Gastronome

This seafood restaurant is on the ground floor of a building in central Riga, connected to a delicatessen. It opened in 2006 and as well as the main dining room there is private dining for up to twenty people available. The menu was quite lengthy, with plenty of both raw and cooked seafood, as well as a few meat dishes. The head chef is a gentleman called Evgeny Ponomarjov.  

The meal began with a trio of seafood tartare dishes: shrimps with coriander and lime zest, Scottish salmon with lemon and dill oil, and bigeye tuna (from Sri Lanka) with Parmesan and rocket salad. These were pleasant enough, though bigeye tuna does not have the quality of flavour of its cousins the yellowfin or bluefin (12/20). This was followed by a prettily presented dish of discs of octopus along with quail egg, potato and sun-dried tomato. Octopus is not an easy ingredient to work with as it can easily be chewy, but the version here was carefully cooked and was pleasantly tender (14/20).

Grilled scallop with mango was served with Dutch asparagus. This was rather disappointing, the scallop clearly frozen and of mediocre quality, probably trawled rather than hand-dived, and having no detectable sweetness or indeed much taste at all. The asparagus also lacked flavour, though at least the elements were correctly cooked. However if you start with ingredients like this then there is not a great deal that a chef can do (10/20).

Veloute of truffle with chanterelles and cheese was rather better, through the soup could have been served warmer, and the truffle fragrance was limited (11/20). Turbot was properly cooked but again lacked flavour, the fillet here appeared to me to be frozen and came from a small 2 kg fish - with turbot, generally the bigger the fish the better the flavour. This came with celeriac purée and apple, which was a pleasant accompaniment, but again with such an ordinary main ingredient there are limits to what a kitchen can achieve (11/20).

The meal concluded with a mango cheesecake with a mango sauce and lime zest. This was capably made, though in what was a recurring theme the mango did not have great flavour, especially if you compare it to the lovely Alphonso mangos from India that appear around May (12/20). Service was fine, the staff quite efficient. I was being taken here but a typical cost per head might be around €65 (£56) or so, depending on the quality of wine that you order. Overall I think that the chef here can actually cook perfectly well but is being limited in what he can achieve by having to work with very ordinary ingredients.