Anyone who’s just started reading this blog in the last month might very possibly think I have an obsession with Michelin stars. And/or a lot of money. Neither of these assumptions would be true, but recent behaviour would make them understandable. Don’t worry – normal mid-week dinners for under €40 will soon resume… not least because I am broke.
But before that, there was Dining with the Stars (Restaurant Week, but then for Michelin-starred restaurants) to contend with, and I decided to book a table for lunch at the Posthoorn in Monnickendam. Again, I don’t usually review restaurants outside Amsterdam, but since this one is within cycling distance (and cycle we did) I decided to make an exception.
The 20 km it took us to get there were not too arduous on a sunny Sunday, but we felt we’d earnt our calories by the time we got there. So we kicked off with an aperitif and various amuses.
The first was a mousse of Serrano ham in a glass with grapefruit granita and red pepper crisps – it tasted like a cross between a palate cleanser and something you’d spread on toast, but it went perfectly with a glass of prosecco. The second was a little bag of salted, sugared, roasted pumpkin seeds, which were more-ishly crunchy. The third was herring caviar in filo pastry. But the fourth was the cleverest by far: a little garden of asparagus shoots, asparagus purée and fresh peas in a miniature flower pot, which you ate with the wooden stick identifying its constituent parts. All hit the mark in terms of flavour, originality and – critically – amusingness.
Our starter was a roulade of chicken, miniature crab spring rolls, and various just-poached vegetables in sort of geometrically complementary shapes: asparagus, celery, watermelon, turnip… It looked like a painting – I just can’t think who by.
The fish course was sea bass, under-cooked so it resembled the oily rawness of mackerel, with a prawn tartar stuffed inside baby squid. Everything was so barely cooked that its texture was velvety and not overly fishy. It came with what seemed to be the sauce incarnation of a Greek salad: it involved tiny blocks of feta, tomato, olive and a lightly salty, fishy jus. Quite sensational, in the literal sense.
I’d pre-warned the kitchen that I didn’t eat mushrooms, so our main of veal fillet came with lentils (for me) and chanterelles (for my friend). Both versions were accompanied by an exciting parcel of something that tasted like beef rillettes wrapped in a skin of beetroot, pickled turnip, potato gratin and a beefy jus… It was so good I forgot to take any photos.
Dessert was a celebration of strawberries: fresh, smoothie’d, jellied and served with a basil and green tea parfait, mango sorbet and crunchy crumble mix. I was decidedly tipsy by this point, having polished off a glass paired with every course, but it was refreshing and fruity, if not as creative as some of the earlier courses.
Something possessed us to plough on and order a cheese plate, which involved a light, fresh goat’s cheese perfumed with lavender, a super-soft cow’s milk cheese, a creamy taleggio and a hard Dutch cheese that was delightfully caramel-rich and not at all salty and tart.
By this point, the restaurant staff were trying to set up for dinner so we were moved into the lounge for coffee and friandises. Lunch – despite the fact that the menu itself was priced at just €40 per person – cost us €125 each. I’m not quite sure how we managed this, but still: if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, right?
