Marty’s Birthday Dinner
Undeterred by my mothers taunts that I was morphing into a premature housewife, I decided to cook my boyfriend’s birthday dinner. As most of the meals she cooked for my overly understanding father and I were made in the microwave, I’ve always taken her feminist preaching with a grain of salt, and maybe some pepper and hot sauce. However, in a way, I’m thankful that she protested via Lean Cuisine as it pushed me to become resourceful in the kitchen at an early age. Part of me thinks this was and is all part of some master plan and that my mom is actually a culinary Mr. Miyagi, prompting me to find my inner cook out of necessity. So when she started referring to me as Martha, I saw the encouragement in her teasing, reminded her that my temporary namesake made the Forbes top 20, and decided to cook truffle oil steaks for Marty’s big birthday dinner.
With my mother’s coded encouragement ringing in my ears, I intrepidly laid out ten garlic cloves, ten tenderloins and the rest of my ingredients on Marty’s parent’s luxuriously spacious kitchen counter. I had decided that potatoes au gratin and roasted brussels sprouts would complete the meal nicely and as I started to slice the potatoes I had visions of a boisterously fun dinner party where I was lauded as supreme chef and number one girlfriend.
However, when I finished cutting the potatoes, arranging them in a baking dish, mixing in the cream sauce, and smothering them with Cheddar and Monterey cheese, my visions changed to a boisterously fun dinner party where someone’s arteries clogged mid-meal, sending him to the hospital and the rest of us to our medicine cabinets. It didn’t help that my next step was placing the brussels sprouts in a bath of olive oil, salt and pepper but I comforted myself with the thought that A. Marty’s father is a retired surgeon and B. the majority of the guests were boys in their early twenties who could handle a little extra grease and butter.
Fears slightly assuaged, I moved on to preparing the steaks. After sprinkling the tenderloins with salt and pepper, I evenly spread and then pressed minced garlic into each side. I made sure we had a copious amount of truffle oil to pour over them later as well as some balsamic vinegar and butter to make the accompanying sauce. When guests started to file in, the potatoes were already in the oven, the Brussels sprouts were poised and ready to go, and the steaks were prepped for the skillets. I had been so focused on putting everything together that I had given very little thought to who was coming. In my head the number ten was all that stood out, but now as I started to see actual faces, I was no longer worrying about the reception of the food but rather the envisioned boisterousness of the party.
The first to arrive was Marty’s mother Jean. After a long day of work at the Center for Inter-Faith Action on Global Poverty, it looked like the last thing she wanted were decadent tenderloins that cost my monthly allowance. I pushed a plate of cheese and crackers on her with an apologetic smile. Why hadn’t I thought to make a donation in Marty’s name for his birthday present instead? The next guest, no joke, was a priest. Father Leon was a family friend and member of Jean’s religious book club. The last time I’d seem him was when Marty and I tried to creep past their group as they discussed their latest book: a tome on pre-marital sex.
The next person to arrive, Jim, Marty’s father, made me feel a bit more at ease. A jolly retired surgeon with high cholesterol, he relished every time he had an excuse to eat steak. “It’s Marty’s birthday!” he exclaimed. But I knew what he really meant was, “My wife is going to let me eat steak tonight!” I soon noticed someone trailing behind him, an eleventh guest. She was a nice older Turkish woman who he had met at Starbucks. This was not the first time he had brought someone home who he thought would make a good secretary for his wife. Retirement makes people find interesting ways to pass the hours and Jim’s latest endeavor was to simplify his wife’s life by inviting potential secretarial candidates to eat their food.
Marty’s four friends then arrived in quick succession, seeming a little bewildered at finding a priest, a tired mother, an over zealous father and an old Turkish lady nibbling at the triscuits and brie. As if some higher power sensed a need to make the group even more eclectic, Medea, Jean and Jim’s nineteen-year-old, painfully shy, Georgian tenant emerged from the basement. She was immediately introduced to the Turkish lady but after they commented on the fact that their homelands share a border, they both seemed to run out of topics. Everyone except Jim, who was thoroughly enjoying himself, gave a sigh of relief when the birthday boy, arrived.
Leaving Marty, the glue of the party, to enliven the group, I turned away from the living room and back towards the stove. If only my mom could have seen this image of domestic tag teaming! She was far from my mind, however, as I heated two large skillets until they were piping hot, dropped a dollop of butter in each one and watched as the butter instantly sizzled into caramelized puddles. After spreading the puddles into lakes, I put five tenderloins in each skillet, searing them five minutes to a side. Removing them with tongs to a serving dish, I then turned down the heat to medium-low and poured enough balsamic vinegar to coat the bottom of each pan. As always some of the vinegar instantly evaporated, the acidity rising and relentlessly attacking my eyeballs. Leaning my body away from the stove, I sacrificed my arm to the rising steam and scraped up the bits of garlic that had stuck to the bottom of the pans. As a finishing touch to the balsamic glaze I dropped in two tablespoons of butter per pan and stirred until the sauce became thick and creamy. I then turned off the burners, rubbed some truffle oil on each of the cooling steaks and finished them off with a sizzling balsamic coating.
After setting up a neatly organized buffet line and announcing that “dinner was served!” (Mom would be so proud) my fears about the liveliness of the party returned. At first, they seemed to be well founded as, with drinks in hand and food in front, heads started to bend downward and mouths started moving in silence, interrupted only by knives and forks clanking. Either the randomness of the group prevented conversation or they were all ravenous. Whichever the case, the food seemed to be the magical antidote as one by one everyone started to lift their heads, smile, laugh, tell stories and pour more wine. Come to think of it, perhaps the wine did the trick. Regardless, the meal was a success punctuated by lots of toasts to the birthday boy as well as to the cook who disarmed and charmed them with cholesterol. When we were about to take a group picture, I ran back to the kitchen and put on one of Jean’s dirty aprons just to make the Mr. Miyagi in mom proud.
Ensure Shakes
The whole hospital smelled like orange Pine-Sol, the kind my Catholic grade school used on its blue linoleum tiles. The people at the front desk were pleasant enough. They told my mom and I we’d need warmer sweaters and gave us nametags with our pictures on them. These tags lost their stickiness after the first week so we carried them in our wallets like business cards. My mom had the first shift with my father, 7am-12pm. I got the afternoon, 12pm-5pm. And then the two of us would stay for dinner and leave when it got dark.
I’m still ashamed at how happy I felt leaving that hospital at the end of each day, walking out those automatic doors, inhaling the night and feeling alive, healthy. I knew that only a hundred paces behind me, my dad was restlessly sleeping, breathing Pine-Sol air in-between the constant drone and intermittent beeps of hospital life. Still, I felt increasingly elated as I put more distance between us. That three-week hospital stint was the first time I ever thought of my 78-year-old father as an old man and it scared me.
Of course I had always known that my father was older. Kind people would constantly refer to him as my grandfather by accident and with red cheeks I’d bark back that he was my DAD. But with a wife 15 years his junior and a daughter 59 years younger, my dad never seemed his age. He was in incredible shape and could never sit still for long. He attempted and failed to retire a total of 4 times and a couple of months before this hospital stay, he had beat me in tennis. Yes, he’d had a few health problems, but nothing a couple stents and a pacemaker couldn’t fix. Strangely, what turned him into an old man was appendicitis. Because he had been undergoing light radiation a month prior for prostate cancer, a routine appendectomy left him incredibly weak, listless and malnourished, transforming him into someone I didn’t recognize.
There were still moments during those three weeks when the man I knew would shine through. I remember a couple of times when he asked his grumpy old nurse, Marlene, “so when are ya gunna take me out dancing?” His voice sounded weak and foreign but his eyes had the same bold energy. Old Marlene, with her short, kinky grey hair and slight mustache would start to giggle and my Dad would turn to me with a wink, as if to say, “See? I still got it.”
My mom and I carried on the same routine every day, flashing our business cards, donning our bulky sweatshirts, trying to get my dad to drink his Ensure shakes. He couldn’t stomach their chalky consistency even though the doctor said they were the best way to raise his albumin, or nutrition levels. My mom and I would get home from the hospital and turn our kitchen into a wall-stained laboratory. Pathetically exhausted from sitting most of the day, we’d try to remember to secure the blender top before pulsing our concoctions. First we tried vanilla Ensure with Greek yogurt, ice and strawberries then we tested chocolate Ensure with bananas, yogurt and ice. The list goes on and on, one less popular than the next.
Each night I’d make two lunchtime shakes, one for each of us. And each day I’d slurp the thick concoction down in front of him with forced enthusiasm. I didn’t mind the slightly ashen, protein-shake taste but my “yummm”s and “mmm”s certainly weren’t warranted. Despite my theatrics, my dad would take one sip, look at me apologetically, then close his eyes and go into “vacation mode,” as he called it.
The fact that the doctor repeatedly encouraged me to make shakes, while I repeatedly failed to make them appetizing made me incredibly frustrated, and not just with my dad. I couldn’t understand why he had to be subjected to something he found so unpalatable, if he already had a nutritional IV dripping into his veins. The doctor finally said adding a little bit of ice cream to the shake would be all right. Soon after, I stumbled on a hit: butter pecan Ensure with coffee ice cream and ice. I remember when my mom brought it to supplement his daily dinner of red Jell-O and a forgettable grey-tinted main course. He drank the whole thing and I felt a strange urge to give him a gold star. My father had morphed into some kind of old-man-baby. Even though he still tried to protect me, making sure I left the room before Marlene changed his catheter or moved him on his side to prevent bedsores, for the most part, in his sick lethargy, my dad’s fatherly protectiveness had given way to a child-like neediness.
With time, however, this needy distress subsided. We prematurely credited the nutritional shakes but at the end of the three weeks, my dad truly seemed better. His old self had pushed through. The day he was discharged from the hospital, I drove his wheel chair precariously fast towards our car. With that initial wind-blown taste of freedom, my father was a young, grateful, enthusiastic kid, telling me to go faster, faster as he stretched both arms out with schoolboy-excitement. We ended up having three more wonderful, almost childlike weeks with him. We played board games, watched old home videos, and had Ensure tea parties instead of happy hour. We’d clink our shakes together and cheers to “24 vitamins and minerals!” Sure he didn’t sleep well at night, but during the day my Dad was his old self, even younger than his old self, and if he didn’t have the strength to play tennis with me just yet, I was sure he would soon.
It was still summer time so I started to see my friends again and go out at night. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I hadn’t left his side during those three weeks. I woke up one morning to my mom screaming. At a youthful 78, my father died from a silent heart attack quietly and I tell myself peacefully, during the night.
Somehow, during the three weeks we spent in the hospital, his doctor hadn’t noticed the calcification building up around the stents in his arteries. Somehow, even though this same doctor told us it was OK to put a little cholesterol-laden ice-cream in my dad’s Ensure shakes, he hadn’t looked into the condition of my dad’s stent laden, pacemaker run heart. I don’t think I’ll ever get over my fearful mistrust for doctors.
My mom still drinks Ensures. I can’t go near the stuff.
Deen Needs Greens
Paula Deen thinks that adding a stick of butter to each of her dishes makes them fall into the “comfort food” category. If I were a professional athlete and needed 5,000 calories a day, I might agree with her. As it is, however, I’m just one of the many regular Americans who would feel uncomfortable with an extra doughnut ring bouncing around my midriff.
But Paula remains unfazed by such physique critiques and continues to produce artery clogging meals on National TV. In fact, she is so attached to her butter that she concocted a recipe in which it stars as the main ingredient. In the “Everything’s Better with Butter” episode, Paula instructs how to make “fried butter balls.” First mix 2 sticks of butter with 2 ounces of cream cheese. Then assemble the mixture into little cholesterol globs with an ice cream scoop. Drench the globs in egg and cover them in bread crumbs. Finally, freeze the atrocities before plopping them into a deep-fryer.
If this doesn’t curdle your stomach enough try Paula’s recipe for the “Lady’s Brunch Burger.” First, make sure a defibrillator is close by. Then grill some patties, smother them with cheese, a couple pieces of bacon and a fried egg. Then wedge the colossal mess in between two Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I’m not kidding. These are real recipes, backed by Paula, published on the Food Network’s website.
Paula’s supporters maintain that if the recipes repulse you, don’t use them. For the most part, I agree with this “to each his own” philosophy. However, considering the weight issues in America, it’s clear that more people should become averse to the gluttony inspired by Paula’s cooking. According to data from the Center For Disease Control and Prevention, a whopping 34 percent of adults are obese, more than double the amount 30 years ago. The number has tripled for children, clocking in at 17 percent this year.
I don’t want to lay complete blame on the often affable Queen of Southern Cooking. Of course the obesity epidemic also stems from other deep-seeded issues, like the rising amount of saturated fats in processed foods, and the mindset (and often reality) that unhealthy foods are cheaper. However, I don’t buy the argument that she should get off scot-free.
In one of the many scrolling online comments prompted by the “Lady’s Brunch Burger” recipe, lilstink98, a pre-teen from San Diego exclaimed, “I am now watching this on TV and it looks so good. I am only 11 and I thank you because i need to start practicing if i want to become like you! I LOVE YAH PAULA!” Lilstink98 is one of the many examples of impressionable youths who learn eating habits by example. And if I were her parent, I’d change the channel to shows where Giada De Laurentis and Jamie Oliver teach delicious yet healthy recipes as opposed to “Bacon Wrapped Fried Mac.”
We can’t hide from televised bad examples. From Law and Order to South Park, we are constantly bombarded with bad role models for entertainment sake. However, in these instances, whether or not they’re vilified, the good and bad sides are clearly marked. Paula, on the other hand, parades as a Southern Mama with nothing but harmless “Hi yalls” and butterballs to offer. I’m not saying she’s a satanic food pusher. But shows like hers certainly aren’t helping the growing number of obesity related health issues plaguing our health care system.
Thanks to the First Amendment, Paula can dunk her doughnuts on the Food Network as much as she does in her bedroom. But let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that the meals she prepares are comforting in any way to those who eat them or to those who reject them.
The Homegrown Omnivore
A ten-year-old Irish boy, Thomas Legge, sits at an old oak table in his aunt’s summer garden. He searches for his initials that are carved into the table’s grainy underbelly, inching his fingers around until they finds the grooves. He keeps them there, probing, prodding, proving to his mother and aunt that he has patience. They hate it when he starts to pick before everyone else is seated. After what seems like an eternity, his five siblings, four cousins, aunt, uncle, grandmother, mother and father take their usual seats and his hands tentatively slink back on top. His mother serves him salad first, a mixture of rocket, romaine, butter-head, full length scallions, radishes, boiled eggs, croutons, and toasted pine nuts. Next comes a serving of baby new potatoes, complimented with dollops of melted butter and dill, a few slices of avocado with lemon drizzle, and a spoonful of sliced, quartered and skinned tomatoes. If there’s still room on his plate he’ll get some barely sautéed zucchini, a couple slices of yesterday’s roast beef, and a piece of soda bread.
Thomas is twenty years older now but he remembers these lunches with fond clarity as they shaped his summers for many years. “My family knew how to put on a summer lunch. I shouldn’t say knew, actually, because they still do it. Every summer I make a point of getting back to Ireland, to County Wicklow, to recharge and refresh myself with their delicious rabbit food,” says Thomas with an Irish lilt. It’s easy to picture Thomas as a ten year old, anxiously waiting for lunch with his hands under the table. He moves around a lot, not in a nervous fidgety way but in a boyishly excited one. He’s wiry and relatively tall, about 5’11, with a tidy mop of curly redish-brown hair covering a smooth, broad, extremely pale forehead. For two years he’s been living in DC, working as a program officer of the German Marshal Fund’s climate and energy program. He rides his bike everywhere in the district and seems to know more of the in, hip spots then most DC lifers do. “Yes, I ride my bike at night. And yes, sometimes after a few beers,” he admits. “I think these BUI’s in the states are complete bogus. Honestly, if I bump into another car while I’m peddling, I’m going to hurt myself, not the person in the car. I pose no threat to society, just to myself, so as far as I’m concerned they have no business giving me a ticket.” He says this all with a wry smile. He might be joking.
“But back to Ireland talk,” says Thomas, trying to stay on track as he sips a Belgium pale ale and energetically shifts around in his chair. We’re sitting outside at Kramer’s books on Dupont circle, a coffee house/bar/bookstore that has as much spunk and liveliness as the Irishman before me. “Wicklow was my favorite place growing up. It was gorgeous and green and fertile and all that and was still relatively close to the city. Now, county Mayo in the west, where my family also went from time to time, was beautiful and pristine with wide open moors and the frigid Atlantic staring right back at you and the smell of peat and everything, but a little too rugged for my taste.” Thomas grew up in Dublin but visited the countryside of Ireland quite often. His favorite place was and still is his aunt’s farm in Wicklow, about an hours drive from the city. The only difference with his rabbit lunches there now is that crisp white wine accompanies them. He swears there’s no meal like it but insists he’s an avid meat lover.
His opinion of meat in the states is torn. “On the one hand you have hyper-industrialized beef from anonymous sources, like your McDonald’s patties and on the other, high end meat that is actually sourced, like from farmer’s markets, specialty shops and the like.” However, Thomas has found an even more direct way to get his meat. “This past January, a friend of mine started something called the ‘Meat up.’ It’s so brilliant.” Thomas explains that the meat goes from the farm to a dry age freezer and then directly to the consumer, cutting the middlemen, supermarkets and specialty stores, out entirely. “What he did was get around ten people to pitch in money for about 30 pounds of high-quality, dry-aged beef. 300 lbs of meat is about what you get out of one cow so he then went to a farmer, bought the cow directly from him, watched it get plump and slaughtered, then dry-aged the meat himself.” I look back at Thomas with wide eyes and he anticipates my question. “Yes I know he’s a strange character and it’s a bit odd he had a big enough freezer but he’s a meat enthusiast. I’m just glad I got to be a part of the original ten because he has the most ridiculous waiting list now.” Thomas’s eyes light up and I imagine he’s secretly salivating as he leans forward in his seat. “ I mean this stuff is good. I mean really really good. Dry-aging the meat takes all the water out, something supermarkets would never do because it lessens the weight. What you’re left with is 30 pounds of deliciously, dense, fresh meat in your freezer that will last you a while.”
This meat has been put to good use at Thomas’s one bedroom Dupont flat. His place backs out into a private ally, where 60 plus friends once gathered for a BBQ. “It was a bit awkward at first. All the guests knew me but not necessarily each other and the size of the ally didn’t really leave room for personal space,” Thomas explains with a jocular grimace. He admits he pretty much neglected his guests for the first hour or so while he manned about 70 burger patties on the grill. He trusted that the close quarters would bring people together and he was right. At the end of the night, everyone seemed like long-time friends, leading Thomas to believe he’d stumbled upon a perfect recipe for entertaining: “Meat, Beer, and no room to escape.”
Entertaining has always been an integral part of Thomas’s life. As he is one of six kids and his mother is one of eleven, a meal for fewer than 15 people has always been rare in the Legge household. “Our holiday family gatherings could fill a small restaurant, truly” admits Thomas. “I used to help my mom out a lot in the kitchen and to this day I have a very difficult time cooking small portions. I’ll try to make something for three or four friends and myself and will end up eating leftovers for days.” Thomas says he’s quite lucky his family always kept up traditional “Irish clan mealtime,” with fresh, locally sourced ingredients. In the past 25 years, the supermarket culture has steadily grown in Ireland, replacing staples like slow-cooked Irish beef stew with more ready-made meals. This is a drastic change from just one generation ago, when a large percentage of Irish men and women grew up on homegrown vegetables and easily sourced meat. “It really wasn’t very long ago when people actually got their meat from someone they knew. If they didn’t know the butcher, then they would know the farmer. It was a very close community. All pork, all lamb, all beef was domestic, meaning it wasn’t processed. Now you can go buy chicken in the supermarket and end up eating a bird from Ukraine,” laments Thomas.
Thomas likes to keep up his family’s tradition of eating locally sourced food wherever he is. But these locations change often. In the span of about ten years, Thomas has lived in Dublin, London, Brussels, The Republic of Georgia and New York City. The main impetus behind so many moves has been one to two year “program officer” jobs for various climate and energy related programs. His interest in these programs and in the environment in general ties into his interest for food and for its sustainable, locally grown production. However, Thomas admits that sometimes his simple love for pre-industrial food outshines his commitment to his work. He’s still leaning forward, a second pale ale in hand, as he excitedly explains the food culture in Georgia. “The Republic of Georgia has the most fiercely traditional food I’ve ever seen. All meals are based around 20 delicious dishes, cooked for the most part by the matron of the family,” he explains. “My friend Lado’s mother made the most incredible tkemali. It’s a plum sauce,” he pauses to make sure I’ve spelt it right. “Although it doesn’t really matter if you have the right spelling or not since you’ll never be able to get it in the states.” (I checked later and found about three different versions on Amazon.com but I’m sure they’re not up to traditional Georgian standards.) Thomas maintains that every Georgian family has a stock of this plum sauce, even though it isn’t sold commercially within the country. “Each batch tastes different according to which region it’s made in and when it’s made. It’s truly incredible,” Thomas explains. “Lado’s mom started making it in June when the plums were green and unripe. Then she continued throughout the summer so by fall the pantry was lined with gradations of tkemali from bitter green to sweet purple. It was really beautiful.”
For all of his energy and easily uprooted lifestyle, Thomas seems to have a real knack for slowing down and appreciating the beauty in life, or I should say in food. “Food has always captivated me. I consider myself a longtime member of the slow food movement and I try to bring that consciousness with me wherever I go.” Thomas admits that it’s been somewhat of a struggle in the States. “There’s a monolithic industrial food culture here but there are gaps,” he explains, getting very serious all of a sudden and leaning back for the first time in his chair. “And these gaps speak to the best of American consumerism.” He’s referring to farmers markets and projects like the “Meat Up” here, but Thomas finds even more creative ways to circumvent processed, anonymous foods. His mood lightens when he recounts, “Last month, I went on a ten-hour road trip to Savannah for a friend’s bachelor party. When we got hungry, we pulled over to a truck stop and I brought out a big picnic basket. It just takes a little foresight. We had boiled eggs, cold cuts, cheese, good quality bread, some pickled onions etc.”
Of course, he later had to succumb to a dinner of wings at the bar they went to. But Thomas isn’t uptight. He can handle some bar food. It’s just that when he can avoid it, he does. “I’m not a total food snob. I’ve had Big Macs on occasion and they’re pretty good. But usually I feel like complete shit an hour later.” Thomas leans in once more with a knowing grin and I feel like he’s about to tell me a secret. “If you really want to know, my interest in unprocessed, locally sourced food is, for the most part, self-serving. Yes, it’s more sustainable and better for our environment and our health than say a Tyson’s Food production mill. But at the end of the day, it just tastes better.”
Minibar
Before last month, I thought “minibar” was a term reserved for little hotel room fridges that house $6 cokes and $5 snickers bars. So when my boyfriend proudly produced a gift certificate to “Minibar” for my birthday, waving it around like it was Willy Wonka’s golden ticket, I was a bit perplexed. Nevertheless I was still excited to loot one of those little boxes of exorbitantly priced ordinary goods that have always been off-limits. He soon set me straight, however, explaining in an artificially condescending tone, hand on hip and nose in the air, “Christina, my dear, Minibar is DC’s most renowned culinary hotspot. It’s harder to get a reservation there then at a White House State dinner.” I looked at him skeptically so he showed me Tom Sietsema’s raving review, which says exactly that: Minibar is a hot ticket.
With only six bar stools, two nightly seatings and a receptionist who won’t take reservations for further than a month in advance (for a reservation on Feb 15th you have to book on January 15th), Jose Andres’s gastronomic playground is not for the apathetic or lazy. My boyfriend, undeterred by a constant busy signal, tried to get a reservation for three weeks. Finally he discovered that if he called a minute before the restaurant opened, his phone would continue to ring until their phone turned on. Last week at the long-awaited, 27-course meal of mini-bites, he and I heard similar tricks from our enthusiastic neighbors.
With large, semi-crazed eyes, the middle aged man next to me explains, “I had FIVE different office friends helping me out. We’d all call at 8am on the dot and it still took a week for one of us to get past that busy signal!” He calms down a bit as Charrisse, Justin and Brian, the three chefs behind the bar, simultaneously place pisco sours in front of us. The South American cocktail starts off warm with hot foam made from egg whites, then turns refreshingly cool with a tart icy, mixture of pisco (grape brandy) lime juice and simple syrup. As we slurp, waiters distribute our cutlery for the night, pairs of silver spoons with fork ends, effective and stylish hybrids, just like the many dishes to come.
The sleek copper bar and modern, teak and steel food lab behind it take up a corner on the second floor of Café Atlantico, Jose Andres’s more traditional restaurant. However, chef Justin explains, “for all intents and purposes, we are a separate restaurant.” While Café Atlantico has some original dishes like foie gras soup and shrimp with grapefruit, Justin proudly and succinctly describes Minibar as “Jose’s creative outlet.” And I can see why. Each dish follows closely on the unique heels of the one preceding, prompting me to take countless pictures in an attempt to document and preserve the edible spectacles. Surprises include a bloody mary that you eat in two bites, deconstructed New England clam chowder, perfectly shaped liquid carrots in coconut cream, hearts of palm ravioli filled with bone marrow and cooked via blow-torch and sea urchin ceviche served with hibiscus foam. Other gastronomic feats follow such as a quail egg surrounded by cheddar cheese posing as egg whites, “bagels and lox” served in a shaved bagel cone topped with salmon caviar, bacon covered chocolate and a greek yogurt/honey dish frozen into an airy, astronaut food texture via liquid nitrogen.
As they whip up these creations, the three chefs continue to invite questions, but their focused and cool demeanors do not. “Which dish is your favorite?” I ask Charisse. “Probably the ‘zucchini in textures’” she responds, simply elaborating with “I love zucchini.” I love zucchini too but mere partiality for the vegetable does not do justice to this warmly comforting, original dish. Chef Brian describes it as “zucchini on top of zucchini, on top of zucchini.” However, the three layers are anything but repetitive. As I dig in with my hybrid spoon I find a zucchini cream puree on the bottom that has the off-white color and taste of rich bone marrow. A transparent zucchini consommé covers this layer and is interspersed with tender zucchini seeds that taste more like a delicate orzo. I wish I could ask for seconds, or at least eat what (gasp!) the couple on the far end of the bar has left behind.
Our dining experience comes to a close when six seemingly hollow eggs are placed in front of us. The three chefs plus three servers then stand behind each of us and simultaneously bring their fists down with a theatrically loud smash, prompting some oohs and awes from a few patrons and a terrified scream from me. Between the pieces of eggshell lies the check. I thank my boyfriend profusely, take the cellophane menu home for my scrapbook and wonder how many traditional minibars I could buy for the price of our meal.
Christina Conrad 