From the Ledge

The best dishes are ultimately about taste and the balance of flavors, to a certain extent it’s also about presentation, aroma, texture. For me, the appreciation of food is also heavily influenced by memory: the evocation of childhood scents and experiences, of friendships kindled and strengthened, of places and people revisited. My most memorable dining experiences this year revolved around taste and flavor, for sure, but many of them also conjured up memories full of warm glows, happy times, and deeply-missed people. Here, then, is the second annual From the Ledge best dining experiences of the year (and the photo at left is of memorable dining experience #4, the farm dinner): Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Aburiya Kinnosuke, Angel Organics, Gourmet Magazine, Graham Elliot, Koi Palace, Mercat a la Planxa, Moto, Otom, Perbacco, Sun Wah BBQ

San Francisco is a city very close to my heart.  It’s the first city I visited during my first trip to the United States way back when so my initial glimpse of its skyline and harbor views, my inaugural sense of its smells and throbbing vitality are all indelibly etched into my memory, as only first experiences can be.  It has been a city of  joyous celebrations over the years:  of my college BFFs congregrating from everywhere in the world for Tina’s wedding weekend in 2003, a weekend full of memorable feasts (at Aziza and Ton Kiang, courtesy of Chef Mako) and uhmmm, memorable unmentionables (ahem, courtesy of SF-based Jojolah and me); of Filipino-style Christmases (including, one year, four Christmas eve dinners, or noche buenas, in one night) with Minneapolis-based BFF Tita Joey and John and the colorful cast of characters that naturally gravitate to their dynamic personas; of the last trip I took with both of my parents together.  San Francisco and New York City are the two places I try to go to every year to get away from Chicago in order to regroup and rejuvenate.  Despite the fact that it is, in my opinion, a theatrical wasteland, there’s a lot of other things that San Francisco can fascinate one with:  it’s a hot hub for visual art, design, world music, and cuisine.  It was the city’s thriving, one-of-a-kind food scene that I wanted to zero in and explore further during my most recent week-long trip.  And it didn’t disappoint:  from Burmese food to organic Bolivian to Michelin-reviewed dimsum palaces to exciting nights at two of the city’s hottest new restaurants (Perbacco and Zinnia), San Francisco demonstrated once again that it is the perfect city for collecting memorable culinary experiences.  I’ll be recounting the five evenings and four days I ate my way through the city in a series of blogposts over the next week or so, and I’d like to start the series with one of my favorite San Francisco experiences, culinary or otherwise, a walk through of the gourmet food market, the Ferry Building Marketplace. 

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Tags: Ferry Building Marketplace

I’m sorry to disappoint anyone, but, despite the title, this blogpost is not about Chanhassen Dinner Theaters or Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding (and I’m sure some of you have thought I’ve come down from my pretty little perch on a marble pedestal…uhmmm…no), nor is it about some loud, dramatic break-up scene I may have had with a mysterious lover from out-of-town over the caprese salad at Follia (a more unlikely event than the plopping from the pedestal).  Nope, this is about a highly memorable, truly mind-opening, three hour dinner at Moto, that shrine to the progeny of science and gastronomy in the Fulton Market district, built by wunderkind chef Homaro Cantu (who, among many accolades, is probably most famous to the average person as the guy who beat Morimoto in Iron Chef, a feat in itself).  Moto, together with Alinea, really helped create the reputation and stature that Chicago now has on the world map of boundary-pushing dining, a pretty exclusive map that includes Ferran Adria’s El Bulli in Spain and Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck in the UK.  Without a doubt, its reputation for highly imaginative, unexpected, sometimes dumfounding, always thrilling, and yes, impressively theatrical dining, is well-deserved.  Although I felt that some of the dishes were less successful than others in the 12 course tasting menu, the overall experience was uniquely wonderful and indelible, and for the most part, headily delicious.  I can’t wait to go back!

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Tags: Moto

Chicago is food festival central every summer.  Of course, the motherlode of culinary shamelessness, the Taste of Chicago, just wrapped over the weekend (with the hue and cry over violence at the Taste overshadowing any discussions of the quality of the delicacies on view, or more apropros, in mouth).  There’s something for every self-styled Chicago foodie over the next several weeks; from street festivals such as the Taste of Lincoln Avenue (where Chad and Trixie-watching will trump any attempt at true gastronomy) to high-end food celebrations/benefit events such as the very noteworthy Share our Strength/Taste of the Nation at the Trump International Hotel and Tower to idiosyncratic discoveries such as the Sugar Grove Corn Boil in, uhmmm, Sugar Grove, Illinois.  Since corn isn’t my vegetable of choice and Sugar Grove isn’t this white-linen-pants-wearing boy’s kind of town, I’ll be attending, instead, two of the most interesting, culinary-wise, and most significant food events of the season.  Next week, on July 17, I’ll be at the Green City Market’s Chef’s Summer Barbecue Festival.  Of course, the Green City Market, with its wonderful selection of fresh, sustainably-farmed meat and vegetables from small farmers and agricultural producers, is legendary among Chicago food lovers, and this annual benefit event helps the Market continue to enrich Chicagoans’ culinary lives. The restaurants and chefs participating in the festival are some of the boldface names of the Chicago food scene:  Rick Bayless, Blackbird’s Paul Kahan, North Pond’s Bruce Sherman, James Beard winner Carrie Nahabedian of Naha, Food and Wine Best New Chefs of the Year Koren Grieverson (Avec) and Guiseppe Tentori (Boka), Green Zebra’s Shawn McLain, and Top Chef Chicago winner Stephanie Izard.  Wow, with this lineup, you know foodies are going to be buzzing like fruitflies to honey at the corner of Clark and Stockton.  Tickets are available online at the Spice House website or at the Green City Market every Wednesday and Saturday.  Check out the mouth-watering reportage, with yumm-o pics (yep, this whole post is unleashing not just my hunger but my inner Rachael Ray!), on last year’s event that was posted at foodie blog www.lthforum.com.

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Tags: Angelic Organics, Green City Market

Chicago foodies of all shapes, sizes, shades of black clothing, and types of Jimmy Choo heels descended on the Field Museum last night for Gourmet Magazine’s Wine Cellar, a celebration of how great a restaurant town this city is, which benefited the American Institute of Wine and Food.  Thanks to the generosity of Greg, the husband of my friend, the lovely Dulce, and who works for Gourmet in the West Coast, BFF Debra and I got to participate in what was clearly one of the highlights of the Chicago culinary calendar.  Most of the city’s top restaurants and chefs were out in full force and it was a kick, for this inveterate food fan, to see a goggles-wearing Homaru Cantu blowtorching a Baked Alaska with strawberry puree and truffle oil (aptly called, well, Baked Alaska Inferno) at the Moto table; or a very unassuming, and thankfully healthy- and boyish-looking Grant Achatz, one of the greatest chefs in the world currently, hanging butterscotch-flavored, rehydrated bacon on a deconstructed chicken-wire type contraption at the Alinea table, or Christophe David shaving slices off a humungous piece of jamon Iberico at the NoMi stand.  And since my life is always inadvertently eventful, I managed to shamelessly introduce myself and gush all over a very game Stephanie Izard, owner-chef of the deeply-mourned, dearly-departed restaurant Scylla, and currently one of the favorites to win Top Chef Chicago (yay!), as well as get filmed (yes, filmed!) by a Food Network crew doing a documentary on Achatz, while gobbling down the aforementioned Alinea bacon offering (since I never signed the release form..maybe they’ll blur my face?  But will they leave in my stretched out belly?  Could I be recognized from my stomach??? Yikes…and then *faint* with a thud!)

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Tags: Alinea, Avec, Gourmet Magazine, MK, Moto, Otom

So it all started with an intriguing post from Moto’s Homaru Cantu (yes, the guy who, together with Alinea’s Grant Achatz, put Chicago on the molecular gastronomy world map; who was chosen as one of the Top Innovators in any field by Time magazine; who mercilessly beat Morimoto on Iron Chef) six weeks ago on the foodie blog and forum, http://www.lthforum.com/.  I’d like to invite you to a special event at OTOM on April 30.  Respond quickly.  Hmmm…of course Chicago foodies buzzed, fluttered, and dashed, hoping to snag one of 20 or so slots for this mysterious April 30 event.  Lots of angst went around when there wasn’t an immediate peep heard from the OTOM/Moto crew.  Then, those who got slots received a very strange email from Omar Cantu containing timeslots in GMT time, a sentence written backward, more cryptic notes.  And once you’ve confirmed that you could actually make it on April 30 and how many guests you were bringing, you got another confirmation email back, this time from Darryl Nash, former number two guy at Moto, Cantu co-conspirator in all things scientific, unique, culinary boundary-pushing.  For the past year, he had been at the helm of  OTOM, Moto’s sister restaurant (these guys like to write things backwards and in anagrams, must be the trait of the genius mind!), which had always been billed as comfort cuisine, without the attention-demanding techniques of Moto’s culinary style.  The several times I had been at OTOM since they opened in the late spring of 2007, I’ve found the food to be very good (I especially liked the trio of mini-hamburgers and the mac and cheese), the service exceptional, and the ambience, with its post-modern 70’s Knoll vibe mixed with warehouse district hip, really fabulous, but I really didn’t get a strong sense of what defined the place.  I thought it was a great addition to the Fulton Market area, but last year, I didn’t think it was destination dining, which, understandably, was quite difficult to be in Chicago where great restaurants of every shape, size, price point, ambience, and twist were available at every street corner.  So I was very excited to go to this special event last night- I had a feeling that there was going to be an update, a revamp, a relaunch, but with the playful, idiosyncractic, smart, guerilla-type antics that these boys were capable of, I was sure it was going to be quite the unexpected night to remember.

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