Blank Restaurant,
43 Malone Road,
Belfast,
BT9 6RX.
028 9040 6399
WHEN Blank opened two years ago on the Malone Road in what it's obligatory to refer to as leafy south Belfast, it did so on a wave of an impressive amount of publicity.
It was easy to see why – the headline wrote itself: 'A restaurant without a menu.'
Instead of a list of dishes, guests sat down only with the 'Blank list', the names of ingredients and their producers that would feature at some stage throughout the meal.
That 'experience' has expanded from the initial £50-a-head five courses to six courses for £75 or nine topping out at £120 per person – £195 if you want to add wine pairings.
Now they've filled in the blanks, up to a point, with an à la carte menu to offer a more streamlined choice of courses, while also recognising that the appetite for pricey tasting menus has waned – a fact acknowledged by the recent news Michael Deane is closing his Michelin Star Eipic in favour of a new venture in response to "current market demands and changing customer preferences".
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If you do want the full-on blank Blank experience, don't even take a peek at the à la carte offering as it'll give away much of what you'll get in the tasting menus. As it happens, they changed their ingredient list and menu soon after I visited, so you can keep reading safe in the knowledge that you're in a spoiler-free zone.
Anyway, as different as it is, the gimmick was only ever going to get Blank so far. The food and the experience has to speak for itself – and it does. Sometimes it sings.
Few things scream fine dining as clearly as both the presence of and the attention that goes into amuse-bouche. If it's fine dining worthy of the name the skill and consideration of the kitchen will come through in these single bites.
It emphatically does at Blank, where a beetroot crisp and jelly is good, a little nugget of smoked black pudding with scallop roe powder is better and a sweet liquorice star anise macaron with an earthy lentil purée is better still.
Three little bites but all big hitters. Blank doesn't swing and miss. The flavours are concussive and fantastic.
Every bit of the tomato tart is tomato to the max from the discs of heady jelly and the foam that's more than a bit of froth to the fruit-studded sharp-sweet mix in the bottom of the pastry case.
And it's lovely but it pales next to one of the best plates of anything you'll ever eat – the cheese custard. Actually, if you don't like cheese it probably won't be for you. Also, why don't you like cheese?
And even if you claim you don't like cheese, you still like cheese and onion, don't you? And as well as the soft, just-set custard there's little onion rings, blobs of sharp onion gel and the crunch of a potato tuile to give the full bag of perfect crisps effect.
The mains don't hold back either, with more big, bold autumn whacks of taste.
Pieces of blush-pink mutton stand up against a welter of Jerusalem artichoke, as a purée and a little barrel of a fondant cooked in butter and topped with curly crisps. Lamb sweetbreads that melt in their creaminess inside a crunchy coating come on a stick so get called a lollipop. The sauce that brings everything together is shimmering and thoughtful.
It appears identical to the one that comes with the chicken, but while one sings of lamb the other is essence of poultry, along with glistening, soft pieces of breast, a pungent black garlic purée and a squat cylinder of leek, singed black on the outside to give the sweet innards a bitter edge, with a lovely mound of mash on the side.
An apple panna cotta is set inside a green, white chocolate case, compete with little stem, but the best stuff on the plate is outside – a chewy granola, a thumping burnt apple purée and a pieces of ginger cake.
In launching the new menu head chef Marty Carroll spoke about Blank's pride in introducing customers to ingredients and dishes they may never thought of trying before. Even with the benefit of knowing what's coming, the namelaka is a new one on me.
From the Japanese for 'smooth' or 'creamy', the internet tells me it's all the rage. It's somewhere between a ganache and a mousse and the white chocolate version here is as silky as that implies, with chunks of aerated chocolate and pings from a pickled raspberry gel.
Blank may have shifted its target but it hasn't lowered its aim. And it still doesn't miss.
THE BILL
- Amuse-bouche x2 £12
- Cheese custard £10
- Tomato tart £9
- Chicken £24
- Mutton £26
- Namelaka £10
- Panna Cotta £10
- Alcohol-free cocktail £6.50
- Tequila cocktail £13
Total £120.50
