Birch in Providence, RI (Dec ’15): “revisit”

During my final year at Brown (mid-2013 to mid-2014), I dined at the newly opened Birch 18 times, a rate of about once every 2-3 weeks. The reasons I dined there so often were because it was head-and-shoulders the best restaurant in Providence, RI, and also it was relatively affordable at ~US$60-$70 after tax and tip for an excellent 4 course menu. Chef Ben Sukle would generally change the menu every 3-4 weeks and never repeat a dish, giving it a novelty that other restaurants in the Providence area lacked.

Some local talk: New Rivers was a very good bistro with excellent $1 oysters nights, but chef Beau Vestal’s ambitions were limited to more casual food. Matt Jenning’s Farmstead (before he moved to open Townhouse in Boston) I never really rated, having had my fair share of being his guinea pig for weird experiments (snail whole wheat pasta that had the consistency of sawdust, steak with burnt rice, kimchi something or other). Champe Speidel’s Persimmon in Bristol, RI was an excellent restaurant influenced intelligently by modern trends (a faux-mussel shell a la Noma sticks in my mind) and created an excellent rendition of Michel Bras’s famous gargouillou salad, which I discovered late in April 2015. But it was a 45 minute drive away from Providence, and an eternity away by bus, which was why I only made it down there twice.
I came back to the US for a two-week period in December, and decided to make my way up to Providence to see old friends and sample Ben’s cooking again (for a 19th and 20th time). The US flight ticket was originally planned for May in time for Brown’s 2015 graduation ceremony, but work had other ideas and I ended up in Vietnam during that time.

The cooking at Birch is quite unique, and doesn’t fall in any particular style. In the first half of 2014, I had Japanese influenced dishes (black bass sashimi, sweet potato tempura, raw scallops), French-influenced dishes (opera cake, a roasted quail salmis from a collaboration dinner with Justin Yu of Oxheart), as well as Asian-fusion touches (fermented vegetables served with baked rutabaga, and in this couple of meals, my 19th and 20th, I had crisped rice [soccarat]). In fact, that’s what makes dining at Birch exciting – the sense that anything is possible.

But I think Ben’s good taste allows the cooking to avoid a couple of pit-falls, like excessive Asian saucing with kimchi. Asian-fusion cuisine is rarely good, and as far as I know has never comes together to form a cohesive and enjoyable series of dishes. (Examples: Benu, Bo Innovation, etc etc.) The accompanying sauces at Birch are usually French, or some distilled broth that brings to mind consomme. This is intelligent. Also, at ~$65, the one never feels too down for dishes that are merely good, rather than thought-provoking and excellent. (I don’t recall having a dish that was anything less than good).

Birch, as Ben told me, is the opposite of a Saison, where being funded by unending spouts of successful VC money allows them to cook the best ingredients in the best way at any price. Of necessity. Rhode Island’s economy is respectable but not as frothy as San Francisco’s (but then again, where is?). In such an environment, prices have to be reasonable. While I feel the price at Birch is a bit low, the chef’s relationships with local fishermen and farmers, allow Birch to offer these dishes at highly competitive prices. And so it preserves a bit of the neighborhood vibe, which makes Birch a bit of a Rhode Island Chez Panisse.

The two types of dishes I previously enjoyed the most at Birch were the vegetable-dishes (e.g. roasted carrot with clams in autumn, beetroot with shaved walnut in summer, spaghetti squash with marjoram in winter, rolled beef carpaccio with turnip in winter) and the desserts (the sweet grain cereal was insanely delicious, a riff off peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich very enjoyable). The comparative weakness of the 4-course menu would be the Course 3 mains, which tended not to be as creative as Courses 1 & 2. Scup, squid, and other Rhode Island fish; pork, would be cooked simply with a simple vegetable accompaniment and a broth-based sauce. I tend to enjoy Ben’s more offbeat takes, and so preferred the first and second courses.

On this visit though, I found myself really enjoying the main of Rhode Island monkfish, which was really fresh, 6 hours off the boat, and roasted on the bone. Judging by the bone-line, it looked like a small monkfish, but had supreme texture, possessing the gelatinous chew of good turbot. The ingredient itself was good enough to make the simple arrangement highlymemorable.

Starting in January 2016, downtown Providence will have the Sukles’ second restaurant, a casual restaurant called Oberlin, which will be headed up by ex-Birch-chef Ed Davis. I wasn’t able to catch it this time around, but will definitely do next time. (especially since they have the dearly-departed Sweet Grain Cereal).

Birch – worth a special trip to Providence? Definitely.

Rating: 17/20

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PICTURES OF THE ENTIRE MENU (OVER TWO DINNERS)

1. Black garlic and mushroom chips, with apple butter and sorrel (4.25/5)
   1. The combination of black garlic and mushrooms had a rounded mushroomy savoriness. An excellent bite

1. Sunchoke: marinated with cherry blossoms and seaweeds with autumun olive and almond (4/5)
   1. Cold slices of sunchoke, with savory almond milk and floral sakura. Very

1. Warm broth of pork and sourdough: grilled onions, coriander and kombu (4.25/5)
   1. Charred onions, with day old sourdough bread and pork bone broth. A hearty and delicious broth made from day-old sourdough bread and pork bone broth. A micro-soup

1. Raw Rhode Island Fluke: parsley, pickled broccoli stem and preserved tomato (4/5)
   1. Usually tasteless fluke was cured, to give it a savory taste. As far as a white fish could be, it was a facsimile of ham, with parsley creme and pickled stems. It reminded me of the traditional Japanese progression in Tokyo, where the first raw fish is often a whitefish.

1. Grilled radishes: Barbecued chicken hearts, hazelnuts and nasturtium (3.75/5)
   1. Grilled radishes in chicken fat. Not bad.

1. Kabocha squash: clams, whelk and preserved peppers (4.75/5)
   1. Kabocha squash was roasted, along with clams and whelks. The sauce was excellent (made from red peppers?) It was buttery and tasted like a Grand French sauce, which brought it together. The char on the sweet squash added the necessary complexity. This riffs off the successful carrot and clams dish Ben had in 2013.

1. Baby beet: Wild mustard, husk cherries, rice and goat’s milk (4/5)
   1. Rice crispies, sweet beet, mustard flowers, and sugar kelp. A similar butter sauce was with the kabocha squash. Towards the end the beet made the sauce purple with a strong sweetness. The texture of crisped rice (soccarat) was interesting, but didn’t really harmonize with the dish. This brought to my mind mind the beet with shaved walnut in late 2013, but I felt that dish was stronger because the texture of shaved walnut was more delicate than the very crisp soccarat, which had a clashing texture.

1. Rhode Island Monkfish: Roasted on the bone with celeriac, broccoli and potato (5/5)
   1. This monkfish was served barely 6 hours after it had been landed. The texture was gelatinous, probably the best I’ve had, and similar to the white meat at the core of the best turbot. Monkfish flesh is densely packed, and can be unpleasantly chewy if overcooked..
   2. Of my meals in 2014 (about 10-12 in total), I used to find Ben’s seafood dishes (e.g. Pt. Judith Scup or Squid) some of the less convincing dishes compared to his vegetable conceptions. This tends to because they were based around a simple conception of protein, vegetable, and a sauce. It was completely different with this dish – the monkfish excellent enough on its own to distinguish the dish; the celeriac topped with roasted broccoli and potato bits was pleasing. A potato/brown butter broth brought together the dish.

1. Lightly grilled cabbage: winter squash, caramelized sauerkraut, toasted seeds and a broth of dried apples (4/5)
   1. Cabbage, with apple core oil, toasted seeds (cumin, anise, poppy, sunflower, fennel). I could see the thought process at work. For a vegan dish, the core was layers of cabbage and squash, sour and sweet. Complexity came from the mix of grains (one of Ben’s strengths is creating an optimal mix of grains), and the char on the cabbage. This dish was purely vegan – it was good for a vegan dish.

1. Rhode Island pork: Field peas, spinach, green tomato and mitsuba (4/5)
   1. Suckling pig, fatty and tasting heavily of bacon. This was a showcase of good ingredients, but little beyond that, perhaps the least accomplished main – though still very good.

1. Cato’s Corner Balck Ledge Bleu cheese: walnut, dried corn and sorrel (4/5)
   1. Celery oil, sweet corn crisp, shaved cheese, walnut milks. Very sharp cheese, and probably the most intense dish of the meal, a dessert that wasn’t sweet in the slightest except for some sugar crisps. I found this dish a bit dry for my tastes, but appreciated the attempt at a savory dessert.

1. Apple: Apple blossoms, oats and raspberry (4.25/5)
   1. Really good cooked apples, with raw apple, apple blossom and raspberries. A good fruit dessert end, highlighting the stewed apple texture from apple pie.

1. Quince Sherbet: Caramelized whey, toasted grains and rose. (4.5/5)
   1. Caramelized whey ice cream with quince sugar and rose cream. Delicious, the rose cream perfuming the dessert with floral flavor.

1. Whoopie pie

Kitchen | Providence, RI | Spring ’14 | “brunch”

• Rating: 5/5
• Address: 94 Carpenter St, Providence, RI 02903

Over 4 years, I tried Louis; Brickway’s; Duck & Bunny; Julian’s; Nick’s and a lot of other breakfast places in Rhode Island. But my favorite go-to, if I had the fortitude to brave the Saturday or Sunday queues, was Kitchen in Federal Hill, just a short car ride away from Brown’s campus.

Kitchen is a small outlet in Federal Hill that serves about 16 people at once -> 3 4-tops, and 2 2-tops. It has an open kitchen, with just one man who cooks thick-cut bacon to perfection (and I do mean absolute perfection, the perfect marriage of salty crust and tender meat-texture within), does a mean French toast, and really good crab cakes. Who is this one-man, on a single-minded quest to provide the best breakfast in Providence, if not Rhode Island?

Brunch is almost always a disappointing affair, a shakedown of Hollandaise – I don’t find anything compelling around normal eggs, simply cooked. But the brunch at Kitchen was always worth the trip.

French toast and bacon

Crabcakes and bacon, salsa (5/5)

BACON (5/5)

CRABCAKE

Double review of Atelier Crenn (San Francisco, April ’14) and Hedone (London, May ’14)

• Atelier Crenn rating: 17/20
• Hedone rating: 16/20

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MODERNISM

I visited the Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona recently for the first time, and happened to look upon the Josep M Subirachs’ Passion Edificio, and was especially struck by the sculpture of Christ hanging by the wrists. The difference is that this Christ was hanging only by his hands from a cross horizontally suspended from the front of the church, instead of being vertically planted into the ground. Subirach’s atypical sculpture emphasised one element of the grotesque brutality of crucifixion – the downward pressure of gravity on hands – out of a few other choices, the flayed skin from the condemned’s back, the nails being driven through the hands to create the stigmata (usually the emphasis).

• Here’s a picture of the Sagrada Familia Christ, as part of the Passion Edifice: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Passion_on_the_Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia.jpg

This highly personal idiosyncracy, is what I consider the touchstone of modernism in the arts. To me, Modernism is an individualist ethos, not a style. I much prefer this highly stylised sort of sculpture over the strict requirements of Renaissance photorealism began to be relaxed for the painters, with the perfection of perspectival rules, most of which leaves me cold. It seems to me that much of the painter’s energy was engaged in portraiture as ur-photography for the nobility, so that art from those centuries tend to be either functional portraits that were intended as ur-photos, or second-rate allegorical scenes.

Modernism could thus be equivalent to the maxim of “letting a thousand flowers bloom”. And in the splintering, we find very few schools with many people working within a strictly defined aesthetic, as the photorealistic Renaissance school. The radical cubist portraiture of Picasso (Ambrose Vollard, man with guitar) may be allied with the cubist landscapes of Braque, but one generally finds not that many major cubist styles that Picasso had not done (he was legendarily prolific with 50,000+ paintings; and in the 30s, he painted luminously round portraits of his mistress, and in his 50s he created a much more fluid subject-cubism with surrealist backdrops, I recall a picture of a convoluted sea monster on a beach, which name temporarily escapes me). Why is Gaudi’s interpretation of Christ hanging from the “ceiling” by the wrists successful? What makes it successful (and surprising) is a long history of Christ crucifixion depictions, such that the viewer always has that reference point of a vertical cross. And that reference point is a pillar of strength in modernist interpretations, because it gives another data point to dazzle the diner (see, the Atera cracked-egg dessert, or the Alinea balloon).

And so too is modernism in food, if the increasing amount of personalisation outside of the French-haute cuisine style can be analogised with the increasingly personalised styles at the dawn of modernism in the early 20th century. When Ferran Adria calls his style of food “techno-emotional”, it is not the direct style of food that other chefs imitate (who explicitly calls his/her food “techno-emotional”?) but the ethos of changing the menu every year to something completely different, committed to providing the diner with new dishes and new sensations no matter what the cost. In this sense el Bulli seems similar to the practice of the unclassifiable Picasso (who was more than a cubist, producing some first-rate Blue-period pictures). This seems the real legacy of modernism in food, an ethic of constant and personal exploration.

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ON ATELIER CRENN

On top of the substratum of the chef’s ethic (of ceaseless exploration of new flavor possibilities, of organic, of loca-vore, which is the internalised ethic of almost all of the top chefs in the US) is style. Here Chef Dominique Crenn, to extend the analogy of early modernist art, seems to be a cross between a surrealist and a abstract painter. This is not a merely visual analogy, this style extends to the flavor combinations she produces as well. Atelier Crenn may well be the most imaginative restaurant I had the chance to visit in the US this year (more than Alinea, or Atera; who else could think of an all-encompassing dessert from the life of bees, or create a vegetable pin-cushion using a vinegar meringue, or a Dali-esque composition involving Birth?), but there is something missing about the harmony of the tastes sometimes. Atelier Crenn is still a work in progress, and of the 5 fine-dining meals I had in the Bay Area in April, it was perhaps the weakest. But it is also one of two meals (with Manresa) that satisfied the intellectual and artistic senses the most. There is no doubt that Chef Crenn is a true artist, my hope for my next visit is that the pleasures of tongue will match the pleasure she conjures for the eyes.

In my first fine-dining visit to California (Atelier Crenn, Saison, Benu, Manresa, Meadowood), I found that the old stereotype about Californian cooking, where ingredient-simplicity rules (under the influence of Alice Waters from Chez Panisse), is simply not valid. Chefs there are taking great risks with modifying the ingredients. If Atelier Crenn is abstract surrealism, then one can analogise Californian-naturalism a la Waters, with Renaissance realism in art history. Modernism’s personal expression makes it prone to going out of fashion, as adhesion to an artist’s personal aesthetics can easily change, but it generates greater loyalty than a widely-accepted dogma as Californian naturalism, or Renaissance realism. That is the evangelist-mass-adopter distinction found in Silicon Valley business thinking. But like Renaissance realism is a second-rate artistic school for me, pure naturalism when it comes to ingredients, seeking to transform them as minimally as possible, seems a second-rate cooking philosophy. Pure naturalism cannot produce truly great dishes. While I have never found a formula for the great dishes I have liked, I don’t remember ever thinking a very simply cooked dish was truly great – there are usually just too many jagged edges in the ingredient pairings, that must be smoothed down by the chef to ensure a harmonious interlocking taste profile. It is necessary for a chef to have the leeway to transform the ingredients.

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ON HEDONE

Mikael Jonsson of Hedone is a man who has surely has opinions on Californian cuisine. Formerly co-writing the influential  Gastroville blog with Vedar Milor (now writing as Gastromondiale), he opened Hedone in London in 2011, and seems to have taken down the restaurant reviews he formerly wrote on Gastroville. Hedone is a restaurant that specialises in ingredients sourcing. Indeed, ingredients seem to have been the focus of the Gastroville and Gastromondiale blogs. The restaurant is pegged by Mr Andy Hayler (a hugely influential critic and blogger who has been to every 3* restaurant in the world), as serving food between the 2*-3* level. When I visited in late May, the impeccably sourced ingredients, were half-the-time minimally transformed. This created an association in my mind between Hedone and my trip to California. Here, in London, of all places, I had found a restaurant that seemed in tune with the stereotypical Californian naturalist philosophy, minimally transforming ingredients a la Waters.

That half of the Hedone menu (Dorset seabass, Scottish hand-dived scallop, asparagus, pork, lamb) reminded me heavily of that ingredients-first philosophy. While I enjoyed that half of the menu, I also found there to be limits on how nice a pure-ingredient dish could be. Perhaps the best of those was the Scottish hand-dived scallop, which had a crunchiness that was really superb. So it was all the more disappointing when the oyster, and lamb (the last main) were comparatively devoid of taste. When Hedone’s ingredient dishes work, they are very good though not great dishes. I remember the texture of the scallops, but not as well the mint, lime, cucumber flavors that came with it. So too the sea bass, where the bass was good but the accompaniments more forgettable. But sometimes the cult of the ingredient-dish can puzzle with its intimations of the Eleusinian mysteries – the bland lamb (very good, I’m sure) and nice pork (pleasant) not really showcasing any added delta in performance from superior ingredients.

One commonality of both my Atelier Crenn and Hedone meals was that the last mains (guinea fowl, AC; lamb, Hedone) were disappointing, which lowers the score of both restaurants. The last main is the crescendo, which all courses build up to. More care must be paid by both restaurants to the last main.

The more modernist touches on display at Hedone were pleasant but paid less attention to the texture of the dish than I would like (I liked the taste of a cuttlefish confit, but had to basically saw my way through a thin slice of cuttlefish; a Parmesan ravioli was a bit rough). Where Hedone really shines are the desserts – a chocolate fondant and Gariguette strawberries are truly memorable creations.

Hedone reminds me of Saison, though much less polished. What I think separates the two is that there a consistent cooking philosophy across the plate at Saison: transformation by fire. I did not as much perceive the individual style of Mikael Jonsson in his cooking, beyond the testimony of his ingredients themselves. I do genuinely wonder if Hedone will develop a signature style as Mr Jonsson matures as a chef, given his own ideological commitments to clarity of ingredient tastes set out in his Gastroville blog.

Which provokes the amusing thought-experiment. What if the two restaurants switched places? It almost seems as if Hedone and Mikael Jonsson are spiritual successors to the ingredient-first philosophies of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. That we should eat the very best local ingredients in fine-dining, is now a global ethos that has transcended France and Alice Waters’ California. And Atelier Crenn being particularly modernist-process-driven, is a restaurant that could really exist anywhere in the world today.

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ATELIER CRENN (San Francisco, April 2014)

• Address: 3127 Fillmore St, San Francisco, CA 94123, United States
• Phone:(415) 440-0460
• Rating: 17/20
• Value for money: 2/5
• Price I paid (after tax and tip, ex. drink): $260 ($195 base menu price)
• Chef: Dominique Crenn (ex. Luce (SF))
• Michelin Stars: 2

*Note: Menu and dish descriptions are a poem written by Dominique Crenn herself.

EDIT: Here is a video of most of the dishes, being prepared by the kitchen.

1. Spring has come with its cool breeze (4.25/5)

• Kir Breton, creme de cassis jelly within
• Cider suspension with the creme de cassis jelly, within a cocoa butter shell.
• Fruity, dominating liqueur. Very enjoyable.

2. Mellow serenades of colors licorice and orange (4.25/5)

• Uni custard, with caviar from Sacramento Delta. Smoked potato gelee, licorice consomme. Interesting.

3. Under the midnight glow I can taste the sweetness of the sea (4/5)

• Kusshi oyster poached with black garlic, seaweed

Crackers

• bitter tasting, almost like cordyceps

4. Where the broad ocean leans against the Spanish land (5/5)

• This was the most memorable dish of the night. Squid like a noodle. Ham (Californian Berkshire ham hock, belying the description which foreshadowed Iberico) and truffle (Perigord, from Tasmania, Australia) consomme,
• Lardo, aioli. potato chip.
• Complex broth. Salty squid noodles. A complex bite, where the ham and truffles did most of the heavy lifting, with good squid texture approximating noodles. A surrealist ramen.

5. A gentle smell, oceanic, of yummy feeling (4.5/5)

• Shima-aji (White Trevally/Striped Horsemackerel). Turnip tempura, coconut, cilantro, thai chilli, cucumber.
• Good fish, fatty in texture like ham, but turnip tempura was a bit oily. Interesting choice of ingredients. – Japan and Thailand.
• http://www.trueworldfoods.com/products/tsukiji/all/shima-aji/
• http://shizuokagourmet.com/japanese-seasonal-fish-striped-horsemackerelshimaaji/

6.As the shell was found, its natural beauty made no noise (4/5)

• Abalone, sundried tomato jelly, crispy yuba, yuzu foam, yuzu leaves
• Quite good. Did not rise above the yuzu-and-seafood theme. (see also, Brooklyn Fare)

7. The half moon, silky and smooth (4/5)

• Chef Crenn’s take on French onion soup. Broth of roasted charred onion. Dumpling comte + black truffle, shiso, lemon balm. Apple vinegar jelly.
• Quite sour.

8. I refreshed as I gazed at your smooth green coat (4.5/5, functional dish)

• Shiso + green pea sorbet, pickled green strawberry. Rice wine vinegar ice.
• Very refreshing and successful palate cleanser. I especially liked the shiso and green strawberry, but I did not have a strong impression from the rice wine vinegar rice (would have given 5/5 if I had)

9. Elegantly sitting on branches (4.75/5)

• Carrot jerky from branches (a bit of a trope, see my meal at Borago, and Ruth Reichl’s report of her 2014 meal at Alinea LINK).
• Carrot had a really intense candy flavor, salted, and with the right dash of cayenne pepper. A delight.

10. Nature rejoice, chasing childhood memories (4.25/5)

• Pumpkin, sunflower, flaxseed, cooked in different ways. Smoked buckwheat, Liquid nitrogen white balls of smoked sturgeon pearls. Dashi. Yuzu, fermented chilli, steelhead trout roe. bottarga of sturgeon roe
• Surely the most complex dish of the night. I could not really draw out a “childhood memory” from this dish, but it was good. I was not sure what the smoked sturgeon pearls added to the dish though.

11. Feeling of black sand under my toes, I dreamed of (4.75/5)

• Grade A1 wagyu cured. Apple puree, onion gelee. Soil of rye + squid ink. Horseradish puree. Onion gelee.
• Another successful dish. While at first glance one might decry the use of A1 wagyu in this dish (as opposed to a higher grade), this gave it a firm, striated consistency, and it is difficulty to see how it would have worked with oilier grades of wagyu. Hammy.

Housemade brioche (5/5)

• A+, buttery and flakey.

12. .These creatures, who move with a slow, vague wavering of claws (3.75/5)

• Lobster bisque, phytoplankton dumpling, bone marrow, sea grapes, pickled onions, dashi gelee covering the lobster bisque, gelee of lobster brain.
• A statement is being made about bottom feeders (Dan Barber, in his newest book the Third Plate, highlights the chef Angel Leon of Aponiente, who cooked phytoplankton bread to highlight the lower phytotrophic levels of the marine food chain). I appreciate the cooking with phytoplankton, but the taste of Main lobster bisque was too one-dimensional (cream, mostly) and that overwhelmed the complexity of this dish

15.Walking deep in the woods, as the earth might have something to spare (3.75/5)

• Pine-scented meringue, pumpernickel, basil, hen of the woods, shaved hazelnut
• The pine, hazelnut and hen of woods (AKA maitake) (lightly roasted) gave an earthy smell to the dish. However the taste was too one dimensional (salt predominating) and it was also very dry.

16.Birth which gives its morning mystery (4.25/5)

• Duck consomme, meant to be drunk with a chocolate branch, duck and corn eggs, nested corn silk. wild rice, pear, apple, vanilla puree.
• “Birth” – another conceptual dish which leaves me with no doubt that Chef Crenn is an artist’s chef. One might draw the comparison to a surrealist Dali painting of Birth – the surreal imagery of a nest on a highly fluid and stylised branch; and the taste of chocolate and duck consomme, which is a surreal pairing, reinforces this impression. It was impressive to look at, and good in conception. However it is not purely delicious, rather contrasting in flavor.

17.Where birds sing and are causing ripples in the nearby water (3.25/5)

• Guinea fowl, pintade, with nori seaweed butter, and lemon, preserved cabbage.
• Tough texture.

18.Dotting the fragrant flora (4/5)

• Vinegar meringue (Spanish banyoules vinegar)
• Fresh salad.
• A very unique and creative presentation

19.Spring has come and is full of sweet surprises::: (this line of the poem refers to the following entire sequence of desserts)

A stick of sugarcane with -lemongrass, in the vial: chia seed; shiso; finger lime; guava juice. (4.25/5)

• refreshing

Essence of the Bay Area (4.25/5)

• Eucalyptus-menthold popsicle
• Eucalyptus is an invasive species throughout the Bay Area
• The revaluation of ingredient values is on.

Honeycomb (4.5/5)

• Chamomile-honey cake; Beeswax sorbet; white choc cremeux; pistachio/pear; honey meringue. Wax mold using bubble wrap. Caramel of beeswax and bees pollen.
• Full marks for imagination, a tour-de-force of the bee, but the use of pollen in the beeswax sorbet did irritate my palate a bit.

 Mignardises (5/5)

• Passionfruit Marshmallow “kiss”.
• Ginger.
• Nougat of  mango + brazil nut + macadamia
• Citrus macaron
• Toffee + cocoa nibs
• Quinoa + milk chocolate + sesame
• Roasted macadamia + dark chocolate ganache + star anise
• Coffee bonbon.

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 HEDONE (London, May 2014)

• Address: 301-303 Chiswick High Rd, London W4 4HH, United Kingdom
• Phone:+44 20 8747 0377
• Rating: 16/20
• Value for money: 2/5
• Price I paid (after tax and tip, and two drinks): 120 pounds, or $210 (1 GBP = 1.6805 USD)
• Chef: Mikael Jonsson (ex-writer at Gastroville)
• Michelin Stars: 1

 

Mojito

1. Beetroot cream, smoked eel (4.25/5)

• pleasant combination

2.Rye crisp with cheese (3.75/5)

• a musty cheese

3.Buckwheat crisp, bone marrow, sturgeon caviar (4.25/5)

4. Poached oyster (Dorset), granny smith apple jelly, elderflowers, pickled shallot (3.25/5)

• poached very well, though largely tasteless.

5.Umami flan, bread consomme, bread croutons (4/5)

• umami from katsuobushi, fish stock, and white egg. not bad

6.Baguettes (5/5)

• I was looking forward to trying this bread, learnt from French master baker Alex Croquet. It did not disappoint. With a marvellously irregular crust and complex toasty flavors, I was very impressed with the bread.

7.Scottish hand dived scallop, mint, lime, cucumber (4.5/5)

• strong integrity of scallop texture, crunchy, in a way I’ve never had before. World-class scallops
• Well accompanied with mint, lime, cucumber flavors. This was a hallmark let-ingredients-speak-for-themselves dish.

8.English green asparagus, pistachio, avocado, wild garlic (4/5)

• Asparagus veolute, garlic leaves, pistachio puree, raw avocado, nasturtium
• Sweet and juicy asparagus spears.

9.Pan fried sea bass (Dorset), fennel chips, black olive sauce (4.25/5)

• Really nice pan-fried sea bass, though the accompaniments (black olive esp.) were a bit puzzling.

10.Cuttlefish (4.25/5)

• Smoked, pan-fried cuttlefish leg, Mandarin Sicilian tomatoes, sheet of thin cuttlefish with ink
• Not bad in taste, though the sheet of thin cuttlefish was nigh un-cuttable with my knife. I spent maybe 10 seconds sawing through that piece.

11.Liquid Parmesan ravioli, onion consomme, mild horseradish, smoked guanciale (4.25/5)

• Light horseradish foam. I enjoyed the Roscoff onion consomme, with sweet flavors, but the ravioli was a bit rough in texture. The onion and parmesan were the two dominant tastes
• it was less accomplished than a smooth quail egg Ravioli I had at Schwa (Chicago) in March.

12.Suckling pork rack, garden pea, morels, red pepper (4/5)

• very good crisp skin, garden pea was in two forms, pureed and regular. morels with smoked paprika and lime juice.

13.Rack of Bourbonnais lamb, Petit Violet artichoke, rosemary and rocket infusion (2.75/5)

• A disappointing let down at the crescendo. A cut of lamb whose tendon-ous texture I would not have minded one bit if it had profound flavor, was mostly flavorless and bland except on the outside.

14.Gariguette strawberries, hibiscus, coconut (4.5/5)

• Hedone has first class desserts. Here two discs of Hibiscus gelatin with coconut sorbet and dried strawberry meringue. The Gariguettes were sweet enough to not die of comparative tartness in a contrasting mouthful with the sweet meringue and coconut sorbet.

15. Warm chocolate, powdered raspberry, passion fruit jelly, Madagascar vanilla ice cream (4.5/5)

• Warm chocolate fondant below a chocolate disc with raspberry powder, and vanilla ice cream on top. Classic and enjoyable.

16.Mignardises

• Black sesame macaron, green tea bon bon

Benu | San Francisco, CA | Apr ’14 | “saucing”

• Address: 22 Hawthorne St, San Francisco, CA 94105
• Phone: (415) 685-4860
• Price I paid (after tax + tip, incl. a $16 beer and $25 supplement): $330/ ~$305 without drinks
• Courses: (20 main/22 total) 18 savory / 1 bread/ 2 dessert / 1 mignardises
• Price/Main Course: $15
• Rating: 17.5/20
• Value: 3/5
• Dining Time: 160 minutes
• Time/Course (total): 7 minutes
• Chef: Corey Lee (ex. chef de cuisine at The French Laundry, Per Se, Daniel, Lespinasse, Guy Savoy, Alain Senderens)
• In Own Words: “My family used to run through the cheese section of the grocery store,” he says—in flight from the unfamiliar dairy smell. At home, they kept two fridges, one for Korean food and one for American. “It informed how I see my American-ness versus my Korean-ness. There is some separation there. Benu’s food is about how those two can coexist.” – http://www.foodandwine.com/blogs/2013/12/17/corey-lee-wise-chef-of-the-west
• Style: Asian-fusion
• Michelin Stars: 2

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After London, Lee spent time in the kitchens at Daniel and Lespinasse in New York. “You heard about it—there’s this kid that’s a badass and he’s an awesome cook,” Chang says. “He’s a fighter—a tiny pitbull. Nobody’s going to outwork him, and you’re not going to outthink him, either.”

“His commitment to his career was profound,” says Thomas Keller, who hired Lee to work at the French Laundry in Napa Valley and Per Se in New York City. “It was a rare—that’s an understatement—approach from a man so young, that kind of foresight and ambition and willingness to learn.” Lee was with Keller for nine years. To his physical endurance and mental wherewithal he added finesse, and the confidence to make his cooking personal.

“Thomas Keller was the first chef to do French interpretations of American food,” Lee says. “For him, it was mac and cheese. For me, it might be re-creating flavors from when I was younger, finding a way to refine them. It’s realizing that people can find your own experiences interesting.” – http://www.foodandwine.com/blogs/2013/12/17/corey-lee-wise-chef-of-the-west

I approached benu knowing that this restaurant would probably have the highest probability for differing opinions. Dining at Atelier Crenn and Saison the previous days, I had heard nothing but the highest praise for Benu. My maitre d’ at Saison had worked at Benu, and my server at Crenn considered Benu and Meadowood to contain the highest potential for a truly great meal. But at the same time I knew most of the Asian dishes benu would riff on, inside and out. There would be little wow-factor for me in terms of novelty. And it turns out that what would wow me, were the superlative sauces.

I confess to having immediately left my meal at Benu slightly underwhelmed, primarily because I felt I had experienced most of the original touchpoints (Nasi Lemak, xiaolongbao, galbi) in Asian restaurants, and I felt that while they were interesting takes on them, they did not go substantially beyond the original dishes. However, with a month’s reflection behind me, I have substantially revised my opinion of Benu. In my mind, I perhaps came in with the wrong expectations, expecting innovation on top of Asian dishes. The dishes (xiaolongbao, galbi) were brought to a high-pitch of quality, and with the relative paucity of top-quality Asian food in the US, it is heartening to see Benu being a standard bearer for Asian-American cooking.

Saucing. While there were cute little visual tricks in the meal, such as the “oyster, pork belly, kimchi” being served in a Chinese take-out box, and a beggar’s purse being served, the star of the show was the sauces, which relied heavily on aging/fermenting and traditionally Asian condiments like gochujang and Shaoxing wine. They were thick, complex, rich. The dishes which really impressed me with taste combinations – “oyster, pork belly, kimchi” a creamy kimchi based sauced, “wild bamboo fungi and shoots, chicken, cabbage” had a really rich chicken broth that would put the watery cabbage dreck most Chinese restaurants serve to shame, “whole baby sea bream” had an amazing tangy tangerine sauce that I ate off the plate, “Okhotsk sea cucumber” had another amazing peppery sauce with gochujang. “Roast quail” had a cognac glaze with lam kok olive that was addictive. Any restaurant to have two or three amazing sauces has already hit a home-run. To have five, seems like carefulness.

At the same time, Benu is a restaurant that is not particularly tied to California. Chef Corey Lee was originally slated to open Benu in NYC, and it really could open anywhere in America. Benu is not Californian in the stereotypical way (in the way of Manresa or Saison) – relying essentially on the quality of its native bounty and farms. What is distinctive about this restaurant is the care put into saucing, and its mission to modernise American conceptions of Asian cooking. Benu seems the state-of-the-art in Asian-American cooking today.

Rating: 17.5/20

Memory: “oyster, pork belly, kimchi”, “wild bamboo fungi and shoots, chicken, cabbage” , “whole baby sea bream”, “Okhotsk sea cucumber”, “roast quail”, “shad roe, bacon, horseradish, spring vegetables”

Notable Links: Andy Hayler and Ruth Reichl were recently in town, and had very similar menus to my own dinner, that the two of them liked different dishes than I did (and liked different dishes from each other) attests that Benu has no real absolute meh-dishes, just dishes that cater differently to the taste of different diners.

• http://www.andyhayler.com/restaurant/benu (he likes the celery with anchovy, which I don’t)
• http://www.ruthreichl.com/2014/05/a-truly-great-meal.html

*This is a post from the road, with spotty wi-fi and all. It may have more typos than usual, and definitely has less links and details than I would like. Apologies.

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1. thousand-year-old quail egg, potage, ginger (4/5)

• The century-egg process of harsh alkali, is paired with a neutral potage. This was reminiscent of the century-egg porridge one finds at dim-sum restaurants. What was particularly interesting about this preparation was the choice of quail eggs (higher yolk to white ratio) than chicken or duck eggs. I enjoyed it, but it did not differ much from the standard century-egg porridge recipe elsewhere.

2. braised abalone with toasted grain jelly (4/5)

• abalone from Big Island in Hawaii
• yuzu and barley for toasted grain jelly

3. oyster, pork belly, kimchi (4.75/5)

• miyagi oyster, creamy,  and savory. not the main player. oyster gave it a creamy texture
• Great. A novel combination, take-out box style is paired with oyster and pork belly. A bold flavor of kimchi.

4. eel, feuille de brick, crème fraîche (4.75/5)

• creme fraiche with lime salt
• feuille dough, freshwater eel

5. anchovy, celery, peanut (3.5/5)

• caramelised anchovy, celery, peanut
• Nasi Lemak combination. (anchovy, peanut form the complements to the Singaporean/Malayan dish Nasi Lemak) usually paired with cucumber for freshness – here celery. Ultimately what makes the original Nasi Lemak dish delicious is the creaminess of coconut rice, and the greasiness of fried egg and chicken wings. Therefore I felt it lacked a creamy counterpoint.

6. homemade sunflower tofu (3.75/5)

• Made from Sunflower seeds, real sunflower flavor
• fermented sunflower tofu

7. xo sausage with basil curd (3.75/5)

8. beggar’s purse of treasures from the oak (3.5/5)

• purse made from acorn flour, black truffle, iberico ham, red onion, quail egg yolk inside the beggar’s purse

9. salt and pepper squid (4/5)

• squidcracker, with squid meat
• chilli powder, fried garlic powder, confit squid, pickled serrano chilli
• good mix of tastes, a two/three-bite dish. rather insubstantial

(bread) orange blossom honey/wild ginseng, McClellan farms butter.

• poured over the butter, for dipping with the bread

10. wild bamboo fungi and shoots, chicken, cabbage (3.75/5)

• a Chinese banquet dish, which could have been quite insubstantial – however the richness of the broth saved it from a being a mere bitplayer. the lightness was intentional. usually the light vegetable dish is the one I like least about Chinese banquet menus, because it (usually cabbage) contains neither texture nor has it been braised with meat long enough for it to complement the sweetness of cabbage.

11. shad roe, bacon, horseradish, spring vegetables (4.5/5)

• shad roe (which I made bottarga with in April, tossed perfectly with a squeeze of 1/4 lemon, (European) parsley, and al dente spaghetti) has a 3-4 week season every year when the saltwater shad spawns, and can only be found in the colder waters of the Northeast. It was easy to find it in Rhode Island in spring, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the restaurant had imported it from the northeast. What I especially like about shad roe is the size of shad eggs – small enough to have a macro-texture, large-enough to be distinct if you really want to emphasise it (like curing it for bottarga, as I did). The size occupies a happy medium.
• here you can read a paean to shad roe: http://www.saveur.com/article/Kitchen/Rite-of-Spring-Shad-Roe.

As a meal, it’s terribly sophisticated and satisfying. And it makes me feel part of a legacy of legendary bon vivants: Joseph Mitchell, the midcentury New Yorker’s streetwise columnist, gathering tales of the Fulton Fish Market over an early-morning shad roe omelet at a fishmongers’ hangout. Or Eartha Kitt singing Cole Porter: “Why ask if shad do it? Waiter, bring me shad roe.”

• here at benu, wrapped in bacon, and grilled. the day I had it was the last day on the menu!
• bacon added a savory flavor, though the actual presence of bacon was unnecessary, since it had imparted its flavor to the shad roe fully.

12. pig’s head with lentil hozõn and bõnji (3.75/5)

• hozon (a miso-paste-analogue applied to non-soy products, namely fermented nuts and grains) and bonji (a soy-sauce-analogue applied to non-soy products) are products dreamt up by the food-entrepreneur David Chang of Momofuku. Benu is I think the only restaurant outside of the Momofuku chain I have encountered these products in. The two (Benu and Momofuku) share a similar commitment to bring bold Asian flavors to an American audience
• taste of the Chinese sausage lapcheong, with Shaoxing wine, dates, and black peppercorn
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hozon
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonji

13. lobster coral xiao long bao (4.25/5)

• good, xiao long bao with lobster. sauce = yuzu(?) and banyeuls vinegar

“five tines a winner”

14. whole baby sea bream, spring onion, lily bulb, aged tangerine peel (5/5)

• tai. deboned painstakingly
• done in a gently steamed style (literally, qingzhen, which means “lightly steamed”). raw radish and raw lily bulb. hard to see how it could have been improved upon.
• usually chinese sauces aren’t edible by themselves. but this aged tangerine sauce was just restrained enough to be sticky sweet, eat-off-your-plate

15. Okhotsk sea cucumber stuffed with shrimp, cucumber, perilla, fermented pepper (supplement) (4/5)

• Okhotsk Sea == off the east coast of Russia, from Sakhalin Island.
• peppery, good sauce, with gochujang – the sea cucumber itself had a pleasant hard gelatin flavor, but there are limits to how exciting a homogeneous mass of gelatin can be, even with a sea cucumber as excitingly-shaped as this one. (do I use it to comb my hair or what?)
• but the action was all in the sauce.
• “a savory and pungent fermented Korean condiment made from red chili, glutinous rice, fermented soybeans and salt.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gochujang

16. roast quail, lam kok olive, dandelion, walnut, hot mustard (5/5)

• the apogee of saucing tonight – (quail from Wolf Ranch, Northern California) – with a bitter horseradish, cognac glaze, Michigan cherries and Lam Kok olives. It was earthy, coffee-ish, and reminded me of the champagne pork ribs (sauced with some hard liqueur and coffee) I like at Singapore’s old-school Teochew eating-house Por Kee

17. beef braised in pear juice with oyster plants (3.75/5)

• shortrib cut, galbi. brisket-like in taste and tasting of harsh low-quality beef. (though I’m sure the kitchen did not skimp, but that was the effect) not a fan of this cut of beef.

18. “shark’s fin soup”, dungeness crab, Jinhua ham custard (4.25/5)

• shark’s fin is made from an artificial soy base, the manufacture prompted by Chef Corey Lee’s attempt to incorporate the wavy and pliant but crunchy texture of shark’s fin without using the actual product. the product he came up fulfils the _crunchiness_ of shark’s fin alright, but doesn’t have the pliancy of real shark’s fin. Benu faux-Shark-fin Veracity: 50%
• the taste profile is similar to the classic Chinese soup “Buddha Jumps over the Wall”, which is characterised by scallop, ham, chicken, abalone and shark’s fin). Here the seafood taste was provided by dungeness crab, and the ham custard gave it the pork flavor.

19. sake lees sherbet, strawberry, nasturtium (4/5)

• a play on “strawberries and cream”
• nasturtium for pepperiness, needed more. taste of nasturtium didn’t come out

20. fresh and dried yuba, almond, white chocolate (5/5)

• not bad for texture
• really profound almond flavor, with white chocolate. The soft form of yuba was a bit unnecessary, but the crisp type of yuba, with almond streussel and almond tuile was a textural delight.

mignardises.

Manresa | Los Gatos, CA | Apr ’14 | “the early spring garden”

• Address: 320 Village Ln, Los Gatos, CA 95030
• Phone: (408) 354-4330
• Price (after tax + tip): $334 (incl. drinks [$20 pre-tax] and cheese supplement [$35 pre-tax]) // ~$250 without
• Courses: (11 main / 22 total): 5 amuse / 5 bread / 7 savory / 1 cheese / 3 desserts / 1 mignardises
• Price/Main Course: $30
• Rating: 18/20
• Value: 2.5/5
• Dining Time: 220 minutes
• Time/Course (total): 10 minutes
• Chef: David Kinch (ex. Quilted Giraffe, L’Esperance, Akelarre, Sent Sovi); Chef de Cuisine Jessica Largey (ex. Providence (LA))
• In Own Words: “When we’re young cooks, what we do is we’re always putting one more thing on the plate – “what can we add to this plate?” But the older you get and the more confident you are, and the more you realise that really – what nature gives us is the key to what we do, it’s – “what we can take off the plate?”” – source
• Style: Vegetable-focused
• Michelin Stars: 2

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The town of Los Gatos, CA is one of the most prosperous communities I have seen in America. Think immaculate bushes, and, tastefully decorated houses. It is among the richest communities in the Bay Area, and America at large. (verified according to this Businessweek report). The town is home to some notable personalities, including the immortality researcher Aubrey de Grey.

In the midst of this wealth stands a restaurant dedicated to vegetables, Manresa, the spiritual counterpart to l’Arpege (Paris) in the United States. Its debt to l’Arpege is clear in many ways. In his cookbook, Chef David Kinch devotes a chapter to Alain Passard’s philosophies; Manresa has an egg dish explicitly named the “Arpege egg”. Indeed my meal would show a similar care and respect for vegetables, (the signature “Into the vegetable garden…”), as well as an impressive duck dish featuring harmonious ingredients colours, reminiscent of the similar colour-coded cooking of some of l’Arpege’s most spectacular dishes, a signature Passard “style”.

In my visit there, I thought the flavor profile was subtle, seeking a quiet harmony. Manresa is not a restaurant that seeks out to shock and awe in every course – a sign of a mature aesthetic. There is something of the Japanese kaiseki philosophy in Chef Kinch’s cooking – trust in the ingredients, restraint. Dishes which I was not sure whether I liked right after eating them, have in the course of remembering them, grown in my estimation.

The cooking wasn’t always this vegetable-forward. My server for the night had been with the restaurant from the start. Conversing with him about the changes he has seen, I found out that about 70-75% of their clientele is regional, from around California, and the remaining 25-30% is national, with internationals still forming quite a rare minority. This is probably due to Los Gatos’s geographical position right in the very end of the Bay, more internationals passing through the further SFO (San Francisco) than SJS (San Jose) – it takes a special effort to head down to Manresa. In the early years Chef Kinch, cooked in a more rustic French style, but that shifted towards his current vegetable forward fare. The transformation of the restaurant towards haute-fare was made complete this year, as now Manresa only serves a $195 tasting menu.

Again, the blogger “Food Snob” has written the canonical post about Chef Kinch’s history, so I won’t re-invent the wheel and direct you to his write-up if you want to find out more about Chef Kinch. An excerpt:

Kinch first hit the national headlines in the summer of 2004, when at the behest of Eric Ripert, he prepared a meal at Le Bernardin for a group of journalists. Ripert had just eaten at the chef’s then newly-opened restaurant and was amazed: ‘that guy is seriously talented. I was like, Son of a *****! He has an incredible, obsessive knowledge of his products and the rare talent to elevate ingredients to their best.’ The assembled guests were stunned and delighted by what he had cooked with the local produce that he had brought with him all the way from the Bay Area.

Since then, inspired by Passard’s biodynamic gardens, Kinch has followed in his footsteps, establishing a partnership with farmer Cynthia Sandberg to create their own potager to produce Manresa’s produce. This search for superior ingredients, in combination with his creativity and talent as a chef, has won him loyal and growing admiration locally and globally. In 2007, he was invited to speak at Pamplona’s I Congresso ‘Vive las Verduras’ and then at the Festival International de la Gastronomie de Mougins the year after. He is currently recognised as a chef on the forefront of gastronomy.

[…]

Kinch believes that ‘there are two characteristics that enable restaurants to transcend the ordinary. First is that someone has a vision…the other is a sense of place – the restaurant couldn’t be anywhere else than where it is.’ He wanted the cooking to reflect who and where he was and to, like Chapel had, ‘create a sense of place’. Thus, sandwiched between the mountains and the ocean (thus bringing to mind the Basque country) and amid some of the richest farmland in the United States, he quickly fell in love with the area’s unique and fruitful terroir. Whilst in Saratoga, the chef had his own herb garden and employed a forager on nearly full-time basis, but after the move to Manresa, he expanded his local supply lines: he buys from (and surfs with) the producers at the much-loved Dirty Girl Farm; sources his cherries, apricots, peaches and nectarines from the nearby Novakovich family; and knows well the retired IBM software developer, Gene Lester, who owns twelve acres filled with hundreds of rare and exotic citrus to which he lets friends help themselves.

Each of these suppliers is important yet secondary. It is actually a two-acre plot in Ben Lomond, twenty-five miles from Manresa, which shares a mutually-dependent and mutually-rewarding relationship with the restaurant. It is called Love Apple Farm and run together with attorney-turned-farmer, Cynthia Sandberg. Several years ago, it dawned on Kinch that local chefs were ‘go[ing] to the farmers’ market and all…buying the same organic leeks and lettuces. We’re all doing the same thing. I wanted to do better.’ To him, the natural next step was growing his own. Originally, he thought about buying a farm, but after tasting some of Sandberg’s organic tomatoes, he asked her to supply him exclusively. When it came to negotiations, each had a final condition, which fortuitously turned out to be the same thing – to try biodynamics. By November 2005, the pair had made their first ‘preparation’ of manure-stuffed cow horns to be buried beneath the soil. By summer 2006, the garden’s crop was on the restaurant’s menu.

http://foodsnobblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/manresa-los-gatos/

Manresa is famous for its sole-customer relationship with Love Apple Farms; the farm supplies exclusively to Manresa. When I went in late April, there was going to be a celebration in Los Gatos the next day to celebrate the release of the film “The Farmer and the Chef” – the film about the relationship between David Kinch and Love Apple Farms proprietor Cynthia Sandberg. It is one of the great culinary partnerships.

I would recommend Manresa to a diner who is tired of the sensational but anonymous New International style of cooking – dashis, gelees, exotic citruses, foie; mindless trend-following – cooked up in so many Michelin-starred kitchens. Here is a kitchen that intelligently brings the taste of California to the diner.

Rating: 18/20

Memory: “Into the Vegetable Garden…”, Duck and rice, “yuzu-jalapeno”, Rhubarb compote with elderflower

Other notable write-ups

• Food-snob
• Gastromondiale

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The Early Spring Garden (late April)

Garden path

Promotional Flyer for a May visit by Eneko Atxa (Azurmendi, 3* Michelin, Bilbao)

Santa Cruz 75 Cocktail (Osocalis Brandy, Lemon, Love Apple Farm Honey, NVI Lasalles Brut Champagne)

1. Petit fours “red pepper-black olive” (4/5)

• A cute piece of visual trickery, where similar looking dishes are presented at the beginning and end of the meal. (also see, Eleven Madison Park)
• Here black olive madeleine, a buttery delight. On top of petit-four of red pepper. Strong and intense capsicum scent and flavor.

2. Kohlrabi and meyer lemon croquette (3.75/5)

• Liquid center of lemon and kohlrabi. Lemon butter (rich) was the dominant taste, complemented well with side ingredient kohlrabi, root-vegetable taste.

3.Olive oil and spring savory (4.25/5)

• Olive oil ice cream, made from Sciabaca olive oil, an exceptional and fruity olive oil.
• On top a kale chip savory.
• This was served as a palate cleanser.

4. Abalone and local milk panna cotta (4.5/5)

• A Manresa specialty. Abalone of Monterrey Bay, CA. Dashi gelee made with braising liquids of abalone. Radish greens.
• Taste profile of the dish was towards savory side.
• Highlighted the rubbery texture of abalone, in small bits so it did not become unpleasant.
• I appreciated the qualities of the dish, but my personal opinion is that the rubber-iness of abalone is a lesser quality to emphasise in an abalone, at best an acquired taste. I had eaten an abalone dish at Saison a few days earlier where the meatiness was emphasised (by roasting), which appealed much more immediately.
• (Context is everything) In Singapore, rubber-iness of abalone is de-emphasised. Cantonese fine-dining restaurants choose to braise it for hours in dishes like “Buddha jumps over the wall” to achieve the ideal texture of a gelatin-meat.
• The sociological reason for this general Singaporean preference, I suspect, is there is a prevalence of low to middle grade canned-abalone in Singapore, the canning process of which increases the rubbery texture. So the “luxury” connotations of abalone in Singapore attach themselves to non-rubbery abalone.

5. Arpege farm egg (4.5/5)

• By special request, I had to try the Manresa version of the l’Arpege egg. (famous due to the hot-cold contrast of cold sherry cream with just-poached yolk, and ginger and chive for spice, topped with maple syrup. Thanks)
• I had made this myself using Kinch’s recipe a month before
• Was equally delicious, though I have to say, ironically I did enjoy my version of the Manresa egg a bit more than the actual Manresa version of the Manresa egg (because I blitzed mine with maple syrup, unlike the Manresa version which was a light drizzle) Here they use Tahitian maple syrup.

Bread: One of everything

• Clockwise from 12 o’clock: Levain [using a low production Einkorn flour], Baguette, Onion Roll, Brioche (sitting on top of Sourdough). My favorite was the buttery brioche

• Sciabica olive oil, fall 2013 cold pressing, from Modesto California. You may buy it from http://sunshineinabottle.com/. A real paragon of fruity olive oil

6. Cherry salmon and roasted grapefruit, hazelnut (4.25/5)

• Cherry salmon/ its own roe/ freeze-dried tangerine. Assertive and strong fish flavor from the cherry-salmon roe, cut by citrus from roasted grapefruit and dried tangerine. Dried tangerine crisp, with crisp of fish skin. Not bad.
• Cherry salmon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncorhynchus_masou

7. Asparagus with a norinade (3.25/5)

• “norinade” = seaweed tapenade.
• Blue cheese, grapefruit. A bit lackluster.

8. Into the vegetable garden… (5/5)

• This was the signature Manresa dish that had brought me to the restaurant. It did not disappoint.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpN-sUXJZnQ At 14:00 in this video Kinch discusses this dish, comprised of purees, vegetables, their juices, flowers and stems. It is a dish about showing respect to ingredients
• Each of the vegetables were cooked to individual perfection, including the best peas I have ever tried – petite, juicy, not a trace of starchy texture, firm to the bite, one could almost describe them as “pea caviar”.
• The smells and scents of this dish reminded me a wafting cloud, within which I could only grasp at only a few familiar scents… wasabi, mint, pea, carrot, anise.
• The last time I was so bewildered was when I dined at Central, in Lima Peru. I could not even begin to describe the unique tastes I was trying. Here, my palate was insufficient to distinguish a third of the 60-70 ingredients, other than to say it is an amazingly complex dish. An invigorating taste of Northern California.

Hands all over the plate. It’s that good, folks.

9. Sweet potato and spanish mackerel, apple aioli (4.25/5)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Spanish_mackerel
• A soft white fish, raw-ish inside. Sweet potato chip and caramelised sweet potato. Nasturtium

10. Carrot and onion with candied olive (4.5/5)

• Smoked carrots, musky roasted lentils and grains, juniper (giving a complex anise flavor to the broth of roasted grains and earthy carrot)

11. Black cod ‘demi-sel’ with fava bean  (4/5)

• Paired with morels, reminding me slightly of a Cantonese preparation of cod with black fungus. The earth (morels) and sea (roasted cod)  was paired with fava bean puree, and leek oils on top.

12. Duck and rice, “yuzu-jalapeno” (4.75/5)

• An intriguing dish was served as the last savory. This was a dish about presentation and complimentary flavors. Roasted aged duck, with Japanese rice underneath, and the fermenting blend of yuzu+jalapeno (yuzu zest+chopped jalapeno) had been fermented since December. Daikon.
• The invigorating scent and taste jalapeno brought to mind wasabi. My mind associated this dish with a sort of roasted-duck wasabi sushi.
• The focus on complimentary color, pink-ish roasted duck meat, pink herbs, pink daikon, the pink yuzu-jalapeno brought to memory for a second time l’Arpege, where Passard often cooks dishes of the most brilliant color harmonies
• I was not immediately taken by this dish. But the memory of it refuses to die, it was one of the most interesting dishes I was served on my California trip.
• This was a dish with an intriguing taste, but rooted in an amazing play on color. Two points of harmony.

13. Cheese Cart (supplement)

• I liked very much the Meyer lemon-pepper inflected Sandy Bottom, (Sullivan Pond Farm, Wake, VA), goats cheese. Apparently it is aged in grape leaves. (5/5) top row, right
• Also of note was the Kinderhook Creek sheep, Old Chatham Co in Hudson Valley, NY. bottom row, middle. (5/5)
• Thanks to my server Bryan who was also the cheese curator. Very interesting selection

14. Rhubarb compote with elderflower (4.75/5)

• Another exercise in quiet harmony. Rhubarb foam with elderflower sorbet, and leaves of micro arugular. Elderflower pearls beneath (made with agar), and poached rhubarb. Green grapeseed oils on top

15. Strawberry shortbread, fennel and lemon verjus (4.25/5)

• strawberries from Cook County CA, with fennel fronds, fennel puree, crushed shortbread. Vanilla parfait. Freeze dried strawberries. Pleasing.

16. Sorrel and chocolate (4.5/5)

• Sorrel gave it a herbal flavor, rounding out chocolate

17. Petit fours “strawberry-chocolate” (4.25/5)

• Reversed, now a chocolate madeleine and a strawberry petit-fours. Visual doppelganger.

The kitchen. In the absence of Chef Kinch, Chef de Cuisine Jessica Largey presided over the kitchen.

A bowl of caramels

MANRESA

Saison | San Francisco, CA | Apr ’14 | “fire”

• Address: 178 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA 94107
• Phone: (415) 828-7990
• Price (after tax + tip, excl. drinks): $325
• Courses: (14 main/19 total) 1 amuse / 12 savory / 2 dessert / 1 bread / 3 mignardises
• Price/Main Course: $23
• Rating: 20/20
• Value: 4/5
• Dining Time: 150 minutes
• Time/Course (total): 8 minutes
• Chef: Joshua Skenes
• In Own Words: “There are a number of principles that resonate throughout the menu: if I buy a piece of fish or meat, it has to be the best specimen possible of that product. It has to be the best I’ve had in my life. If it’s not, I need to keep looking for it. It’s the same with the cooking process. If I tasted something and it’s not at that level, we need to keep searching for it.” – http://eater.com/archives/2012/04/18/joshua-skenes-interview-part-one.php
• Style: Ingredients-driven
• Michelin Stars: 2
• Notable: #1 restaurant in the United States for OAD 2014.

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PREAMBLE

There are three things above all to look for in a great restaurant. The first is the ingredients: how dedicated is the chef to getting the best produce possible to the table? How does the quality shine through? The second is the cooking style: what is the merit of each individual dish? Does the chef have a vision? What is the level of originality? How is the menu structured? The third is the service: is it a joy to step into the room? I only rate restaurants on the first two things, but I am also watchful for great service. I am glad to report that the service at Saison was top-notch. We felt right at home.

On the 3 above counts, Saison delivers. Rarely does the Triforce of ingredients, cooking, and service, come together in one package. But it does here.

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COMPARING REACTIONS WITH GASTROMONDIALE

It was instructive on this San Francisco trip to contrast my reactions with the famous food critic, Vedat Milor (of Gastromondiale, and the late Gastroville blog with Hedone chef Mikael Jonsson), especially since we shared two touchpoints he has written about in detail (Saison & Manresa). Of the major critics, I would say that V Milor I have found who is the one closest to my taste so far. We share similar opinions about Per Se, EMP, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and Alinea, as well as l’Arpege – so the first two nailed-on names on my San Francisco trip were Saison and Manresa, restaurants he believes are the two best in the Bay Area. It indeed ended up that out of the 5 high-end restaurants I visited this trip (in chronological order, Atelier Crenn, Saison, Benu, Manresa, Meadowood), Saison and Manresa were my two favorites.

 On the face of it, Saison should absolutely be the kind of the restaurant that V Milor, a noted ingredients and barbecue fanatic, likes. (see his reviews of Asador Etxebarri) Chef Joshua Skenes is also an ingredients fanatic. (see “in own words” quote above) Yet he rates it 17.5/20 (for him, “a restaurant that offers outstanding food made with exceptional to outstanding ingredients but where there is room for improvement with respect to ingredient sourcing, executions of the preparations or where the originality or style is not clear.”). – Source

In ingredients-sourcing, Chef Skenes is certainly among the most diligent:

Recently, though, Mr. Skenes began to work with a Bay Area fishing captain who reels in all kinds of species, monkey eels and idiot fish, and delivers them live to the restaurant. “We’re going to try to wean ourselves off Japan, so we’re more representative of the Bay Area,” he said.

Subsidizing a boat to custom-catch fish for Saison is an expensive proposition. There is also the cost of the seaweed forager and the poultry ranchers who raise pigeons to Saison’s exact specifications. Mr. Skenes said that his ingredient costs are barely covered by the menu price, and that a cancellation can put the restaurant in the red. Thus, the fees for changing plans within 72 hours. – NYT

Since there is clearly no problem with ingredients sourcing, nor the execution of most preparations (he positively gushes about each of the dishes in his review, except the first (turnip custard) and eleventh (baby pigeon)), so I can only imagine that Mr Milor thinks the style lacking. This is where I disagree with him, for Saison to my mind has a very unique style amongst the American fine-dining restaurants: most if not all dishes have been touched by fire, intensifying their flavors. The 11^th dish in my meal was grilled asparagus, poached in its juices and then grilled. It imparted the outside of the asparagus with a delightful char flavor that intensified the contrast with the juicy texture and asparagus tastes within. Or the 5^th dish, a roasted abalone, that enhanced the meaty texture while ridding it of rubberiness, all the while working magic on its tastes. To my mind Saison is actually one of the few restaurants I have dined in anywhere, where the style is recognisable, and yet completely in service to the tastes of the dish. For example, a dinner the previous night at Atelier Crenn, featured a Duck Consomme to be drunk while eating a dish with Chocolate elements, an overplaying of Chef Dominique Crenn’s modernist whimsy which created a confusing-tasting dish. I detected no such excesses here. The visual presentation is also a delight, with textured glassware and expensive flatware. (the many-holed plate makes a reappearance from Brooklyn Fare).

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 CUTTING-EDGE STRATEGIES

I think, in a way, the 3 San Francisco restaurants I dined at (Atelier Crenn, Saison, Benu) represent 3 major strategies of differentiation in the culinary world today. That a lot of consumer money goes into dining experiences, is because there are dining experiences in the plural. The “foodie” trend, where more and more restaurants are seen as destination worthy, has demand factors (networks of information through Twitter, Facebook, RSS etc.), but also majorly depends on supply factors like sufficiently differentiated products (restaurant experiences) to attract money. A dinner at Alinea is completely different from a dinner at Eleven Madison Park, which is completely different from a dinner at l’Arpege, which is completely different from… .  Speaking purely about my dining experiences in the Americas, there seems to be 3 major strategies that are considered cutting-edge.

A. For restaurants like Atelier Crenn; Alinea; atera, it is about the process. The dishes are process-driven, conceived using molecular techniques, and generally served with the aim of subverting the diner’s expectations. The catch-all term is molecular gastronomy. This tends to create particularly root-less restaurants. There is no reason why atera and Alinea, could not switch cities tomorrow without anyone blinking an eye. The process and science of creating these dishes are the intellectual capital of the infinitely mobile chefs. (The truly novel molecular dishes, like floating balloons in Alinea, or a cracked egg dessert at atera, are quite rare.)

B. For restaurants like Benu; Momofuku Ko, and other fusion restaurants like Maido in Peru, it is about introducing new types of tastes. It more commonly manifests as bold flavor combinations and Asian-fusion. In this case, diners expect to be educated with regard to a wider taste bank. The main difference I see between these restaurants and a restaurant like Borago in Chile is that the fusion restaurants are more-or-less rootless, taste without terroir. Nikkei, I believe, is a culinary concept that travels well outside of Peru, and Benu and Ko could also switch cities seamlessly (for many Asian-fusion restaurants I do tend to judge them more harshly, having grown up with these tastes, but I accept that they may be judged more novel and exciting by Western palates)

C. For restaurants like Saison, to a greater extent Manresa, and many of the foraged restaurants like Borago in Chile and Central in Peru, they put equal weight on the ingredients and the process. For the ingredients, it is about terroir, and reflecting a sense of place. Saison has a boat that catches seafood off the California coast specially for the restaurant, and Manresa’s produce reflects the excellence available from Love Apple Farms. Borago forages ingredients from 80km around Santiago. These restaurants rely on the integrity of their local ingredients, but also ally it to their own chosen process and philosophy. (Because great ingredients alone cannot make great dishes, chefs must have license to play with the tastes and textures of great ingredients to transmute them into great dishes). For Saison it is fire, Borago and Central: molecular techniques with plating ingenuity, for Manresa it is judicious use of modernist techniques with attention to complimentary tastes.

There are exceptions to this trichotomy: Eleven Madison Park, I think, is mainly about the theatricality, a non-food related reason. And certainly there must be other more subtle strategies, but at a broad stroke this is what I’ve seen.

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THE FIRE

Really, truly exceptional ingredients are just step one. If you’re willing to pay the price, a lot of people can have access to that. The handling, the part afterwards, is very important. How do you care for something afterwards, to make sure that it’s in its most perfect state after you get it? You can get the best [ingredient] in the world, but if you don’t truly care for it, then it really doesn’t matter, if it goes bad because of handling. When we cook the food, we want to honor the fundamental and inherent flavor of those ingredients, so our food is a little more subtle, and more based on the natural expression and fundamental flavors of whatever it may be. That’s why we have our fire—the use of fire is the most genuine way to cook, in terms of flavor; the most genuine flavor you can get, or the most natural flavor you can get. And how to deepen those things. How do you really deepen or distill the furthest point in an ingredient’s flavor without adding so much to it?

Was it challenging to get permitting to have live fire in the restaurant? It was expensive?

What kind of hoops did you have to jump through? It’s always an issue, but we have such a talented kitchen designer that it wasn’t much of an issue for us in terms of those things. Tim Harrison was phenomenal. He’s someone that I’ll probably remodel the restaurant with 100 times throughout the course of the next 30 years.

– Source

Ingredients minimally cooked, or cooked in a perfunctory way, is nihilism. Nihilism because it reflects the belief that there is nothing more a chef can add besides the testimony of the ingredients. This is perhaps the source of the old East Coast joke about Californian cooks being good shoppers. How does Saison transform the ingredients?

Fire. A variety of fires, from high-intensity Japanese white charcoal to oak charcoal is used, and the element of fire is used to enhance individual elements in many dishes. The chaotic, high-intensity fire is one thing missing from most restaurants in the United States. My understanding is that fire-regulations have long prevented the primordial fire from penetrating urban areas, leaving it to barbecues in the South to harness it. (In a trip to the famous Salt Lick in Texas last year, we could smell the woodburning from a generous distance away as soon as we stepped out of the car). Even excepting fire-regulations for the flame, it is expensive, and space-intensive, to provide ventilation systems for the smoke. Saison, funded by Twitter billionaire Jack Dorsey and others from VC firm Benchmark Capital, is clearly well-funded. In a humongous space (called Saison 3.0 as it opened last year), a ventilation unit the size of a studio apartment hovered over the entire open kitchen space, preventing smoke and heat from reaching the dining room even though there were no partitions. A marvel of technology. Certainly Saison has many dishes involving the fire that will be hard to replicate in kitchens without the ventilation technology (at least in metropolitan areas).

In comparison to my visit earlier this month to Brooklyn Fare (which I rate as the best restaurant in New York), I noticed that there were no significant fire-based dishes. I may be wrong, but I did not notice any grills in the main kitchen area, only induction burners. I suspect the reason behind the lack of fire-based dishes was that the space is probably too small to accommodate both a ventilation unit to handle the smoke and an air-conditioning unit to handle the heat.

I think back to my visit last year to Singapore’s Burnt Ends: 850 degrees celsius, which created some rustic and delicious dishes, and cooked most of the dishes in a closed heating unit. There is definitely a demand for fire, witness the acclaim that Asador Etxebarri (which I hope to visit in June) has gotten from the shill-list San Pellegrino, and Burnt Ends has been a great (and packed) success in Singapore over the last year. I think the charcoal fire will become increasingly important in American cooking in the coming years.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

From my own limited experience dining around the United States, I can confirm that Saison is performing well above what passes for 3-Michelin-star cooking in this country. To my mind, this is the best restaurant I’ve tried in the United States. There are no perfect restaurants. But there are restaurants which take perfectionism more seriously than most.

Rating: 20/20

Memory: Caviar, Abalone, Sea Urchin Toast, Trout, Black Cod, Parker House Rolls, Duck Liver Toffee, Rhubarb Jasmine Sorrel

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1. tea, herbs from our garden and their flora
Meyer lemon and douglas fir tea, with herbs in garden left to steep in the tea. A good palate opener, reminiscent of a Chinese or Japanese meal to me, where the first opener is the choice of tea.

2. white sturgeon caviar, sturgeon belly cured & smoked on kelp, gelèe of the grilled bones (4.75/5)
White sturgeon caviar from California. This is on par with some of the best caviar I’ve tried anywhere, and I actually prefer the mouthfeel of this slightly firmer white sturgeon caviar to Osetra caviar, which I find “pops” its salinity in the mouth with less pressure.
The pleasure of caviar is when the roe “pop”s its saline yolky liquid in your mouth. I’ve always enjoyed caviar on the slightly firmer side. This to me was decadence.
The belly provided the fat; the gelee provided a umami meatiness to the dish, really highlighting the sturgeon’s caviar at its best.

3. wild thistle, bouillon (4.5/5)
artichoke and Hokkaido scallop puree. Anchovy mayo at the bottom anchors a hollowed out artichoke, filled with scallop mousse made from Hokkaido scallops, and grilled in the fire together. Topped with an oxalis (AKA wood sorrel) flower

Number Three: Rum, Pandan, Fresh Lime, Young Coconut Syrup

4a. (cru 1) coal kissed cherry blossom sea bream (5/5)
wrapped around monkfish liver. Fantastic piece of fish, firm yet tender, perfect.

4b. (cru 2) golden eye snapper warmed under some coals, bone vinegar (4.5/5)
with nori wasabi on top

4c. (cru 3) pickled horse mackerel on toast (4.5/5)
with last spring’s pickled ramps. A firm texture, as with most horse mackerel, the toast heated over coals
The series of crudites were of uniformly high quality, basically as successful as I can imagine this type of crudite-series dish being.

5. abalone, roasted over the embers, sauce of the liver & capers (5/5)
incredible dish. an 8-10 year old monterrey bay abalone had the firm meatiness, but none of the rubberiness that can sometimes be unpleasant. Perfectly roasted with the taste of fire. It was topped with fresh nori (mamanori), and what really elevated it was the sauce made from its liver and capers. The sourness of capers was also reminiscent of a really good horseradish paste, a very bold flavor, that had complexity from added meatiness of abalone liver. Astounding sauce pairing.

6. sea urchin toast, river vegetable (5/5)
Fort Bragg sea urchin, about the size of my index finger, was the largest sea urchin I had ever seen. It was sweet and pure, I would say sweeter than even the Santa Barbara type. (I am actually fairly agnostic between Santa Barbara and Hokkaido uni – I would say the sweetness of SB uni is equally good as the more marine flavor of the Hokkaido variety).
the toast was long thin piece, toasted in yeast butter. fantastic.

7. battle creek trout, smoked in the wood oven, sauce of the bones (4.5/5)
a melt in your mouth smoked trout was cured for 2 months under salt, and with an almondwood (sic?) pickled daikon.

8. white asparagus royale (4/5)
A solidified Royale sauce (liver, truffle, Madeira port) was mixed with an egg + kuzu custard
white asparagus and smoked pine-nut (blanched, smoked, dehydrated)

9. black cod, poached in sea water, rangpur lime and yogurt (4.75/5)
a falling apart black cod (Half Moon Bay, CA), in two sauces. The first is coconut oil. The second is coconut milk + yoghurt + ginger + kaffir lime + galangal
plaintain chip on top
This was a great tribute to southeast Asian cooking (especially Thai green curry) The fish was expertly poached.
This dish made the Ulterior Epicure’s top of 2013 list as well. Great dish.

10. [bread] parker house rolls (5/5)
Fluffy, hot, glazed in butter, and sprinkled with salt. The best parker house rolls I’ve ever had.

11. asparagus, cooked in their juices and then grilled (4.5/5)
The first asparagus of the season came in early February from Brentwood, CA. These were poached in their own juices. The grilling imparted the outside of the asparagus with a delightful char flavor that intensified the contrast with the juicy texture and asparagus tastes within.
egg yolk in circles of chive

12. celeriac, poached in smoked water, some herbs from the garden (3.75/5)
Hot sauce, sesame sauce, with a roasted chip of celeriac and roasted slices of celeriac underneath. The sweetness of underlying sauce (like sugar and hot sauce) was a bit one-dimensional for me.

13. toffee, milk, bread & beer (5/5)
California instituted a foie gras ban some time ago, which makes it hard to get around it. Here “savory duck liver toffee” approximated that magical ingredient. It was topped with white chocolate, with a yeasty topping of milk, bread & bear. Surprisingly refreshing before the final main, it was also a prelude to dessert. Sui generis.

14. wood pigeon, sunchoke & sunflower seed butter, coffee beans (4.5/5)
dry aged pigeon for 30 days, its breast grilled, and with an intense funky dark jus. a quenelle of sunchoke+coffee+sunflower puree
morels with stuffed with boudin white sausage made from breast + gizzard + foie + chicken, with pigeon.
at 10 o’clock, pear and pear butter
pigeon cutting almost like a medium-hard cheese (cleanly and softly)

15. rhubarb, jasmine, sorrel (4.75/5)
Kumquat, shiso, two Bavarois (rhubarb at the bottom [pink], and jasmine on top [yellow]) with chamomile tastes.
A sorrel granite made with liquid nitrogen
At the very base, a white chocolate feuilletine
Very good.

16. black walnut, soufflé and ice cream (4.5/5)
A good pairing of black walnut soufflé with maple flavors. Nuttiness with sweetness, Hot souffle cut by cold ice cream.

Buckwheat tea to end the meal

17. Tartlets, meyer-lemon poppyseed and chocolate spearmint (4.5/5)

18. Liquid Peanut Truffle (4.25/5)

19. Canele de Bordeaux, held under the coals, with a splash of orange blossom essence (4.75/5)

Earl Grey brioche to take home.

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The Restaurant at Meadowood | St. Helena, CA | Apr ’14 | “leaves of grass”

• Address: 900 Meadowood Ln, St Helena, CA 94574
• Phone: (707) 967-1205
• Price (after tax + tip, excl. drinks): $288
• Courses: (15 main/20 total) 3 amuse / 12 savory / 1 cheese / 2 dessert / 1 bread / 1 mignardises
• Price/Main Course: $19
• Rating: 18/20
• Value: 2.5/5
• Dining Time: 140 minutes
• Time/Course (total): 7 minutes
• Chef: Christopher Kostow
• Style: Vegetable-focused
• How I got here: Zipcar from San Francisco (2 hours to the restaurant, 1h20 min back)
• Michelin Stars: 3

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FOOD

First of all, credit where credit is due. I thought the flavours at Meadowood were very strong, and certainly there was bold use of grassy flavors in the first half of the menu, to a degree I have not seen before. It was rarely perfectly harmonious, but this is a direction that not many kitchens are taking. I can certainly understand the rationale of 3 Michelin stars, for the cooking here is quite unique, relying strongly on fresh plants and grasses (uncharitably, weeds). The menu transitioned seamlessly from grass-garden to seafood to red meats, and had a strong finish with a memorable coconut+olive oil dessert, and a comforting custard. The kitchen is doing some really interesting things with fresh-plant (and esp. grassy-type) flavors, and they succeeded convincingly with dishes like “peas and cheese”, though less so with the others.

A bit less convincing was the theme of “vegetables playing the meat”. Neither the third dish, “chorizo” kale, nor the 17^th dish castelfranco “ham”, were successes. Indeed, the most successful dishes were the heartier ones, like “peas and cheese”, “potato in beeswax”, “bavette”, “olive oil and coconut”. The experimental vegetable-forward dishes, like “lardo+fava bean dumplings” and asparagus with hints of grass, in addition to the small vegetable snacks are generally weaker than the non-vegetable dishes. But those vegetable dishes are clearly where the kitchen is putting time into improving, so it will be interesting to see in a couple of years if Meadowood does manage to master the fresh-plant flavours on a more consistent basis.

My reading of the menu I was served is that Meadowood was serving strong if conservative fare (aforementioned potato, bavette, pea and cheese dishes), but has chosen to innovate in the herbaceous direction. It is a credit to the kitchen that they were able to fuse the traditional and modern strands into a seamless menu.

The most similar restaurant to Meadowood in the United States I’ve tried is probably Blue Hill at Stone Barns in upstate New York. There is a similar focus and attempt to haute-ify vegetables. But the difference is that while Blue Hill (when I went in winter) attempted to haute-ify the root vegetables (kohlrabi, carrot, beetroot), and the less-intense leafy vegetables (cabbage), whereas Meadowood is trying to elevate the weed flavours of grass, chlorophyll and non-traditional herbs. In fact, of the two, I would say Meadowood is more innovative in terms of flavour profile.

Of the meal itself, I look for the ‘wow’ factor in my visits 3* Michelin restaurants. Meadowood on my recent visit lacked this spark. I think the meal I was served was certainly worthy of a solid 2* Michelin restaurant, but to me the restaurant’s dishes as they currently are, are not the finished product, and they will need a bit more time to experiment with the various weed-grasses and unripe plants they are playing with, to master their flavors. But if they manage to do so on a consistent basis, this will be a restaurant of the very top rank. The ambition is clearly there, and innovating towards fresh plant flavours, letting a thousand flowers _and_ weeds bloom, is a fairly unique direction in American gastronomy.

Rating: 18/20

Memory: “Moroccan black olive meringue”, “peas and cheese”, “potato cooked in beeswax”, “bavette, koji, parsnip, rice”, “olive oil, coconut, borage”

[I have much less complimentary things to say about the service, and will say them after my dish notes. You can skip them if you’re here only to find out about Meadowood’s gastronomic offerings. I don’t usually talk at length about service (and it doesn’t figure in my rating scores), but I left the restaurant feeling disappointed for non-food related reasons.]

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AMUSE

1. moroccan black olive meringue, whipped olive oil, cress flowers (5/5)
a real fruity (from the olive) sweetness in the meringue, remarkable clarity of olive flavors.

2. crudites fermented in champagne (3.25/5)
left to ferment overnight. the radish was the best, possessing a surprising savory note. the (literal) turnip was, well, a (metaphorical) turnip.

3. chef’s garden (puffed kale with chorizo seasoning) (3/5)
the start of a common theme at Meadowood, vegetables dressed with all the pomp of meat. I did not find this convincing.

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4. peas and cheese (4.5/5)
a ode to pea, cut by cheese. a pea broth gelee, with pea shells, pea tendrils, and baby peas. and cow curds from black beaut cows in Pedroso farms, in Sacramento CA.
very good. flavors of peas were very clear, and enhanced by the 4 different textures of pea. very impressive. a clean, clear idea.
to be picky though, they were a bit more starchy and harder than the ones I had at Manresa (still the top peas I had on this California trip)

5. whelk “conserva”, wild and cultivated grasses (4.25/5)
whelk broth and brine from pickling, green garlic
I doubt I’ve had whelk in America before, but this was a dish of contrasting flavor, the slippery texture of whelk, with the peppery tastes of grass and baby asparagus. Good.

6. asparagus, surf clam, smoked goats butter (3.5/5)
A third dish in a row emphasising the taste of fresh greens. Here surf clams from Monterrey Bay, CA. (Peeled) Asparagus from the Sacramento Delta, raw grain sprouts from barley, and smoked goats butter. Here, the taste of wild grass formed a course pair with the previous. I did not like this course very much, because the grass flavors tended to dominate.

7. adductor muscle of surf clam, walnut (3.25/5)
the “scallop” (adductor muscles are what we eat of the scallop) of surf clam had a taste akin to dried scallop, and the texture of dried scallop. topped with shaved walnut. okay.

8. potatoes cooked in beeswax, assorted sorrels (5/5)
http://www.cuesa.org/food/corolla-potatoes
this was a dish I really enjoyed. potato, poached in beeswax, small yellow, the poached potato had almost the consistency of mashed potatoes.
a puree of potatoes beneath, and potato bits (fried with sorrel leaves). amazing, to find almost two textures of mashed potato (the solid, actual corolla potato), and the potato puree co-existing on the same dish.

9. parker house rolls (4/5)
tasted more like Chinese buns (mantou), but not bad. Pales in comparison to the Saison version though.

10. lardo, fava, sea lettuce, caviar, avocado (3.5/5)
Verdant tastes again, with a quenelle of osetra caviar dropped into a green fava-bean+immature-chickpea puree
Lardo + fava bean dumplings.
I did not like this dish much, because there it was unclear what lardo served in the dish besides a binding agent for fava beans, and the caviar taste did not pair especially well with the verdant fava bean+chickpea puree. (I understand the commitment to the taste of fresh-greens at Meadowood, but it was hard to forget a truly harmonious preparation of caviar with sturgeon bone gelee at Saison a few days early)

11. day lily (allium), San Diego spot prawn (4/5)
Good sweetness from spot prawn

12. sea cucumber, wild onions, whipped bean, brown butter, seaweed (4/5)
sea cucumber from Santa Barbara, seaweed from Mendocino coast, wild onion, whipped Rancho Gordo bean

13. aji, unripe tomato, artichoke, green almond (3/5)
Here, cured in juices of unripe tomato 5 hours (akin to ceviche). And then lightly grilled on one side. I did not like the grilling. I did not smell the delicious scent of charcoal, and what it did was merely made the fish chewier and sinewy on one side.
the sauce was a (artichoke) barigoule, with juicy green almonds (that I liked), and served with really large pieces of bonito. I learnt there is a reason why bonito tends to be served in flakes, and that’s because the bonito here was really chewy, like bad jerky.

14. squab “tea” (4/5)
squab consomme (made from jus), with fennel, thyme, rosehips, and spicebush (tasting of melon & peppercorns), growing around the property of Meadowood. Micro-local terroir, if you will.

15. squab curds, green strawberry, celery (4/5)
The rest of the squab breast, from Paine farms (dir: next to Fremont Diner). Unripe strawberries (surprisingly sweet) and celery (fermented, and also the leaves), and (I believe) paprika. Another solid dish that I could see possible improvements in. The celery had no synergies with the strawberry, other than a bland slight saltiness of the ordinary celery we’re used to. Neither did the salad have much synergies with the squab breasts. Resolutely separate.
I had tried, the previous day, some truly special herbs and vegetables at Manresa, especially those with an anise/licorice flavor, but many of the Manresa herb tastes, I will confess, are ineffable to me. Instead of bland celery, I could envision this dish much improved by including some stronger tasting herbs.

16. bavette, koji, parsnip, rice (4.5/5)
Chopped bavette (from the flank), dry aged 21 days, seared in oven. Cured beef shavings on top.
Brown rice koji (brown rice inoculated with the spores of Aspergillus oryzae) http://www.clearspring.co.uk/blogs/news/8024723-koji-the-culture-behind-japanese-food-production
Beef = American wagyu, Snake River farms
Morels, roasted in butter. I enjoyed very much the flavorful beef which complimented the earthy morels.

17. contralto, castelfranco, “ham”, bread (3/5)
Contralto cheese from Andante Farm, Petaluma, CA. Fermented rye (Geechi Boy)
Again, there was an attempt to dress castelfranco radicchio with ham seasoning. It was playful but not especially delicious
http://radicchio.com/castelfranco-radicchio/

18. olive oil, coconut, borage (4.5/5)
frozen coconut cream with Hudson ranch olive oil (peppery) and gooseberry sauce+lime juice, borage sprouts
I thought was a very good dish, with the peppery olive oil going well with sour gooseberry and sweet coconut tastes.
the borage had a fishy taste

19. silken chocolate, panettone (4/5)
Chocolate broth, and roasted dates, custard, with chocolate panettone (sweet bread loaf) panettone was a bit dry. But the custard was good, emphasising complimentariness of the earthy-sweetness of date and of chocolate

20. praline (3.25/5)
almond praline, standard.

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SERVICE

Now that the objective part of the review is done, let me explain why I was disappointed: I was seated about the same time as a couple when I finally drove into the Meadowood resort at 6pm. Our tables were about 1 metre apart, and as a solo diner, I was looking forward to catching up on some reading.

About half an hour to an hour in, it becomes clear that the couple next to me are starting to argue. Whatever, everyone has their differences right? Maybe they’ll stop after 10-15 minutes. Half an hour later, it becomes clear that they are going to be the story of dinner.

This basically went on until the end of dinner, despite my increasing discomfort at being stuck 1 metre away, as the passive-aggressive-ness just kept increasing at the other end of the table. Basically, at the end of the night, I was pissed off that no one had noticed that for 90 minutes I was increasingly uncomfortable with the scene unfolding beside me, shifting my body away, trying to discreetly cup my facing ear so I wouldn’t have to hear their arguments (giving the couple besides me some face).

No doubt, that such an unpleasant experience should occur is like an act of God. No one really wants it to happen. Yet I believe the Meadowood team could have significantly reduced the unpleasantness for all parties around.

My two complaints with Meadowood’s service: (they’re related)

1. I don’t remember my captain, whom while pouring the opening glass of champagne had indicated she would be my server for the night, approaching my table again after the 60 minute mark. Whoever was in charge of my table, did not do a good job. I never felt I had a point person for service.

2. What would have been exemplary service, since the staff had noted the argumentative couple next to me, would have been perhaps to inquire discreetly about my situation (being seated 1 metre from them as a solo diner, with no distractions except their constant argumentation as my backdrop), and offer to reseat me somewhere, perhaps in a private dining space or even at the bar. We were not in a metropolitan area, and certainly space is no constraint out in Wine Country, and I’m sure some other spaces exist for Meadowood. Anywhere else would have been preferable to 1 metre away from a squabbling couple. I think about how Blue Hill SB, a paragon of great service, was able to shift me (a solo diner) around 2 dining spaces (the bar and the kitchen). Why could Meadowood not have done the same?

The irony is, I had read a piece last week about Meadowood building a service culture:

Oftentimes in a restaurant they don’t allow the staff to talk to guests. I want to build relationships. Dining is so much more. [Guests] come here to eat, but they come here to have an experience. They come here to have conversations with the people they come to dine with. They come here to have conversations with the staff [at a] restaurant that is approachable and sincere. When a guest leaves and says, “Tell Olan and Sam and Chris, ‘Thank you,'” I know we’ve accomplished our goal. Because, again, it’s about the food, but it’s about the chairs, the aesthetics, the conversations, the people …

Right, that’s all important.
For instance, when you left the restaurant, maybe there was a specific item you remember that you really enjoyed, but it’s more or less the feeling you got when you left.

Exactly.

And, 10 years from now, that’s what you remember is the way you felt on your anniversary with your husband, or your babymoon. You remember what you felt, not exactly what you had.

Right, so you’re looking to create that feeling above everything else.
Yeah, it’s to create memories. So many people Google to find out interesting things about their guests. We Google to see if we can connect on different levels with guests. Maybe they have a baby, maybe they’re from Scranton, PA. Maybe I’ll put them with a waiter from Pennsylvania, too, so when they’re here and they normally don’t dine in restaurants like this, they have some type of a connection that will get them to relax and forget about the fanciness around them.

http://eater.com/archives/2014/04/22/nathaniel-dorn-meadowood-interview.php

That article was published on 22nd April, 2014. My experience with the service at Meadowood 6 days later, 28th April, 2014, was quite different indeed. To sum the service in a word, “disappointing”.

Persimmon | Bristol, RI | Apr ’14 | “playful Rhode Island fare”

• Address: 31 State St, Bristol, RI 02809
• Phone: (401) 254-7474
• Price (after tax + tip, excl. drinks): ~$125
• Courses: (18 main/19 total) 14 savory / 1 cheese / 3 desserts / 1 mignardises
• Price/Main Course: $6.50
• Rating: 15.5/20
• Value: 4/5
• Dining Time: 150 minutes
• Time/Course (total): 8 minutes
• Chef: Champ Speidel
• Style: New American

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Reflecting on a recent meal at Persimmon, I think that Persimmon is among the top two restaurants in Rhode Island I have tried after 4 years living here; along with birch in Providence. Chef Champe Speidel and Lisa Speidel are the managers of this restaurant, Chef Speidel used to be the sous chef at Gracie’s when it was a 38-seat restaurant in Federal Hill in Providence (source – http://ediblerhody.com/files/pages/articles/winter2007/pdfs/inTheKitchen.pdf). When Gracie’s decided to move downtown (where it now is opposite the Trinity rep, and next door to birch), Chef Speidel decided to move out to Bristol to open Persimmon in 2005. I in fact ate there just 2 days shy of the 9^th anniversary of the restaurant this year, in 2014. The restaurant is a labour of love:

A couple of years after graduation, Champe was hired as sous chef at Gracie’s. Shortly after he started, the head chef left. “I knew I could handle it but, basically, I got the job because I was there,” he laughs. In those days, Gracie’s was a 38-seat restaurant located on Federal Hill in Providence. “They mostly did a weekend business, so we had a lot of freedom to take out time and do things the way you’re supposed to do them. We experimented with a lot of different cooking methods and prepped all week to handle the weekends. It was a tremendous learning experience.

“We took the menu they had and added my spin. We got some great accolades.” He stayed for three years. When the owners decided to move the restaurant downtown, to more than double the size, Champe knew it was time for him to find his own place.

That’s when he and Lisa started shopping for a restaurant. It only took a couple of months to find the spot, called the Hotpoint at the time. It took about six months of negotiation to close the deal. The size of the kitchen, which is substantially larger than the dining room, sold him on the place. “We put a 200-page business plan together and solicited help from just about anyone willing to talk to us. We did all the things they teach you in school. The minute we got the keys, April 7, 2005, I proposed to Lisa. Three weeks later we opened.”

Since then Champe has been, “doing the food that we really believe in,” making folks on theother side of the kitchen doors at Persimmon very happy. “The main thing we really want is for people to trust that, when they come here, they will get a well-prepared meal and service that will take care of any needs. Trust is a big part of the restaurant experience.” – Edible Rhody

What Chef Speidel’s cooking deserves to be commended for is his playfulness. It is not a common feature in RI dining to feature experimental presentations, taste combinations, besides the aforementioned birch (presentation and taste) and some Asian fusion (taste) at north. My thoughts (and praise) on birch’s dishes can be read on this blog; north has some interesting dishes but they are generally hit and miss, and their highs (4.5-5) are much rarer than their low to middling fare – of the highs, ham biscuits, and roasted cabbage have left a lasting impression. Other stalwarts like Gracie’s generally play it cookie-cutter safe with no surprises, or in the case of La Laiterie, alternate between the safe and the bizarre, like steak with rice browned with soy sauce. New Rivers does enjoyable bistro fare and great fluke, and has been experimenting with some Asian fusion dishes recently, but is still rather conventional (it is after all self-characterised as a bistro). My two picks for interesting and innovative dishes here in RI, would thus be Persimmon and birch.

Among the plays on RI tropes I had that night: clam cake with chowder, mussel with edible shell, Quonset oyster with herb butter powder,and a drop of absinthe. Even if these dishes were not fully successful, it was just a delight and surprise to be confronted with such thoughtful cooking. If only there were more chefs in RI willing to take these risks!

Boldness in flavor is a double-edged sword. A weakness throughout the meal was the erratic salting. The balance of salt was off on the beef tartare, and the chicharrones course. North Star Farm lamb had the rub all on the skin, and none of the flavor in the meat.

The general flow of the menu went from seafood is the first half of the menu (and where most of the memorable dishes) to meats, and then to a standard assortment of desserts (sorbet, panna cotta, chocolate cake). But there was a wild unpredictability throughout the 14 main courses. In the midst of a succession of seafood courses, suddenly beef tartare was served. In the midst of the heavier courses of foie+pork+game, a beautiful plate of vegetables (evoking the famous Bras gargouillou) was served, followed by the chef’s take on Asian-fusion, with bold use of fish and peanut sauce, as well as kabayaki sauce (more often used for unagi). The desserts which followed, were conventional, a slight disappointment given the chef’s flight of fancy earlier in the meal.

Service was fantastic. Lisa Speidel runs a great FOH, my dining companion and I felt very comfortable throughout the night.

Overall, a restaurant I was very excited to dine in. One of two best I’ve tried in RI. I believe that by remedying some minor flaws in the dishes served, this restaurant would reach a 1-star Michelin standard.

Rating: 15.5/20

Memory: Mussel with edible shell, foie gras gateau.

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1. Deviled quail egg, caviar (3.5/5)

Egg yolk seasoned with soy sauce and/or worcestershire sauce?
Slight gripe: I felt the strong taste of the deviled egg detracted a little from the taste of the caviar.

Cocktail: Maginot Line

2. Marinated Massachusetts sea scallop, scallop chip (3.75/5)

A third component was scallop mayo underneath. Interesting in conception. The idea was to showcase two textures of scallop.
My dining companion G and I agreed that the oiliness of the scallop mayo hid the freshness of the scallop. The mayo could have been reduced in volume.

3. Beef tartare, cured egg yolk (3.25/5)

Additional ingredients: capers
The tartare was oversalted, though not unbearably so.

4. Raw Quonset oyster, ‘herb butter’ (4/5)

A very interesting Quonset point oyster, with herb butter powder, and a drop of absinthe.
I enjoyed the fruitiness and lack of salinity in the Quonset point (a rarity given the high salt levels of East Coast oysters generally). The herb butter powder was an interesting textural contrast (akin to edible soil), the absinthe added a herbaceous note. An intriguing and avant-garde combination.

5. Chowder, clam ‘cake’ (4/5)

Rhode island chowder foam broth with a clam cake seasoned with fennel. A playful reinterpretation of clam chowder and clam cakes, both traditional RI edibles.

6. Mussel, edible shell (4.5/5)

Butter poached mussel, with an edible shell, made from pasta dough with squid ink, and shellfish-broth foam.
Inspired in conception, this had echoes of atera’s famous “razor clam with edible baguette shell” from their 2012 season.
It would have been 5/5 for conception, if not for that the “mussel shell” had thin innermost layer that had an undercooked texture.

7. Black olive financier (4.5/5)

Fruity and buttery, a delight.

8. Potato agnolotti (4.75/5)

Mascarpone cheese and yukon potato in the agnolotti (little purses), with yukon and celeriac
With a fragrant onion jus. The scent of the onion was very strong.

9. Foie gras gateau (4.75/5)

Applecake, pickled apples, foie terrine, elderflower gel.
An inspired combination. This was probably my favorite dish of the night. The complexity of the pickled apples, with the fragrance of elderflower gel was an inspired pairing for a foie terrine. However, I feel the dish could have improved if the foie didn’t have a slightly mushy texture – which detracted again from a perfect score for this dish.

10. Pork jowl confit, pickled daikon (3.75/5)

A pork skin crackling with dehydrated pork jowl and  kabayaki sauce (which usually goes with uni). Okay, a bit oversalted.

11. Raw, pickled vegetables, herbs (4.25/5)

A take on the famous Bras gargouillou, transplanted to RI.
Each component was well prepared, and with great freshness and different tastes in the vegetables. My favorite of an assorted plate was probably the sweet beet.
Unlike the gargouillou which has ham in the poaching water, this I think was purely vegetarian.

12. Chicken wing, peanut sauce, shishito pepper (3.75/5)

fish sauce and peanut sauce on the deboned chicken wing
An experimental Asian dish, which was bold on flavor, esp. with fish sauce.

13. Squab, egg, emmer, jus (3.75/5)

How could the squab breast be so perfectly cooked – crisp flat skin with rare meat –  (4.75/5), yet the leg almost raw? (2/5) The center of the leg bone was simply raw meat. I was very pleased with one, and unhappy about the other. Both could have benefitted from having slightly more seasoning on the well-roasted skin.
Praise for the fragrant trumpet mushroom sauce.

14. North Star Farm lamb (3.25/5)

Decent. This was a sous-vide lamb dish. I am starting to not be a fan of sous-vide cooking, I find it gives meat the uniform texture of styrofoam, which is not appetising.
The very tasty seasoning on the fat of the lamb did not penetrate into the meat. Meat was relatively flavorless.

15. Bayley Hazen blue, Greensboro, VT (3.5/5)

Served with Cinnamon Raisin Bread

16. Sorbet (3.5/5)

Coconut lime sorbet, with calamansi-lime curd.
I enjoyed the coconut+lime sorbet pairing, but calamansi curd was too sweet and one-dimensional; it might have been improved by dispersing the curd relative to the sorbet.
It also might have been interesting to me as a diner, to try different citrus curd pairings, like the lighter finger-lime from Australia.

17. Panna Cotta (3.25/5)

Vanilla panna cotta with passionfruit gelee.
By now the desserts were all very conventional

18. Chocolate Cremeux (3.5/5)

19. Mignardises

Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare | Brooklyn, NY | Apr ’14 | “theatre”

• Address: 200 Schermerhorn St, Brooklyn, NY 11201
• Telephone: (718) 243-0050
• Price (after tax + tip, excl. drinks): $329
• Courses: (16 main/17 total): 12 savory, 1 cheese, 3 dessert, 1 mignardise (20 courses advertised includes 1 bread [not counted here], and for the 3 mignardise items to be counted as 3 courses)
• Price/Main Course: $20.50
• Rating: 19/20
• Value: 2.5/5
• Dining Time: 150 minutes
• Time/Course (total): 9.5 minutes
• Chef: César Ramirez
• Style: sui generis
• Michelin Stars: 3

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The Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare is definitely the single-hardest reservation to make in NYC. It is possibly the hardest reservation to make in the United States. 6 weeks out at 1030am on a Monday, the phones are off the hook, and by the time you get through, the seats are all gone. But we were lucky enough to score a 4-top on a Friday night at the ungodly hour of 955pm, the latest I have ever started a tasting dinner, which required me to imbibe caffeine at 8pm (I’m a morning person).

The food at BKFARE is the highest standard I have encountered in New York. Per Se has dishes which are adequate but not many truly memorable ones, a 1 or 2-star Michelin elsewhere. Eleven Madison Park’s food is also of the 1-star Michelin standard, though the theatrics and entire experience perhaps push it to a high 2-star Michelin. Le Bernardin is solidly 1-star Michelin. Jean-Georges is also of 1-star Michelin standard. I have not tried Daniel, or Masa, so I cannot comment on their food. The New York Michelin guide is known to be lax in standards. But in awarding BKFARE the highest rating, they have not erred. I consider BKFARE to be the only true 3-star Michelin restaurant in NYC I have tried so far. (the only other plausible contender for true 3-star status is Masa).

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Why does BKFARE have 3 Michelin stars, and why does Momofuku Ko have 2? The two restaurants share key similarities. Both are chef’s counters, seating a limited number of diners. Both, to forestall the possibility of slow-poke photographers tripping up the rhythm of the meal, have banned photography altogether (a policy I strongly disagree with). BKFARE goes further to outlaw note-taking at all. Both are also seafood-focused restaurants.

My friend Y and I speculated on a few reasons: (A) the leather chairs at BKFARE were definitely more comfortable than the stools at Ko, (B) BKFARE had some nice silverware and they displayed a dizzying array of custom flatware (though I suspect they have the same flatware supplier as Grace in Chicago), but really the crucial bit is (C) while Ko sources very good ingredients in the relatively-inexpensive category (bronzino, mackerel, scallop, black trumpets), BKFARE sources very good ingredients in the top-end category of traditional luxury ingredients (quality black truffle in April, morels, osetra caviar, koshihikari rice, Miyazaki beef). (D) The technique at BKFARE may also be a tad more precise: I was wowed by the last dessert, a sugar globe that was fragile and thin, yet completely clear – a hallmark of technical excellence; as well as the minimalism of many of the best BKFARE courses. (at its best, such as Ko’s mushroom consomme, Ko can create such minimalist compositions. But quite a few of their main dishes can be overdetermined, and an ingredient or two can be safely omitted.)

I believe the Michelin guide rewards use of traditional luxury ingredients. But it is hard to see right now where those ingredients would fit into Ko’s bold flavors and Asian-influenced cooking (and price point).

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Originality. What is the level of Chef Ramirez’s originality? It is hard for me to tell. The best dishes I enjoyed were simply the finest ingredient exemplars of their type (a Koshihikari rice risotto with truffle; Miyazaki Wagyu presented simply with grated daikon). To compare with a meal I had last month, Chef Curtis Duffy of Grace paired Miyazaki Wagyu with a Vietnamese rice cracker and tom yum broth. Chef Duffy’s Southeast Asian vision came through, but here at BKFARE luxury ingredients were just worked perfectly. But I believe the Akamutsu with puffed rice and black vinegar sauce gave me an glimpse into a chef with Japanese elegance and refinement, a strong believer of minimalism and absolutely fanatical about ingredients. I reserve judgements on the uniqueness of Chef Ramirez’s style, and I will have to return to Brooklyn Fare to make a more final judgement.

Flow. The flow of the meal was: [light fish 1-4] + [luxury blockbusters 5-7] + [heavier seafood + risotto 8-10] + [game + meat 11-12] + [cheese 13] + [sorbets 14-15] + [showcase dessert 16]. I thought it was a well thought-out meal-plan, though variation of courses 11+12 might have improved the meal (both were red meat, squab and beef), and there was a bit of a flag in quality from courses 7-9.

Slight Gripes. One slight gripe I had is that service was perfunctory. Questions were answered curtly, but this is probably due to the logistical strain of keeping all courses (the left side of 9 diners ahead by 30 minutes, so the two sets of diners staggered into two batches) going like clockwork. Another slight gripe is that I counted only 16 main courses, 4 short of the advertised 20. The only way BKFARE hit 20 courses is if I count the solitary bread (no butter) as a course, and the three mignardises served together at the end as 3 separate courses instead of just 1. My friend also remarked that there were quite a few repeated ingredients: yuzu was used at least 3 times, citrus more generally at least 5 times, black truffle (I personally have no complaints) was used 3 times. For me though, the repeated use of yuzu and truffle was not a complaint, since I appreciated the chef’s attempt to follow seasonality, though the citrus got a bit repetitive towards the end.

Overall, a very fine restaurant indeed. To my mind, BKFARE and atera are the two most exciting restaurants in the city at the moment.

Rating: 19/20

Memory: Akamutsu, Hokkaido Uni with Truffle, Koshihikari Risotto with Truffle, Miyazaki Wagyu, the clarity and thinness of the Sugar Globe

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Thoughts on dishes:

1. Ishidai (Striped Beakfish): one bite, clean flavor, muscular but not chewy, not fat despite being winter. Yuzu, small whiffs of orange crispy ginger on top. (4.25/5)
   • A clean palate opener. No big taste.
2. Akamutsu (Red Bluefish): black vinegar savory sauce, crusted with puffed rice (5/5)
   • Perfect and sublime. I liked this because of the perfect cooking of the fatty bluefish with affixed puffed rice to its skin (It did not drop off when I lifted it).
   • The Asian influenced black vinegary savory sauce complemented the fish superbly well. Perfectly calibrated tastes, from which no ingredient could be subtracted. Highest praise.
   • http://www.trueworldfoods.com/products/tsukiji/all/akamutsu/
3. Oyster: Island Creek oyster with celeriac (4/5)
4. Kinmedai (Splendid Alfonsino): Overcooked, flaky (3/5) (yuzu?)
   • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splendid_alfonsino
5. Hokkaido Uni with Black Truffle on English muffin style flatbread (5/5):
   • Decadent and rich. The sweetness of Hokkaido uni was complemented by potent smell of truffles. Both were covered in a dark glaze, similar to anago(salt-eel) glaze. On top of an English flatbread muffin. I enjoyed it because it combines these two very assertive and rare “luxury” ingredients, and the whole effect was more than the sum of its parts. Highest praise.
   • Early April is right at the very end of the black truffle season, and the powerful smell of Chef Ramirez’s truffles surprised me in their potency, a testament to his sourcing abilities. Truffles were used in 3 dishes, and all had exceptional potent aromas
6. Osetra Caviar with cauliflower cream, yuzu: (4.25/5)
   • A generous helping of osetra caviar set in cauliflower cream, with a circular biscuit.
   • The marriage of tastes was pleasant, though I did not feel a true synergy between them.
7. Snow crab, chawanmushi, foie gras (3.75/5)
   • Chives and onion green chawanmushi paste at the bottom of a deep bowl, snow crab broken down to bits, A seared piece of foie gras (about 1.25x the size of the first phalange of an adult thumb) floated in a dashi. Black truffle made a welcome reappearance as black bits, adding its scent to the dashi.
8. Lobster, celery root, blood orange: (4.75/5)
   • Perfectly cooked lobster, with only mild “graining” of very sweet lobster flesh. A piece of celery root, a white radish, and a piece of blood orange by the side (which could have been subtracted) Navel oranges were used for a yellow sauce covering about 90% of the plate, with vanilla seeds visible in a second clear sauce, and fennel foam.
   • The radish and blood orange could have been subtracted: the radish added nothing to the dish, the blood orange added too much one-dimensional citrus notes. The lobster paired well with the orange sauce, and the fennel probably served as the aromatic (I could not ID the scent by myself, thinking it was lavender at first, and had to ask my server). This reminded me of the lobster dish at Schwa, where “lavender+earl grey” was the aromatic on top of the lobster+orange base.
9. Turbot with Peas (3.5/5)
   • Turbot from Holland.
10. Koshihikari Rice with black truffle (5/5)
    • A risotto, in the shade of beige/pink with truffled bits around. Topped with a slice of black truffle.
    • At this point, this was the third truffle dish.
    • The rice was top class, having a firm texture and slightly sweet taste. Risotto was prepared perfectly, with the strong smell of black truffles coming through again. Top marks.
    • http://commongrains.com/japanese-rice/
11. Squab (roasted) with Stuffed Morel (4.5/5)
    • Squab was served rare, with varying degrees of doneness. The very middle of the squab had no graining, while the outside was a very-reddish-slightly-pink shade with graining. I enjoyed the squab, it was well roasted with no chewiness and the stuffed morel was pungent.
    • Morels are the first sign of spring. It was truly a privilege to have eaten a meal in the short window between winter and spring when both morels and truffles were available.
12. Miyazaki Wagyu with Grated Daikon (5/5)
    • Miyazaki wagyu is considered the best wagyu of Japan, over the Kobe region.
      • http://www.rareedibles.com/wagyu.html
    • I did not ascertain the grading, but the seared beef just oozed fat like a sponge over the tongue, reminding me of otoro).
    • It was simply salted and served with vinegar-ed grated daikon. Simplicity itself, but a tremendous ingredients driven dish. Top marks.
13. Buffalo cheese (partita) from Petaluma CA with hot tangerine jam (3.25/5)
14. Shiso sorbet [functional dish, 3.75-4/5]
    • A green, strong herbaceous palate-cleansing scoop of shiso sorbet, about the size of a melonball scoop. Served in a plate with lots of holes at the outer 2/3 edge.
15. Soba-tea (roasted buckwheat tea) ice cream, Caramel, Seaweed (3.5/5)
    • Not bad. Crispy seaweed and caramel on top, plated to look abit like the end of a honey-dipper.
16. Spiced Chocolate Foam, Yuzu Marmalade, Sugar Globe (5/5)
    • A dark chocolate/yuzu cake base; a yuzu(?) sorbet in the center, with spiced chocolate foam around, and covered with a sugar globe.
    • The tastes were harmonious, creating a pleasantly spiced dessert on its own
    • However, what makes it truly spectacular is the sugar globe. Never have I seen such a perfectly clear (usually sugar glass is frosted and unclear) sugar glass with such thin-ness. It yielded easily to my spoon. (even the one made by an ex-Roca patissier at Restaurant Andre in Singapore was hard, and had the danger of cutting one’s lip). The technique required to make such a perfect sugar globe made for an amazing visual effect. Clearness and thin-ness, top class.
    • The globe was actually made of isomalt.
17. Mignardises: Miso Cookie, Chocolate with Pistachio filling, Mango Tartlet

La Carne @ Eataly | Chicago, IL | Mar ’14

• Address: 43 East Ohio Street
• Telephone: Tel: 312.521.8700
• Website: http://www.eataly.com/chicago-la-carne/

It is really quite impressive how successful the Eataly concept, a “disneyland of Italian food“, has been. The idea is to combine a one-stop shop for premium Italian ingredients, with a whole bunch of food outlets showcasing Italian food – an emporium. The Chicago outlet is the second outlet in the US (opened in Dec ’13), after the New York City outlet in 2010. Both joints are co-owned by Mario Batali, and Joe Bastianich (the New York outlet is also co-owned by Lidia Bastianich, a long-time NYC Italian restauranteur). The concept began in Italy but has been a smash hit in the US, reportedly grossing $1700/sq ft in 2012, when even lucrative malls only take in $350-$500/sq ft.

But as Eataly’s second anniversary approaches on Friday, the surprise is that the 58,000-square-foot store has become a phenomenon in the world of retailing and restaurants.

Eataly’s gross revenues for its first calendar year were $70 million, according to Joseph Bastianich and the chef Mario Batali, two of its principal investors.

“That figure was way over their initial projection,” said Malcolm M. Knapp, who heads an independent restaurant consulting firm in New York that bears his name.

Predicted revenues for the second year are $85 million, “a huge figure, $1,700 per square foot per year,” Mr. Knapp said. He compared that to the Cheesecake Factory, one of the nation’s highest-performing restaurant chains, which in recent years has reported about $1,000 a square foot in sales. Even lucrative malls, he added, take in only $350 to $500 a square foot. – NYT

I was hoping on a cold Chicago Saturday to visit the Purple Pig, but got there at the all-too-late time of 1:30pm, and was quoted a wait-time of 1h45m. So the search began for an acceptable alternative. Our first heuristic was Yelp: Eataly popped up, a short walk away, so off we went.

When we entered, there were two storeys. The first level is a supermarket, dedicated to all manner of Italian produce, for the home-cook. The second level was a food court with multiple fenced off areas serving as sit-down restaurants. Among the eateries was a pasta outlet, a snacks outlet, a fish outlet. Facing dizzying wait times for most of them, we settled on the suspiciously half-full La Carne, in a quieter corner of the second floor.

But it turns out they were half-full not because quality as we suspected, but I suspect because most people thought it was a long + pricey sit-down meal, which it wasn’t. The light dishes we had were priced at $15-$25, and we were in and out of there well within 90 minutes.

Vinegar Pork-Knuckle Dish with Egg (4.25/5)

A well-composed dish. The vinegar pork knuckle with bacon cubes went well with the salad bits, and who can argue with a soft-boiled egg with your bacon cubes?

Roasted Quail

A spot worth visiting in central Chicago. I wonder if a Spanish mercado concept would quite take off in the US the same way Eataly has. Bourdain certainly thinks that NYC is ready for a world street food-centre. Will we see more successful emporiums of a single cuisine?

Related Links:

• Some upcoming food hall projects