Foaming Waves, Foaming Food

Friday, February 7, 2014

We went to the seaside yesterday.  Well sort of.   We did our excursion on the antique trolley busses—the same age as the busses John rode as a child in Providence, Rhode Island in the mid 1950s.  They are still fast, a bit jerky and fun.  Pay cash (about 50 cents)to ride, which is good since we didn’t buy transit cards here.  Trolley bus stuff is everywhere! 

Then we decided to see the seals.  From the trolley terminus there are motor busses every 30 seconds up the beach road (a six lane affair) heading to Viño del Mar.   About two miles up the road is a huge fish market, fishing fleet and piers.  One was closed off to shoot a movie, but the other was the home of the seals, cavorting in the waves looking for lunch, along with thousands of gulls and a few pelicans.  In the market, we examined lots of fishes, including the local reneita, a hake like fish that we had the other night for dinner.  We also looked over many many different kinds of shellfish, from scallops with roe to crabs that grow like rocks.  

Then we took the busses back, and had empanadas for lunch, which tasted like cardboard, and then Ben had good cappuccino at the bottom of the Reina Victoria ascensor.   Home for a lovely afternoon nap and then readied ourselves for the meal last night at Al Alegre.

La Reina Victoria Incline

Aimee, Mitzi and us

We met Aimee and Mitzi at the restaurant and began the tasting menu that took well over two hours.  John is trying to remember all the courses:   a pisco sour of lemon foam, then small puff pastries with mint sauce, skin of salmon deep fried, a small urn of caramelized tomatoes with chopped chicken, smoked salmon with beet foam and pickled celery, wagyu beef, chopped and rolled in a potato pancake and served with seafood fried wonton, pastries for dessert—macaroons, maple sugar cubes, mint sugars, and then a digestif that is local to Chile.   We enjoyed the food immensely but found the wines designed to go with the courses a bit off track.  We did not enjoy the espumante, and felt that the timing of the chardonnay before the sauvignon blanc was out of place.   No reds to go with the wagyu beef.  Fun, but as Aimee, a chef, said,  Sergio Barroso, age 28, who apprenticed under Ferran Adrià at El Bulli in Spain is cooking like Adrià when he cooked 10 years ago.  The artistic plating and textures were gorgeous.  Both of us think that it was not as grand a meal as Attica two years ago in Melbourne, Australia, though even that tasting menu had a couple of rough edges too,  (That meal was significantly more expensive than Al Alegre.)  

Home to a view of the city from the widow’s walk and to bed.