From Abundance to Silence – Epicurean Fine Dining Restaurant Introduces a New Menu

We can still feel the fullness of summer, yet the first signs of autumn are already emerging. The light changes, nature begins to slow down, and flavours become more concentrated. Something is coming to an end while something new is already taking shape. Epicurean Fine Dining Restaurant’s new menu, “The Invisible Cycle – From Abundance to Silence,” captures this almost imperceptible transformation in six courses and will be available from 3 September.

The concept is simple yet unusual: what if a menu could convey not only flavours, but also the passage of time? At Epicurean, the courses are therefore not separate episodes. Each one follows from the previous course and carries the story forward. Guests begin with Abundance, pass through Transition, Maturity and Fulfilment, arrive at the almost complete stillness of Rest, and then return to freshness through Rebirth. In this sense, the menu forms a circle. It has no conventional beginning or end, just as nature does not: what is passing away already contains, in part, the beginning of what comes next.

The journey begins with Abundance. Hokkaido scallop, fennel and seawater come together on one plate, bringing the sea, the garden and the earth into harmony. This is still a world of openness, light and ease – the final moment before change begins.

In Transition, the rhythm begins to slow. The warmer, deeper character of foie gras, pumpkin and hazelnut evokes the period when nature still retains the energy of summer, but is already beginning to function differently. There is no sharp break; the imperceptible transformation itself is the essence.

Maturity turns towards the forest. Wild mushrooms, a vegetable emulsion and miso appear on the plate. At this stage, it is no longer the abundance of flavours that matters, but their concentration – as if all the experience of the season were becoming condensed into an ever-smaller space.

After abundance comes Silence. In the second half of the menu, André Bicalho gradually takes elements away rather than adding them. The pigeon in Fulfilment, served with beetroot and blackcurrant, already reflects this restraint. There is no need for superfluous components: every ingredient has a precise function.

From here, the journey reaches perhaps the most intriguing point of the concept: Rest. In the combination of pigeon, aged Madeira and spruce, even intensity recedes into the background. The aim is no longer to deliver one stimulus after another, but to allow guests to perceive what remains behind the complexity. Here, the menu arrives at silence – but it does not end.

In Rebirth, the acidity of green apple, the creaminess of kefir and the delicate sweetness of white chocolate bring movement back to the experience. Light and freshness return, now enriched by everything the guest has encountered during the previous five stages. The circle closes, while simultaneously beginning again.

The concept of the new menu continues through its wine pairing. In selecting the wines, the team considered not only the flavour profiles and textures of the individual courses, but also the dramaturgy of the six stages and the idea of nature’s continuous cycle.

According to André Bicalho, a menu becomes truly exciting when it has dramaturgy, rhythm and an underlying idea. A distinctive feature of the concept is that the same six-stage story can also be experienced in a vegan version. The restaurant’s previous concept took guests on a journey through Hungary’s wine regions; the new menu retains Epicurean’s characteristic approach to gastronomic storytelling, but this time the protagonists are not landscapes, but time, nature and transformation.