Corned beef and quinces

Last Thursday we went to Bistrode to eat. I love the location and the ambience of the place. It feels like the old butchers shop it once was – and so it should. I had a silverbeet and parmesan tart, with unctuous and finely crumbling pastry, designed to halve the size of your arteries on the spot. The sour taste of the silverbeet was properly offset by the richness of the cheese. This dish needs a strong, definite vegetable to pair with the Parmesan – it was comforting to see an ingredient like silverbeet which had long crept out of favour and fashion used well. I get a very slight sense that silverbeet may be in the process of being discovered again – when of course it has been here all the time, just neglected and unused. Perhaps silverbeet will become the new pork belly. Perhaps not.

Then for my main course I had to have the corned wagyu beef I ate here last time. This time it came with dense cornmeal dumplings and heirloom carrots. My partner in crime had grass-fed Scotch fillet with roasted bone marrow and we had excellent Roman beans on the side. I stuck to the mineral water and she had a shiraz from the Barossa. Beforehand we stopped at Toko and I had another mineral water in a rather funky bottle and she had a German riesling which tasted excellent – very dry but complex and lavish. For dessert we shared a cows milk yoghurt cheesecake with poached quinces.