Enoteca Sileno was not what I had expected; I had, for some reason, expected less. (The moral of the story is to do your research.) Some decent bread and a hearty pork sausage risotto. An antipasto platter and a bowl of mixed olives. A glass or two or il vino rosso (probably two, knowing me). In short, a couple of courses of Italian comfort food to see us off to the theatre happy. Nothing too extravagant or expensive. Nothing too over-the-top. Not tonight.
Well, I certainly fudged that one up. The Enoteca is both more extravagant and more expensive than I had initially expected, with culinary and oenological offerings of a higher calibre than I was prepared for. Far from being excited about this, however—as I probably should have been—I was actually a trifle disappointed. Clearly, it seemed to me almost instantly, the meal was a shaping up to be a bit of a lost opportunity: a menu twice as long as my arm, a wine list several times longer than that, less than two hours before we had to be somewhere else, a limited budget, and one of us driving. I started drafting a mental list of rules for future outings: no other plans, sufficient funds on the credit card, and public transport all the way. But not tonight. Oh well. Tough luck. Sigh.
The menu is a formidable document broken up into six parts: two columns of assaggini, small dishes ill-fated to be lazily described by writers such as myself as Italian tapas, as if no one else but the Spanish has ever fashioned a meal out of appetiser-sized tasting plates; antipasti; primi, or entrées, mostly pastas and risottos; secondi, or mains; dolci, desserts; and formaggi, cheese plates. The Italian-heavy wine list, like the rustic-with-a-bit-of-spit-shine menu, deserves far more attention than I was able to afford it this time round.
We decide to share two assaggini dishes instead of ordering antipasti or entrées. A white eggplant parmigiana and a carpaccio of redfin come out on a big wooden serving block in two beautiful little bowls. A single stack of thinly sliced eggplant is interspersed with layers of well-cooked pasta and is held together, as if by glue, by a beautiful white béchamel sauce. It’s better than the so-called carpaccio, which, adorned by a garnish of finely chopped carrot, cucumber and chilli, is less a carpaccio than a small mound of roughly heaped fish fillets. The fish is admittedly cool and fresh, and the garnish adds some much-needed character, but the parmigiana, slippery and delicious, is far and away the more impressive of the two.
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We’re not particularly hungry by this stage—in addition to the various dishes, we’ve also been filling up on some first-class bread—but duty calls in the form of the dessert list (the cheeses will have to wait for next time). With a bit of sweet-talking, I’m able to convince my partner to share one of il dolci with me: I have my eye on a chocolate hazelnut semifreddo with roasted hazelnut toffee. It emerges, a solid pyramid of chocolaty goodness, its peak truncated by a glass-like shard of golden toffee encrusted with hazelnuts. An uneven zigzag of chocolate dust and a sliced strawberry make the whole thing look pretty. It’s a pretty good semifreddo, too, and we have fun trying to break up the toffee with our spoons.
Sometimes a restaurant doesn’t quite live up to expectations because the expectations one has are all wrong; if you go to a steakhouse thinking it’s a seafood restaurant, of course you’re going to feel slightly gypped when the meat comes out and is white, not crimson. Given that this critic isn’t in a position to make multiple visits to a restaurant in the interest of providing a fair and balanced assessment (no company credit card for this bistro hound, thank you very much), let me just say that next time I wish to pull out all the stops and do the hearty Italian food and wine thing in swank environs, cashed-up to the gills and gunning to get through a couple of bottles, I might just have to give Enoteca Sileno another go. Because while it’s by no means the cheap-and-rustic eatery I expected—and felt like—when I sleepwalked in one rainy night, there’s something there that intrigues me a little—which is to say, enough to go back. I’m not sure that I agree with paying quite so much for fairly traditional food that’s less remarkable than it likes to think—the plating of the lamb, for example, is a little bit silly—but that assaggini menu—and more to the point, that cellar—demand a late night of unfettered exploration, which I’m more than happy to give them. I suspect that they, if nothing else, deserve a more considered review than this one.
The Scene, 4 June 2007
