my rambling, ridiculous recap of our tasting menu meal at wd-50 this weekend: http://bit.ly/cbcX9r #fb
2 mins of L&O:SVU reminds me that no number of actors i love on that show ever made me want to watch a minute of it. ugh. white collar now?
i take back everything bad i ever said about foam.
we have discovered our favorite way to plan a vacation: book the plane tickets at least a few months out, maybe the hotel. everything else waits until the week or two before. in the case of this trip we’d been debating what to do on our two real nights in new york city, and whether to have a fancy expensive dinner one of them.
on tuesday we got a little more serious, looking up some reviews and consulting some foodie friends, then made the leap and reserved a table for saturday at 10pm at wd-50, the molecular gastronomy restaurant owned by chef wylie dufresne that my wife, jessica, has been dreaming about going to ever since she first knew it existed. i was a little unsure - i am a lifelong recovering picky eater who loves loves loves food but still has a gut level reaction of skepticism and scrunched-up-face-ness when presented with anything i can’t clearly identify before putting in my mouth. i knew enough about the kind of food at wd-50 to realize it was squarely in my WTF corner, but not enough to get in the way of how excited jessica was.
we went back and forth about whether to get the tasting menu - it was pricey, sure, but also less flexible than ordering a la carte off the menu. as soon as we sat down, though, it was an easy choice - why bother coming at all if we weren’t truly excited about the opportunity for a once in a lifetime meal?
completely obvious disclaimer: i know my way around a kitchen, but i’m no chef. i’m a writer with a tendency towards the enthusiastic, not a food critic. (if you want to read real poetry about wd-50, try this frank bruni review.) that said, i don’t speak french, can rarely spell menu items correctly the first few times i try, and most of the adjectives i consider applying to food i undoubtedly stole from tv. i’m ridiculously spoiled by fresh california ingredients, but have never traveled or eaten outside north america. i have in the past made many disparaging comments about the use of foam. i have come to accept the uncomfortable truth posited in this nyt magazine story that my obsession with watching people cook has done nothing for my own culinary skills but has vastly improved my ability to order. and - maybe - to help me tell you about what i ate.
wd-50 july 2010 tasting menu
1: amuse bouche - sardine, pickled grape, white gazpacho, forbidden rice (no photo). i will admit to finding this a terrifying start. i have never liked sardines, and here - on top of a crispy square of forbidden rice (which i do love) - was what seemed like an enormous slab of skin-on sardine. it had been my only real pause when looking over the tasting menu, but i remembered that we had made up a tasting menu rule when we went to piccolo in venice beach earlier this year: you have to try one bite of everything, but you don’t have to feel obligated to eat any more. so i ate a tiny bite of the stack (i know, i know, you’re supposed to put the whole thing in your mouth at once, but i was scared!) and it didn’t taste too fishy, so i ate the rest in two bites and took a sip of water and was extremely proud of myself for being a brave little toaster.
2: Everything bagel [ice cream], smoked salmon threads, crispy cream cheese (read more about how it was invented on a dare here). welcome to weird and wonderful. this was when i embraced that i just needed to open up my mouth and savor whatever hit my tastebuds. the “bagel” is actually ice cream, crisp and cold, and then the salmon threads are salty. the crispy cream cheese snaps into tinier pieces, and beneath it are pickled onions.
3: Foie gras, passionfruit, chinese celery. i am not a huge fan of foie gras, though this was the third time we’d had it this year. this was nothing like those other two times - mostly you taste the passionfruit (kind of a wet gelee) and the crispy celery and the foie gras just holds it all together.
4: Scrambled egg ravioli, charred avocado, kindai kampachi [yellowfin]. the waiter had asked if i have any allergies - i am, to mustard - and then moments after setting down the scrambled egg ravioli before us both, another waiter all but ran up to our table. he snatched my plate away, saying, “no, no, the chef has sent this instead.” this:
4 [alt]: Eggs benedict (read more from the NYT here). our waiter came back to explain that the chef had realized there is a small amount of mustard in the charred avocado, and that to be safe he was giving me the eggs benedict instead. (already food-drunk, i decided try a small bite of the avocado, which absolutely had mustard in it and made the roof of my mouth tingle. i am so, so glad that i only had a speck of it instead of that whole amount.) but this was the luckiest allergy ever, as the eggs benedict is amazing and awe-inspiring and was also the favorite of two different nearby tables. i’m not wild about benedict, generally, because i dislike both poached eggs and hollandaise sauce. this had neither, strictly speaking. there were little cylinders of egg yolk and then fried squares filled with a creamy, tangy, distinctly un-lemony hollandaise sauce - plus a very thin crisp of canadian bacon. this is one of the appetizers on the menu (you get 4 cubes instead of 2) and i cannot recommend it enough. it was surprising and savory and stunningly good. and the intervention and attention to detail meant that i let go of that little doubt i always carry that some unknown food will trigger an unpleasant (if not life-threatening) allergic reaction.
5: Cold fried chicken, buttermilk-ricotta, tabasco, caviar. i’ve seen enough top chef to vaguely put together how this was made - the chicken was pulled apart and probably rolled back together and cooked in some fancy machine at a very specific temperature, then re-wrapped in breaded skin, fried, and chilled. (maybe? that’s what it seemed like.) regardless: it was really fucking good. the tabasco honey had a really gentle, but unavoidable, kick to it, but the buttermilk ricotta (which had a dried, yet creamy texture) was a good, cooling balance. i’ve never really eaten much caviar - though one of my few science fair food experiences was with spherified, caviar-shaped lemonade, an accent on something we ate during our honeymoon. i had some of it mushed in with other bites but left more than half on my plate.
6: Striped bass, chorizo, pineapple, popcorn (no photos). this was a really hearty portion of fish - the rest of the tasting menu, unlike the one we had at piccolo, was relatively small. it was really well cooked, with dried chorizo, grilled pineapple with dehydrated lime zest (so good) and a popcorn puree, which i didn’t think added much beyond a bit of creaminess. this was good but maybe suffered a bit from being dead in the middle of the servings.
7: Beef and bearnaise. these descriptions, by the way, all come directly from the restaurant’s menu, and i’m sure are meant to be deliberately vague so you’ll be all titillated and surprised by what arrives. this level of understatement, though, is a crime against adjectives. the bernaise is somehow made into these soft, gnocchi-like balls that rest in the beef soup. (jessica says to call it a consomme.) on top are sauteed green onions and shavings of snow peas, somehow completely sharp and crispy and bright-flavored amidst all the really intense gluttony of the other ingredients (that ring you see around the edge is a drizzle of straight-up beef fat). this was, hands down, one of the best dishes i’ve ever eaten in my entire life. it was rich but crisp, extremely complex flavors but totally in harmony with each other. it made my wife incoherently happy and teary and she declared herself a crying panda. that isn’t even a thing, but it made sense at the time.
8: Lamb loin, black garlic romesco, soybean, pickled garlic chive. this lamb was good - and i want to give it the benefit of the doubt of having the hardest slot on the menu. it’s the last savory course, and after the richness of the beef bernaise it was hard to imagine ever eating anything again at all. the garlic romesco smear was outstanding and the crunchy green bits were a good contrast, but overall i wanted either a 10-minute time-out or, barring that, a much sharper knife with which to cut the meat. during the tasting menu at piccolo we hit a similar wall towards the end, a pasta that we ultimately felt we just didn’t need or want as we moved from one kind of course to another, and i don’t know if we just aren’t capable of eating enough for a tasting menu or if the pacing is total personal preference or what, but this was the only course where i distinctly thought, i am just going to eat less of this so i have room for other things coming next.
9: Chewy lychee sorbet, pistachio, [and yuzu]. i was wary of a lot of this dish - i don’t particularly like lychee, or sorbets that are described as “chewy,” or pistachio ice cream, and the few times i’ve had foam on a dish it seemed really useless and show-offy. i was so, so, so wrong. the waiter described this as a palate cleanser, an understatement second only to “beef bernaise.” the sorbet immediately woke me up from my lamb funk, so cold and clean tasting. the pistachio was creamy and crunchy, at the bottom of the bowl (i have no idea in what state it was presented, but by this point i had long stopped trying to understand how the food existed and just focused on enjoying it). and the yuzu foam was breathy and light and disappeared on my tongue in just the right way i had no idea to know i should want.
10: Hazelnut tart, coconut, chocolate, chicory. this is something that, based on the ingredients or even this picture from the restaurant, i would never have normally ordered. it is the best. fucking. dessert i have ever even dreamed of eating. better than that. better than all the words i have to write a mediocre, self-indulgent recap of a meal i ate. it was, from the top down, a chocolate ganache, then coconut cream underneath, with a hazelnut streusel crust and a chicory foam. halfway into the second bite i started to get dizzy - the good kind of dizzy. my hands started to shake - not enough to put the fucking fork down, of course, but noticeably. my eyes began to water and the back of my neck got warm. none of this stopped me from eating, of course, but right about when i finished i felt a literal tear roll down my cheek and i realized that somewhere in the middle of this dessert i had started to cry. i don’t even know. it sounds ridiculous to write out like that, but it’s true. at piccolo we ate a filet mignon that had been smoked with vanilla bean, and it gave me a total head rush, a heart-pounding immediate physical reaction like nothing i’d ever experienced while eating before. this was like that on every drug ever at once.
11: Rainbow sherbet, rhubarb, tarragon, orange, olive oil. after that foodgasm i was fully prepared to just quit, to leave, to finish while i could still find my ankles and purse and get home in one (relative) piece. i’m glad i didn’t stop, though, that i trusted that someone at some point had sat down and eaten these dishes in order and there was a reason to give me something else, something more after the tart. this looked, on the plate, a lot like a spring roll wrapped in rice paper, sitting atop a piece of sushi. the sherbet was wrapped in a piece of mandarin orange tuille, basically a sugar casing. there was a smear of rhubarb jelly on the plate, too, and an actual slice of mandarin orange, which completely confused me because i kept poking at it and expecting it to be made of something else. the olive oil cake beneath had a great texture, but for me this was all about the cold wake-up call of the sherbet.
12: Cocoa packets. Chocolate shortbread, milk ice cream. from what i could tell, the chocolate shortbread balls stuffed with ice cream are the complimentary dessert you get when you don’t order dessert with a regular meal. they explode in your mouth, sort of like the most souped-up gourmet milk duds, only better. the outside was like a cookie crumble, and the inside was just a burst of frozen cream. the packets, which are entirely edible and melt in your mouth like flavor strips, are apparently very famous but were a total, delightful surprise to me. i wanted to eat a million of them.
so: that was that. it was, two and a half hours later, over.
we signed our exorbitant check. we stared at each other in confusion and wonderment. we congratulated ourselves on making a just slightly later than average reservation (in new york terms) so that by the time we finished the crush had thinned considerably, though we weren’t the last people to leave. we went downstairs to use the bathroom and there, in the hall talking shit with our waiter, was wylie dufresne, the chef. jessica just stood there for a minute until i shoved her forward so we could make embarrassing thank yous where we talked about how food can make you cry (us) and awkward, self-deprecating small talk (him) for a few minutes.
then we stepped out onto the sidewalk, where it had just started to sprinkle, shook our long legs and short skirts at every cabbie that passed by, got a bunch of unsavory offers from other drivers, and climbed into a taxi just in time to close the doors and have a complete downpour open up onto us.
amazing Italian sandwiches from salumerie. now we’re going to see the llamas! what is this town?
it’s about fucking time!!! get it, guys. RT @Rollthetanks: Starting to record our new record!!!!
bumper stickers in Milford: “Wag more, bark less.” & “My heroes have always killed cowboys.”
dinner on the front porch.
she’s a giggler.
find only rental car in Milford > drive to camp to find bag owner/counselor > swap suitcases > lunch & tour @ nearby Buddhist temple > :)
RT @BenoitDLewis: “You don’t have to be right. All you have to do is be candid.” Allen Ginsberg
in conclusion: #bagwatch10 is the path to enlightenment? also YAY I have my stuff again.
camp office has bag, will handle swap! attempting to rent car from repair shop side business. or hotel repair guy can take us. #bagwatch10
