From the Ledge

Frankly, I was a little apprehensive as I approached Alinea’s unmarked door several weeks ago to meet my close friend from high school, Ageless Dr. M., and his partner G, in town from the East Coast, for our dinner reservation. Despite, arguably, being the most talked-about and most written-about restaurant in Chicago, and a true dining destination (anecdotally, I’ve heard that around 60% of the restaurant’s nightly reservations are from out-of-towners) I haven’t been back in close to three years – since my wondrous, mind-expanding dinner with BFF Rene which landed at the top of my most memorable dining experiences of that year.  With the financial and time commitment it requires, it’s not like you can go to Alinea any old day of the week because you don’t feel like cooking or you feel like celebrating a good performance review or a Cubs win.  I also feel that dining there is such a singular experience, creating wonderful new memories and strengthening old ones, that you want to have the right dining companions to savor its pleasures and surprises with; the unexpected, daring, yet thoughtful connections it makes between food, chef, and diner over the course of several hours.  Ageless Dr. M is one of my oldest friends from the Philippines and is passionate, like me, about all things culinary (and, unlike me, is quite the home cook), so during his and G’s visit to Chicago, Alinea needed to be part of the weekend itinerary, no question about it.  But part of me still wondered – would Grant Achatz’s acclaimed “molecular gastronomy” cuisine still blow me out of the water and into the stratosphere, the second time around?  Might those still-vividly etched memories of my first encounter with his food lose some of their burnish because this next go-round would feel somewhat familiar or comfortable?  I’m glad to say, though, that dining at Alinea in early April was like dining there for the first time once again (a very welcome culinary Ground Hog Day) – astounding, breathtaking, horizon-broadening, thought-provoking, definitely not familiar nor comfortable, and yes, delicious to the last bite.  The big Chicago food news this week was of Alinea being voted #7 in the world and #1 in North America in Restaurant Magazine and San Pellegrino’s “World’s 50 Best Restaurants”, finally overtaking a restaurant owned by Achatz’s mentor, Thomas Keller, as the best in the region (either The French Laundry or Per Se had occupied the top regional slot since the list’s inception in the early 2000s).  I couldn’t loudly, whoopingly, agree more, and with my recent experience, I’m pretty convinced Alinea would crack that top 5 (all held by European restaurants) pretty soon.  I think that unmarked, nondescript black townhouse on Halsted St. contains, behind its doors, what 21^st century fine dining is and should continue to be.

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Tags: Alinea

All my close friends know that I am as passionate and as intensely curious about food and cuisine, from sourcing to plating, as I am about theater, film, and art, but I rarely write about them on this blog (in the two years and change that http://www.fromtheledge.com/ has been alive and kicking, I’ve posted approximately 16 food-related entries as compared to 143 for theater and 57 for film).  There’s only so much time and intellectual capacity that I have in a year to write about all the things and experiences that have made an indelible impression on me, so sometimes culinary matters get shunted aside in favor of other blog topics.  And, as I have said previously, there’s so many other people in this gastronomy-obsessed city we live in who can write about food more authoritatively and vividly than I can (plus have more gut-capacity and better digital-photo-taking skills than I have) that unless the culinary experience was quite unique, I probably wouldn’t be writing about it.  So my dining end-of-year-list has always been my attempt to share the myriad of dishes and dining experiences that left an impression on me during the year past.  I’ve tried very hard to keep the list to my Chicago dining experiences this year, unlike in previous lists, but I had to make an exception for the arguably singular, but also ambivalence-inducing, dining pilgrimage I made to The French Laundry in the summer, where some of the dishes stunned me into speechlessness, but where the overall culinary point of view felt somewhat old-fashioned.  Here, then, are my top ten dining memories of 2009:

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Tags: , Big Star, BOKA, Chicago Gourmet, Girl and the Goat, Graham Elliot, Green City Market, La Cebollita, Me Dee Cafe, Perennial, Perman Wine Selections, The French Laundry, The Publican, underground dining, Vie, Wandering Goat, X-Marx Chicago, Xoco. Mercat ala Planxa

There was general consensus that last year’s Chicago Gourmet, a “celebration of food and wine” which was designed to showcase the city as a vibrant culinary scene was quite the mega-train wreck, with its staggeringly high ticket prices (you had to pay to get in, to attend the wine seminars, and to partake of the Grand Cru tasting), the general lack of seating areas in Millenium Park’s Great Lawn where the event was held, and the commission of  the most heinous crime a food festival could ever commit:  making food as scarce a commodity as the black rhino in Tanzania or common sense in Glenn Beck’s head.  I was quite apprehensive, then, when I bought my one-day pass for this year’s event, scheduled to run last September 26-27 (ok, so I got a substantial discount courtesy of Groupon.com, which would have made it less of a sucker punch to an empty stomach if history repeated itself and I had to run to the Randolph street Chipotle after the event).  But there were some early signs of hope – attendance at the wine seminars didn’t require separate admission tickets anymore, and the number of Chicago restaurants and chefs increased substantially from last year.  There were still some kvetching and doubting and naysayering in the city’s foodie community but boy, did the organizers of the event, the Illinois Restaurant Association, show us all:  they picked themselves up by their bootstraps, shook off the dusty shoeprints on their back, retouched their mascara, and put on a Chicago Gourmet that was quite the thrilling celebration of a city that prided itself on being a major player in the culinary world stage.

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Tags: Chicago Gourmet

I have a lot of friends who think watching a reality TV show is like getting a botched dermabrasion, but who are, nevertheless, out and proud fanatics of Top Chef.  With its well-thought out competitive matches, its highly qualified contestants, and its superior production values, Top Chef is in a class of its own, towering above, and incomparable to, those other reality shows where people eat reptiles, or where real housewives scream at each other in an Italian restaurant by the New Jersey turnpike, or where non-suburban floozies scream at each other to become Flavor Flav’s own real housewife.  Of course, for this Chicagoan, the most exciting Top Chef season had to be the season set  in Chicago, not just because it showed off our wonderful, food-centric city and innovative, talented chefs, but also because it was won by the only female Top Chef so far, our city’s very own Stephanie Izard.  I was a big fan of Stephanie’s now-shuttered Bucktown seafood restaurant, Scylla, so I was very thrilled when she was crowned Top Chef, since I knew it was so well-deserved.  So when I had the opportunity to attend the underground supper club she was doing monthly as a lead-in to the early 2009 debut of her new restaurant, The Drunken Goat, so appropriately called The Wandering Goat dinners, I jumped at the chance (plus, this particular dinner would be devoted to the lusciousness, deliciousness, bungee-jumping-worthiness of all things bacon).  As devoted readers of the blog know, I’ve written quite a bit about the underground dining scene in Chicago, so I was curious, what would a Top Chef winner’s underground supper club be like?

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Tags: Top Chef, Wandering Goat supperclub

Any legitimate, laminated-card carrying foodie will at some point in his or her life decide to make the pilgrimage to the nirvana, the apex, the Shangri-La, call it what you want, of American culinary greatness, Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry tucked away in the small, bucolic town of Yountville in Napa Valley, California.  A trip to The French Laundry is a singular experience for the food-obsessed, a combination culinary bar mitzvah/confirmation ritual, cattle branding, and pledge initiation – a rite of passage, a marker, an indication that one has indeed earned his or her foodie stripes.  So when I had the opportunity to dine at the restaurant during my recent trip to the wine country (with heartfelt thanks to my friends Dulce and Greg, who managed to get my reservation around the convoluted FL system!), I was on the road faster than anyone can say “bouillabaise”!  And The French Laundry experience was indeed quite the experience – dining as a civilized, leisurely, luxurious ritual; food as a vital, centrifugal life force.  I probably ate some of the best dishes I have ever eaten in my life in that one night two weeks ago at the restaurant (and more on that below), and there were mostly hits, very few misses, in the twelve course (including two amuse bouches) Chef’s tasting menu.  The service was impeccable. Yes, it was worth the trip, the expense, the hyperventilating.  But I do think I hyperventilated a little too much, since I wasn’t as blown away as I expected to be.  Although the dishes were excellent and sophisticated, the techniques superlative, and the ingredients top-caliber, I really didn’t think the menu had the risk-taking, the imagination, the redefinition, the capability to astound and flabbergast of, say, an Alinea, (which has recently overtaken FL in the 50 Best Restaurants in the World ranking, and, yes, just in case people forgot, Grant Achatz trained under Keller at FL). I will always take provocative over comfortable, and for this 21st century foodie, FL felt like an early 2000 artifact.  And for most people, that’s not a bad thing.

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Tags: The French Laundry

Yep, blog posting has been sparse since the beginning of June, unfortunately, since I seem to have jumped on a careening, brake-less Metra train between dealing with lots of organizational transitions going on at my day job, helping the rest of the Board and the company of TUTA Theatre Chicago put on our annual fundraiser benefit (which we successfully pulled off last Sunday, June 7, yay, despite lots of anxiety and hairpulling, de rigueur for non-profit fundraisers of all kinds, I’ve come to find out), and co-chairing this year’s Steppenwolf Theatre Red or White Ball (which benefits the theater’s educational outreach, the Steppenwolf for Young Adults Program).  The Red or White Ball is tonight, and boy, if I was exhausted last year after the event, I’m not sure what state of physical and mental being I’ll be in tomorrow.  Putting up a fundraising event of this scope and scale is pretty intense, with lots of hard work and time commitment required, but I think it’s going to be a spectacular event for a cause I’m passionate about – as my blog readers know, I feel very strongly that the arts can only survive if we are able to successfully enthrall, convert  and immerse new audiences.  I’m psyched!  Despite all kinds of crazy busy schedules though, I still have a lot of things on my mind, so I’d like to give a shout out to these below (and there’ll be more blog posts starting next week!) Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: French Laundry, Guerrilla Truck Show, Hypocrites, Mary-Arrchie, Steppenwolf Theatre