Among the desserts, we try an excellent gooseberry (the berry of the moment, with a sour tartness all of its own), frangipane and macadamia tart (£7); and a chocolate tart with sea salt and crème fraîche (£6).
When it aired in the US, Girls generated a lot of what television executives like to call "noise", most of it approving, for the tartness of the writing, for its refusal of standard comic formulas and for what many saw as the unblushing realism of its depiction of young women's lives.
The sweetness of our second oyster, this time on the half-shell and set under the grill for a few seconds, was offset by the slight tartness of beurre blanc and pickled cucumber.
Puddings ended the meal on a high: poached Yorkshire rhubarb Eton mess was sublime, the rhubarb ice-cream sustaining a tiny kick of tartness, the meringues slathered in pistachio green syrup.
As well as really good-quality butter, flour and eggs and chocolate, I also always have a selection of bitter fruits such as passion fruit and pomegranate and redcurrants or blackcurrants: that tartness is great to counteract the sweetness in a cake or pie.
And the egg at the centre was not hard-boiled but pickled – creating a long, lingering balance between the tastes of warm, oozing meat juices, creamy yolk and the tartness of a mild vinegar.
It can add tartness and acidity, or dryness, or – and this is where the controversy really rages – cloying sweetness The event demonstrated the city's thirst for flavoursome beer The brewer, 10 this year, now produces a startling variety of different beers In 1966, as any English football fan will attest, was a very different world.
"You can use the word 'self-centered,' if you wish," she told an interviewer in 1972, with a tartness that Albee clearly relishes in his homage.
"Fuck" is the universal locution in her family, and hip-hop slang — a little out of date, but still potent — shapes the rest of her talk, all of it delivered with a peculiarly English tartness, as if life at any moment could be defined by a phrase.
The tangy tartness of the lime juice combined with the antiseptic astringency of the icy-cold vodka — wonderful.
And the shchi, their smoky sweetness cut by a subtle tartness, were a revelation.
