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Oslo's Best Restaurants that are most frequently booked by customers of Kolonialen Oslo
😍 5/5 - A pleasant surprise.
By 👻 @Namal Suganda L, 02/22/2022 3:00 am
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When you walk through those nondescript wooden doors beside which a 2018 Michelin commendation looks faded, you don’t hold your breath for a distinguished dining experience, especially not in Oslo where exquisite settings for eating out is as rare as my donning skis, grooming myself to get on the Birkebeiner track in freezing March.
Once bitten twice shy, when you’re prepared to expect very little, service-wise or otherwise in many a restaurant in Norway, a rush of joy leaps & seizes you, when you encounter the contrary. Kolonialen was such an experience. The carefully trudged steps of ours to avoid a near-fatal fall on deceptively fresh ice which brought us in from the hostile outdoors were met, not necessarily by a grand maitre-d’hotel, but by an affable host. He knew exactly the reservation. And he ushered us in, without any inquisitorial looks, as if I’ve mistaken a plush place like Kolonialen for Kareem’s Kebab next door, a not-so-infrequent experience, lamentably, my sort- discreetly defined as the ‘nye landsmen’- , are greeted with, even well into second decade of our century. Needn’t to debate if Oslo has signs of Cape Town for greeting the guests of colour, for this is not the place for that. I will happily reserve that for my students after the weekend. Sorry for that wee interlude of demographics.
Anyway, no sooner did we sit by the window at our reserved, spacious table for four than we were greeted by another smile-clad waiter with the menus. His unchoreographed, exuberant corporeal gestures together with the carefully elicited sibilants gave him away to be someone from le monde francophone, for sure, an asset which elevated the restaurant’s ambience. He was persuasive with the wine collections but polite, passionate in his recommendations but not pushy, unlike the dime a dozen diners in New York. His sommelier knowledge allured us to even to choose a bottle of bubbles which was beyond our originally intended budget. With pleasure, my friend went along with an excellent Cremant to go with the air-flown, live, fresh Boudense oysters by David Herve. Upon their arrival, arranged on a single plate, I was reminded of Tunic Spencer’s mini-naked congregations in stunning spaces, which I’ve always dreamt of prostrating my unathletic mortal coil, in return of a free photograph.
As promised by our French friend for the evening, the oysters were crisp, sweet and succulent. As I relished my four pieces, with the tongue-tingling sip of bubbles, I thought of Somerset Maugham’s colossal characters dining at Parisian culinary establishments like the Foyot in Rue de Tournon in Edward VIII and Wallace Simpson’s Paris. The low ceilinged, disconcertingly poor acoustic setting of Kolonialen was not Foyot, not even being able to hold a candle to the elegance of Theatercafeen in Oslo. The Iittala wannabe wine glasses were a travesty to the extent that the straw-thin stem was irksome to the holder. Yet, the food was a feast!
I always dread the arrival of the main course, for these high end, epicurean empires are known to serve a glazed coterie of organic artichokes, plucked by a virgin in Vanuatu, in the break of dawn, nestled on the north western edge of the Flora Danica plate, so the dog-hungry diner can enjoy the delicate design. And I’m left, dreaming of the nearest falafel parlour, not to go feeling peckish for the rest of the evening. Unlike the above art-of-the-fine-dining narrative, I’ve experienced in a few Michelin starred and Michelin commendation restaurants, ‘dagens fiskerett’, Lofoten cod with Spanish croquettes which two of us had was filling and tactfully prepared. At least, it occupied most of the plate. A good sign, indeed it was.
I was impressed how accommodating the Kolonialen was. Let’s be fair; only a non-cosmopolitan city like Oslo’s restaurant would yield to an unreasonable demand like my friend’s. He had the audacity to ask, in immaculate French to put the French host at ease, if he could have the gnocchi in smoked butter to be served with non-smoked butter. I was fizzing in fury. Had I been the chef, such an affront to the original creation would have been met with my politely asking the guest to choose another dish, without butchering the smoked butter which holds the juju of the dish. Then again, we are dining in social democratic Norway, hence everyone has to be heard and included, even at the expense of a carefully crafted dish being dwarfed to mediocrity. Once again, I was proved wrong. Regular butter soaked gnocchi arrived; my friend fed his face happily. He even complemented the French host and shared a few moments in French again as if they had known each other for sometime. C’est la vie! So it is good to hold the bar not-so-high sometimes, I thought.
Meanwhile my carnivore friend’s sighs of affirmation were demonstrative of his choice of 350 grams of entrecote was a roaring success, delicately handled - not to lose its medium-rare quality, with its centre showing scarlet red. Us the quartet sat for nearly good three hours. It was indeed a sign of more than a run-of-the-mill, ‘neighbourhood restaurant with an informal atmosphere and an international feeling’ as their web page reads. And when we left the almost empty Kolonealen, I decided to be less censorious about dining in Oslo!
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