Starters - Smoked Salmon blinis, Spiced Pork and Duck Pierogi
Mains - Pan-fried Sea Bream with cucumber salad, Marinated Red Snapper with pomegranate and fennel salad
Side - Kasza with bacon
Dessert - White chocolate and vanilla cheesecake
Wine - Picpoul de Pinet 2011 Claude Jourdan Languedoc
Date visited - 1st May 2013
Rating - 4/5
There's a real sense of understated cool to Baltic. Situated right next to Southwark tube station, you enter the restaurant through thick wooden doors and a heavy curtain. Walking past the vodka bar, you come to a mezzanine area overlooking the dining room, which is like a barn conversion done by well-heeled hipsters (in actual fact a Polish prince, but I digress). There's subtle lighting, the odd chandelier, exposed concrete walls and beams (exposed brickwork is so last year) and urinals so small that you have to watch your aim after a bottle of wine.
The blinis were warm and slightly toasted on the outside but gave way to a soft centre. The smoked salmon was fresh and tasty and came with some sort of cream-cheesy-chivey sauce. The pierogi were also very good, al dente on the outside and warm and meaty on inside. I have to say the starters were demolished pretty quickly.
The Red Snapper was also right on song, beautifully cooked with a firm texture and fresh flavour, complemented well by the pomegranate and fennel. The bream was a little less inspiring, and the cucumber salad was fairly insipid. Still, on a technical level, it was well executed.
The Kasza turned out to be bulgar wheat, and was a good hit of carbs and smokiness. It went down very well with the Red Snapper, but upset the clean flavours of the Bream.
The wine, which I always order when I see it on the list, was as reliably pleasant as ever and didn't buckle when faced with the smoked fish. Its austerity when first opened caught me off guard a little bit, but that may have been my fault for tucking into a plate of pickled gherkins just beforehand.
The dessert took ages to arrive, around 25 minutes or so. I am reliably informed that this was a New York cheesecake, and as such the top layer was baked to a golden hue. Either way, it was delicious and well worth the wait, not needing any of the accompanying over-sweet red berry compote.
From my previous visits here, I can tell you that Baltic is also a great place to have a party.
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