Truffle season is a major highlight of the UAE culinary calendar.
Running until the middle of November, a variety of the country’s leading food spots have unleashed a special menu dedicated to the wildly expensive mushroom. In terms quality and ambience, it is hard to past Cipriani Yas Island. Once again, the ritzy and nautically themed restaurant (it is rather surreal in that it feels like you are dining in a cruise-ship while your table overlooks the formula one racing circuit) exhibited another lavish truffles menu dedicate to the white truffle from the Italian town of Alba.
The truffle man
The man tasked with sprinkling the delicacies across the dishes is Massimo Vidoni, otherwise know as the Truffle Man. He says there is no such thing as too many truffles.
“Truffles are such a delicacy that the more truffles you add to a dish, the more flavourful that dish will be,” he says. “But due to its high price, truffles are sliced paper-thin on purpose to cover the dish and to release more flavour.”
Vidoni points at Cipriani Yas Island’s special menu dishes, which range from pastas to veal, as proof that truffles’s distinctive taste can be used across many different dishes. “It’s flavour is contagious, addictive and loved,” he says. “Initially truffles were used mostly in pasta and risotto but here in the Middle East with the different cultures, you can find truffles in a variety of dishes.”
Lets get truffle-ling
That’s the beauty and mystery of truffles. On plate it may look minimal and uninspiring, but it does wonders in boosting up traditional dishes.
The Burratta (Dh300) benefited immensely from the inclusion. The wet, creamy and curdy cheese almost soaked in the truffles, as a result the subtle flavour was transformed to something more prominent and robust. When it came to the carpaccio (Dh204), it was a more interesting affair. The alpha-male flavours of the carpaccio and truffle almost seemed to battle for supremacy — the winner being the taste buds which had a lot to take in.
The best dish was perhaps the most understated. The home made Tagliolini (Dh300), which came with an outrageously delicious egg-yolk sauce, was the perfect foil for the truffles. The pasta was perfectly cooked with the egg yolk and truffles working well together to create an unexpected smokey garlic flavour. The only dish where the truffles addition didn’t work was the Veal Piccante (Dh324). The dish is already rich in its own right with its gravy-thick sauce — with the truffles the affair became too heavy and it took a mighty effort to finish.
That aside, Cipriani Yas Island’s truffles menu is a treat and a great way to appreciate the delicacy.
Cipriani Yas Island Truffle menu runs until November 15. For reservations or enquiries call 02 6575400, or alternatively email yasisland@cipriani.com.
The National was a guest of the venue
sasaeed@thenational.ae