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Originally Posted by augie_
went to b&b tonight. i was intrigued by the lamb tasting menu, but their policy dictating the entire table has to do the tasting menu or nobody can do it prevented me from ordering it.
My wife and I had this menu Tuesday night. I also ordered the Riserva Wine Pairing with it. Think of it as an Iron Chef evening with lamb as the main ingredient. Fortunately, the dessert courses were "excepted" from must use lamb rule. It's an 8 course meal and really gives you an wide range of applications of Mario's TV themes of: 1) don't over sauce, and 2) meat as a condiment in pasta dishes. It's a eight course meal with 7 different wines $105 for the "Riserva" pairing. The pairing is a great opportunity to try a broad variety of wines at a good price when you look at the price of those 7 bottles.
None of the 8 courses really grabbed me as "out of the this world" but it was worthwhile to taste a variety of really pro level pastas in a variety of preparations. My wife has trouble talking about our favorite course, the pasta with lamb's brain "francobolli". If you weren't told it had brain in it, you wouldn't know. Very small ravioli typa pasta with the gentle "mounting" of butter lemon and sage. Very delicate and nice. Penne carbonara, a classic, was twisted by using a house made lamb belly bacon. (Mario admits he belongs to "Bacon of the Month" club!) The "weakest" course in our view was the last "main" course, smoked potato ravioli with lamb neck ragu. My wife and I agreed that the smoke was a little heavy handed on the ravioli.
The wines cost more than the meal, but when you consider I would have had to buy 7 different wines to experience the same sampler, this was a good way for me to broaden my limited experience with Italian wines. The most interesting wine was the first one, a white wine "Coenobium Suore Cistergeni "07. It was paired with a lamb stock soup. The wine was described as having "tea and smoke" notes, unusual for white wines. Yet the description was spot on, those notes led the way. It was not a perfect pairing with the soup. But it was a good "ABC" (Anything But Chardonnay) wine that was very pleasant, but a very hard to catagorize wine.
Review: Was the dinner and wine worth the $? Yes, but there are only really 3 courses I would want again and again. The lamb's brain, and the dessert courses, a perfect granita and a panna cotta. My wife, who is "so so" on panna cotta - destroyed hers and was enviously eyeing mine.
I would look at a different tasting menu @ B&B favorably because it does offer a broad food experience that is difficult to reproduce in other more traditional restaurant settings.