A recipe is a culmination of every single way every single person ever tried to make something, a conglomeration of other people's trial and error, a conglomeration of everyone else's pain. I'm not saying you can't modify it a smidge or tweak it a a tiny bit to suit you, but change it too much, and all you'll end up with is something someone else already had to throw away.
I follow recipes to the letter because I'm lazy, but when it comes to fine dining, I'm paying for something I can't make. I sit at that cloth-covered table every time hoping for just one gustatory glimpse into the soul of a chef truly touched by genius. When I'm in a restaurant, I want to see chefs going against the grain, going off on a limb, branching out to the point that I can no longer see what twig they're on. And that's exactly what I was looking for when I walked into Fig & Olive.
I'm not sure what kind of creativity I was looking for, but the Crostini came from the recipe book called "generic & unremarkable". And at a whopping $4 a pop, let's just say this recipe won't be called "biggest bang for your buck". Everyone knows that avocado is good in any recipe, and combining it with crab on a cracker is a pretty puny cop-out. The crab was so tasteless it could have been canned, and the firm, unripe avocado wasn't doing the crab any favors. Considering this was a combination of my two favorite ingredients, I was hoping for something better than what normal people serve at a high-end housewarming.
Whatever the crab was lacking, the Manchego cheese with fig jam did not make up for. The fig was a tasty texture, but the triangle of manchego tasted just as good from Trader Joe's, and you'd have to be nuts to go crazy over a couple of Marcona almonds.
The octopus crostini came highly recommended, which I found surprising. You either love or hate octopus and it's definitely not for everyone, but it looks like Fig & Olive found a way to turn the texture turmoil into a crowd-pleaser. The octopus is shaved so thin it's undetectable. Add a sweet carrot puree and you can have octopus without having to taste the octopus.
The crostini were pretty forgettable, but the Sea Scallops were sublime. Fresh, tenderly seared on a bed of carrot tapenade with critical curls of citrus, these three little 6-dollar scallops were an even worse value than crackers. I think the tentacled-mess presentation was trying to distract from how little was actually on the plate.
The Melone & Burrata is ring to relish. This one goes in the book of "sure things". The sweet, fresh mascarpone-stuffed mozz puts all other cheeses to shame. Sure, burrata is the avocado of cheese, but the pairing with cantaloupe contrasted by bitter arugula and radicchio is hard to beat. I may value culinary creativity, but there's no need to reinvent the wheel...of cheese.
My cooking stories often start with " the recipe was perfect, the execution is somewhat flawed." Whoever made the Rosemary Lamb Chops didn't have that problem.They clearly found the most tender lamb chops in the market and added a premixed plethora of Provence herbs. A common, winning combination with amazing underlying eggplant, a brilliant bed of smoky darkness like nothing I've ever tasted.
Everything I ate at Fig & Olive tasted like a foodie following a recipe exceptChilean Sea Bass. The fish is flaky and flavorful and the asparagus and carrots were crisply cooked. How you make that crock of creamy, savor-loaded sauce without a single drop of butter or cream is genius beyond my wildest dreams.
The entrees were dressed to impress, but the Mixed Berry Crostata was a recipe for disaster. The berries are fresh, the cointreau syrup is undetectable, and the vanilla mascarpone is perfectly barely-there. The filo is hard and stuck together, and trying to get everything in one bite becomes a natural disaster. At the end of the day, someone bought a bunch of things that looked pretty and threw them all together.
A recipe is not a marker of your peak of perfection, rather it’s a conglomeration of your mistakes. It's not meant to tell you how do things right, it's meant to prevent you from doing things wrong. It seems that Fig & Olive follows its recipes to the letter. There's definitely nothing wrong with their food, but at the end of the day, the only thing they got right was the recipe.
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