Beefing it up

[Photo by Mike Peters/CHINA DAILY]

Our meal started with a perfectly crusty round of Italian-style bread, hot from the oven and served with both pesto and a savory herb butter.

Next came a beautiful platter of six Guillardeau French oysters (388 yuan, or $56), fresh and as delicious as the vision promised, but two were surprisingly gritty for the price and tone of the establishment.

Our Wagyu surf-and-turf plate (the menu calls the steak and seafood combo "Char indulgence") is a 120-gram fillet of Blackmore Wagyu, fed for at least 600 days in the traditional Japanese style out in the countryside of Oz. It comes with grilled lobster, foie gras and truffle mash potato for 1,208 yuan; you can get a bigger hunk of Wagyu, 180 grams, for 1,588 yuan.

The steak was a hymn made flesh, cooked medium to order and so tender we might have been able to cut it with a fork. We didn't bother to try, however, because our server presented us with a wooden box with five fancy steak knives from around the world. The most popular, we're told, is amber-handled Laguiole from France, though we thought the black-grip Global from Japan was tres chic.

Chef Fernando Tabernero's way of cooking is to focus on simplicity and flavor, and our fillet is an example of how he simply unleashes the flavors of superbly sourced ingredients instead of depending on sauces and such to carry the day.