This brand new restaurant is the latest edition to restaurant mogul and chef extraordinaire Marvin Gauci‘s rapidly expanding empire. It is housed right above Caviar and Bull in the Corinthia San Gorg Complex in St Julians and unlike his other restaurants is firmly based on a very interesting mix of ethnic Far Eastern cuisines, cleverly fused with European styles and ingredients.

The place itself is very original as it is entirely made of glass and distinctly feels like being inside a glass dome which impressively dominates St Georges Bay. So it is definitely not devoid of splendid views of the sea and also full of dazzling lights from the surrounding areas.

After admiring the set up and intricate details in the form of novel tableware, menu and wine list presentation and other clear touches of chic, we moved onto more serious matters – to inspect foods and wines on offer. The menu proved to be an extraordinary eclectic mix of sushis and sashimis, oysters and caviar, tandooris and tempuras, meats and fish, often fused with European ingredients. It is very much that type of menu which puts you in an enormous fix as to what to go for, due to the endless choice of so many tempting dishes, making you want to order virtually everything on the menu.

The wine list on the other hand was not very extensive and certain wines lacked detail. However in spite of the European element being present in the menu, I suppose that with the focus being more centred on the Asian, wine might lose a bit of its importance. I am also seeing a local trend not to fuss so much over the wine list. An increasing number of establishments seem to be going against the very recent tendency to feature a wine list akin to an encyclopedia, which can at times border the presumptuous and the unnecessary. I do however very strongly hope that we will not go from one extreme to the other and I do believe that at least the basic descriptive details of the wines on offer should remain firmly established in local wine lists for a very long time to come.

So after much deliberation we decided to start with a selection of salmon and yellowtail sashimi, which we devoured in roughly 12 seconds flat. So when Marvin popped by and saw our desperately hungry faces he brought us a larger assortment consisting of octopus, prawn, tuna and eel. We are great fans of sashimi, but admittedly just having returned from a holiday in Japan, where we over-indulged in this delicacy, the experience can get quite repetitive. So we then decided to change tack and order some hot food to follow.

We had crab and foie gras wontons which although might sound like a rather weird combination, is anything but unheard of. It was a very interesting dish but which admittedly requires a rather acquired taste to fully appreciate the contrasting flavours.

We also had spicy chunks of wagyu beef in a truffle and mushroom sauce. Another interesting dish with a splendid sauce and where my only small remark would be that the meat would have improved slightly with just a little bit more cooking, to melt down the remaining stringy fat.

As for wine we went for Chablis, mainly because I found the lesser wines to be relatively pricey while the difference to upgrade to a Chablis relatively small. This incidentally also reminded us of Tokyo, where the same phenomenon is also the order of the day, but to the extreme. There if you decide to ‘invest’ in a bottle of wine, you either pay a very hefty price for a horribly basic bottle, or you pay just slightly more and get a good one. So for us it was either sake or pretty good wine most of the time.

We agreed with Marvin to return very soon to continue our exploration of this incredible menu and to delve deeper into intricate mysteries behind some of the more daring dishes he has combined.