On 7 Nov 2007 (Wednesday) 15 of us host a farewell dinner in honor of Nansen who’s going to face a new career challenge at the Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo end of this month.
As usual I used the Panasonic Lumix LX2 at ‘Food Mode’ to take the photos (Aperture Priority @ f8, built-in flash and RAW).
Appetizers: The thousand-year egg and ginger is very good as usual. And the deep fried fish skin with broth is great with champagne.
The shrimp fruit salad is not bad but the dressing is somewhat excessive.
The soup was sweet and savory (attributable to the Xinjiang melon). We had to restrain ourselves from eating too much of the ingredient since there were more food to come.
The pomfret was reportedly wild (i.e. not farmed) and we preferred the deep fried to the soup based.
Instead of the freshwater hairy crabs we had the deep fried great (1.5 catties each) red crab (again wild and not farmed) with foie gras sauce. Yummy!
The ancient recipe salt-baked chicken was good but couldn’t match the one we had a few weeks ago as the chicken is not the free ranch type.
The vegetables, dessert (egg white almond tea) and melon/watermelon platter were good especially the almond tea.
For beverage we had seven bottles of champagne (mainly Drappier), 2002 Pio Cesare (Barolo), 2001 Destieux (St Emilion), 2002 Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon Selection (96 RP) and 2001 Haut-Bages Averous (2nd wine of Lynch-Bages) which unfortunately was corked.
