Lunching at Tamarine

Yaa, Becca, Dominique, Nadia, and I had a good lunch at Tamarine on Monday, in a room with wood colors and beautiful artwork lining the walls. The artwork brightened the room by focusing on single colors and weaving varieties through them with different shaded patterns and geometries within the panels of a single color.
I was extremely disappointed with the service, because the waiter consistently forgot every order I made, which surprisingly, interfered with my enjoyment of the meal. It was very interesting how much that influenced my sense of how well the meal was prepared, since the two are entirely unrelated, but it made me more critical on the whole.
I enjoyed some of Becca’s Wakame salad, which was a light collection of seaweeds drizzled with a citrus lime vinaigrette. It was incredibly refreshing, and the different textures of the seaweeds were interesting to explore by taste. In addition, the seaweed was laid on a bed of salad, and that contrast was also intriguing—alternating between the smoothened taste of citrus flavored spinach, and the chewy crunch of green seaweed.
I had the shrimp cupcakes, which were floured cakes fried and filled with shrimp and shrimp powder. It seemed that they only thing they had to trade on were the delicious aroma and flavor that comes from being fried—otherwise they were boring and surprisingly bland. The shrimp cakes had to be flavored by dipping them in a sweet vinegar chili dipping sauce, to enhance a sense of contrast—unfortunately, the cakes could not stand very well on their own, which I was disappointed with.
I also had a mango tilapia, which was to be panfried and glazed with a mango salsa. The pan frying did not reach through to the fish, and so it tasted like a fried layer covering a grilled piece of tilapia. In addition, the mango salsa tasted too much like sweet and sour chicken sauce. The combination of the two was very disparate—it felt like a grilled fish had been thrown in to the salsa without any melding of the flavors. At Tamarine, I find that they play on the combinations of two different and unusual flavors, but in this dish, there was no successful melding of the two in a convincing way. The attraction of the contrast is the process of convincing the taster that the two disparate ingredients do in fact taste delicious together. This was not achieved.
When I compared my meal at Tamarine to a meal I had at Three Seasons the night before, a similar restaurant that I had been to before, I was very surprised. I had similar dishes at both, but somehow the flavors were more well integrated at the Three Seasons. Their mango fish was a pan fried fish that was infused with the taste of “buttery friedness” and had a simple accent of greenish mango, lemon, and chili sauce that set it off. In addition, it was fried very lightly, but well enough that it didn’t feel like my arteries would be clogged, but the flavor and texture had infused through to the entire fish. Had I to choose between Tamarine and Three Seasons, though I have been a relatively regular customer at Tamarine, I would now switch to dining at the Three Seasons.