Cy'an
Metropolitan Hotel
South Sathorn Road
Bangkok 10120
Tel: 02 625 3300
Website.

Cy'an is a place I have missed on my travels and therefore I was eager to be there when the Bangkok B & B (Beefsteak and Burgundy) announced their next lunch was there. I had a heard talk of Cy'an and fellow members assured that this lunch is one of the year's highlights.
The Metropolitan Hotel sets itself out to be oh so trendy. My 30 something cousin stayed here with a group of London's hippest last year and that is the crowd that is aimed at. As a result everything is understated. Uniforms look like they are jeans and certainly need a press!
The Cy'an restaurant may be upmarket but it has a definitive canteen feel about it, but it is light and airy looking out onto the swimming pool. But after two hours in one of their designer chairs I needed to go for a walk to get some feeling back into my legs: deep vein thrombosis from a decent lunch would have been a careless option.
We had some interesting canapés before the meal as well as a couple of excellent glasses of Prosecco. Of the canapés the little mushroom tarts were, for me, the highlight: delicate pastry and an excellent mix of baby mushrooms and subtle sauce.
However it was once we sat down and I got my hands on the menu I was able to fully appreciate the lunch we were in for: it was a seven course menu degustation. Maybe this is the wrong menu with which to review the restaurant because it was set for us, but it does show the capabilities and direction of the cooking which is described as 'Mediterranean cuisine enriched with Moorish accents.' And you might well say what the hell does that mean: to me it says fashionable or whatever is cool today!
The first four courses were seafood in some form or the other. The first was 'Raw flavours of the sea' and was described as black king fish in the style of crudo. In other words raw fish fillet which I found pretty tasteless despite all the elaborate garnish including foam. The next course featured an oyster and was titled 'Pearly Shells' (sea scented salad of chilled oyster, tapioca and seaweed). The smeared green garnish stole the presentation show and, of course, the oyster was the taste supreme. We moved on to 'Oceans and Gardens' (warm salad of artichokes and sea scallops with Arbequina olives). To me this was the first really balanced dish with strong taste coming from several parts of the dish, the sauce, made with those olives, being particularly tasty. But upon reflection putting these first three dishes together would have made a really exciting starter.
The fourth offering was entitled 'Land and Sea' (monkfish accompanied by a rich saffron stew of mussels, chickpeas and tomato) and for me was the course of the meal. I am always partial to monk fish whilst mussels and chickpeas really set the whole concept off. A decent portion of this would have been a great restaurant dish.
The reason I rated the fourth so highly was that I was disappointed in the meat dish described as 'Wagyu beef "Tongue to tail"' (Wagyu beef grilled, braised and seared with sweet onions and aniseed flavour). The problem was not the meat which means not the great oxtail that fell apart, nor the carefully cooked tongue nor the nice cooked rare beef sirloin, nor, for that matter, the carefully thought out garnish, but the sauce. It was for me too sweet and tasted like a Chinese style sauce: I suppose it was the aniseed. I would have preferred a sauce a little less expansive, or a sauce 'on the side' allowing me to decide how much and where.
We then had a pleasant portion of four cheeses with some excellent homemade biscuits and jam followed by 'Sweet Treats.' The first sweet was lychee jelly with old fashion shaved ice which I thought was little insipid but the lemon tart with red wine macerated strawberries was excellent and a suitable end to an interesting meal.
Being the B&B we had some excellent wines (supplied by the club) with the meal including some rare Borasso shiraz and some interestingly named, as well as special, Nine Popes: an Aussie version of that well known Rhone wine. The other not insignificant wines included an Italian Chardonnay and two wines from Torbeck (Australia), a Semillion and delightful dessert wine called The Bothie.
The chef, Daniel Moran, came out and joined the party after he had finished. The meal, in particular the presentation, undoubtedly involved a considerable effort on his part so I do not want to be churlish with my comments. I could argue it was pretentious mucked about food. But having said that, it was an interesting meal, it was different and of course it was a fixed menu so I got what I was given and I ate it without complaint. I have no doubt those of less traditional and more adventurous taste would have thoroughly enjoyed the whole meal. So it proved once again there is an awful lot you can do with food; it may not please all the people all the time but that does not mean it was bad food or bad cooking.