If you asked the Blue Tomato team to name their top 5 favourite things in the world, you could safely wager that cheese, chocolate and beer would feature pretty highly on that list, (the other two being tomatoes and the colour blue, naturally). So you can understand our barely-contained excitement at being invited to an evening of ‘pure indulgence’ at The Stafford Hotel, which would involve the triple pleasure threat of, well, cheese, chocolate and beer.
The Lyttleton restaurant is the perfect setting for such an occasion, with opulence dripping from the décor that is draped throughout our plush surroundings. We are told that each dish in our 6-course meal is to be served with a matching beer, which will not compliment the food but serve as a tasting focal point of which the dishes themselves will compliment. Bring it on…
The deep fried olives are stuffed with a delicately texture goats’ cheese and their crunchy exterior is balanced out by the smooth and subtle fizz of the Goose Island India Pale Ale, shipped all the way from Chicago. Next up it’s a trio of starters all served with their pre-assigned glass of beer; the hand dived scallops are nestled amongst a cauliflower and white chocolate sauce, which lends an indulgent thickness to their velvety feel and are enveloped in the Erdinger Weiss’s mountain of foam…a perfect pairing. A black pudding is served with a small slab of dark chocolate with a pickled beetroot and the complexity of flavours is more than a match for the vanilla laced Innis & Gunn Oak Aged Beer, a popular tipple around our office. The pigeon with parsnip, pear and chocolate sauce is predictably rich but not with out its charm and any undue thickness is quickly drowned out by the gentle spice of Jennings’ Sneck Lifter.
Now we’re on to the main event; a chocolate cheeseburger. We’ll repeat that: A CHOCOLATE CHEESEBURGER! The meat in this particular burger is lightly seared venison with a potency of carnivorous flavour that serves as an ideal canvas for Alex James’s Blue Monday Cheese to paint its pungent tang all over; combine that with chocolate ketchup and a pear chutney that rescues the dish from the depths of heart-deforming decadence and you have the makings of the B.B.E. (Best Burger Ever). The beers that are matched with this tantalizing treat are a sturdy and robust Bishop’s Finger (insert your own inappropriate pun here) and a slightly overpowering Schneider Aventinus, clocking in at an intimidating 8.2%; both beers offer something to the burger’s flavour, yet we decided that if we were to have the meal again, we’d take the Finger every time.
To continue in our adventures in excess we are treated to a chocolate soufflé with goats’ cheese sorbet that is served alongside a Belgian beer called Timmermans Kriek, both of which are pleasant enough yet washed away in sensory overload that was left in the B.B.E.’s wake. A small cheeseboard is sent to finish us off, with a Colston Bassett Stilton and Harcake providing a savoury coup de grace to the table’s ‘diet-starts-tomorrow-preaching’ patrons; the accompanying Ginger Beard beer is fizzy and playful and we kid ourselves that the effervescing bubbles will go some way towards breaking down what now lies within us. (Marmite Chocolate Truffles are served as a teasing challenge to anyone with enough room left to ingest, yet they go mostly untouched, regrettably so as they really were quite delicious…the diet starts tomorrow, OK?!)
As we rolled away from the magnificent double doors that lead the way in and out of The Stafford, Blue Tomato added a couple of other potentials to our Top 5 List; we won’t spoil the surprise but suffice to say that one of them starts with ‘L’ and ends in ‘ipo-suction’…
The evening was in honour of the restaurant’s exciting overhaul of their beer list, so for a meal with an impressive beer list but a tad less of everything else, pay a visit to The Lyttleton at The Stafford. Visit www.thelyttelton.com.
Written by David Harfield
(Not pictured, top right)
Date posted: 02/12/2011
Category: News.
Tags: beer, cheese, Chocolate, excess, the lyttleton, the stafford.
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