Glenlivet and grouper, please

Why let those ever-popular wine dinners get all the great food when you can have a whisky dinner? That’s what Pernod Ricard Thailand hosted in extravagant style last Thursday at Bangkok’s Hansar Hotel, with Glenlivet single malt on offer. 

Whisky – and especially potent single malt – isn’t what most people knock back with a meal, other than pirates of the Caribbean. In fact, it’s a great accompaniment to fine dining, as the event at the Hansar’s French restaurant Eve proved. 

Chefs Stephen Jean Dion and Chatree Wongsripaisarn’s four-course dinner was made to match the booze. It began with a jumbo Hokkaido scallop and Alaskan king crab in imported Italian tomato sauce served with The Glenlivet 15 Years Old. 

The rich, aromatic single malt enhanced the seafood tastes surprisingly well, even making the scallop less “fishy”. Our glasses were refilled for the second course, Margret de Canard, a seared Soulard foie gras, with young spinach and raspberry essence. 

The whisky’s complex, entrancing taste with a slightly bitter note didn’t overpower the rich foie gras, but rather brought out the flavours of all the ingredients and made it a very balanced, tasteful dish. 

The main course was a beautiful, vibrant Surf & Turf of Wagyu sirloin and deep-sea red prawns with pied de mouton mushrooms, needle leeks and lobster foam. And the symphony of luscious concentrated fruit and floral fragrance, lingering vanilla and floral finish of The Glenlivet 18 Years Old drew explosions of flavour from both the beef and the prawn. 

The dinner ended with dark chocolate souffle, served with Glenlivet-vanilla scented ice cream and The Glenlivet 21 Years Old. Buttery and robust, the whiskey went along with a drying spiciness of cinnamon, ginger, walnut and dark chocolate. 

Glenlivet is the best-selling single malt in the US by volume. Advertised as “the single malt that started it all”, Glenlivet comes from Scotland’s first licensed distillery, established in 1824 in the parish of Glenlivet. It came to define the “Speyside style” of whisky, named for the heartland of Scotch malt whisky production.

Made with barley harvested from the same source over the decades and spring water from Josie’s Well near the distillery, the whisky is finished in hand-selected casks to produce the rich, balanced, flavoured malt that has, so the legend goes, been prized, celebrated and fought over.