Starters
I’d done some homework about Messa’s menu before I arrived, so I knew what wanted to order for most of the meal.
For my starter, I ordered two dishes: Veal Sweetbreads and the restaurant’s flagship dish, Seared Foie Gras.
Sweetbreads are very easy to ruin when prepared by a novice, but in this case the dish was just wonderful. It contained sweet potato tortellini, sunchoke cream and pearl onions broth.
The texture was soft and the taste was exquisite.
Score: 9/10.
The Seared Foie Gras looked like a dessert at first glance, with its creative and unconventional aesthetic. The combination of liver and white chocolate “Valrhone” lemon was incredible — I actually thought about ordering another one because it was just so good.
Score: 10/10!
Main dishes
After a brief consultation with the waitress, I ordered two main courses: Beef Fillet with Potato Cream and Sea Bass Fillet.
The sea bass was served with goat’s cheese and hyssop tortellini, smoked eggplant, sunchoke cream, tomatoes and garlic confit. The fish had an amazingly rich flavor and a soft texture, which was a pleasant surprise.
As regular readers know, I’m not a fan of fish, but I’d definitely recommend this to any fish-lovers.
Score: 8.5/10.
It seems the combination of meat and potato puree is a winning combination, considering how common it is in high-quality restaurants. The beef fillet was a great example of how to do it right: the fillet was so soft, lightly-salted and well-prepared it melted in my mouth, as did the delicious mash.
Chefs can sometimes make puree like this with too much butter and cream, which can make it too heavy, but here they got the balance just right. It looked and tasted fantastic, with a perfect texture.
Score: 9.5/10.
SIDE NOTE: For those who eat kosher and gluten free, I was told most of the dishes on the menu can be prepared to accommodate both dietary requirements.
Dessert
The dessert menu included a selection of nine desserts to choose from. After consulting with the waitress again, I chose two dishes that ended up being better than I could have imagined.
The first was a jar filled with ice cream and white chocolate — a popular style of dessert seen in quite a few restaurants today.
It included 2 Macaroon cookies on top, strawberry compote, patisserie cream and meringue pieces — just as delicious and luxurious as it sounds. Sweet, delicate and moreish: what more could you want from a dessert?
Score: 8.5/10.
The second and more daring of the two was the Snow White. I had no idea what to expect, but the waitress insisted I’d be “pleasantly surprised”.
And she was right. The Snow White dessert caught me completely off-guard.
It consisted of a white chocolate mousse ball filled with raspberries, on crispy pastry, topped with a white-chocolate biscuit. Alongside all this, the dish was decorated with ‘pebbles’ containing raspberry ganache and white chocolate, which stunned me with every bite I took.
The level of creativity and flavour in the Snow White was of the highest standard: I’d never eaten anything like it before.
If you visit Messa, you have to try the Snow White. It’s that simple.
Score: 10/10.
