Aramco ExPats Restaurant Review: Versailles, InterContinental Bahrain
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Author: Kyle Pakka
Released 6 January 2006
You don’t have to be King Louis XIV to enjoy a meal at Versailles, but you’ll eat like a king and be treated like royalty by the staff at the Versailles Restaurant at the InterContinental Bahrain hotel.
A grand staircase, flanked by portraits of famous guests at the hotel, including authentic royalty from around the globe and popular personalities from the worlds of sport and entertainment, sweeps us into the grand dining room. From the indulgent comfort of our plush chairs, we admire the painted ceilings and the trompe l'oeil paintings on the walls of French chateaux and formal gardens, flanked by large framed mirrors and urns overflowing with flowers.
Instead of the customary piped-in electronic music, Versailles offers a pianist, and the muted musical tinkling of the piano casts a charming spell on the evening. Large windows overlook the streaming gold and red lights of cars on the Corniche while the steel skeleton of the Financial Harbor complex, dotted with work lights, soars into the black sky like a tower of pearls. A single red rose in a vase and a candle lantern grace our table. In Bahrain, you can sometimes judge the seriousness of the food by the weight of the cutlery, and at Versailles, the forks and knives portend a sumptuous meal indeed.
As befits a French restaurant, Versailles offers an eight-page wine menu, listing the wines by region with selections from France, Italy, Spain, Lebanon, Australia, South Africa, Chile, North America and Argentina. A handful of rosés and a champagnes are also included.
The food menu, while short, is inspired. Appetizers comprise salmon pâté, pan-fried foie gras, mesclun (mixed greens) salad seasoned with walnut oil, shrimp konafa, and Belgium endives and Roquefort cheese salad with walnuts. There are a couple of soups: chilled Roma tomato soup with Xeres (wine or sherry) vinegar and eggplant puree, and lobster bisque.
Main dishes from the seafood side of life include Bouillabaisse, pan-fried hammour with sweet potatoes and green-pea velouté, roasted turbot with black olive tapenade and pesto spinosini, pan-fried lemon sole with seasonal vegetables and purple potatoes, and gratinéed whole Canadian lobster with wild rice and citrus.
Offerings from the meaty side of life consist of roasted rack of lamb, roasted pigeon, pan-fried breast of duck in a green pepper sauce, grilled beef fillet with anchovy sauce and gratinéed potatoes, and pan-fried veal with truffle sauce.
Our waiter, clad in classic bistro gear of black vest and bow tie, brings a basket of little bread rolls (including olive rolls with tangy bits of black olive) hot from the oven, and a ceramic condiment tray of coarse ground black pepper, sea salt and butter.
A plate of complimentary marinated smoked salmon soon follows. The thin slices of salmon are smooth-tasting, and enlivened with a balsamic vinegar and dill sauce on the side. The smoked fish, accompanied by a hot, soft roll, awakens our palates and has us hungering for more.
Our appetizers arrive. The salmon pâté is intensely flavored and creamy, and more bread disappears along with the pâté. The shrimp konafa is served with a mesclun, or mixed green salad, dressed simply with sea salt and olive oil that is so fresh it tastes as if it came from a Provencal garden just outside the kitchen – superb. The konafa pastry is crunchy while the shrimp within are tender and sweet.
We chase these opening notes in our banquet with glasses of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. We couldn’t help ourselves: we had taken a holiday in Tuscany in the fall, and had visited the famous wine village of Montepulciano where we reveled in the village’s premier art (and art, not industry, is the correct term). Some people hold to rigid ideas of matching the color of their wine to certain food groups, but we prefer to drink what pleases us, so when we saw the bottle on the menu, we couldn’t resist.
A Parisian bistro staff might look down their noses at us for ordering a bottle of red wine with our food choices, but at Versailles, it’s clear they just want us to enjoy ourselves. (And just for the record, we’ve never had an unpleasant experience in a French restaurant or been made to feel like idiots for failing to fluently speak the language or for ordering the “wrong thing” on our three trips to France.)
The worries about the wine having been dispensed, along with more glasses of the wine itself by our attentive waiter, the chef comes out of the kitchen to ask us how the evening is going. He ventures forth several times in the evening to talk with guests, a great touch in a region where so many kitchens have anonymous, and frequently rotating, personnel.
Our main dishes, beautifully presented on the plates, arrive in a cloud of tantalizing aromas. My wife has the hammour, a big slab of tender fish in a delicate green sauce served atop white sweet potatoes, with carrots, broccoli, mushrooms, asparagus and squash. The smoky and tender mushrooms are particularly good, and the hammour is delicious.
I have the rack of lamb, and like my wife’s dish, the roasted vegetables are notable for their freshness. The broccoli is vivid green and slightly crunchy, while the au jus from the lamb has soaked into the potatoes. The lamb is tender, juicy and peppery, and seems to have come from a French grandmother’s cottage in some postcard-perfect village.
Those with chocolate addictions might want to skip this paragraph: Thursday night is “chocolate buffet.” Arrayed on a large circular table are servings of double chocolate cake, dark and white chocolate mousse, baked chocolate pudding with chocolate sauce, brownies, raspberry chocolate mousse cake, éclairs, pistachio chocolate roulade, chocolate mousse delight, mixed boxed chocolates, and tubs of ripe strawberries.
Diners circumambulate the buffet, crowned with bouquet of flowers and a candelabra, debating what to have. The concept lets us try a bit of this and that, as opposed to ordering just one, and the servings are small so we can try a lot of things, and we do.
The double chocolate cake is dense and moist, a dark chocolate lover’s dream. The raspberry cake features tart berries and a luscious mousse. We also try the mousse on its own, served in tall, delicate glasses each containing a dollop of mousse speared with two squares of white and dark chocolate. We savor the chocolates in-between sips of dark French espresso, and feel quite content.
The regular dessert menu also offers cheese, fruit and ice creams for those strange few who don’t want chocolate.
Versailles isn’t overwhelmingly French in its menu per se – only a handful of dishes feature sauces – rather, the approach is French: fresh ingredients, beautiful presentation and classic service. Versailles also hosts a visiting chef every month for a week at a time, and the visiting chefs, to judge from the past menu we saw, pull out all the stops and offer more flamboyant French dishes such as lobster salad, roasted quail, sautéed guinea-fowl and typical side dishes such as Paimpol white beans (named for a town in Brittany where they originate), plus specially selected wines.
The original Versailles might be a palace, but the Versailles restaurant in the InterContinental is a palace of food.