Taste of spring and the sea

Octopus eggplant with Iberian ham features flavors of both spring and the sea. The thinly sliced octopus is cooked slowly and topped with roast avocado, while the sauce is made with eggplant and miso. The fun part of the dish is the small deep-fried stuff on top, which are actually the legs of the octopus.

Olabegova also elevates the taste of Fresco's signature dry-aged beef, a delicacy rarely found in the capital.

The smell of the roast beef and the accompanying sizzling sound arrive well before the plate of beautifully grilled meat even reaches the table.

A bite of this dish is indeed a spring treat-it's tender, juicy and almost melts in the mouth.

Olabegova's secret for cooking the steak is the jasper charcoal oven he brought with him from Spain. The oven took him a long time to master since it only uses 100 percent charcoal and operates at temperatures of 600 C to 700 C, which allows Olabegova to roast and grill the beef while preventing it from baking and losing its juices.

The restaurant's director of operations, Tony Yip, thinks that pan-frying can often leave a residual metallic taste on the beef-which is certainly not the case with Fresco's oven-roasted dishes.

"We dry-age the beef to make it tender and flavorful, which is another secret to the tenderness of our beef," says Yip.

Dry-aged beef is meat that has been placed in an environment-controlled container to dry for several weeks, a costly process as the beef has to be stored at near-freezing temperatures.