Oooh saucy!

I have eaten in a couple of fantastic restaurants recently where excellent service and imaginatively used ingredients were undermined by a failure to balance the main ingredient with the sauce. At Zuma, a seaweed salad came drenched in a tahini sauce that not only beat the subtle flavour of the sea vegetable into submission, but left the succulent, rubbery texture bedraggled and unattractive.
The signature dish of marinated black cod wrapped in hoba leaf, while obviously the finest fish you could wish for, was again overpowered by a sweetish sauce that simply did not give the fish room to express itself. Mixing rice into the sauce did lighten the mixture so that one could see the point, but given the way the menu was set out (very Atkins friendly), it would have been easy not to order any carbohydrate at all.
I should say that the sashimi was delicious, the soft-shell crab with wasabi mayonnaise dreamy and the service assiduous without being intrusive. My notes say that we also had grilled tuna with barbecue sauce and grilled chillies. I remember the tuna (fish that good is hard to forget), but the barbecue sauce has passed from my memory and is not visible anywhere on the menu.
Lunch today at Café Studio Delfina (pictured) was as delightful as I have come to expect from this interesting outpost of culture, both visual and culinary, behind London Bridge. The starter of tempura Monte Enebro goat's cheese drizzled with lavender honey and almond nibs next to a salad of bitter leaves was beautifully judged. The balance between unctuous and delicate, salty and sweet, lush and bitter, brought all the ingredients together in a complex system of flavour and mouthfeel.
However, the lemon sole with strawberry and Thai herb sauce, served with rice, displayed the same failing as the Zuma dishes. Excellent ingredients, thoughtfully combined (the sweetness of the strawberry sauce was beautifully cut by the anise of the Thai basil), were just in the wrong proportions. The delicate sole was swamped in the bright pink gravy, both texture and flavour dampened by too much sauce.
At least this time rice came as part of the deal, but it was served in a bowl alongside, consisting of fat, undersalted grains, failing to fully serve its purpose as a soaker-up of unnecessary sauce.
A friend of mine has accused me of being anti-sauce, but I'm confident this is not the case. As a devotee of French cuisine, I am sometimes even concerned that I am too much given to smothering my food with sauce, but I do try to make sure that the underlying component can stand up to the overlay. Perhaps I just need to prioritise the carbohydrates on my restaurant plate - or perhaps fashionable chefs need to spend more time thinking about the structure of their dishes as eaten by the customers, instead of concerning themselves only with the checklist of flavours.