With restaurants all over the world, including London, Las Vegas and Shanghai, Hakkasan showcases Cantonese food infused with local flavors that is served in some of the most elegant settings you can imagine; think dark wooden carved latticework and the fragrance of sandalwood incense as you enter. A dining experience here is definitely one for all of the senses.
Christine Parkinson, a gracious English lady, is responsible for putting together the wine lists at all of the restaurants in the group and on Tuesdays, she takes time with her team to taste new wines and decide how well they pair with Hakkasan’s dishes. Since wine pairing with Asian food has only been more fully explored in recent years, Christine organizes her wine list in an unusual way, with intriguing categories that include ‘Curious vines: distinctive wines’ and ‘New classics: genius without a château’. The criteria for making it onto the remarkable wine list is quite straight-forward: the wine must be able to work well with all dishes sampled at the tasting. If it doesn’t work well with one, it doesn’t make the cut.
Our meal began with a delicious steamed dim sum platter, followed by a tofu, aubergine and shitake mushroom claypot, which with its chili black bean sauce, took comfort eating to a whole new level. This was served alongside a dish of black truffle roasted duck that had me in raptures; the duck was sublime, perfectly cooked with the meat succulent and skin crispy. The addition of the truffle shavings gave it an aroma that I will forever catalogue in my memory banks as one of the most intoxicating scents I have ever experienced.
Sweet and sour pork cooked with pomegranate seeds saw a well-known dish elevated to something quite amazing but it was a dish of roasted silver cod, a beautiful silky fish, in a perfectly balanced sauce of champagne and Chinese honey that really had my attention. I will admit I wanted to lick the plate.
Alongside this amazing food, we tasted four excellent wines. I found a pouilly-fumé excellent with the cod but too viscous to match up with the skins of the dim sum. With that incredible duck, an earthy wine from Chile prolonged the sumptuous taste of truffle in my mouth. But for all five of us at the table, it was a Spanish wine, Scala Dei Negre 2012, which consistently shone with each dish and that will be added to the wine list.
There are some meals that you will always remember for the rest of your life and for me, this is going to be one of them. The attention to flavor from the quality of ingredients used at Hakkasan has invoked in me a whole new respect for Chinese cuisine. Whenever I sense the scent of sandalwood in the air, I am going to revisit a meal that was so extraordinary, so fabulous, so sensual, I didn’t want it to end.
Hakkassan is located at 311 W. 43rd Street near Eight Avenue. For more information, please call: (212) 776-1818, or visit: hakkasan.com/newyork
–Fiona Tedds
