Japanese Dinner: Sampling the food of Morimoto & Nobu- 4/7/12

Table Set up The guests Sampling the food Action in the kitchen

Action in the kitchen..

You know how it is done when you are watching TV, they never give you the answer right away, they always tease you a bit so you have to watch until the end of the program.  Well, same concept here, you will need to take a tour in the kitchen first and then the winner will be announced at the end (NO Cheating so don't scroll down ASAP-yes you have to be patient and wait a bit))

So while our guests are sitting down in the dinning room, this is a quick glance at the kitchen in action...

Clam mojito

 

You can't shuck the clams ahead because you want to eat them fresh so I have to shuck them at the last minutes just before our guests are sitting down.

Once they are shucked all I need to pour on top of the clams is the prepared and chilled mojito.

Served in shot glass, they are supposed to go down straight in one gulp!

 

Black cod in butter lettuce wraps

Pan searing the cod...because there are 17 guests I have to use 2 pans in order to fit all the fish.  In order to have a nice brown crust on the fish you have to give them room in the pan.

 

Flipping over the fish.....

Here the final presentation of the dish.

 Hamachi sashimi

 

Maily in the kitchen, platting the Hamachi

Maily wanted 3 pieces per person but since she bought a lot of fish I suggested we served 4 pieces per person.

 

Tuna Pizza

The flour tortilla is pan seared and brushed with BBQ eel sauce.  Here I am spreading the raw tuna and the remaining salmon gravalax on each pizza.

The anchovy aioli is drizzled all over the pizza and here I am just adding a few daikon sprouts on top for decoration.

 

Tuna tartare with 5 type of garnishes

The tuna tartar are made and platted ahead so all I need to do is to remove them from the refrigerator.  Here I am piping some sour cream together with the other 5 garnishes.

Since it is time consuming to pipe the 5 garnishes Ha and Mui are helping me.

Here is the final presentation of the dish.

Fried soft shell crab with cucumber salsa /King oyster mushroom

The soft shell crabs are pre-fried and they are refried once they are ready to be served.

by pre-fried them it is much faster to re-fried them and serve.

The fried soft shell crabs are now ready to be served.

Maily already sautéed the king Mushrooms so she is just re-heating them.

Presentation of the fried soft shell crab with cucumber/avocado salsa.

 

The croissant are heated and are cut in half.

Filling the croissant with roasted duck and then the cucumber slices, and a piece of foie gras on top.

Mui helping me by pouring the port reduction sauce in each bowl while I am in the back frying duck eggs for this dish.

 

Here is the final of presentation of the dish!

Okay the tour of the kitchen is now over so let's move on...

 

You have been patient enough so it is time to find out the results.

After I added all the votes here are the results:

Category:

Best dish from Nobu

1-Oyster salmon roll w. shiso leaves

2-Black cod in butter lettuce wraps

3-Clam Mojito

4-Fried soft shell crab w. cucumber salsa

 

 

Category:

Best dish from Morimoto

1-Tuna Pizza

2-Tuna tartare with 5 types of garnishes

3-crispy duck with port wine reduction

**-Shrimp tempura (Not qualified because we did not serve it that evening)

 

Category:

Best dish overall

1- Tuna Pizza

2-crispy duck with port wine

3-Tuna tartare with 5 types of garnishes

4-Black cod in butter lettuce wraps

5-Clam Mojito (tied)

5-Oyster salmon roll (tied)

7-Fried soft shell crab with cucumber salsa

So whose cuisine reign supreme?  NOBU OR MORIMOTO?

and the answer is... I am sure you know by now...

MORIMOTO!

Morimoto got 10 votes and Nobu got 6 votes so it was not even close, Morimoto won by a long shot!

Here are how the votes are tally up!  I printed out a spread sheet and distributed to all our guests and they had to fill in the columns by ranking from 1 to 4 ( (1=best 4=worse)) then I combined all the dishes and asked our guests to rank from 1 to 8 (1=best 8=worse).

Here is a copy of Phuc's entries!

 

Note that Maily's dishes are not ranked because this is a battle between Nobu and Morimoto...

and the best chef prevailed!

We had a great evening so until the next battle?

Filed under: Dinner parties

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