I see my one post on UB has gone missing, so I will repeat it in short form here.
I had no problem with anything at UB except this.
The ingredients were good, the preparation well done, but the seasoning, the palate, left me cold. I enjoyed the first bite of each of our dishes, enjoying the subtlety and depth of the flavors. As I chewed, new notes, different flavors kept emerging. And kept emerging.
By the third bite, I was tired, worn out, wanting to taste one thing, not 10 with each fighting for my attention. In the end I found all the food overseasoned, not in the sense that any one seasoning was added with too heavy a hand, but because the seasoning was so complex, so full of layers, that it lost me at some point. Enough, I wanted to cry, enough.
This is a strange criticism in many ways, as I usually prefer assertive and complex seasoning. It is also strange as I readily acknowledge that there is real ambition and creativity at work at UB, so much so that I really need to go back again and see if my reaction is the same. But instead of coming together as lively and interesting food, it became a cacophony of flavors, jarring and annoying by the third bite, leaving me wanting a soothing symphony of rich and restrained flavor.
Make what you will of that. Maybe on another day it would have left me energized and not enervated, though I usually find nouvelle Asian food, and particularly pan-Asian and fusion attempts, to be much less interesting than the real stuff. Hey, I understand that it is possible in theory to improve on a perfectly prepared bowl of ramen, but it is damned hard to pull off.
d
Feeling (south) loopy