Risotto of herbs, parsley puree, horseradish

Recently we have had the Danish club of London join our membership, this led this Welsh boy to wonder what do Danes eat?

Through many a google trawl, I kept coming up with breaded plaice, open sandwiches, mini meatballs and the like of homely comforting food, stuff I could happily include in my bar menus, but nothing that really jumped out and grabbed me as restaurant food.

My background is in 5 star hotels, running minimum 2 AA rosette kitchens and like to feel that my food has not diminished by moving 'behind closed doors', I still carry the same culinary ethos and try to improve what I do each and every day, even if I do not sell a single dish to 'the general public', so consequently cannot be judged by the guide books. Not that I necessarily agree with these guides, they are, whether you like them or not, a benchmark by which we are judged. Some of my old restaurant customers indeed chose to dine with us, purely because they had found us on the AA website.

Anyway guidebook digression aside, our restaurant food is a little more refined than our bar offering, and as we do not cater for a huge amount of guests each day, I do not have restrictions on the amount of effort necessary to produce each dish as we have the time to do so. This does not come at the expense of flourishing the dish more than is genuinely required, the question is always asked 'does it need anything else', as long as it ticks all the flavour and texture boxes and it is visually appealing then it is good for the menu, sometimes however this can take 8 or 9 visits to the plate, but hey we have the time 'generally'

back to the dish at hand, I came accross this from Foodsnob's blog which is a great write up about one of Denmarks leading restaurants Noma, and was inspired by the razor clam dish to utilize these flavours in my own interpretation, during the testing I used razors which were fantastic, however for my current menu I had a scallop dish already waiting which made me re-think and produce a vegetarian version, where I have utilized salsify rather than razor clams, the result is a heavenly combination of the herbs, the aldente bite of the rice with the crisp rye bread, finished with the earthy salsify and creamy horseradish.

herb risotto (parsley, chervil, tarragon)

parsley puree

braised then roasted salsify

horseradish fluid gel

beet gel

crisp rye bread

olive oil

micro parsley

wood sorrel