From The Butler's Pantry
The second Fine Bouche evening was held on Tuesday 29 May. This time, the challenge was to convey a sense of the silver service tradition from Western Europe in a dinner lasting a few hours in contemporary Sydney.
The First Service was an interpretation of service à la Française, a system of service which reached its height in the 18th century. In its original form as a formal dinner, guests entered a dining hall and sat at a table carefully arrayed with all the dishes comprising the entrée course along with candles and other ornaments. The banquet was conducted with the serving staff removing certain dishes at intervals and arranging more dishes on the table as the dinner progressed.
The disadvantage of this particular system of service was that the quality of food was compromised by attention to the visual effect of a symmetrical arrangement of the dishes on the banquet table. To redress this, we set up a series of entrees around the area of the restaurant. It also required the interaction of guests with the floor and kitchen staff, breaking with the tradition of invisible service which service à la Française would suggest.
Guests were offered Black Velvet as an aperitif to accompany their wanderings through the restaurant. Roasting chestnuts were served to the guests in the courtyard. Deep-fried choux pastries variously filled with venison tongue, duck liver cream or souffleed gruyere mixture were offered fresh from the deep-fryer in the larder section of the kitchen. Walnut Mushroom Tart and Mulligatawny Soup were offered in the dining space upstairs.
Once the guests sat down in the dining room, the Second Service began. This course was derived from service a la Russe, a style of service where guests were served course following course. A warm salad of poached Blue-Eye, baked Marron tail and paupiette of John Dory was sauced at table with a Sea Urchin dressing made before the guests by one of the floor staff playing the role of the butler.
The Third Service was intended to celebrate the theatrical and practical aspects of the carver's role, a revered position in the medieval household. Roast Pheasants were brought into the dining room and carved by one of the chefs. The pieces were served to guests individually. We bypassed the traditional coyness where ladies were not served any of the leg because of its obvious reference to the body part with the choice of pheasant because the tough sinews in its leg made it unsuitable to be served in roasted form.
The Final Service was presented as a selection of desserts. The service was conceived as a homage to the emergence of the "Restaurant" after the French Revolution. Up to this point in the dinner, guests had been served the same dish at
the same time in the manner of the table d'hote or public eating houses and inns. The Restaurant originally offered restorative broths and other health-giving items as were suitable for the individual needs and demands of its
customers. The Restaurateur consulted each guest's needs and desire and ascertained his/her taste. In our dinner, the waiters were set the challenge of presenting to the guests the dessert which would ideally suit them.
One way of classifying desserts in former times was into types of entremets or "between dishes". Our desserts comprised hot entremets of Quince Savarin, cold entremets of Rhubarb Trifle and Iced
entremets Red Wine Sorbet with Pear poached in Brandy and for chocolate aficionados, Chocolate Mille-feuille.
Thus the dinner ended.
