Frasca Food & Wine Dinner
Sometimes in life, it is nice to indulge yourself and your wallet for the chance to experience something like never before.
In this case, my recent indulgence (3/9/23) happened to be the Frasca Food & Wine dinner at the Element 47 restaurant in Aspen, Colorado.
It’s not much of a secret that Aspen is known for being on the high-end side of things, and Element 47 in The Little Nell hotel, located near the base of the Aspen ski mountain, is no different, giving us an eclectic fine dining atmosphere where the flavors in their food are as big as how much they charge.
On this night, however, Element 47 was proud to host the Frasca Food & Wine dinner, a 5-course menu that took us to the finest bites that Italy has to offer, along with a fine selection of wine pairings provided by Friuli, a region in Italy known for it’s fantastic wines.
While all of the wine selections Friuli, and sommelier, Bobby Stuckey, had to offer were exquisite, I will be focusing on the food of the evening as, while I do enjoy wine, I am not the sort of person who can pick up 10 subtle flavors with just one sip.
Upon getting sat at my table, I was immediately blown away by the cozy yet upscale atmosphere that Element 47’s dining room had to offer. Dim lighting, ambient blue lights scattered throughout, a live band, and a private dining room that looked like you needed a secret password.
I and the other diners was also given a copy of the food and wine book written by Bobby Stuckey, who signed each book given to us, along with Chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson, and author Meredith Erickson.
The book has a wide range of information regarding classic Italian cooking, recipes, and wines that any food-loving reader would go nuts for.
After a few minutes of waiting and meeting my server for the evening, Mike, I was then given a metal leaf tower that happened to contain my amuse bouche for the evening, titled frico gambero croccante.
To break that down, a frico is a fancy word for a cheese crisp, gambero is the Italian word for shrimp, and croccante is defined as candied roasted nuts.
What had arrived was a small cheese crisp with the colors of the Italian flag dusted on top, presumably a shrimp powder for the orange and possibly an herb powder for the green.
It was a small bite, but it was powerful. The cheese was wonderfully crispy, and I got a slight sweetness from the shrimp powder, but I didn’t quite get the nuts that the croccante had promised.
Maybe that was meant to be the nuttiness of the cheese itself, and maybe I wasn’t sure what to expect, but overall it was certainly a tasty bite that got me ready for the next course.
Along with my frico, I was given a loaf of freshly baked focaccia bread that was topped with sea salt and served with some olive oil to dip in.
I was already familiar with this palate pleaser of bread dipped in oil, but the softness of the focaccia was wonderful and was perfect for picking up the fruity olive oil.
Moving on to the next course, we have a beet and smoked ricotta cjalson with buffalo milk butter.
A cjalson (jal-son) is an Italian dumpling, similar to ravioli, but has a crimpled edge that makes it look more like Chinese gyoza or potstickers. In this case, my cjalson contained a beetroot and cheese filling with a bit of butter made from buffalo milk.
The taste was out of this world. The wrapper for the cjalsons was perfectly soft and tender, the filling had a nice creamy consistency and tons of beetroot flavor, and that buffalo butter tied it together nicely.
If I had to critique one thing, the menu promised smoked ricotta, and I didn’t get the smoky flavor I expected. I suppose that flavor got lost amongst the strong beetroot flavor.
However, it is certainly something I would have many times.
These are seppias, by the way.
Moving on to course number tre, we have seppia (a small cuttlefish) with salumi (a cured pork product) vinaigrette, mashed potatoes, and a dot of an ink sauce.
I was somewhat skeptical about this dish when it arrived, but I was instantly blown away by one bite of those seppias. The seppia had a sweet tenderness similar to squid or calamari, which I found to be very enjoyable.
The salumi vinaigrette provided some nice added saltiness and a bit of smokiness, the potatoes had that buttery, creamy, velvety texture that you can only get from fine dining mash.
However, the most surprising part of the dish was the ink sauce! That was my first time ever having seafood ink of any form, but it had this briny taste like the bottom of the ocean and made the whole dish that much more enjoyable.
I have no notes about that dish, it was incredible!
Then it was time for the main course for the evening, a roasted lamb chop with braised lamb neck, caramelized radicchio, and creamy polenta.
There were many things to love about that dish. The lamb chop was cooked to a perfect medium-rare, the lamb neck was fall-apart tender, the seasoning was on point, the radicchio had a wonderful bittersweet flavor that lifted the whole dish, and the polenta had all of the velvety creaminess that I love in polenta.
Here is where things fell short for me, personally. The menu promised the little nuggets known as black truffles, and I was excited because I had yet to try fresh truffles, but I’m afraid that I didn’t taste the truffle like I was expecting.
It could’ve been that I wasn’t sure what to expect from those black fungi, but it did feel a tad disappointing to me.
Of course, every great dinner has to end with dessert, in this case, it was a black cherry panna cotta sitting on a crisp shortbread base, mascarpone bavarois, almond crisp, and a cherry sauce.
There was nothing to not love about this dessert. The panna cotta itself was creamy and full of cherry flavor that was backed up by the cherry sauce, the mascarpone provided extra creaminess, and the crunch from the cookie base and the almond crisp were excellent.
There was also some bundles of a siphon cake, made by passing a thin cake batter through a CO2 canister and microwaving for a 30 second sponge cake, which gave extra bits of texture to balance out the whole dessert.
Overall, I’d say that the combination of excellent food and tasty wines led to a night to remember for months to come!
