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):

1. Aburiya Kinnosuke (New York) – When I first started going to Aburiya Kinnosuke, a tiny, nondescript Japanese restaurant in the middle of Midtown East’s culinary wasteland, I thought I was back in Tokyo, which I visited in the mid 1990s, since each and every table was occupied by Japanese expatriates, the specials on the chalkboard were all written up in Nihongo, and it took a lot of unflattering sign language poses to get the gracious but English-deprived servers to understand what I wanted. Over the years, it has been New York Times -reviewed, Zagat-guided, and Michelin-cited, so there’s less Tokyo and more self-satisfied New York in its vibe. It is still a wonderfully authentic Japanese home-cooking restaurant (no sushi, just sashimi, and lots of robatayaki grill choices), and in a freezing winter trip earlier this year, I had the best, most comforting, most memorable dish I’ve eaten all year round: a very traditional version of scrambled eggs with eel, the eggs flavorful and fluffy, the eel savory and meaty, the surprising dashi-flavored broth robust but not overpowering.
2. Sun Wah BBQ (Chicago) – Sun Wah and its very visible, undeniably stop-in-your-tracks display window of hanging roasted meats, Hong Kong style, has been around Chicago for more than a decade, but this year, it suddenly burst into the consciousness of many Chicago foodies (well, the posters over at lthforum.com) for its terrific Chinese dishes such as the must-order-in-advance Peking Duck. I, on the other hand, had been consistently bowled over by dishes that recalled my irreplaceable education in Chinese cuisine, Philippine style, at Manila’s unique Chinatown panciterias (noodle house). At Sun Wah, my Filipino friends and I, over meals filled with reminisces, would always have the roast Hong Kong pork belly, crispy skin on top of moist, fatty, utterly one-of- a-kind pork meat, very similar to Filipino lechon; beef with bittermelon, another Filipino-Chinese classic, tender chunks of beef mixed with delicately sliced rounds of bittermelon gourd, an acquired taste if there ever was one; and the off-menu Pancit Canton, Filipino noodles with vegetables and mixed meats, the staple of every Filipino child’s holiday memories.
3. Otom (Chicago) – I probably ate enough pork belly this year to populate an Iowa pig farm, but one of the most memorable was Otom’s barbecued pork belly with “pork and beans” (pureed pork molded into tiny beans), which Chef Darryl Nash served at the restaurant’s launch of its reinvention as a high-concept, moderately molecular gastronomy-influenced restaurant (a kindred, but not copycat, soul to its sister restaurant Moto, and more on that restaurant later). In my blog post from May, I said “the pork belly had that indecipherable but harmonious ratio of fat and meat, very tender, very flavorful, with the barbecue sauce not smothering it, but rather enveloping it, tenderly, gingerly.” Delicious!
4. Angelic Organics Harvest Farm Dinner (New Caledonia, Illinois) – Angelic Organics is one of the leading CSA (community-supported agriculture) farms in the country and attending their second annual Farm Dinner last summer to benefit their Learning Center was one of the highlights of my dining year (ok, so it was two hours outside of Chicago and in a farm with crapping goats, but that was ok). I felt both awe-inspired and humbled at the opportunity to catch a glimpse of how my food made its way to my plate. My favorite chefs from the Sunday Dinner Club catered the event and incorporated the farm’s produce in all of the dishes they served, but the highlight of the six course dinner for me was the starter, a bevy of farm greens picked that day (several types of lettuce and arugula, some red onion) with grilled plums and marcona almonds, lightly dressed with aged balsamic vinegar – fresh, simple, unpretentious, unbelievably delicious, emotionally resonant as eater became strongly connected to soil.
5. Perbacco (San Francisco) – Perbacco and its Swedish-born, Italian-food loving chef Steffan Tarje are stars of the competitive Bay Area culinary firmament. And it’s a reputation that is so well-deserved in my opinion; on my last trip during the Christmas holidays, I stopped by its painfully hip, ever-buzzing Financial District location and had a mind-blowing agnolotti stuffed with bone marrow and fontina cheese. I grew up eating bone marrow in the Philippines (usually in a hearty soup stew), so it’s something that I had no qualms enthusiastically partaking of. But this dish was just one-of-a kind: the delicate agnolotti, tiny ravioli-like pasta, a staple of the Piedmont region of Italy, was stuffed with a delirious, ridiculously over the top, unapologetically brilliant blend of bone marrow and cheese. It was an indescribably exhilarating dish that I would have sold off all my Zegna and Jil Sander suits for (ok, so thrown in those To Boot shoes too!).
6. Moto (Chicago) – This year also marked my first pilgrimage to the original shrine of molecular gastronomy in Chicago, Homaru Cantu’s very much acclaimed, sometimes divisive, always talked-about Moto. It was a three hour, twelve-course dinner with lots of interesting, unique, “can you believe he thought he could do that?” culinary choices, and one doozy of a conversation piece, the delicious, creative, almost cinematic in sensibility, braised duck “roadkill” complete with red beet sauce simulating blood and rice krispies impersonating maggots. It was outrageous, brazen, but also completely flavor-packed, the apex of dining as theater.
7. Koi Palace (Daly City, California) – I think the best dimsum outside of Hong Kong is in San Francisco (so quiet down, Vancouver and Toronto dimsum diehards!), and there’s just so many dimsum places in the Bay Area that to choose the best one would require the tenacious research of a social anthropology doctoral student. One of the best bets in my opinion, and also in the opinion of the snobby Michelin Guide reviewers who included it in their San Francisco edition, is Koi Palace in Daly City. It’s dimsum like the best of HK: ordered off the menu, not from carts, so it’s fresher and hotter; comprised of surprising dishes you wouldn’t see anywhere else. Forget the tired siumai, har kow, and xiao long bao, and order instead the phenomenal coffee-glazed pork spareribs- melt-off-the-bone pork meat, tantalizing bits of crispy pork fat, and a unique, moderately flavored coffee-based marinade and glaze which lingered on your tongue in a comforting, unassertive way. Pork and coffee, to die for (well, yeah, overindulge in these two, and it’s probably going to be respirator-ville for you!).
8. Mercat ala Planxa (Chicago) – There were a lot of restaurant debuts last year in Chicago, strengthening our claim as a world gastronomic center, but I thought one of the most auspicious ones was Mercat ala Planxa, Jose Garces’s modernist tapas joint in the refurbished Blackstone Hotel. There was a lot of buzz around the advance order-only conchinillo asado (roast suckling pig), but I thought its brilliant Fideua Negra, or squid ink pasta, was the reason to go back again and again. The dish was bold, hearty, showstoppingly flavorful, and wonderfully evocative of warm-hearted, leisurely-paced Barcelona, a city by the sea, and one of my most favorite cities in the world.
9. Graham Elliot (Chicago) – I was underwhelmed when I went to Graham Elliot’s opening weekend in the early summer, and perplexed by its almost schizophrenic blend of gastropub food, fine dining prices and slightly upscaled TGIF ambience. I’m still not sold on the menu, or the restaurant as a whole, but during that first weekend, I had a wonderfully creamy, incandescent condensed milk ice cream, on top of a dessert I now couldn’t recall (was it the fancy snickers bar cake? Or a bread pudding?). All I could remember was that each dizzying bite of the ice cream transported me back to idle childhood summers in Manila, where we liberally and luxuriously poured condensed milk into cake batter, cream-based toppings for sweets,  coffee both iced and hot, and the national Filipino dessert halo-halo.
10. Gourmet Wine Cellar (Chicago) – Thanks to my friend Dulce’s gracious hubby, Greg, who runs Gourmet magazine’s west coast marketing operations, BFF Debra and I traipsed around the Field Museum main hall on an unseasonably cool spring evening, rubbing elbows with the city’s self-styled foodies to sample the best of the Chicago restaurant scene. Plucking a piece of bacon from rockstar chef Grant Achatz’s hands would have already made my night, but the fabulous vertical wine tasting that Greg took us to, of Chateau St. Jean’s highly-acclaimed, pricey Cinq Cepage, vintages 1996-2005, seated with the Gourmet magazine editors, in some tucked-away room overlooking the Field’s Great Hall, nearly pushed me over the edge. It was uber-fabulousness!

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