Ma'Ono

I was impressed by the speed with which Spring Hill changed concepts and became Ma’Ono Chicken & Whiskey. Seriously, these motherfuckers turned on a dime: Spring Hill was closed for maybe a couple days while they revamped the menu. Then they unveiled the new concept: all fried chicken, all the time.

This, of course, was a brilliant idea: Spring Hill’s weekly fried chicken dinners on Mondays were perennially sold out. If you’ve got a goose that lays golden eggs, you make that motherfucking goose lay eggs ALL WEEK, not just on Mondays. Which is what they did. Was the change worth it? I wanted to find out for myself, so off we went to Ma’Ono.

We started with an order of brussel sprouts. For $10 we got a plate of roasted brussels sprout halves, caramelized until they were a pleasing mahogany on the cut side, and as vibrantly green as a leprechaun’s jizz on the other side. Accompanying these masterful sprouts were big sautéed slices of apple. The whole thing was shingled on top with savory medallions of thick-cut bacon. The only way this dish could possibly be more autumnal would be if it were garnished with a fallen leaf and a sense of foreboding.

Manapua were $7. For this price we got two of these barbeque pork buns: delicate ivory spheres of pastry filled with finely shredded roast pork. Unlike the usual humbow you get on the street, purchased from some shady dude under a bridge, who glances repeatedly over his shoulders before surreptitiously palming a dimebag of pork buns into your hand, the manapua at Ma’Ono are fucking legit. The dough was airy and foamy, like Gwenyth Paltrow’s thoughts, with a filling of what tasted like real barbequed pork. They were the total opposite of the aforementioned street pork buns, whose gloomy maroon filling usually resembles red Kool Aid mixed with sausage. The only downside to the manapua was the dipping sauce, which was too brassy and tasted like a doorknob with lightning bolts shooting out of it.

A side of grits ($6) was so slick it could convince a carney to give up a giant stuffed Spongebob Squarepants. Seriously, these grits are so smooth and creamy and rich, it would make the most comfortable and also most disturbing waterbed filling ever. I didn’t want to eat these grits as much as I wanted to jump into a giant tub of it and luxuriate as though I were an obscene roman aristocrat. But at least then my elbows wouldn’t be ashy.

A whole fried chicken is $38 and this, of course, is Ma’Ono’s signature dish. It came to the table dismembered into 10 pieces, of course, as fried chicken typically does, because nobody deep fries a whole chicken, despite the fact that it would be cool as fuck. The crust was a rich bronze, which shatters when bitten like the stained glass in a bombed out cathedral. Beneath the chicken’s brittle armor was a succulent and yielding flesh, dripping its juices erotically down your throat with every bite. And that was the white meat. The dark meat practically melted, collapsing into your mouth like a fainting Victorian matron, overwhelmed by a challenge to the social order by some dashing vagabond.

This mind-altering chicken is served with a perfectly serviceable bowl of rice and a little jar of kimchee, fresh-tasting and briny, without a trace of the farty smell that plagues shitty dented cans of lesser kimchee. Also included with your fried chicken purchase are two dipping sauces: a pretty lame honey mustard, and a fucking PRISTINE chili sauce which is sultry and sweet, with an ocher heat that approaches slowly from behind. Just like your mom. Ignore the honey mustard the way I ignore your mom. Go for the chili sauce. I insist.

Dessert was milk chocolate crème ($5), which was basically a fancy name for pudding, which came with a dusting of superfine sugar and some macadamia nuts. We also had a huge wedge of banana cream pie ($7) which had such an intense banana flavor, a monkey would stop throwing his shit at you if you only offered him a slice. A coconut milk shake ($7) was okay, but they made the mistake of putting cubes of tofu or something else that’s leathery and bland and cubular, and I wasn’t very pleased by that at all. I realize that tofu takes on the flavor of whatever it’s in, but the texture is always just too gross to me. After all, I imagine that tofu cubes are what Q-Bert’s jizz probably closely resembles.

This is expensive fried chicken. There’s no sugarcoating it. But like all handcrafted works of art, the food at Ma’Ono is of high quality: the ingredients are exquisite, the preparations skillful. The decision to change Spring Hill’s fine dining format to Ma’Ono’s slightly more casual family-style Hawaiian menu was a gamble, but it’s one that has clearly paid off because the place is fucking PACKED every day now. Make a reservation. And you should mention whether you want to order the fried chicken when you call, because they DO run out. Don’t worry: the Spring Hill classics, like the saimin and the cheeseburger and the popcorn ice cream, are all still on the menu. But the permanent addition of this magnificent chicken to Ma’Ono’s menu is just the icing on this perfect solid gold cake which is garnished with a leprechaun.

Rating: 9 perfect cakes out of 10

Ma’Ono is located at 4437 California Ave SW

For reservations call 206-935-1075

Rione XIII

If you don’t know how to read roman numerals, you’ll be pretty sad indeed when you go to Rione XII. That’s because you’ll tell your friends you had a great meal at “Rione ex eye eye eye” and they will mock you. But if that actually IS the case, and you really don’t know how to read roman numerals, then you’ve got bigger problems than Rione XII because you probably pronounce movie sequels wrong too and go around talking about how “Rocky vee” is the worst of the Rocky movies. Luckily for me, I learned a lot about roman numerals in school, since in my home state of Louisiana they still actually use them, along with leaded gas, phrenology, and those old-time exercise machines with the vibrating canvas belt that goes around your waist. So I felt right at home at Rione XIII.

We started with the zucchini street pizza ($15). The crust was thin and bubbly, simultaneously chewy and crackly, as good pizza crusts should be. Thin rounds of roasted zucchini dotted this pizzascape, along with cloudy globs of the softest and sweetest ricotta I have ever tasted. A generous dusting of microplaned cured tuna heart topped it all off. I was hesitant to order this pizza, but it was definitely tastier than it had any right to be: sweet and salty with just a briny hint courtesy of the tuna heart. If you were expecting a big bloody beating heart, you would be disappointed because the reddish brown flecks of heart looked more like grated nutmeg than anything else. This flavor combination, unlikely as it might sound, really worked. My biggest complaint about this pizza is that they unfortunately call this “street pizza” on the menu which is, as everyone knows, a synonym for roadkill.

Trippa alla romana ($12) was interesting, to say the least. Gigantic ass beans, each the size of a fetus, bathed in a rich amniotic fluid of tomato sauce with squares of tripe, bread crumbs, and a little mint. Like the street pizza, the tripe featured an unlikely combination of flavors and textures, but it was utterly bewitching. Still, to this day I have no idea why people eat tripe. It’s fucking stomach lining. Why would you want to put MORE stomach in your stomach? Plus it tastes vaguely dirty. Or maybe it’s not tripe’s fault. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just want to gripe. Gripe about tripe.

Bucatini Amatriciana ($14) was the best thing I ate at Rione XIII. Big slippery pasta tubes, which your mom likes even more than MY big slippery pasta tube, writhed joyfully in a bright tomato sauce. Also in the sauce were little porky batons of guanciale and sautéed arcs of red onion. The plate was dusted on top with grana. This was generally good but I take issue with the red onion. There’s no reason to put red onion in anything: raw, it’s too strong. Cooked, looks like worms. You can’t win. The only reason people use red onions instead of yellow is because they’re red supremacists. Go to hell, you fucking onion racists.

Gnocchi alla romana ($14) was okay but very cheesy. Too cheesy. Cheesier, even, than Kenny G’s newest album, “Kenny G Performs a Thomas Kinkade Christmas.” Big soft round areolas of polenta were topped with melted mozzarella and tomato sauce. These were quite tasty: the rich satiny pucks of polenta sported a charmingly bruleed skin of mozzarella on top, but in general it really just tasted like pizza.

Oxtails alla Vaccinara was, for $19, a relative bargain. For this price you got a couple silky chunks of braised beef that dropped effortlessly off the bone. Unfortunately there was a lot of bone: too much bone, in fact, even for your mom, whose appetite for bone is legendary. And these weren’t regular, unassuming bones, they were big fucking dinosaur vertebra. It looked like HR Giger plated this fucking thing. Beneath the macabre beef cadaver was a big slick pile of polenta, with tomato sauce on top. This tasted a lot like the gnocchi, which tasted a lot like the bucatini, which tasted a lot like the tripe, which is to say: it all tasted red. You can blame me for choosing the wrong menu items, but the waitress could’ve mentioned to us that all the shit we were ordering had identical flavor profiles.

Dessert was a chcolate amaretto cake ($8), with a quenelle of straciatella gelato on the side. It’s a pretty moist cake, and the gelato was creamy enough. You really can’t go wrong with cake and ice cream, but isn’t there a more “authentic” Italian dessert with tomato sauce and polenta in it? Actually there must not be, because if there was we would’ve probably ended up with it.

Rione XIII isn’t bad, but I’d hardly call it mind-blowing, though maybe that’s not the point. I definitely give them credit for some very creative flavor profiles, and a competent (though no-frills) preparation, but something about the place just doesn’t do it for me. I think I might just be suffering from Ethan Stowell Fatigue: the indefatigable restaurateur seems to be opening new establishments at a pace that rivals the proliferation of facebook posts that complain about the president. In fact, by 2025 there will be one Ethan Stowell restaurant for every hummingbird on earth. So watch the fuck out.

I could also be suffering from Italian food fatigue, which as we all know is notoriously technique-free, mostly because Italians would prefer to spend time honing the ability to grab a woman’s ass while piloting a speeding Vespa instead of making elaborate terrines and delicate sauces. The French like to fuck too, mind you, yet they somehow ALSO find the time to create the world’s finest cuisine AND complain about American hegemony AND they manage to do all of this in a 35 hour work-week. Still, if you like Italian food and you are on Capitol Hill and Spinasse is booked, which I assure you it will be, then why not give Rione XIII a shot?

Rating: 6.5 street pizzas out of 10

Rione XIII is located at 401 15th Ave E.

For reservations call 206-838-2878

Marx Foods

Marx Foods is the brick-and-mortar outlet of marxfoods.com, the online luxury food retailer which is based here in Seattle. I’m not going to sugarcoat it: unless there’s a Whole Foods somewhere with a Maclaren Stroller showroom inside it, I doubt there’s a bigger yuppie magnet than Marx Foods. I was invited by Justin Marx to visit the Marx Foods showroom on lower Queen Anne. Yes, he knows what I look like. And no, I don’t give a fuck. I don’t typically review grocery stores, so I figured what the fuck. Justin brought out a bunch of stuff for me to try, and I ate it.

I started with a jar of pistachio cream, which is dreamy. It’s a subtle green, and lightly textured. Visually it resembles the puke-color paint they used to paint public school rooms back in the 1970’s and 80’s, but you shouldn’t judge this book by its cover because it is SO FUCKING DELICIOUS. It tastes like angels fucking. The flavor is mild and sweet, yet not at all cloying, with a rich pistachio flavor. It’s $12 for a 7.4 ounce jar which, compared to Nutella, is pretty pricey, but it’s several orders of magnitude tastier. In fact, Sabatino & Co’s Fior di Pistacchio, which is the brand that Marx Foods carries, won the NASFT gold award for Outstanding Nut Butter this year. Your mom was outraged that MY nut butter didn’t win; such is life.

Maple cream is made from real maple syrup that has been whipped like a stepchild. The inevitable incorporation of air into the maple cream turns the color of the syrup from its usually glossy amber to a satiny, bland beige. Luckily, the flavor of this stuff is anything but bland: it’s creamy and very sweet and tastes like highly concentrated waffles. If some chump ever invents a breakfast mayonnaise, it would taste like maple cream. Like the pistachio cream, it’s not cheap ($17 for 6 oz) but it is totally worth it.

Madyson’s Maddy Melts ($9 for 8 marshmallows) are disc-shaped marshmallows, fiendishly engineered to float atop a mug of hot cocoa, thus melting into a perfectly even marshmallow layer. As far as marshmallows go, these are gauzy and not overly saccharine. My only complaint is that “Madyson” sounds like it should be the name of a stripper, not a marshmallow.

Manufactured by boutique confectioner We Made This, macaron mixes are probably the most retarded thing Marx Food sells. This macaron mix sells for $16 for about 6 ounces. To make macarons from scratch you only need five ingredients: sugar, salt, egg whites, almonds, and confectioner’s sugar. We Made This’s mix requires you to add your own egg whites. You’re essentially paying for 6 ounces of sugar and ground almonds. $16 macaron mixes are why the terrorists hate us.

Panforte di Mirabissi is also pretty shitty. Invented during medieval times to provide a durable source of quick energy for knights at war, panforte is basically a fruitcake puck. Panforte is about as successful a dessert as all those knights who ate panforte were successful at the Crusades, which is to say: not very. Marx Foods sells several flavors, but they all taste like a stale muffin that rolled around on the floor of a Penzey’s. Like slavery, open sewers, and hairy 1970’s pubic bushes, panforte is one of history’s bad ideas which should finally be retired. Prices range from $19-22 depending on the flavor, for 350g.

Butternut seed oil, on the other hand, is magnificent: nutty and sweet and savory all at once, with grassy hints in the finish, this stuff tastes like autumn in a bottle. Here is a list of stuff I would lick this butternut seed oil off of: a dog. An old sponge. Mike Tyson. An electric fence. Your mom. Manufactured with a grant from Cornell University, whose agriculture department was trying to find a use for unused butternut squash seeds, this oil would even taste good on Vienna Sausage. That’s how fucking good it is. $12 for 6.3 ounces.

Marx Foods sells, literally, several metric shit-tons of items. In addition to being the FIRST retailer in the USA to sell ghost chilis, Marx Foods also sells exotic meats, oils and sauces and spices and dry pastas of all kinds, as well as stylish paperware. They’re currently trying to source Trinidad Moruga Scorpion chilis, currently the world’s hottest at 2 million Scoville units.

The showroom has maybe 50 different things on display, but there’s more to it than that: shoppers will be able to peruse the store’s website, which has hundreds more items, on conveniently mounted ipads inside the store, and you can buy anything from the website because they have all of the stuff the website sells on shelves in the back. Some of this stuff is too bourgeois, and it can be quite expensive. However, the inventory is impeccably sourced, and some items are quite cheap: vanilla beans, for instance, which sell at Marx Foods for about $19 for 20 beans, are much cheaper than Penzey’s princely $36.89 for 15 beans. Personally I wish they’d start selling pot brownie mixes, but I suppose that’s a pipe dream.

Rating: 7.5 brownies out of 10

Marx Foods is located at 144 Western Ave W.

For inquiries call 1-866-588-6279, or check out the website.

One Night Only

The One Night Only Project is a series of dinners, which I hesitate to describe as “underground,” but fuck it: if the shoe fits, drink champagne from it. This culinary Xanadu was dreamed up by well-known local television personality Julien Perry and locavore cheerleader Melissa Peterman. The culinary rap sheets of these two women is as long as a whale cock, and so when I was invited to attend a dinner created by Ma’Ono owner Mark Fuller, I jumped at the chance the way your mom jumps at the chance to attend a Truffaut retrospective. Look at your mom, showing interest in something besides methamphetamines!

Anyway, the One Night Only dinners typically move around from venue to venue, but this time it was held at the Velvet Underground Dining Experience, a small banquet room in South Lake Union which is as stylish as its acronym, VUDE, is gross-sounding.

Mark Fuller was cooking Mexican food, paired with beers from the Georgetown Brewing Company. I admit I was skeptical. After all, Fuller is known for a polished and modern take on Hawaiian comfort food. Would he be able to pull it off? Read on and you’ll see.

We started with passed appetizers: pork croutons with clam salsa. “Crouton” here is a misnomer. Let’s get one thing straight, this was a fucking pork rind with stuff on top of it. But the pork rind was mildly salty and airy, with the brittle snap of a brisk walk through a wooded land on an autumn day, which all good pork rinds should have. I’ve only had tastier pork rinds at La Bete. These were topped with a small pile of smoked clam salsa: colorful cubes of bell pepper and tomato were interspersed here and there with diced chunks of heavily smoked clams and a brunoise of crunchy jicama. The smoke flavor was a welcome addition to the pork rind, and the salsa was bright and fresh.

A pork and rice meatball soup was fucking tasty. Downy meatballs , dense slices of chorizo, and grilled potato splashed around in a plunge pool of a savory and spicy broth, glimmering topaz which sported a very subtle yet undeniable heat. This was garnished with a slice of avocado.

Next up were tacos: I have NEVER HAD TACOS LIKE THIS BEFORE. People like to wax rhapsodic about tacos, but that’s usually because they have never tasted something which is ACTUALLY DELICIOUS, like white asparagus, or a bone-in Wagyu ribeye, or a galantine with an interior garnish of smoked chicken breast and foie gras. Tacos are cheap, sure, but so are potatoes, and Pommes Robuchon is way better than the average taco. I don’t get the obsession lots of chumps have with tacos.

Until now.

Crispy shreds of carnitas were packed into handmade tortillas, ivory, soft, and creamy in a way that was unlike any tortilla I’ve ever eaten. On top was a salsa of tomatillo and white onion. On the side was a bowl of handmade queso which was very good but a little salty for my taste. Accompanying the tacos were grilled red jalapenos. These were a mine field of Scoville units. I ate 2 tacos, each topped with a pepper. The first was pleasantly spicy but the second one was a fucking raging capsaicin inferno which caused the tears to roll silently down my face like a stoic widow in a New England cemetery. All I needed were sunglasses, a leafless winter tree, and a black umbrella to complete this tableau. Still, it would take more than a freakishly spicy jalapeno to ruin these tacos; that’s how magnificent they were.

Charcoal grilled skirt steak was great. I could eat an entire skirt’s worth of this steak. In fact I could eat an entire WEDDING DRESS of this steak. It was pleasantly charred on the outside, grilled to a pleasing, vaginal medium inside, with a spicy and tangy marinade of cumin and lime. This was garnished with scallion rings and accompanied by these soft cornmeal biscuits which were filled, jelly donut style, with a thin layer of refried beans.

Next up was a cucumber and shrimp salpicon. “Salpicon” is Spanish for “a bunch of shit chopped up like a motherfucker.” The salpicon had a whole bunch of ingredients: shrimp, banana peppers, chunks of cucumber, radishes, all very fresh tasting but I couldn’t understand how, exactly, this mélange should be eaten. There were no tortillas in evidence. Should you just spoon the salpicon into your mouth? Or was it meant to be used as a condiment? Some people were spooning it atop their slices of grilled skirt steak, which was probably the best option, but personally I just chowed down on it.

By this point I was getting pretty damn full but we still had two more courses to conquer. The first was the Tamale of Disappointment: a big loaf of cornmeal was filled with a rubbery white skein of Beecher’s Jack Cheese. I should also point out that the Tamale of Disappointment had a weird, humid, tropical funk that smelled like what I imagine the Predator smells like. The Tamale of Disappointment donned a dark brown sash of chocolate sauce, grainy and bitter, like an old photograph of your mom. I expected this sauce to taste like a melted Hershey Bar but as the name suggests, I was sadly, sadly disappointed. This was accompanied by a couple chunks of roasted sweet potato for some reason.

Dessert, however, was great: a big bowl of dolce de leche rice pudding, finely grained and light. Puddled on top was a shallow pool of horchata, a few slippery mango wedges, and a scattered topping of Corn Pops. At first I thought these were some artisan “corn pops” somehow manufactured by Fuller’s crew using advanced tech, but no: clearly visible from my seat was the actual box of Kellogg’s Corn Pops, with its bright yellow and red pop-art label, sitting on a shelf in the kitchen. The mouthfeel of this pudding was superb: it was like my tongue writhing around between satin sheets. It was sweet, but not cloying, with notes of cinnamon provided by the horchata, and of course the fruity black pepperiness of the mango.

The One Night Only Project is an interesting idea. At $150 per person, it’s a bit pricey, though I don’t consider the cost obscene, considering that you can get as much alcohol as you can pour into your piehole, and tip and tax is included. Plus, the food is impeccable. Mark Fuller is a seasoned veteran, and the food is prepared by his hand-picked cabal. Besides, this isn’t 2006, when every chump with middling knife skills would declare a meal at his house an “underground dinner,” propped it up with a lame code word and a flimsy thesis about “community,” and then make friends of friends pay $100 to watch him drizzle truffle oil over everything.One Night Only is, instead, a demonstration of power. The menus are lyrical songs, each dish a stanza written by a professional fully in command of the vocabulary of cuisine. It’s a chef’s playground.

One Night Only’s next dinner is Saturday, November 3rd, and will feature a fucking crazy barbecue feast prepared by Chef Eric Hellner of the Metropolitan Grill, with wine pairing by Master Sommelier Thomas Price. Tickets are still available. If you miss this I pity you.

Rating: 8.5 tacos out of 10

Tickets to the One Night Only Project are available here.

The Last Parsnip

I admit that I am suffering from burnout. Not writer’s block, mind you, but a general malaise: while my wellspring of convoluted metaphors and analogies, tortured to within an inch of their lives, is as deep as your mom’s vag, my patience, unfortunately, is not.

But when I heard about the Last Parsnip, my will to live returned. I heard a whispered rumor that there was an aristocratic new restaurant opening, somewhere near Seattle. This was no mere “underground club.” Nay, the Last Parsnip is an experience: more precious than an elf riding a Yorkshire Terrier, and as exclusive as an invitation to sip 150-year-old brandy with P Diddy on the deck of a yacht.

A visit to the Last Parsnip’s website reveals a draconian reservations policy: tables are by invitation only. Fortunately, this isn’t as bad as it seems; if you can provide three letters of recommendation from restaurant industry professionals, they’ll probably let you in. At least, they let me in, though I pulled a lot of strings to get those recommendations. Without resorting to shameless name-dropping, let’s just say I now owe three fucking GLOWING reviews.

With my table secured, we proceeded to the Last Parsnip’s secret Bainbridge Island location. The restaurant’s website describes the dining room as being located within a decommissioned lighthouse. This is patently untrue: there IS no lighthouse on Bainbridge Island. It’s a red herring designed to discourage the meek, since the Last Parsnip is ACTUALLY situated within a private dining room inside a wealthy burgher’s house near the Blakely Harbor Put-in.

Once inside, you’ll be escorted past a racquetball court and an indoor stable which, as the maitre’d will point out to you, is completely smell-free: a 100,000 CFM ventilation system whisks away any offending molecules of horse shit, so as not to insult the delicate olfactory sensibilities of diners.

We were led into the Last Parsnip’s opulent dining room, which looks like the Belaggio threw up after eating a bunch of Skittles, and were seated. But claiming one’s seat is still no guarantee of safe harbor, because the Parsnip is like an Arthurian footbridge, governed by an aloof and invincible guardian: there are THREE challenges that must be hurdled to gain entry. Getting a reservation is the first. Finding the place is the second. And negotiating the menu is the third.

The fact is that the menu itself is yet another sly trap for those with a lack of panache. If you attempt to actually order from the menu, you get kicked out. I’m not shitting you: when you think the Last Parsnip can’t possibly get any more ostentatious, they blow past the previous line in the sand as effortlessly as your mom shattered the world record for number of blowjobs given in a day. I personally witnessed a pair of wealthy dowagers, each ripe for a pie to the face, coldly escorted out after requesting the Coronation Mutton (£18), medium well.

The tip-off that the menu is fake is the prices, which are listed in British Pounds. At the very bottom of page is “Bryce’s Tasting Menu,” the cost of which is listed as “MP.” This is what you should actually order, if you want to be served. And “MP” for us cost $495 per person, taxes and gratuity inclusive. Dinner comes with a wine flight, but I’m not a wine blogger and besides, Mad Dog 20/20 is good enough for me, so I dare say I’m not the most educated oenophile.

We started with an amuse: Caciocavallo Podolico “Cheetos.” A small pile of these were brought to the table in a jeweled pimp cup: gnarly caveman clubs of crispy puffed cheese which were similar to their junkfood namesake in shape only. Unlike their neon-orange counterparts, the Caciocavallo Podolico Cheetos were a blunt ivory color, with a clean and creamy dairy flavor imparted by Caciocavallo Podolico, the most expensive cheese in the world.

Next up was an appetizer: the Last Parsnip’s take on “surf n’ turf” featured two cubes of seared “Ultra Kobe” and two cubes of sous vide blue whale blubber. “Ultra Kobe” is, as the waiter described to us, similar to regular Kobe beef, but the cows are fed champagne instead of sake, and are raised most of their lives neck deep in a tank of water. This allows for better marbling, since the buoyancy of the water means less strain on the cow’s muscles. Ultra Kobe tenderloin was then seared using a plasma arc at 7000 degrees Celcius; this is hotter than the surface of the sun.

Beef, when subjected to such a stellar inferno, yields a brittle caramelized crust which I have never encountered; it tastes almost like meaty lace. Inside, the meat was served rare: delicate and vaginal, the purple flesh, spiderwebbed with threads of fat, practically dissolved on the tongue. The Ultra Kobe was served drizzled with a couple drops of port reduction. And , oh yeah—the port was 90 years old.

I must admit I didn’t care for the sous vide blue whale blubber, which was obtained by the Last Parsnip via a special permit from the US Fish & Wildlife Service. This was fatty and rich: TOO rich. Imagine what Oprah’s bone marrow probably tastes like. Blue whale blubber makes that taste like a rice cake. Yet instead of being yielding to the bite, like pork belly, it’s instead strangely fibrous. Yes, yes, I know: Eskimos eat whale blubber. But Eskimos do a lot of dumb things.

The salad course was a thimbleful of “nano greens,” which are micro greens whose growth has been stunted by a lack of water, in much the same way Bonsai trees are grown. This miniscule Mesclun was composed of tiny leaves of red leaf lettuce, arugula, and chicory. Even the dressing was microscopic: the salad was doused in 500 microliters of a Dwarf Patuljak Pepper vinaigrette. Dwarf Patuljak Peppers are, in case you haven’t already guessed, the smallest pepper in the world.

Soup was beef consommé, as crystal clear as a Teabagger’s racist intentions. Submerged in a shallow pool of this piping hot masterpiece was a lozenge of saffron egg custard. This savory yellow parallelogram was creamy like a boob in a Flemish master’s painting, and best of all: emblazoned on top of the custard was a gold-leaf Fleur-de-Lys.

The pasta course was fucking killer: a snickering jab at the Olive Garden’s obesity-inducing lunchtime special, “Bryce’s Neverending Pasta Bowl” was a Mobius Strip made of a single piece of papardelle. This delicate ribbon of egg noodle was served amid a spicy sugo of ground pork, finely textured and gleaned from pigs fed only fennel. Shaved atop the pasta were coils of a rare pecorino from Colorado, made only by lesbians.

The main course was, naturally, Lievre a la Royale. This is the most complicated recipe in the world. The eldritch instructions to prepare this are of course easy to fuck up, but as I expected, they nailed it. A ballotine of hare was cooked, sous vide of course, then served draped in a glossy maroon jus of rabbit blood, foie gras, brandy, and butter, garnished with a roasted chestnut and a small pile of pickled haricots verts.

The pinwheel of rabbit meat, tender as the denouement of a Lifetime Original Movie, was alternated with a farce of foie gras and rabbit liver and black truffles, dark and dense and utterly capable of fulfilling the appetites of even the most corpulent one percenter. The roasted chestnut was like an entire winter in a single smoky, creamy nut, and the haricots verts had been pickled in a vinegar made from Bollinger Blanc de Noirs Vieilles Vignes Francaises 1997. Overkill? Of course, but the pickled beans made a welcome counterpoint to the Lievre’s viscous imperial sauce.

Dessert, the waiter revealed with a serial killer’s smile, was “The World’s Girliest Dessert.” A small puck of molten chocolate cake was drizzled with a salted caramel sauce and crowned with a hazelnut tuile. On the side was a quenelle of lavender ice cream, which the waiter prepared tableside, in a move designed to brutally emasculate all of the “molecular gastronomists” dicking around with liquid nitrogen, by dripping BOSE-EINSTEIN CONDENSATE from a steaming cold, matte-black graphite flask into a bowl of cream. Bose-Einstein Condensates are made of rubidium atoms just a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero. When rubidium encounters water it reacts similarly to potassium, by forming a peroxide with the oxygen atoms in the water and liberating hydrogen gas. The hydrogen, of course, infiltrates the ice cream, giving it an effervescence which stings the tongue a bit.

Around the perimeter of the plate, Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” was written in caramel sauce. The World’s Girliest Dessert was garnished, appropriately, with a live puppy. When the finished dish was presented you could hear a subtle squelch, like the sound of a stepped-upon grape, as every vagina in the room became simultaneously lubricated. I was nonplussed.

You may have noticed that I don’t actually describe the relative deliciousness of any of the dishes. This is because, of course, that every single thing was perfect; each course was the absolute template of its respective dish. There was no need for me to do anything except describe the recipes. An easier and more pleasurable job has never been had by a restaurant critic. That having been said, I’m giving the Last Parsnip a 9.9: they lose 0.1 points because thanks to the World’s Girliest Dessert, I now have to raise a fucking puppy.

Rating: 9.9 puppies out of 10

The Last Parsnip cannot be reached by phone. For reservations, they can be contacted here.