Asta - No.5 - Boston's Top 50 Restaurants

Time for a visit to Back Bay (with our friend Rob who was visiting from England) to Asta, and a choice of a 5 or 8 course tasting menu. The restaurant itself was contemporary and we were all immediately impressed as we discovered our cutlery for the entire meal, hidden in individual drawers under the table in front of us, a first. Also very novel was the wine list, a hand written notebook which took me back to my student days with items circled in colour and double underlined. Old-school.

We decided on the 5-course tasting menu and following an amuse-bouche we started with a cauliflower soup with 3 small lobster mousses dotted about the bowl: I have to say it was delicious. Probably the star of the show for me was the next dish; a mushroom tart, which packed an intense mushroom flavour. I could have eaten 3 of those…seriously. Following the fish course of sablefish (never heard of it? – me too, I have since discovered it is also known as Black Cod or Butterfish) we were presented with a perfectly cooked duck breast, which was nice if not inspiring, and then it was dessert time. Now, I don’t have a big sweet tooth but a good dessert after 4 courses always seems to hit the mark. On reading the dessert was ‘grilled squash’ I thought it should appeal to my more savoury tooth. We have had vegetable based deserts before and they have been very good. However this was not. It was dry and tasted like… grilled squash (surprise). Definitely not dessert…what’s wrong with a good old-fashioned cheesecake?