a picture of the light fixture, not the wine), to your table, where you meet your serving team for the evening. our waiter was yvan, and it was his first night as a main waiter - but he did just fine. we also met the various other folks who would be helping us for the evening. one guy did bread & water, one guy helped serve, there was the head waiter for the whole restaurant, etc. it is a very small restaurant, and with the staggered seatings, it was very quiet. we had the 2nd seating of the night, so it was virtually empty when we arrived.
you are greeted by some lovely show plates (that, astonishingly, were not immediately removed), and a complimentary champagne cocktail, the colette, named for the female chef in ratatouille. it consisted of champagne, pear vodka, and some fresh berries & bits of dried apricot, i think - it was quite tasty...
right off the bat, you are brought an amuse bouche course, consisted of a little grape-sized breaded & fried item. you are instructed to put the whole thing in your mouth at once, and when you do, it is immediately obvious why. it is basically a fried ball of tomato soup. i don't know how you fry soup, but they do. it was quite yummy - i don't have a picture of it, because, well, i ate it too fast, but imagine a little fried ball looking thing, and there you go.
i think that's when we got the menu, as well. the menu was created by two chefs, scott hunnell (the head chef at victoria & albert's, where we went a couple years ago), and some 2 michelin star french chef. there are basically two preset menus, the "gout" and "saveur" menus (i am sure there are weird french accents in there, but i don't feel like finding them on my keyboard today), or you can mix & match among those courses & some alternate courses. i went with the saveur & steve went with the gout, but we traded courses - he didn't want jamon wrapped shrimp, so he swapped in my asperge verte, and i got the shrimp. we could have had repeat courses, but i hate repeating, plus jamon wrapped shrimp sounded divine to me ;)
about then, the bread started coming, as well - there were three types we could select from, and we were given a plate of (really good) butter & a little crock of sea salt, as well. yummy. my favorite was the truffled brioche bread, which was divine. the other two options were multigrain (shown, with bonus hidden remy!) & little mini sourdough baguettes. they were also quite yummy. bread showed up throughout the meal, between each of the courses. at this point, we were served another amuse bouche course - it was, i believe, watercress soup, with a crunchy crouton & some kind of herbed cream cheese stuff. it was served in a martini glass, with the soup on the bottom, then the round crouton up a bit with the cream on top of it. it tasted green, that's the best way i can describe it. not my favorite course of the night, but not bad :)
now the food started in earnest - steve started with the aforementioned asperge verte - there were a 3 fat little asparagus stems (asparagi?)), on a truffle sauce, with an additional creamy sauce on top. in a bowl on the side, he was served a poached egg, with shaved asparagus & more of the truffle sauce. i'm not sure if the egg was standard, or just something they added for him to make it more equivalent to the shrimp course, but either way, it was quite tasty.
i started with the langoustines royale, which was lobster served two ways. i have no idea what those ways were, only that they were quite tasty. underneath the lobster was a rectangle of what tasted just like thick lobster bisque to me, and the off white blob on the side, also seemed to be the same thing. hilariously, they called the single itty bitty piece of romaine in the middle "salad" - must be a french thing ;)
for the second course, steve had the ratatouille - of course they serve ratatouille at a remy restaurant. it wasn't quite like the ratatouille in the movie, but it was SO GOOD. it was three round tubes of pasta that contained a fine dice of all the traditional ratatouille ingredients - tomato, pepper, i think eggplant, probably something else i am forgetting. then it was topped with, of all things, cuttlefish. not a traditional ratatouille ingredient, but apparently it worked. it also had some drizzles of aged balsamic, which are always a nice addition. sorry the picture isn't great, but i was avoiding the flash...
i had the jamon wrapped shrimp for this course. it was both beautiful and delicious. the shrimp was wrapped in spanish iberico ham, then cooked up, and served with a fine dice of melon & a crazy delicious melon sauce. i know it sounds odd, but it was an excellent balance of salty & sweet, with just a bit of acid to help balance things out, too. it was an excellent substitution, i thought - the asparagus was great, but this was even better, at least for me.
somewhere in here, we also each ordered a glass of champagne, having finished our lovely complimentary cocktail. the disney dream has her own special labling of taittinger champagne, which i actually quite liked - even more than the iron horse fairy tale cuvee that we usually get. they used it in the cocktail, and we both liked it, so that's what we opted for here.
next, steve had the duck breast, which was actually duck served three ways - a piece of breast, a sausage, and some duck confit. he really, really liked the confit. the other parts were good too, but the confit was the best. it had some kind of strawberry-rhubarb sauce & some freeze-dried strawberries with it.
i had atlantic sea bass with thai sweet & sour sauce. it was fine. it was my most unremarkable course - it was fine, but nothing too exciting. the sauce was quite tasty, but honestly, i don't remember anything else about it.
now, for main courses. steve's was amazing - he had some amazing steak: australian wagyu tenderloin. it was really, really, really good beef. it also had some nice seasonal vegetables on the side, and some kind of sauce - but the most amazing part of this course was the pureed potatoes (aka, super creamy, buttery mashed potatoes) topped with braised short rib - holy cow, this was delicious. the potatoes were awesome on their own, but add short ribs, and you get something amazing. i am drooling thinking about those potatoes...
i had the poularde rotie, which is chicken, and doesn't sound terribly exciting, but it was possibly the best piece of chicken i have ever had in my entire life. steve's steak was delicious, but i have had lots of good steak in my life. this chicken was *amazing* - it was super juicy & flavorful, but it had phenomenal crispy skin on top. it had sauce albufera. i have no idea what that is. it was tasty, though, whatever it was. i also recall some foam. and some veggies on a separate plate on the side, with more of the sauce. they were fine. but that chicken, oh boy. i never thought i'd be this effusive about a piece of chicken, but i would *love* to know how it was made. again, sorry about the crappy picture...it was really dark in there...
then came the highlight of the meal for me. not so much for steve, though, but it was something i had been looking forward to since i spotted it on the way into the restaurant: the cheese course! they had a cart with, um, 10 different kinds of fancy cheese, and you could have as many or as few as you wanted. needless to say, i wanted all ten. i think i may have given the impression that steve would be eating some too, which, perhaps, wasn't entirely the case - but oh man, did i eat a lot of good cheese. hard cheese, soft cheese, stinky cheese, mild cheese. steve had some little nibbles of some of the milder ones, and i gorged myself on the rest. seriously, i could have just eaten cheese that evening, and still been full. so, so, good. i only remember a few of the specific cheeses - there was a comte, fourme d'ambert (a really good blue cheese), saint marcellin (my favorite, a cheese so runny it was served from a bowl - it's the gooey one in the center of the plate), a mild goat's milk cheese that was the only one steve would eat...mmm...again, my stomach is rumbling just thinking about it.
after that, i was really, really, full, but we were not done yet - it was time for dessert! my menu came with a vacherin framboise, which was a layered concoction of meringue, vanilla ice cream & raspberry sorbet, with raspberry sauce & fresh raspberries. it also came with extra sorbet on the side with sauce & little meringue kisses, for sharing (or not, depending on how generous you were feeling). steve's menu came with the tanzanie chocolate pyramid with white chocolate gelato - this may be familiar, as it is very, very similar to the dessert i had at victoria & albert's (and conceived by the same pastry chef) - it was super chocolate mousse in an inverted cone shape, with some gold leaf on the tip & some loopy chocolate surround thingies, and with fresh berries, and white chocolate gelato in a chocolate cup on the side. if you know me and/or steve, you know that these desserts are backwards, so, for all intents & purposes, we traded - i gave him the main serving of mine, and he gave me the chocolate pyramid part of his. he kept the little chocolate cup with the white chocolate gelato, and i kept the extra serving of raspberry gelato from mine. they were delicious. so, so, so delicious.
You would think we were done now, but no...it was time for tea, coffee & mingiardises - that's right, more surprise food. it's like the amuse bouches of dessert. steve had decaf, i had jasmine tea, and we both had a pile of sweets. literally, a pile: they brought out two serving pieces, upon which were served: two lollipops (we brought those back for sophie), two shortbread cookies with lemon curd, two strawberry marshmallows (these were steve's favorite - the strawberry flavor was very pronounced, in a good way), two chocolate bars (one dark, one milk), two canelles, two salted caramels (there were my favorite - clearly, i have a weakness for salted caramel), two nougats (that almost pulled out one of my fillings), and two pastry cookie things. after a proper dessert. i almost exploded. also, drinking three cups of tea was, perhaps, a mistake.
as we finished, we were presented with the bill (which they gave to steve, even though they had my room card, sigh), along with a fancy pen in a wooden box. and they also brought me a rose. of course, when we got back to our room, sophie immediately took possession, but it was nice while it lasted :) also, when we got back, there was a nice thank you note & a box of chocolates from remy waiting for us. as if they didn't feed us enough already...
to sum up, the meal was phenomenal. i felt well fed & well pampered. steve says: everything should be topped with short rib. so i guess he liked it, too. all in all, yum. i'd definitely do it again, in a couple years. and i think some of that cheese is still in my stomach.
