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:
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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