Seta is located in the beautiful Mandarin Oriental Hotel. It has a nice sized indoor dining room as well as a good sized candlelit patio, where we were able to sit. The patio has large windows looking into the kitchen where you see dozens of people working on your meal. It is new, having just opened in July 2015, but the service is well up to speed. They offer a tasting menu as well as a la carte. It was a gorgeous, elegant way to enjoy our last meal in Milan.
With our cocktails they brought a tray of snacks as well as warm sourdough bread and amazingly thin breadsticks called grissini, according to the waiter, because they are made with extra virgin olive oil. The bread was not too sour but had a great crispy crust and nice chewy interior. The amuse bouche was a chunk of salmon with coconut that was great.
The tasting started with cauliflower that was roasted and sitting in almond cream. It was accented with tasty bits of seafood. It was a good start to the meal.
The risotto was sitting in sauce and you needed to mix the two together to get the dish to pop. It was perfectly cooked rice, creamy and when mixed with the other flavors it was good. I worried about he raspberry powder but it added a nice tartness that blended well. Overall it was a mild flavor dish but it had lovely textures on the palate.
The chef threw in an extra dish, tortelli stuffed with salt cod. The strong taste of the fish mixed with the perfectly cooked pasta was moderated with white beans and potato and all mixed with a caramelized fish sauce. This was as hoped – strong flavors for a taste of the sea.
The spaghetti with friselle sauce was topped with a raw tomato. Mix it in along with the artichoke dry bread sauce and dried tomatoes. Now a taste of the Mediterranean.
The turbot was served with coconut and asparagus – a winner combination of tastes. The sauce was savory enough you could eat it alone with a spoon, but since I didn’t have one the nice bread served as my tool. A good one.
The pigeon was stuffed with foie gras and served on polenta, topped with pineapple. The sommelier was nice enough to bring us a glass of Primativo to eat with this amazing dish. The pigeon was so tender, the foie gras added such richness, the creamy polenta in the background and then add the accent of thin sweet slices of pineapple and you have a combination of flavors to sit back and take note of. This was outstanding.
The first dessert was apricots and passion fruit topped with lemon grass ice cream and olives. No one taste was dominant, they all just blended nicely to deliver a perfect amount of sweetness to the ready the palate for full blown dessert.
That dessert came in the form of almond ice cream and strawberries stuffed with yogurt. All the ingredients on the plate were great on their own so it was hard to want to mix them together, but when you did you got a whole other level of deliciousness. Triple yum!
The traditional extra tray of treats contained a mango and passion fruit(Yes!), cream puff, Linzer tart with raspberrry, chocolate tart(Yum) and a babarum (YUM!) Lastly they rolled over a cart of chocolate bars of differing levels of chocolate. We got shavings off all three.
