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:
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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