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.
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Altura
In America, Italian restaurants that want to charge lots of money are confronted with a quandary: you can’t charge big bucks for baked ziti, but you ALSO can’t use too many classical French techniques because then you cross the culinary equivalent of the Alps.
So what do you do? You have two choices: either strip the recipes WAY down, like to three ingredients, but make sure that those three ingredients are the MOTHERFUCKING BEST GODDAMNED INGREDIENTS IN THE UNIVERSE. For instance, slather some delicate pristine handmade pasta with some fancy butter, such as reggiano butter, or some other kind of exotic butter made from the milk of cows that are fed only apples or some shit like that, and then top this with an obscure D.O.C Pecorino made by rustic badasses, or monks, or even better yet: Shaolin monks, which are in fact both. This is the strategy of places like Cantinetta and Spinasse. Or you can try a different approach and put a whole bunch of stuff on the plate and hope for the best. This is Altura’s approach.
I’d been trying to get into Altura for a while. Unfortunately, the only reservation options, for WEEKS, were either 5:30 or 9:45. I place the entire blame on Open Table. As recently as seven years ago I used to place reservations with impunity in this town, gleefully calling up every restaurant in town and scoring valuable tables for two at 7:30 on a Saturday.
Now, sadly, modern technology has enabled any common Aspberger’s sufferer, in a town, mind you, which is JAM FUCKING PACKED with awkward computer programmers loathe to communicate with AN ACTUAL PERSON, to cock-block people like me who are TRYING TO WORK HERE, YOU FUCKING NERDS. The horrors of technology, I suppose.
Anyway: Altura. Suffice to say we eventually did get a reservation. They’ve got an interesting pricing structure. The menu is divided, as Italian menus frequently are, into antipasti, primi, and secondi, though they aren’t labeled as such. While you can order anything a la carte, you’re better off taking advantage of a coursed meal, which is offered at Altura at a rate of $53 for 3 courses, $61 for 4 courses, $69 for 5 courses, or $132 for one metric shit-ton of courses. This sounds complicated, but don’t worry; your waiter will laboriously explain all of this to you.
We started with the Spicy Grilled Baby Octopus. Grilled tentacles were present, of course, along with lots of cucumbers: there were thin rounds of lemon cucumber, cubed English cucumber, and round balls of some other kind of cucumber. Accompanying all these cumcumbers and tentacle was what I initially thought was some variety of hummus but was, according to the menu “calabrian bean puree.” There was also a smear of basil puree and an asymmetrical splash of bright orange chili oil, which I assume was leaking from a small, red, grilled pepper.
This dish had a good amount of heat, as befits the name, but seemed unfocused. There were too many disparate elements. I get that you’re supposed to get a bite of everything together, but with SO MANY different ingredients, how much shit can you hold on your fork? At some point it turns into culinary Pick-Up Stix.
Cavatelli was a pretty disorganized plate: a compact pile of perforated pasta cylinders were clad in a thick sauce of ground duck. This was topped with a translucent jade bundle of deep fried sage leaves. It was a lot of sage, actually: it looked like a tiny green chandelier fell from the ceiling and landed onto my bowl of pasta. The cavatelli was very ducky tasting. It was like an aggro mallard suffering from roid rage teabagged the cavatelli with his cloaca. That’s not a bad thing.
Malfatti was SUPER FUCKING TASTY. Malfatti is like sloppy gnocchi: big, round, sloppy balls which are exactly what your mom craves. Three big fluffy green balls, flecked with kale and dandelion greens and bound together with ricotta, were piled atop a savory ragu of ground rabbit. The deliciousness was inexplicable. Normally I would think a pasta made primarily of ricotta and kale would be the kind of thing folk musicians would want to eat. Yet these delicious savory balls were somehow imbued with the spirit of True Tastiness, a Dickensian apparition which was not just an omen of my own terrifying pigheadishness, but also a symbol of delicious possibilities. Kudos. And when I say “kudos,” I actually mean “K-K-K-KU-dos!!!” sung to the tune of the Chia Pet theme song.
Snake River Farms Flatiron Steak was competently prepared; grilled until the caramelized brown crust enshrouded a lurid clown-nose rare interior, the steak was then sliced into medallions. These were strewn about a plate containing shitloads of other stuff. Seriously, that steak was the Fred Sanford to the junkyard of garnish, though my indelicate metaphor doesn’t do justice to how good the garnishes were.
There was grilled Treviso radicchio, which managed to be palatable because it was wrapped in pancetta. There was also a grilled green onion. Lurking off to the side, in much the same manner as your mom at a peep show, was a puree of parsley root with black truffle jus. I’d never eaten parsley root before, but you don’t need to be Jules Verne to have an imagination fertile enough to predict that parsley root, like ANY edible root, pairs as tightly with truffles as Dave Murray pairs with Adrian Smith. Truffles and root veggie puree: a culinary twin guitar solo.
Acorn finished Iberico Pork was a special treat. Medallions of grilled Iberian pork, finally available in the USA after the FDA realized that Spanish pigs aren’t the threat to democracy we initially thought. This pork was seared medium: the rose color, with a blush of blood even (!) made me feel-- let’s just say-- less than comfortable, though it was so delicious I couldn’t help but eat the fuck out of these forbidden undercooked pig pieces: it was, for me, the culinary equivalent of the stiffy I got watching Usain Bolt.
This homoerotic pork was cut, I was told, from a specific section of the pig shoulder, analogous to the aforementioned flat iron steak, I would imagine, and served atop a chewy and nutty bed of faro, along with figs 2 ways: a grilled fig half and a gorgonzola stuffed fig, wrapped in pancetta. Don’t know why you’d include the plain grilled fig alongside the fig stuffed with gorgonzola and wrapped in pancetta: “Hey, let’s put something NOT as good next to something similar, but more awesome!”
Dessert was a chocolate truffle cake. This was so chocolatey it caused a chocoquake in my mouth when I bit into it! The strata of dense chocolate, alternating with moist chocolate cake, were tectonic with coca flavor. We are witnessing an evolution in chocolate desserts: Restaurant Zoe serves mystical cocoa scrying orbs. Café Juanita serves a truffle cake, which is as light and airy as an angel’s tits. Now Altura, which manages to put out the kind of Platonically ideal chocolate cake, the kind of cake I kept wishing for every birthday when I was a kid, yet never got. A chunk of this cake was served with some fancy fucking garnishes: there was an almond-filled cherry, the pit replaced with an amaretto cream, and a sliver of candied orange subbed in for the stem. There was the de rigeur smear of something, in this case cherry sauce. There was also a cube of pistachio brittle.
Apple huckleberry crostata had a misleading name. This was mostly my fault I guess: I thought the crostata would be innovative presentation of apples and berries on a slab of toasted bread. But that’s because I confused crostata and crostini. Crostata, it turns out, is a cobbler with a master’s degree from a liberal arts college. This was topped with a quenelle of a pine nut praline gelato. Delicious praline flavors were all there: creamy, nutty, and caramel. Unfortunately, I’m tired of ice cream being presented as a quenelle. Can’t they shape it into an eyeball shape? Or a skull? Or a dick? That might spice things up.
Altura is one of those restaurants that’s so pristine, you can’t really find fault with it. The pricing structure is liberal like Dennis Kucinich. The techniques on display are masterful. If there’s any fault to be found, it’s in the overcrowded plates with too many competing flavors. Some of the presentations, specifically the octopus salad and the flatiron steak, looked like a Chinese subway station. The place also seems rather soulless, but then again so am I, so I wouldn’t really count that as a disadvantage. Toodle-oo!
Rating: 8.5 Chinese subways out of 10
Altura is located at 617 Broadway Ave E
For reservations call 206-402-6749
So what do you do? You have two choices: either strip the recipes WAY down, like to three ingredients, but make sure that those three ingredients are the MOTHERFUCKING BEST GODDAMNED INGREDIENTS IN THE UNIVERSE. For instance, slather some delicate pristine handmade pasta with some fancy butter, such as reggiano butter, or some other kind of exotic butter made from the milk of cows that are fed only apples or some shit like that, and then top this with an obscure D.O.C Pecorino made by rustic badasses, or monks, or even better yet: Shaolin monks, which are in fact both. This is the strategy of places like Cantinetta and Spinasse. Or you can try a different approach and put a whole bunch of stuff on the plate and hope for the best. This is Altura’s approach.
I’d been trying to get into Altura for a while. Unfortunately, the only reservation options, for WEEKS, were either 5:30 or 9:45. I place the entire blame on Open Table. As recently as seven years ago I used to place reservations with impunity in this town, gleefully calling up every restaurant in town and scoring valuable tables for two at 7:30 on a Saturday.
Now, sadly, modern technology has enabled any common Aspberger’s sufferer, in a town, mind you, which is JAM FUCKING PACKED with awkward computer programmers loathe to communicate with AN ACTUAL PERSON, to cock-block people like me who are TRYING TO WORK HERE, YOU FUCKING NERDS. The horrors of technology, I suppose.
Anyway: Altura. Suffice to say we eventually did get a reservation. They’ve got an interesting pricing structure. The menu is divided, as Italian menus frequently are, into antipasti, primi, and secondi, though they aren’t labeled as such. While you can order anything a la carte, you’re better off taking advantage of a coursed meal, which is offered at Altura at a rate of $53 for 3 courses, $61 for 4 courses, $69 for 5 courses, or $132 for one metric shit-ton of courses. This sounds complicated, but don’t worry; your waiter will laboriously explain all of this to you.
We started with the Spicy Grilled Baby Octopus. Grilled tentacles were present, of course, along with lots of cucumbers: there were thin rounds of lemon cucumber, cubed English cucumber, and round balls of some other kind of cucumber. Accompanying all these cumcumbers and tentacle was what I initially thought was some variety of hummus but was, according to the menu “calabrian bean puree.” There was also a smear of basil puree and an asymmetrical splash of bright orange chili oil, which I assume was leaking from a small, red, grilled pepper.
This dish had a good amount of heat, as befits the name, but seemed unfocused. There were too many disparate elements. I get that you’re supposed to get a bite of everything together, but with SO MANY different ingredients, how much shit can you hold on your fork? At some point it turns into culinary Pick-Up Stix.
Cavatelli was a pretty disorganized plate: a compact pile of perforated pasta cylinders were clad in a thick sauce of ground duck. This was topped with a translucent jade bundle of deep fried sage leaves. It was a lot of sage, actually: it looked like a tiny green chandelier fell from the ceiling and landed onto my bowl of pasta. The cavatelli was very ducky tasting. It was like an aggro mallard suffering from roid rage teabagged the cavatelli with his cloaca. That’s not a bad thing.
Malfatti was SUPER FUCKING TASTY. Malfatti is like sloppy gnocchi: big, round, sloppy balls which are exactly what your mom craves. Three big fluffy green balls, flecked with kale and dandelion greens and bound together with ricotta, were piled atop a savory ragu of ground rabbit. The deliciousness was inexplicable. Normally I would think a pasta made primarily of ricotta and kale would be the kind of thing folk musicians would want to eat. Yet these delicious savory balls were somehow imbued with the spirit of True Tastiness, a Dickensian apparition which was not just an omen of my own terrifying pigheadishness, but also a symbol of delicious possibilities. Kudos. And when I say “kudos,” I actually mean “K-K-K-KU-dos!!!” sung to the tune of the Chia Pet theme song.
Snake River Farms Flatiron Steak was competently prepared; grilled until the caramelized brown crust enshrouded a lurid clown-nose rare interior, the steak was then sliced into medallions. These were strewn about a plate containing shitloads of other stuff. Seriously, that steak was the Fred Sanford to the junkyard of garnish, though my indelicate metaphor doesn’t do justice to how good the garnishes were.
There was grilled Treviso radicchio, which managed to be palatable because it was wrapped in pancetta. There was also a grilled green onion. Lurking off to the side, in much the same manner as your mom at a peep show, was a puree of parsley root with black truffle jus. I’d never eaten parsley root before, but you don’t need to be Jules Verne to have an imagination fertile enough to predict that parsley root, like ANY edible root, pairs as tightly with truffles as Dave Murray pairs with Adrian Smith. Truffles and root veggie puree: a culinary twin guitar solo.
Acorn finished Iberico Pork was a special treat. Medallions of grilled Iberian pork, finally available in the USA after the FDA realized that Spanish pigs aren’t the threat to democracy we initially thought. This pork was seared medium: the rose color, with a blush of blood even (!) made me feel-- let’s just say-- less than comfortable, though it was so delicious I couldn’t help but eat the fuck out of these forbidden undercooked pig pieces: it was, for me, the culinary equivalent of the stiffy I got watching Usain Bolt.
This homoerotic pork was cut, I was told, from a specific section of the pig shoulder, analogous to the aforementioned flat iron steak, I would imagine, and served atop a chewy and nutty bed of faro, along with figs 2 ways: a grilled fig half and a gorgonzola stuffed fig, wrapped in pancetta. Don’t know why you’d include the plain grilled fig alongside the fig stuffed with gorgonzola and wrapped in pancetta: “Hey, let’s put something NOT as good next to something similar, but more awesome!”
Dessert was a chocolate truffle cake. This was so chocolatey it caused a chocoquake in my mouth when I bit into it! The strata of dense chocolate, alternating with moist chocolate cake, were tectonic with coca flavor. We are witnessing an evolution in chocolate desserts: Restaurant Zoe serves mystical cocoa scrying orbs. Café Juanita serves a truffle cake, which is as light and airy as an angel’s tits. Now Altura, which manages to put out the kind of Platonically ideal chocolate cake, the kind of cake I kept wishing for every birthday when I was a kid, yet never got. A chunk of this cake was served with some fancy fucking garnishes: there was an almond-filled cherry, the pit replaced with an amaretto cream, and a sliver of candied orange subbed in for the stem. There was the de rigeur smear of something, in this case cherry sauce. There was also a cube of pistachio brittle.
Apple huckleberry crostata had a misleading name. This was mostly my fault I guess: I thought the crostata would be innovative presentation of apples and berries on a slab of toasted bread. But that’s because I confused crostata and crostini. Crostata, it turns out, is a cobbler with a master’s degree from a liberal arts college. This was topped with a quenelle of a pine nut praline gelato. Delicious praline flavors were all there: creamy, nutty, and caramel. Unfortunately, I’m tired of ice cream being presented as a quenelle. Can’t they shape it into an eyeball shape? Or a skull? Or a dick? That might spice things up.
Altura is one of those restaurants that’s so pristine, you can’t really find fault with it. The pricing structure is liberal like Dennis Kucinich. The techniques on display are masterful. If there’s any fault to be found, it’s in the overcrowded plates with too many competing flavors. Some of the presentations, specifically the octopus salad and the flatiron steak, looked like a Chinese subway station. The place also seems rather soulless, but then again so am I, so I wouldn’t really count that as a disadvantage. Toodle-oo!
Rating: 8.5 Chinese subways out of 10
Altura is located at 617 Broadway Ave E
For reservations call 206-402-6749
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Modernist Jello Shots
I got an email from Seattle Weekly editor Mike Seely asking if I wanted to try the World’s Most Potent Jello Shot. I’ve somehow gained a reputation as a Jello shot expert, so of course I agreed. But I agreed to this less out of a scholarly curiosity about all things Jello, and more out of a desire to get totally fucking shitfaced.
We enlisted Scott Heimendinger, AKA Seattle Food Geek, a well-known local blogger and Voracious contributor, to engineer these futuristic shots. Scott is also business development manager for Modernist Cuisine, which means he has access to the Modernist Cuisine kitchen, and so he has strange chemicals and wacky scientific tools at his disposal. Yes, even a centrifuge. And probably a speculum.
I was skeptical of these newfangled Jello shots. Because alcohol interferes with the polymerization of gelatin, the strongest Jello shot that can possibly be made will contain at most 30% alcohol by volume, or 60 proof. However, these new scientific Jello shots aren’t made from gelatin. Rather, Scott explained that they contain a cocktail of exotic gelling agents: agar agar and gellan. Agar agar is derived from seaweed and is well known in asian cuisine as, among other things, the gelling agent for the squicky black cubes found in the bottom of a can of Grass Jelly Drink.
Gellan is a type of gum extracted from Dr. Scholl’s Gel Insoles. Neither agar agar nor gellan seemed particularly delicious to me, but then again, the traditionally-used gelling agent, gelatin, comes from hooves: the take home message is that jiggly desserts of all kind are inherently pretty fucking gross.
So last week we met at West Seattle’s Tug Tavern, well known locally as an early adopter of jello shots. This was going to be an endurance test: I had to eat as many of these super strong shots as possible. As a metric of my drunkenness, I would have to read, out loud, several difficult literary passages from You Can’t Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe. AND I would have to do this on film. Which is why I dressed as the Unabomber.
Scott brought out a big platter of his ultra-strong shots, arranged on the plate in a colorful constellation of red, green, and blue. The camera started to roll; I started to eat. To say that these shots were nasty is an understatement: they were grainy and reeked with the astringent chemical bouquet of cheap vodka. Scott admitted that there was no sugar in the shots; in a quest to make the shots as STRONG AS POSSIBLE, sugar had been jettisoned. The brightly hued shots were tinted with food coloring, since it looks better on camera that way. What a cock tease.
I gulped down two or three before I started gagging. It wasn’t the alcohol that was repulsing me. On the contrary, it would’ve been no problem to knock back 14 thimblefuls of rotgut. But the texture was just too much: the shots crumbled apart on the tongue, shearing apart into granular chunks which weren’t exactly the easiest to swallow. If you’ve ever worked with petri dishes, you’ll recognize this gross texture instantly, since agar agar is a common bacterial growth medium. It tasted like someone spilled a bottle of Monarch onto a silica gel packet. There’s a reason the outside of those little packs always say “DO NOT EAT.” The bartender brought me a big canister of sugar, which I unceremonious dumped all over the shots. This didn’t improve the taste; on the contrary, the sugar granules added an additional, sandy layer of misery: sadness brulee.
After a couple shots I picked up the Thomas Wolfe book and gave a reading. At first I was psyched: I thought we were talking about TOM Wolfe and, having read “The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” I remembered these books as being relatively quick reads. Unfortunately Tom Wolfe is NOT, as Wikipedia’s disambiguation page politely informed me, the same guy as THOMAS Wolfe, a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s who died in the 1940’s.
Wolfe’s unwieldy prose is purple like Barney the Dinosaur, and possibly just as gay. Awkward, paragraph long phrases read like Roman oratory, and are peppered with completely retarded passages such as "'Will you make me one of your sauces that is subtle, searching, and hushed?’” Hanna Raskin thought this line totally laughable; it’s only a matter of time before this quote ends up in one of her reviews, I’m sure. Note to Hanna: your best chance of finding a subtle, searching, hushed sauce is probably at Lark.
Fourteen shots later, I was drunk, for sure, but not shitfaced. I’d eaten all of the modernist jello shots. My tastebuds were insulted, but for the most part the worst part of the evening was the old lady who grabbed my nipples. I wasn’t too drunk to read, though I was definitely to the stage of inebriation where I was starting to pontificate. Something tells me your BAC has to be pretty fucking high for you to forget how to read.
Are the modernist jello shots a panacea? Nope. They taste like ass. One of my main criticisms of molecular gastronomy is the quaint, almost Utilitarian idea that everything must be “improved.” Scott’s jello shots were about 40% ABV. A standard jello shot is usually around 20% at most. The nasty texture wasn’t worth the attempt to shoehorn the extra 20% alcohol into these things. If I want to get drunk that badly, I’ll have a Wild Turkey, thanks.
If you want to watch the video, it's visible here. Thanks to Laura Onstot for her fine camera work.
Rating: 2 turkeys out of 10
We enlisted Scott Heimendinger, AKA Seattle Food Geek, a well-known local blogger and Voracious contributor, to engineer these futuristic shots. Scott is also business development manager for Modernist Cuisine, which means he has access to the Modernist Cuisine kitchen, and so he has strange chemicals and wacky scientific tools at his disposal. Yes, even a centrifuge. And probably a speculum.
I was skeptical of these newfangled Jello shots. Because alcohol interferes with the polymerization of gelatin, the strongest Jello shot that can possibly be made will contain at most 30% alcohol by volume, or 60 proof. However, these new scientific Jello shots aren’t made from gelatin. Rather, Scott explained that they contain a cocktail of exotic gelling agents: agar agar and gellan. Agar agar is derived from seaweed and is well known in asian cuisine as, among other things, the gelling agent for the squicky black cubes found in the bottom of a can of Grass Jelly Drink.
Gellan is a type of gum extracted from Dr. Scholl’s Gel Insoles. Neither agar agar nor gellan seemed particularly delicious to me, but then again, the traditionally-used gelling agent, gelatin, comes from hooves: the take home message is that jiggly desserts of all kind are inherently pretty fucking gross.
So last week we met at West Seattle’s Tug Tavern, well known locally as an early adopter of jello shots. This was going to be an endurance test: I had to eat as many of these super strong shots as possible. As a metric of my drunkenness, I would have to read, out loud, several difficult literary passages from You Can’t Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe. AND I would have to do this on film. Which is why I dressed as the Unabomber.
Scott brought out a big platter of his ultra-strong shots, arranged on the plate in a colorful constellation of red, green, and blue. The camera started to roll; I started to eat. To say that these shots were nasty is an understatement: they were grainy and reeked with the astringent chemical bouquet of cheap vodka. Scott admitted that there was no sugar in the shots; in a quest to make the shots as STRONG AS POSSIBLE, sugar had been jettisoned. The brightly hued shots were tinted with food coloring, since it looks better on camera that way. What a cock tease.
I gulped down two or three before I started gagging. It wasn’t the alcohol that was repulsing me. On the contrary, it would’ve been no problem to knock back 14 thimblefuls of rotgut. But the texture was just too much: the shots crumbled apart on the tongue, shearing apart into granular chunks which weren’t exactly the easiest to swallow. If you’ve ever worked with petri dishes, you’ll recognize this gross texture instantly, since agar agar is a common bacterial growth medium. It tasted like someone spilled a bottle of Monarch onto a silica gel packet. There’s a reason the outside of those little packs always say “DO NOT EAT.” The bartender brought me a big canister of sugar, which I unceremonious dumped all over the shots. This didn’t improve the taste; on the contrary, the sugar granules added an additional, sandy layer of misery: sadness brulee.
After a couple shots I picked up the Thomas Wolfe book and gave a reading. At first I was psyched: I thought we were talking about TOM Wolfe and, having read “The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” I remembered these books as being relatively quick reads. Unfortunately Tom Wolfe is NOT, as Wikipedia’s disambiguation page politely informed me, the same guy as THOMAS Wolfe, a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s who died in the 1940’s.
Wolfe’s unwieldy prose is purple like Barney the Dinosaur, and possibly just as gay. Awkward, paragraph long phrases read like Roman oratory, and are peppered with completely retarded passages such as "'Will you make me one of your sauces that is subtle, searching, and hushed?’” Hanna Raskin thought this line totally laughable; it’s only a matter of time before this quote ends up in one of her reviews, I’m sure. Note to Hanna: your best chance of finding a subtle, searching, hushed sauce is probably at Lark.
Fourteen shots later, I was drunk, for sure, but not shitfaced. I’d eaten all of the modernist jello shots. My tastebuds were insulted, but for the most part the worst part of the evening was the old lady who grabbed my nipples. I wasn’t too drunk to read, though I was definitely to the stage of inebriation where I was starting to pontificate. Something tells me your BAC has to be pretty fucking high for you to forget how to read.
Are the modernist jello shots a panacea? Nope. They taste like ass. One of my main criticisms of molecular gastronomy is the quaint, almost Utilitarian idea that everything must be “improved.” Scott’s jello shots were about 40% ABV. A standard jello shot is usually around 20% at most. The nasty texture wasn’t worth the attempt to shoehorn the extra 20% alcohol into these things. If I want to get drunk that badly, I’ll have a Wild Turkey, thanks.
If you want to watch the video, it's visible here. Thanks to Laura Onstot for her fine camera work.
Rating: 2 turkeys out of 10
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Cafe Juanita
Café Juanita is a legendary FANCY RESTAURANT in Kirkland, Washington. Totally fucking legendary, much like the legendary philosopher-king Prince Meatyass, who successfully united all the different warring meat products into one united carnivorous nation, not unlike a Voltron made of tasty cold cuts. For years, I’ve been intrigued by the legendary fanciness of Café Juanita, and so I was super excited at the prospect of dining there. More excited, even, than the time I was offered the opportunity to drink rum from a skeleton hand. Note: it was a pirate hand, that’s why it was so badass. That very skeletal hand, which once grasped a saber and, perhaps, some gold doubloons, was offering me a high-quality dark rum, so how could I refuse? You don’t refuse a skeleton hand’s offer of rum, and you don’t refuse an invitation to Café Juanita. So off we went.
We started with veal sweetbreads in crepinette ($18). Many people complain that the word “sweetbreads” is a gross example of false advertising, but I would argue that “crepinette” is worse. That’s because if you ask for a crepinette, expecting a tiny crepe, you’ll be in for quite a shock. When you order “sweetbreads in crepinette,” you don’t get a miniature French pancake wrapped around some variety of sugary rolls. In fact, you get quite the opposite: a calf’s thymus gland, tied up in a web of the fat stripped from a pig’s guts.
Luckily for me, the prospect of such a dish is in fact the opposite of disgusting: I generally enjoy sweetbreads, so I was actually quite excited. The thyroid was perfectly cooked, tender, and very juicy. Unfortunately, it was too salty. It was even saltier when you got a bite of it with one of the fried capers which garnished this dish. Perhaps more disappointing than the saltiness was the fact that, halfway through the crepinette, I got a big sticky mouthful of caul fat. Caul fat is what you stretch over your face when you rob a food bank, so that no one can discern your idenitity. This is supposed to completely melt when the crepinette is pan roasted. Sadly, it doesn’t melt in your mouth. I found this out the hard way.
Next up was the baby lettuce salad with goat cheese crema and Piments D’Argile ($10). This was a perfect salad, and I say that as someone who believes that an actual, Platonically perfect salad can’t possibly exist. Fresh baby lettuce is beautiful: supple and coltish and refreshing, baby lettuce is the Women’s Olympic Beach Volleyball team of salad greens. Café Juanita’s salad featured a mélange of butter lettuce and red leaf, served atop a relaxing pool of a smooth goat cheese dressing, with just enough twang to it to challenge the sunny disposition of the bikini-clad baby lettuces.
Pasta dishes were also quite tasty: goat cheese gnocchi with cherry tomatoes and fava beans ($18) was light on its feet, and far more refreshing than a pasta dish has any right to be. Airy gnocchi nuggets polka-dotted the plate, interspersed here and there with crimson hemispheres of cherry tomato and, of course, the aforementioned fava beans. My only complaint here was the sauce: I realize that they were trying to keep things light, but the sauce came off watered-down, like cafeteria Kool-Aid.
The Maltagliatti with Jones Family Pork Sugo, Honey Ricotta, and Black Pepper ($16) was the dark and stormy yin to the gnocchi’s watery yang. It was also way tastier than your mom’s yin yang. Squares of pasta were fancied up with zig-zaggy edges, as though snipped by pinking shears. These were delicate to the bite but somehow stood up to the hearty bolognese sauce in which this dish was doused. Atop the pile of pasta were three silky globules of the aforementioned honey ricotta. When mixed into the sauce, the ricotta brightened things up considerably, in much the same way as a crack rock brightens up your mom.
I crowd-sourced our choice of entrée by asking everyone on Twitter for a menu recommendation. People overwhelmingly recommended the rabbit, so in the true democratic spirit I ordered the Rabbit Braised in Arneis with Chickpea Gnocchi, Porcini, and Housemade Pancetta ($36). This dish was a showcase of technique, a veritable culinary concept car. A butterflied rabbit leg was stuffed with crumbly dark-brown forcemeat made, I would presume, with the eponymous porcinis. The meat was tender and flavorful and sported more umami than an MSG factory. Alongside this was served rabbit a second way: a delicious and mild-mannered rabbit loin, grilled and sliced into medallions. With the rabbit came a small, golden, starchy cube which seemed like it would be a polenta cake but which was probably the chickpea gnocchi. Rounding out this stately spread was a small side salad of arugula, laced through with batons of housemade pancetta. The whole thing swam in a slick pool of a very savory beige sauce. This sauce was good: lighter than it had any business being, with a glimmering peppery depth of flavor.
We paired the rabbit with an a la carte contorno of roasted carrots ($11) which I enjoyed more than the rabbit. Eleven bucks might seem like a lot for a plate of carrots, but these were magical like Lucky Charms: they sliced the carrots lengthwise, glazed them, and then roasted the ever living fuck out of them until they were charred in spots. The carrot flavor was a million fathoms deep. These carrots were utterly terrific, yet were also a melancholic reminder that, on the other side of the six 89-degree days we get here in Seattle, autumn drearily lurks.
We finished things off with a Chocolate Truffle Tortino ($11). Though I would have been more than satisfied to end the meal with another order of roasted carrots, the tortino was pretty tasty. In fact, as far as desserts go, this was surprisingly un-enraging! A small cylindrical truffle was topped with a couple blackberries and served with a quenelle of chocolate mint strachiatella and a tuile. The truffle managed to taste like rich cocoa, without resorting to the kind of cheap, over-the-top cloying chocolate flavor that fans of "Fifty Shades of Grey" inevitably enjoy instead of, you know, sex. The tart berries and the strachiatella were refreshing counterpoints. The most puzzling aspect of this dish was the tuile, which tasted suspiciously like Froot Loops.
Café Juanita is pretty solid. The technique is impeccable, and the flavor pairings are without reproach. That having been said, the crepinette was too salty and caul-fatty for a restaurant of this caliber. And I was less than enthralled with the ricotta gnocchi. Plus it’s in Kirkland. Still, if someone else is paying, and if the mystical skeleton hand hasn’t knocked on your door with a gift of fine liquor, I insist you go.
Rating: 7 phalanges out of 10
Café Juanita is located at 9702 NE 129th Place in Kirkland
For reservations call 425-823-1505
http://cafejuanita.com/index.php
We started with veal sweetbreads in crepinette ($18). Many people complain that the word “sweetbreads” is a gross example of false advertising, but I would argue that “crepinette” is worse. That’s because if you ask for a crepinette, expecting a tiny crepe, you’ll be in for quite a shock. When you order “sweetbreads in crepinette,” you don’t get a miniature French pancake wrapped around some variety of sugary rolls. In fact, you get quite the opposite: a calf’s thymus gland, tied up in a web of the fat stripped from a pig’s guts.
Luckily for me, the prospect of such a dish is in fact the opposite of disgusting: I generally enjoy sweetbreads, so I was actually quite excited. The thyroid was perfectly cooked, tender, and very juicy. Unfortunately, it was too salty. It was even saltier when you got a bite of it with one of the fried capers which garnished this dish. Perhaps more disappointing than the saltiness was the fact that, halfway through the crepinette, I got a big sticky mouthful of caul fat. Caul fat is what you stretch over your face when you rob a food bank, so that no one can discern your idenitity. This is supposed to completely melt when the crepinette is pan roasted. Sadly, it doesn’t melt in your mouth. I found this out the hard way.
Next up was the baby lettuce salad with goat cheese crema and Piments D’Argile ($10). This was a perfect salad, and I say that as someone who believes that an actual, Platonically perfect salad can’t possibly exist. Fresh baby lettuce is beautiful: supple and coltish and refreshing, baby lettuce is the Women’s Olympic Beach Volleyball team of salad greens. Café Juanita’s salad featured a mélange of butter lettuce and red leaf, served atop a relaxing pool of a smooth goat cheese dressing, with just enough twang to it to challenge the sunny disposition of the bikini-clad baby lettuces.
Pasta dishes were also quite tasty: goat cheese gnocchi with cherry tomatoes and fava beans ($18) was light on its feet, and far more refreshing than a pasta dish has any right to be. Airy gnocchi nuggets polka-dotted the plate, interspersed here and there with crimson hemispheres of cherry tomato and, of course, the aforementioned fava beans. My only complaint here was the sauce: I realize that they were trying to keep things light, but the sauce came off watered-down, like cafeteria Kool-Aid.
The Maltagliatti with Jones Family Pork Sugo, Honey Ricotta, and Black Pepper ($16) was the dark and stormy yin to the gnocchi’s watery yang. It was also way tastier than your mom’s yin yang. Squares of pasta were fancied up with zig-zaggy edges, as though snipped by pinking shears. These were delicate to the bite but somehow stood up to the hearty bolognese sauce in which this dish was doused. Atop the pile of pasta were three silky globules of the aforementioned honey ricotta. When mixed into the sauce, the ricotta brightened things up considerably, in much the same way as a crack rock brightens up your mom.
I crowd-sourced our choice of entrée by asking everyone on Twitter for a menu recommendation. People overwhelmingly recommended the rabbit, so in the true democratic spirit I ordered the Rabbit Braised in Arneis with Chickpea Gnocchi, Porcini, and Housemade Pancetta ($36). This dish was a showcase of technique, a veritable culinary concept car. A butterflied rabbit leg was stuffed with crumbly dark-brown forcemeat made, I would presume, with the eponymous porcinis. The meat was tender and flavorful and sported more umami than an MSG factory. Alongside this was served rabbit a second way: a delicious and mild-mannered rabbit loin, grilled and sliced into medallions. With the rabbit came a small, golden, starchy cube which seemed like it would be a polenta cake but which was probably the chickpea gnocchi. Rounding out this stately spread was a small side salad of arugula, laced through with batons of housemade pancetta. The whole thing swam in a slick pool of a very savory beige sauce. This sauce was good: lighter than it had any business being, with a glimmering peppery depth of flavor.
We paired the rabbit with an a la carte contorno of roasted carrots ($11) which I enjoyed more than the rabbit. Eleven bucks might seem like a lot for a plate of carrots, but these were magical like Lucky Charms: they sliced the carrots lengthwise, glazed them, and then roasted the ever living fuck out of them until they were charred in spots. The carrot flavor was a million fathoms deep. These carrots were utterly terrific, yet were also a melancholic reminder that, on the other side of the six 89-degree days we get here in Seattle, autumn drearily lurks.
We finished things off with a Chocolate Truffle Tortino ($11). Though I would have been more than satisfied to end the meal with another order of roasted carrots, the tortino was pretty tasty. In fact, as far as desserts go, this was surprisingly un-enraging! A small cylindrical truffle was topped with a couple blackberries and served with a quenelle of chocolate mint strachiatella and a tuile. The truffle managed to taste like rich cocoa, without resorting to the kind of cheap, over-the-top cloying chocolate flavor that fans of "Fifty Shades of Grey" inevitably enjoy instead of, you know, sex. The tart berries and the strachiatella were refreshing counterpoints. The most puzzling aspect of this dish was the tuile, which tasted suspiciously like Froot Loops.
Café Juanita is pretty solid. The technique is impeccable, and the flavor pairings are without reproach. That having been said, the crepinette was too salty and caul-fatty for a restaurant of this caliber. And I was less than enthralled with the ricotta gnocchi. Plus it’s in Kirkland. Still, if someone else is paying, and if the mystical skeleton hand hasn’t knocked on your door with a gift of fine liquor, I insist you go.
Rating: 7 phalanges out of 10
Café Juanita is located at 9702 NE 129th Place in Kirkland
For reservations call 425-823-1505
http://cafejuanita.com/index.php
Monday, July 09, 2012
Restaurant Zoe
I first wrote about Restaurant Zoe years ago when it was in its old location, now occupied by Coterie Room. The old Zoe was one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle. When I found out that its new incarnation was opening on Capitol Hill, I got as excited to try it as your mom gets at the prospect of trying a new variety of crystal meth.
Popovers w/ béarnaise were pretty good. For $6 we got two giant muffin-ass popovers. Each of these was clad in a stately bronze crust, with a steamy, yet strangely empty interior. Tan and puffy outside, steamy and hollow inside: these Jersey Shore popovers came with a ramekin of creamy béarnaise which was rich and imbued with a jolt of tarragon.
Ricotta gnudi ($10) were presented interestingly enough: three perfectly round balls of gnudi were clustered on the plate, along with a couple similarly spherical lamb meatballs, so that the plate looked like a savory bumper pool table. The gnudi were delicate, seemingly held together only by atmospheric pressure, and the meatballs were so tender, they were like my own balls after being kicked. A few fried sage leaves and a shallow puddle of citrus vinaigrette on the bottom of the plate finished it off.
Wild Boar Bolognese ($12) showcased a pretty standard Bolognese sauce, with little chunks of rich boar meat clinging bravely to the pasta. The pasta in question was an arugula pappardelle. It was good enough, but maybe a bit too leathery. The biggest outrage was the color: I for one have never been able to stomach the green pasta with red sauce bullshit. It looks too Christmas-y. It might taste fine, but from a graphic design standpoint, it stinks.
An order of steak tartare ($12) was served in a pretty big pile of minced beef with all the usuals: caper, onion, and egg, which in this case was a quail egg, smeared almost as an afterthought off to one side of the plate. This was accompanied by a big pile of housemade potato chips. These were VERY TINY potato chips, I might add, obviously made from either fingerlings, or some variety of midget leprechaun potatoes. There was also a grilled scallion puree, uncomfortably granular, lurking beneath the mound of tartare. The waitress assured us this puree would lend a certain lingering smokiness to the tartare. While I appreciate her effort in the description, come ON dude: it wasn’t THAT smoky.
Grilled asparagus ($12) was a fucking slam dunk. Having said that, grilled asparagus with an egg on top is one of those flavor combinations that seems to fit as seamlessly together as a horse fits into your mom, so I suppose it’s more like a slam dunk when the hoop is like 4 feet off the ground. The asparagus were topped with a smoked duck egg: big and wobbly, this was soft boiled, then smoked until the white was stained a streaky burnt umber. When cut into, a lurid gush of orange yolk spilled all over the asparagus stationed below. There were also a couple baby artichokes, halved lengthwise and grilled. Frequently baby artichokes piss me off because they can be leathery and unchewable and petulant: more like adolescent artichokes. But these baby artichokes were luckily not very long in the tooth.v Short ribs ($32) were pretty fucking rustic. We got two cubes of short rib. These tender squares of meat so luscious and yielding, you could probably blow them off the bone if you breathed on it too hard. Underneath was a lumpy green mixture of braised nettles and oats. On paper it would seem like this would taste terrible, but the chewy oats and fresh tart nettle flavor was a good counterpoint to the hazy fattiness of the ribs.
Dessert was very interesting. A Chocolate Orb was $8 and yes, it was listed on the menu as “Chocolate Orb.” This candy-coated ball of mystery was indeed a perfect sphere which came to the table looking like some kind of magical globe. In fact, this chocolate orb was like the cocoa-flavored scrying glass with which the Chocolate Wizard (played by Andre 3000) foretells the doom of his arch nemesis Count Chocula. The orb actually resembled a very round Three Musketeers Bar, with a smooth shiny carapace of tempered chocolate on the outside, and a foamy center of mousse. Served along with it was a compact quenelle of hazelnut ice cream and a smear of kumquat marmalade. Honestly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I write the word “kumquat.” But the jam made from the only fruit that sounds like your mom’s typical Saturday night was tasty, with a beguiling combination of sweet and bitter that paired well with the chocolate.
Panna cotta ($8): this isn’t what you might think. Slabs of quivering, milky cream were alternately stacked, pagoda-style, with thin sweet tuiles. Dotting the roof of this Leaning Tower of Diabetes was a gloopy orange pile of spherified apricot jam, which while admittedly tart and delicious, was also uncomfortably similar to salmon roe. This was a pretty high-tech dessert and I expected it to come with several HDMI ports.
Before I wrap this up, let’s recap dinner: popovers. Gnudi with meatballs. Pappardelle Bolognese. Steak Tartare. Braised short ribs. All of these were fairly standard recipes, and confidently prepared. But dessert was a strange departure from the rest of the menu’s tone. Either the desserts were too technical for dinner, or dinner was too rustic for dessert. They were just too fucking wacky, and way too technical. It was as if some future pastry chef of Restaurant Zoe, in this high-tech futuristic land, built a dessert time machine and sent some examples of his craft back in time to show us present-day fools the error of our ways. “Flourless chocolate torte? Crème brulee? Fuck that,” said the futuristic pastry chef. “As soon as I change out of this silver jumpsuit I’m going to send a CHOCOLATE ORB back in time to blow those cavemen’s minds!”
Rating: 8 orbs out of 10
Restaurant Zoe is located at 1318 East Union St.
For reservations call 206-256-2060
PS The Chocolate Orb had nanobots impregnated into the shell which allow this orb to not only taste very chocolatey, but the orb can also store several gigabytes of MP3’s.
Popovers w/ béarnaise were pretty good. For $6 we got two giant muffin-ass popovers. Each of these was clad in a stately bronze crust, with a steamy, yet strangely empty interior. Tan and puffy outside, steamy and hollow inside: these Jersey Shore popovers came with a ramekin of creamy béarnaise which was rich and imbued with a jolt of tarragon.
Ricotta gnudi ($10) were presented interestingly enough: three perfectly round balls of gnudi were clustered on the plate, along with a couple similarly spherical lamb meatballs, so that the plate looked like a savory bumper pool table. The gnudi were delicate, seemingly held together only by atmospheric pressure, and the meatballs were so tender, they were like my own balls after being kicked. A few fried sage leaves and a shallow puddle of citrus vinaigrette on the bottom of the plate finished it off.
Wild Boar Bolognese ($12) showcased a pretty standard Bolognese sauce, with little chunks of rich boar meat clinging bravely to the pasta. The pasta in question was an arugula pappardelle. It was good enough, but maybe a bit too leathery. The biggest outrage was the color: I for one have never been able to stomach the green pasta with red sauce bullshit. It looks too Christmas-y. It might taste fine, but from a graphic design standpoint, it stinks.
An order of steak tartare ($12) was served in a pretty big pile of minced beef with all the usuals: caper, onion, and egg, which in this case was a quail egg, smeared almost as an afterthought off to one side of the plate. This was accompanied by a big pile of housemade potato chips. These were VERY TINY potato chips, I might add, obviously made from either fingerlings, or some variety of midget leprechaun potatoes. There was also a grilled scallion puree, uncomfortably granular, lurking beneath the mound of tartare. The waitress assured us this puree would lend a certain lingering smokiness to the tartare. While I appreciate her effort in the description, come ON dude: it wasn’t THAT smoky.
Grilled asparagus ($12) was a fucking slam dunk. Having said that, grilled asparagus with an egg on top is one of those flavor combinations that seems to fit as seamlessly together as a horse fits into your mom, so I suppose it’s more like a slam dunk when the hoop is like 4 feet off the ground. The asparagus were topped with a smoked duck egg: big and wobbly, this was soft boiled, then smoked until the white was stained a streaky burnt umber. When cut into, a lurid gush of orange yolk spilled all over the asparagus stationed below. There were also a couple baby artichokes, halved lengthwise and grilled. Frequently baby artichokes piss me off because they can be leathery and unchewable and petulant: more like adolescent artichokes. But these baby artichokes were luckily not very long in the tooth.v Short ribs ($32) were pretty fucking rustic. We got two cubes of short rib. These tender squares of meat so luscious and yielding, you could probably blow them off the bone if you breathed on it too hard. Underneath was a lumpy green mixture of braised nettles and oats. On paper it would seem like this would taste terrible, but the chewy oats and fresh tart nettle flavor was a good counterpoint to the hazy fattiness of the ribs.
Dessert was very interesting. A Chocolate Orb was $8 and yes, it was listed on the menu as “Chocolate Orb.” This candy-coated ball of mystery was indeed a perfect sphere which came to the table looking like some kind of magical globe. In fact, this chocolate orb was like the cocoa-flavored scrying glass with which the Chocolate Wizard (played by Andre 3000) foretells the doom of his arch nemesis Count Chocula. The orb actually resembled a very round Three Musketeers Bar, with a smooth shiny carapace of tempered chocolate on the outside, and a foamy center of mousse. Served along with it was a compact quenelle of hazelnut ice cream and a smear of kumquat marmalade. Honestly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I write the word “kumquat.” But the jam made from the only fruit that sounds like your mom’s typical Saturday night was tasty, with a beguiling combination of sweet and bitter that paired well with the chocolate.
Panna cotta ($8): this isn’t what you might think. Slabs of quivering, milky cream were alternately stacked, pagoda-style, with thin sweet tuiles. Dotting the roof of this Leaning Tower of Diabetes was a gloopy orange pile of spherified apricot jam, which while admittedly tart and delicious, was also uncomfortably similar to salmon roe. This was a pretty high-tech dessert and I expected it to come with several HDMI ports.
Before I wrap this up, let’s recap dinner: popovers. Gnudi with meatballs. Pappardelle Bolognese. Steak Tartare. Braised short ribs. All of these were fairly standard recipes, and confidently prepared. But dessert was a strange departure from the rest of the menu’s tone. Either the desserts were too technical for dinner, or dinner was too rustic for dessert. They were just too fucking wacky, and way too technical. It was as if some future pastry chef of Restaurant Zoe, in this high-tech futuristic land, built a dessert time machine and sent some examples of his craft back in time to show us present-day fools the error of our ways. “Flourless chocolate torte? Crème brulee? Fuck that,” said the futuristic pastry chef. “As soon as I change out of this silver jumpsuit I’m going to send a CHOCOLATE ORB back in time to blow those cavemen’s minds!”
Rating: 8 orbs out of 10
Restaurant Zoe is located at 1318 East Union St.
For reservations call 206-256-2060
PS The Chocolate Orb had nanobots impregnated into the shell which allow this orb to not only taste very chocolatey, but the orb can also store several gigabytes of MP3’s.
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