Mauri Restaurant — Restaurant in Bali

Mauri Review:

Mango Drink: Refreshing, Tropical but not too sweet.

Welcome snacks: Appropriate description but didn’t allude to the Copa origin. Rosemary cracker was pleasant good crunch. Traditional Italian snack was nice with EVOO. Copa Ham tart was savoury and blended well. Bloody Mary cocktail sphere nicely presented, appropriate notice given about pop. Good balance of spice to tomato & subtle celery. Refreshing after the dry snacks before. Sea bream tartare cigar. Unique presentation and clear itemisation of elements provided by waiter. Well seasoned and balanced, can still taste the sweetness of the fish along with the potato shell. Ikura adds a nice brininess and coriander powder rounds off well. Perigord winter black truffle with savoury custard and parmesan foam. Slightly overfilled with foam but balance of cheese to egg to truffle ratio was just nice. Not overly cheesy.

Bread selection was well presented & good variety. Tomato Foccacia & Grissini. Foccacia good chew, clearly well hydrated and tomatoes cooked out to enhance sweetness. Grissini had a good snap.

Dish 1: HKD Scallop | Bianco Balsamic Vinaigrette | Perigord Black Truffle Sweetness of scallops slightly lost amidst seasoning & truffles. Overall earthy light could’ve benefitted from some acid.

Dish 2 (Add on Ala carte): Boston Lobster | Fried Eggplant | Straciatella Presentation pops with colour and vibrancy. Dish still warm. Almost like a fancy eggplant parm with lobster. Sadly cartilage from lobster was left in. Dish had cohesiveness and worked really well. Hearty and loving with traditional flavours elevated by the lobster.

Dish 3 (Add on Ala carte): Cavatelli | Octopus | Prawns Chef came out to present the dish personally. Eluded to origin and using local rice flour for different and unique texture. Flavour bomb. Sauce tied everything together with Al dente pasta. Seafood was fresh & well prepped & cooked. Stellar dish.

Break was offered & taken.

Dish 4: Raviolo all Uovo Clean simple presentation. Egg yolk ran and pasta was perfect. Well executed.

Dish 5: Atlantic Cod | Topinambur | Mushroom Consommé. Tender cod that flaked using a spoon. Jerusalem artichoke add a lovely earthy sweetness along with the consommé. Smart cooking.

Dish 6: Black Angus Fillet | Sweet Potato | Black Truffles. Fillet was slightly chewy, but doness was proper. Mushroom & sweet potato complimented nicely. Main focus was left to the beef. Sauce wasn’t too rich & didn’t envelope the dish.

Dish 7: pre dessert Mangosteen sorbet with apricot gelee. Refreshing and not too sweet

Dish 8: Nocciole e Tartufo Nero Hazelnut IC | Creme Anglaise Espuma [presented tableside] Tasted like a fancy version of Ferraro Rocher.

Petit four: presented in a tower. Unique and size is just right. Overall good ending with financier, praline, mini-cannolini &...

Our recent visit to Mauri Restaurant in Bali left us utterly dissatisfied and disappointed. While we are willing to pay a premium price for a fine dining experience, we found that the restaurant fell short of its pretentious claims of delivering a premium culinary journey. At a staggering cost of 1.6 million rupiah for just three dishes, our expectations were high, only to be met with a series of culinary letdowns.

The meal began with Focaccia bread topped with a mere slice of ham, a dish that seemed more like a culinary parody than fine dining. This inauspicious start set the tone for an evening filled with culinary disappointment. We won't go into the other dishes served for free as tasting menu. Not because it is nice but not worthy of mention. We ordered:

Crudo di Capesante: The Hokkaido scallop "crudo" with cucumber, avocado mousse, white balsamic dressing, and lemon zest sounded promising on the menu. Unfortunately, it failed miserably in execution. The single, solitary scallop was sliced into minuscule, paper-thin pieces, making it nearly impossible to savor its natural flavor. What's more, the overpowering taste of vinegar and cucumber syrup drowned out any semblance of the delicate scallop taste.

Lobster and Artichoke Gravy/Soup: Next came a dish featuring lobster with artichoke gravy/soup. What should have been a luxurious and delicate flavor combination turned into a salty nightmare. The soup tasted as though it had been poured straight from a can, a far cry from the exquisite flavors one would expect from a restaurant claiming to offer a premium experience.

Cavatelli: The final straw was the Cavatelli, a dish with homemade pasta, red wild prawns, sea urchin, and seafood ragoût. This dish was not only disgustingly salty but also emitted a foul seafood odor. The inclusion of cheap sea urchin in the dish was a grave mistake, as it smelled unpleasantly and tasted bitter. In fact, the dish was so unpalatable that we couldn't even bring ourselves to finish it.

The food at Skool Kitchen is...

In this age of fine dining, gastro-pubs and gastronomic adventures it is quite rare to gasp as you bite into your meal. At Mauri, the gasps, like they do on hit radio, kept on coming. We chose to eat a la carte rather than the tasting menu and yet still ate, what seemed to be, 10 courses. The various amuse bouches were exceptional, especially the cheese mousse with egg foam served in an eggshell, and the mortadella on top of focaccia (probably the best lump of bread I have ever eaten). For mains, the seafood spaghetti was pretty delicious, but the onion ravioli was entirely next level. The pasta was thin, fresh, al dente, delicate and delightful, the onion puree was the perfect balance of onion sweetness and concentrated flavour. Onion dishes usually are overpowered by the onion, which is why I avoid ordering them, but this was perfectly contrasted by an intense, aged parmesan that brought on what should have been my biggest gasp. That exaltation was for the broth. According to the waiter (what impeccable service!) the broth was made from onions but it flooded my mouth with oxtail, beef cheek and fatty abundance. I would have paid just to drink that broth. Combining the broth and the ravioli made me swoon. By this stage we were reeling in a post-climactic lethargy and declined dessert. What we received was another amuse bouche and petit fours that took us closer to heaven than any meal has a right to. The pralines, rectangular prisms of white chocolate encasing a dark chocolate mousse, summed up everything perfectly; we were treated to another surprise, which should have been expected, but no-one makes an after dinner morsel...