Origin‘s the new resto from Claudio Aprile and I really like the space. This room exudes a very polished form of trendy and the open central kitchen provides some interest. It’s a cool place where you’d want to take a group to hang out. With that in mind, it’s definitely more of a photo post than usual today. Mostly because I don’t have much good to say.
Deviled Eggs with gremolata and smoked bacon.
Tostones and guacamole. Tasty.
Tuna salad with Asian pear, avocado, puffed rice, spicy ponzu dressing.
Miso glazed black cod in mushroom broth, jerusalem artichoke purée. Typical but tasty. One of the better dishes.
Smoked cod croquettes and saffron aioli. Good sharing dish.
All quite pretty and well put-together, but I didn’t have a good meal the night I went. Maybe it was a bad night or something (there are many reports of great meals here), but I could only muster a bad-to-ok response for the dishes we had. Of all that was consumed, the tostones were a favourite and very good. Deviled eggs were tasty enough too. But the beef hand-roll was a travesty of mushy rice and soft nori (worst dish I’ve had in recent memory) and it felt like I was eating clichéd dishes with the tuna salad and “wokked and fried calamari.”
Perhaps it was a bad idea to let our waitress send out the “best” dishes on the card – I regret that a lot now. At some point in the meal, we were comped the cod croquettes and samosas as the kitchen was taking a long time to send out our last dishes. They definitely put me over the edge of fullness and we couldn’t finish our final dishes out of the kitchen. Definitely appreciated the gesture, but it threw the meal off.
Now, I rarely post about places I didn’t enjoy, but I do so much want to like this place. And many others have had successful meals at Origin (my opinion is certainly in the minority of the Chowhound masses) – maybe you might too. But what do I know? I’m just an amateur.
More photos at Origin
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January 7, 2011 at 10:46 am
Jen,
I went to Origin last night and I can’t say that I was too impressed. Yes, the dishes looked great. I wouldn’t expect any less from Mr.Colborne Lane but the dishes were, for the most part, not doing it for me.
I did enjoy the foie gras mousse. I liked the cocoa and the sea salt on top of the mousse and the bread was nice and warm. I also liked the deviled eggs. I ordered the Bufala Mozzerella with the preserved lemons. That was good. Simple and light.
What I wasn’t impressed with was the execution of some of the dishes. I tried the chorizo & manchego rice. The rice was interesting but it reminded me too much of way too liquid risotto. The problem with that dish was that the chorizo’s flavour was so intense (read: quite salty) that when you combine it with everything it was the only thing you could taste.
I also had the wokked & fried calamari. Flavour wise it wasn’t so bad. The caramelized peanut sauce was interesting but my issue was that all of the calamari that was sitting in the sauce was WAY too salty. It was like 3 different chefs salted that one dish.
That being said, I’d go back again with other friends just to try out the other dishes since there’s still a lot of items on the menu. I’ll go back….eventually.