When Life Deals You Lemons, Make Foie Gras
So it’s been some time since my last food entry, but it’s been an eventful month. I’ve found myself in the bowels of Austin, the lower intestine of Las Vegas, and rarely in the comfort of my own home. In the meantime, I’ve lost three year’s worth of music due to a hard drive malfunction and I’m now really, really engaged, ring and all.
That said, I’m going to lay down all my best finds over the last few weeks and hope it all makes sense in the morning:
Caveat: all the best food finds I had in Vegas are due to the extreme kindness of Chef Brian Howard of Bouchon (Thomas Keller’s Vegas venture, he’s the only American to hold two joints in this great country that both wield three Michelin stars simultaneously), who I met by chance at B&B Ristorante while I was eating and getting drunk at the bar with some co-workers.
He must have thought I was alright enough, or at least thought I was serious enough about finding something special, he gave me some earnest recommendations: the grilled octopus and the beef cheek ravioli. Both of which were excellent. The grilled octopus was unlike any octopus I’d ever had, not even slightly rubbery (going against everything I’ve ever known about octopus, this was fresh as hell, which was surprising to me coming from a coastal city to a gambling oasis, I was expecting the usual buffet fare), a bit crusty and wonderfully seasoned on the outside. With my nicotine-tinged palate, I’d have to say this was some sort of pseudo-creole seasoning, it had this nice paprika-thyme based redness. The best thing about the dish was the simplicity of the fresh main ingredient and the nice supporting cast of fresh seasoning. This isn’t the powdered shit in your mom’s kitchen, someone actually tasted this shit and made sure it was fresh and good enough for the leading actor, our greco-octo friend.
The beef cheek ravioli almost tasted like organ meat, it was so rich and flavorful. The ravioli pasta was perfectly al dente with a nice, hard cheese melting into it, probably a good stinky parmesan. Not that powdered shit I’m used to, this was nice and oily, hard and cold, beautifully bitter against the savory innards of the ravioli. Just to add here, it was me and two co-workers at the bar getting blistered on the cheapest wine we could get away with ordering in such a place, the other dishes we were passing around were the most retardedly tender lamb chops I’d ever tasted (I gnawed the bones and felt as if I was going to crawl under the porch like a dog ready to die).
The last was a dish I thought was going to be predictable and stupid, something called a “lobster spaghetti”. The only lobster I’d ever had was at Red Lobster twice, once as a drinking grown-up, once as a tender teen, both times I thought, “why am I paying for the pleasure of tasting something that has the texture of a condom that tastes like butter and garlic?” I mean, I love buttah and garlic, but geez… anyway, this was the first time I’d ever tasted capital L Lobster, and it was transcendent. The other wonderful dish was brussel sprouts cooked in an in-house pancetta. Here’s a tip: any vegetable you hated as a child, roast it, toss it in some sort of fatty pork meat (pancetta, lardons, prosciutto, et. al.), and then come see me, see if you don’t like it. Seriously, you don’t love kale? Throw some bacon on that bitch, G.
So I mentioned earlier that I was fortunate enough to meet Chef Brian, and he made my trip to Vegas by personally arranging a night at Bouchon for me and my lady. Here’s a layout of our night’s offerings (sorry Chef if I bastardize them with my crappy descriptions), with descriptions to follow:
1.) Freshly toasted pistachios with a crusty loaf of bread (you might say cibatta or “artisan” bread if you were to bastardize the form, my girl aptly called it “scorpion bread”). In any case, it was perfectly crusty, extraordinarily airy, absolutely popping with air bubbles upon breaking each loaf, it was a waiter’s worst nightmare, whose job it is to crust the workmanlike butcher’s paper tablecloth every time he sees a fleck of crust.
2.) Cold, COLD! moules on ice, some sort of smaller, more delicate variety than I’m used to in H-town. Served with a delicate dijon mustard, it was the kind of taste that you never wanted to swallow, it was beautifully subtle and exquisite. The transition from the bread and fatty euro butter to the mussles, good Lord. Wonderful. Put me on life support and float me down the water log ride in Euro Disney and call it done.
3.) Butternut Squash soup, with julienned apple (gala?) and chopped chive garnish. Usually, something like squash soup in those shit hippy joints either have the consistency of baby food or stringy, undercooked sea-debris. I felt weird getting all fanboy about the chives, but they really tasted more chive-y than any I’d ever had before. The perfectly executed vegetable stock, I believe was the source of this texture, and I’m sneakily suspicious that there was some chicken stock in this mixture, but I think I’m wrong because these mothers are such brilliant, purist perfectionists, they can even pull off a pure veggie dish without plying a guy like me with a marrow-based stock.
4.) Salad Maraichere(?) with blood orange, some delicate form of mandarin orange, and duck foie gras. I’m guessing here, because once I tasted the foie gras, my mind left the shuttle location and wandered off into the desert. Seriously, it was the most beautiful taste of food I’d ever had to that point. If you’ve ever had really good butter and really good gelato, this is some sort of Faustian synthesis. To those of you who are fans of the illegal, there’s a reason our government is trying to do the same to this, it’s so good it could destroy a society. Cruelty aside, this is so, so worth it. Like anything bad is, I mean, if someone needed to make me listen to Springsteen’s “My Hometown” on repeat for sixteen years and then slice me into tiny succulent morsels, I think that’s justifiable on both ends of the deal.
5.) Continuing the chain of eating cruel baby versions of things, I ordered the veal sweetbreads (that’s k-k-k-kidney, folks) seared and covered in bacon, in a miniature roasting pan full of new potatoes, a whole mess of beautiful mushrooms (hedgehog, oyster, etc.), a beautiful veal stock glaze, some pearl onions, and a display of all other things baby in vegetable form. It was so rich it seriously made me gag with how amazingly flavorful it was, at this point I basically began weeping like a small child, seeing color, having fever dreams, which lasted all night. Seriously, I felt like I’d taken really, really strong hallucinogenics, and that I was going to die very, very soon. Now I know why rich people do this. I felt like going on a crying jag.
6.) Just when I thought I was going to crawl under the table and die, our guy brought us a trio of desserts: a pot de creme, which was flavored with espresso, it killed. This badass baker accompanied the creme with what we call biscochitos down in NM, aka cinammon infused sugar/butter cookies to those of you elsewhere. The second dessert was a trio of tiny, beautiful lava cakes, which tasted like something out of baby Jesus’s easy-bake oven, each topped by a different flavor of home-made ice cream: pistachio, vanilla (real bean, bitches), and chocolate (near O.D.). Last of all was a cheese I was too insane-o to remember, but it was served with a reprisal of blood oranges, a beautiful flashback, and some of those beautiful gala-esque apple slices, arranged in a statuesque formation, a recherches geisha’s fan, atop a bed of sticky and lovely tasting honeycomb. I felt like doing coke off of Sartre’s ass at this point.
*continued*
