Ciel Dining in District 2
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Ciel dining
📍 Ciel Dining Thao Dien
I haven't been to District 2 much lately. But Ciel is still one of the fine dining restaurants in District 2 that I always recommend to everyone (and the first and the best is always La Villa French for sure!)
This time's menu will focus on poultry and less seafood.
I will review the dishes that impressed me the most:
• Choux pastry with three types of cheese, the most impressive of which is gorgonzola cheese. Normally this dish is a cold appetizer, but here when it is served to diners, the cheese is still warm enough, moist and melted to blend with the crispy crust of the cream puff as well as the rich fatty taste of Iberico ham and truffle mushrooms 🥰
• Fresh crab with tomato salad is a cold gazpacho-style soup but cooked with a consomme broth of 4 types of tomatoes and a little lemon to increase the freshness. Personally, I don't like crabs so I don't really like this dish but the tomato broth is very delicious.
• Hong Kong fish maw cooked with steamed eggs, Spanish ham hocks. Add a little more cheese, richer, more saturated and thicker. I like version 2.0 of this dish better than the previous version. The fish maw is much more flavorful but still retains the chef's identity.
• Northwest wild duck, as I understand it, is wild duck, hunted, not raised in cages. The technique is very good but the meat is still a bit tough, the smell of wild duck is still a bit strong so in fact, the side dish served with it, although it has it, cannot completely overpower this. Regarding the quality of the meat, it may be due to the soil, so this wild duck meat doesn't taste as good as the ginseng bird eaten at Dung Hoa's house 10 years ago 😹 I'm sorry but in Vietnam right now, I haven't seen any family that can handle wild duck well.
• The best French pigeon in the world (that's what the chef told me), the price is the same as Kobe beef, the quality of the meat is number 1, far surpassing all the pigeons I've ever eaten in Vietnam and even China. Grilled eggplant and hollandise sauce add to the umami flavor of this dish, the meat is so tender that it's suitable for people with dentures 😹
• Abalone rice cooked in a special steamer ensures that the rice grains are evenly cooked and soaked in abalone liver sauce. The abalone is a bit tough and overcooked, but the rice is very delicious, delicious like vinegared rice cooked for Omakase in the Edomae style. The technique is very good, but I would prefer the abalone not to be overcooked.
• The two most excellent desserts are sweet potato ice cream, like eating baked sweet potatoes with vanilla ice cream in the freezing cold winter. Winter truffle is very delicious. In general, the ingredients are impeccable.