Saturday, June 11, 2011

Salta, Icon Village

I've been wanting to come down to Salta (12 Gopeng Street, #01-56/57 ICON Village, tel : +65 6225 8443) for quite a while. This place is relatively (still) new to the scene for steaks in this country and what was essentially different about them was that they are an Argentinian steakhouse. Argentinian meat with their styles of cooking (coal fueled flames, no less!) being the key of the offerings.
Just to get things off my chest, I didn't enjoy much of their Corazon de Cuadril, which was a cut described as heart of rump. It was probably the delicious thin slices of well salted hump from churrascaria that have gotten me confused and thinking that this might have been similar. The grainy textured lean meat was less than flavourful beyond the seasoning of salt and was a little too tough to be enjoyable. They might have been better thinly sliced from spits rather than in the form of the thick chunk of meat where the insides were just....boring and tough. The rest of what I had, I liked. Pretty much.
Started off with a small selection in a bread basket. These served today were warm and that made them enjoyable.
What made the bread better were the little pots of dips that we had used for almost everything else that was served. My favorite of the three provided was definitely the spicy chimichurri. I was told that there was coriander inside, but I tasted none of it so it was all good. These dips they had tasted like they weren't made too long ago. The salsa and anchovy dips were pretty good as well and they actually taste quite good with butter on the bread. This Provoleta was a dish of melted Provolone cheese spiced with oregano and pink pepper. And to the point, it was awesome. The accompanied spices added to the flavours but did little to detract from the original milky and salty taste of the chewy cheese which was bolstered with the char aroma from the browned bits at the edges. I liked this so much that I would probably come back just to eat it again. We had a salchicha as well. It was a nicely grilled and juicy sausage there but the fillings were far from coarse and felt like it was processed by a machine rather than hand. I did enjoy the flavour but it was texture that was found lacking here. I couldn't say the ribeye was anywhere close to awesomeness, but I think it was a good enough job for the meat to be enjoyable. Then again, I must have meant that from the source of the meat rather than the execution because there was really nothing I could have been faulting from the grill. The flavour from the fat wasn't distributed well as I was hoping for. Wouldn't avoid ordering this again a next time though. Damn my habitual usage of double negatives. The mushroom and potato puree on the side tasted slightly sweet. Every potato that arrived on the table tonight tasted like sweet potatoes. That was unexpected.  Except for the sweet potato fries which we had deliberately ordered. The one with mushrooms was addictively tasty. It wasn't actually puree as most of us would have understood it. More like mashed. For all the food that we've already had, we managed to polish off the entire dish. The fries however became a tad too greasy and cloying at the end.

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