Six By Nico: The Best of The Year
At the end of 2023, I visited Six By Nico to try their ‘best of the year’ six-course tasting menu. The menu consisted of their favourite dishes from all the different menus over the past 12 months coming together to create this final feast. My goodness, this was some of the best food I have ever eaten. Six by Nico offers a vegetarian version of their menu along with an off-menu vegan alternative. I am a creature of comfort, I enjoy simple foods, I’m usually quite trepidatious about trying new things and my idea of the perfect meal is pie, mash and peas. With that said, I tried so many new things and ate food that was prepared in ways that I had never eaten before and I loved every dish that came my way. I truly believe this was the best of 2023 and was the perfect way to finish off my year.
The first course comes from the Tokyo menu and is titled Karaage which means Japanese fried chicken. It consists of vegan karaage, togarashi and pickled daikon. Togarashi is a Japanese 7 spice blend which includes red chilli pepper, sansho pepper, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, ginger, citrus peel, and nori. The Togarashi is topped with pickled daikon, the white daikon radish is sliced and marinated in a mixture of rice vinegar, salt, and sugar. When these dishes were presented to us you immediately got overwhelmed you can’t help but look at the beautiful presentation of the food while your server is explaining every component of the dish. This was the first time I had ever done something like this, I had never done a tasting menu and the idea of six different dishes coming out to me was thoroughly exciting. As soon as I tried this first dish, I loved it all of the flavours of the spice mixture came together perfectly and worked in balance with the daikon. Course two came from the Thai Fusion menu and was a pumpkin spring roll. Thai green sauce and shimeji mushroom beneath the pumpkin-filled spring roll and charred corn atop that. Again this dish worked to perfection. I’m a bit of a sceptic when it comes to anything Thai green due to, for the longest time, it being the only veggie/vegan option at restaurants. I was very happy to be proven wrong in this instance and it brought the whole dish to another level.
The next course was chermoula cauliflower from the Marrakech menu. This featured beignets and chermoula cauliflower veloute topped with rose harissa & a coriander dressing. I am a sucker for a cauliflower veloute and this was one of the most flavoursome soups I have tasted. Especially since it was topped with rose harissa, a combination that I have never tasted before but would absolutely use as a soup topper again.
Following this was the Sicilian dish simply titled Zucchini which featured a stuffed courgette flower, trapanese pesto, compressed courgette and a courgette & basil dressing. Pesto alla Trapanese, from Trapani in Sicily, was created as an almond and tomato-based alternative to the typical basil and pine nut version from Liguria. This was one of my two favourite dishes of the night, it felt the most complete and worked perfectly as one of the two ‘mains’ of the evening. This also marked the first time I had tried a compressed courgette and it did taste exactly as you would imagine. Like a regular slice of courgette but more juicy and more compacted. From this dish, I do think I will use a trapanese pesto more often especially when making pasta. The second of the two mains was “What came first, the chicken or the egg” from the A World of Imagination menu. This featured a roasted hen-of-the-woods mushroom, cashew cacio é pepe, pickled celeriac and a brown butter cafe au lait. I have to say, I loved this dish. This is exactly what I was expecting when I booked a six-course tasting menu. You hear a lot about tasting menus where you get a little bit of everything and it’s all fancy. This is specifically what I wanted out of at least one course on this menu and it did not disappoint. This dish as a whole did not disappoint either. I always enjoy a roasted mushroom and, despite my initial apprehension, the hen-of-the-woods mushroom had such a nutty flavour combined with a meaty texture. it was unlike any other mushroom I’ve had previously.
The final dish was the Crema Catalan from the Catalonia-inspired menu. This featured a burnt vegan vanilla creme, poached prune, fennel seed and a honeycomb-shaped biscuit atop it. This dish was the perfect way to close out the whole meal. It was fresh, it wasn’t too heavy after the other 5 courses and it cleaned the pallet after all the food we had eaten. As someone who isn’t normally a dessert person, I ate this all up. If you ever get the chance to go to Six By Nico, do it. No matter what menu you go for, you’re going to be eating great food. I especially praise Six By Nico for creating true off-menu vegan options instead of just removing specific parts of the dishes. I know for a fact I will be back when I get the chance and it will get a whole other blog post.
