Expensive poopz

Here's what my parents, CM and I degusted at Tetsuya's restaurant over four hours on this fine eve:

* Fresh bread rolls with truffle and cream cheese(?) butter
* Warm chestnut soup
* Oysters with [can't recall] oil and lime (an optional course that we couldn't resist)
* Sashimi of kingfish with black bean and orange
* New Zealand scampi tails with curd and scampi jus
* Confit Petuna ocean trout with konbu, celery and apple (HIS SIGNATURE DISH; served with a side salad of seasonal greens)
* Grilled fillet of barramundi with braised wood ear and chestnut mushrooms
* Braised ox tail with sea cucumber and yuzu
* Twice-cooked deboned spatchcock with Manjimup truffle and barley risotto (I'm positive this had a foie gras component, too...)
* Grass-fed Tasmanian Angus beef with Swiss browns and porcini
* Pear sorbet with bread'n'butter pudding
* Strawberries with balsamic cream and balsamic sugar
* Salted sable with lemon-scented leatherwood honey (they gave Mum a birthday chocolate pudding instead)
* Coffee or tea and macarons (blood orange, pistachio and mocha varieties)

Yeah, 12-14 courses, depending on your POV. The menfolk also had the matching beverages - a chilled sake, three whites, three reds and two dessert wines. My mother's not much of a drinker and was content with the occasional sip from Dad's glass.

The highlights were the kingfish, the trout (OF COURSE), the ox, the sorbet and pudding double act, and the zingy strawbs. If anyone's wondering, the super-strong orange was declared by majority vote to be the ultimate in macaron technology.

Tetsuya's specialty was the only item on the set menu unchanged from when CM and I visited with his oldies in November. We both thought this line-up was superior, although I missed the duck with beetroot and pepperberries. I'd also be prepared to argue that the chilled corn soup with saffron and vanilla ice-cream we ate then had a greater "wow" factor than tonight's chestnut. However, to do so would be churlish when it's a spring/winter thang and I'm sitting here grinning and patting my belly like a ferret in a rabbit burrow.


[25/07: Amended points 12 and 13.]