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[Revisited]: T8

Old restaurant, brand new chef. SmartShanghai signs off the Year of the Rabbit with a long overdue visit to T8 in Xintiandi ....
Last updated: 2015-11-09
Revisited is where we circle back on places that have been around for a while and deserve a look-in to see how they’ve aged.


10 years in business is no small feat for a restaurant, but what's perhaps even more impressive about T8 is how it has never devolved into a chintzy tourist trap like so many of its Xintiandi neighbors. That may, in part, have to do with its seclusion from Xintiandi's main drag. It also has to do with the space itself. It's always been gorgeous and, after all this time, somehow manages to not look dated.

But with ten years under a restaurant's belt, shifts in kitchen personnel are par for the course. I've lived here long enough to see two or three chefs pass through its kitchen. Most recently, Inked-up Aussie chef Adam Liston left for greener pastures late last year and Jordi Servalls Bonilla has since arrived in his stead.



Bonilla comes to T8 after a spell in the Middle East, where he served as chef at Harbour Emirates Hotel in Dubai and the Barr al-Jissah Resort and Spa in Muscat, Oman. He has several other impressive notches in his belt too, the most notable of which is a stint at the legendary el Bulli. That one bullet point on his CV tells you most of what you need to know about his cooking style.

His is menu is peppered with molecular terms like "65 degree egg," "porcini powder," "raspberry textures," "spinach glue," and even "forest air." Some of it seems to be molecular strictly for the sake of being molecular, like "green peas caviar." Is it just me, or does spherifying a food that's already spherical seem redundant?



He cooks with a Catalan accent, throwing in ingredients from back home whenever possible. Bread service, for instance, comes with a helping of tomato puree à la Pan y Tomate, that classic tapas staple. At times it's more subtle, like the sprinkling of "olive dust" he adds to his Salmon Tsunami, a plate of house-cured gravlax with shaved beetroot and a sinus-clearing scoop of wasabi "ice cream" (more like a sorbet, if you ask me). Elsewhere on the menu, it's particularly pronounced. Take the "Watermelon Salad 2.0." He compresses the fruit in a vacuum-sealed pack, which concentrates the flavors and gives the fruit a denser, fuller mouthfeel. Then, he cubes it and serves it with a suite of several added features like delicately grilled goat cheese, a tiny bundle of creamy burrata, a few blueberries and a watermelon gazapacho chaser. Definitely unique and worth ordering.

His presentations are often as busy and disorienting as Kandinsky paintings. Plates are sauced in transverse stripes that intersect with circles and dots interspersed with spatters and smears. Take this dish, for example.



This bit of controlled chaos is his roast suckling pig. A crispy shell of skin cracks like peanut brittle to reveal to a supple, fork tender slab of ribbony pork belly (courtesy of a long, low tempurature sous-vide bath I assume). It rests atop a bed of wilted bok choy, a classic Chinese match. Then, due west of that are a few streaks of apple puree that keep a couple of ruby red orbs from rolling around on the plate. They're "sweet sherry pearls," drops of the famed Spanish fortified wine turned into delicate gelatinous spheres with a little help from sodium alginate and calcium. Overall, it's an expertly executed dish. But enough of the foam already. There has to be a better delivery system for garlic essence--or any other food stuff, for that matter--than the ever ubiquitous foam. Sure, it was a cool novelty when Ferran Adria introduced it to the world a decade ago. In 2012, though, it's becoming a tired trope. Not only that, unless it gets to my table, stat, it looks like looks someone spat on my dinner.

His black cod, however, is a more pure and understated expression. He simply poaches a filet in olive oil and vanilla and pipes a few dots of mango curd on the other side of the plate. Easy. Straightforward. To me what really ties this dish together, though, is the odd varieties of seaweed underneath the cod that provide a subtle seaspray flavor to the dish--a natural accompaniment.



Desserts range from the simple and divine to the to overwrought and overrated. Let's start with the latter first. His "Magic Mushroom Patch" is supposed to be the sweet simulation of a fetid forest floor. Talk about cognitive dissonance! This one was lost on me. It amounts to little more than a few meringue "mushroom stems" topped with chocolate "caps," a scattering of "soil" (chocolate cookie crumbles?), "snow" (more shattered bits of meringue) and a scoop of ice cream. Instead go for a tried and true classic, souffle. Bonilla does his with passion fruit and orange oil with a scoop of tangy mango sorbet. You can't really improve upon that.



All told, Bonilla seems to have hit his stride in his new home. His cooking has its moments of excess flourish, but the rest of it expertly exectuted.

However, if T8 wants to continue to justify its prices, it needs to get its front of the house in order. Waiters seem to wander about the dining room without purpose. There is no sense of cooperation or cohesion. The slumped and slouched way in which many of them carry themselves, the way they address each other from across the dining room, it all exudes and air of apathy and a lack of professionalism. We found ourselves constantly scanning the room for our server, seldom able to find her. And I'm still puzzling over how it could possibly take 15 minutes to prepare a cup of hot water. I know poor service is endemic to Shanghai, but this is unbecoming of this level of dining. In fact, it seemed the only force preventing entropy was owner Walter Zahner. To his credit, he dutifully filled in the gaps--always visible and readily available. But, let's face it. If he has to pick up the slack on a Monday evening, when the dining room is at no more than quarter capacity, that doesn't inspire much confidence in how the service staff would perform in the middle of an 8pm dinner rush on a Friday.


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