The Ice Cube Melts

I should be sleeping, but oh well, I technically don’t have to be at uni tomorrow until 4, so whatever.

Instead I’m going to talk about something that’s been floating around my head the past few days. See, the other day (I think it was last Friday?) was one of the few times I can remember that I actually felt disappointed by something. Being largely indifferent about most things has led me to having a mostly disappointment-free life, and then that happened.

Before anybody gets ahead of themselves into concluding that I’ve actually grown a soul (i haven’t lol), let’s cut to the chase as to what actually disappointed me. As you may or may not know, my sister and I eat out on a pretty regular basis (read: whenever we can afford it), and as a result, we’ve been getting less and less tolerant of things tasting below our expectations. Now, the restaurant Ice Cube was one of the first mid-range ($25-$35 mains) restaurants we had been to. At the time, we were both very pleased at how the waiters would lovingly lay the cloth napkins on our laps, pull out chairs for us to sit (mostly me because my sister always takes the inside cushy seat) and consistently keep our glasses filled with tap water. Of course, we also enjoyed the meals there. The seafood grill mains were wonderfully simple, perfectly grilled fish/prawns accompanied with seasoned beans, roast potato and almonds. The overall pleasant experience we had kept us going back (and subsequently allowed me to fall in love with their pumpkin gnocchi) and everything was just peachy.

Until the other day, clearly.

I don’t remember when, but within the last year or so, Ice Cube underwent a slight change in their menu. My favourite pumpkin gnocchi was replaced with a gnocchi with veal and red wine sauce. (Obviously there were other changes but I don’t really care about them.)Clearly, all was not lost and the latter gnocchi climbed quite quickly up my list of favourites. So anyway, last Friday I suddenly had a craving for veal, and since it was a new month, I carted my sister off to Ice Cube for what I expected to be a tasty meal.

For anybody who hasn’t been paying attention to the entry until now, clearly that wasn’t really what I got.

We started off sharing the Salt & Pepper Calamari & White Fish as an entree. Normally we don’t do entrees at Ice Cube, we generally just get garlic bread, but I love entrees and I was paying, so we had an entree.

It wasn’t bad. Both the calamari and the whitefish were cooked about right, but, well, that was all there was to it. I didn’t stop to marvel at how delicious it was, nor did I just refuse to eat it. It was just average, and I didn’t really mind too much because I hadn’t shown up for a mediocre entree– I came for my god tier meat and god tier homemade pasta.

Now before I go into what happened with that, I will just say a few things. I love veal. It is my favourite meat, and I even love veal when I make it, and my cooking is basically only one degree away from awful. Veal that has been cooked properly, meanwhile, is just lovely, being just firm enough to retain its shape but relenting completely to a knife and its strokes. And the taste is just so delightfully delicate, the muscle sinews not having developed enough to be tough and chewy like beef but still retaining the slightest texture while the flesh itself literally melts in your mouth while still managing to be incredibly lean and not requiring the necessary degrees of marbling and/or medium-rareness to be tender. I also love homemade gnocchi. Packet gnocchi is acceptable as well if accompanied with the right sauce, but oh lord, homemade gnocchi. I thought about it for a long time but I can’t even find the words to describe how good homemade gnocchi tastes like. Let’s just stick to it’s lovely.

Anyway.

So we got our mains. I got the Sauteed handmade Gnocchi with Braised Veal Ragout in a Red Wine Sauce, and my sister got the Grilled Paperbark Smoked Barramundi Fillet.

Before I start the shitstorm, I will say, the handmade gnocchi, by itself, without the sauce or the veal, was quite good. It did all the things well made gnocchi is meant to, retain its shape up until it enters your mouth, and fill it with delicious potato pastaey goodness on contact. The rest of the dish, however… the red wine sauce was not nearly as rich or as saucy as it was supposed to be. It was closer to a very thin broth and the characteristic taste of red wine was nowhere to be found. But what messed everything up was the veal. It just wasn’t… right. Whatever portion was used had far too much fat and not enough actual flesh or muscle sinew to give it any texture or integrity. Sure, it was tender, but a) veal being tender is not an accomplishment, and b) being made up mostly of fat meant that the veal lost a lot of its natural taste, and with the already lacklustre red wine sauce more resembling tasteless beef stock, the lovely gnocchi on its own, which also suffers due to the lacking sauce, wasn’t enough to save the dish.

As what we always do, I had a bit of my sister’s main. Her fish wasn’t bad. Again, nothing particularly extravagant, the fish was cooked well and was nice and tender and juicy. However, it seems, during the menu change, the roast potatoes had been replaced by mashed potatoes. I won’t talk about how mashed potatoes don’t generally sit well on a plate because that would be getting beside the point, but one thing my sister pointed out and that I agree with is that mashed potatoes carry a lot of moisture. As a result, laying your fish and your beans on a bed of mashed potatoes results in the fish and beans absorbing quite a bit of the potatoes’ moisture. I don’t think I have to remind anybody that soggy food generally isn’t very appetizing, and that was basically the case with my sister’s main.

After that meal, the only thing I kept asking myself was “Why?”. I loved the veal dish so much, so I am willing to visit one more time in case that day was just a bad day for them (That being said, Friday night is kind of a bad day to have a bad day…), but at the moment at least, I feel that the Ice Cube has melted, and my heart remains as frozen as ever.

Lol, I took it really dramatic right there.