/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>9597237
The first dish of the night seemed to be a sequined branch on an inclined black tortilla. The tortilla was a clay plate made, like many of the serving pieces, by a local sculptor named Robert Boldz. The branch was a water spinach stem brushed with turkey emulsion and bedazzled with little yellow pike eggs, tiny finger-lime orbs, pink and purple flowers the size of shirt-collar buttons, and whatnot. I like salads flavored with poultry juices, and I liked this.

Next came what I thought of as A Wheel Inside a Wheel, a wide looping belt of kelp stuck with blots of lovage sauce to the inside of a black ceramic hoop. There was a bloop of whipped honey inside the hoop, too. I stared, looking for a way in, until a server said, “You can think of it as chips and dip.” Oh, of course.

Some courses were almost inviting. Others seemed determined not to be eaten at all, like the C-curve of black wafer pressed into a C-curve of black ceramic. It wasn’t at all clear which part was supposed to go in my mouth. I gambled on the wafer, which was a crumbly savory cookie made from black currants and dried onions and brushed with black currant jam.

It went on from there, the portions growing slightly more substantial. Nothing tasted as weird as it looked. For this I was grateful. Nearly every dish tasted good, in one way or another, although more than one juxtaposed something unquestionably delicious with other things that turned up empty-handed to the flavor party: wonderful lobster in a bittersweet sauce of malted barley syrup and butter with a dull white spill of tapioca; exceptional brined scallop, sauced with yuzu and a tea made from Douglas fir tips, with unexciting ovals of white asparagus standing up like marble headstones in a cemetery.