alinea : chef's tour list of courses

This is a list of what my sister and I could remember from our dinner at Alinea. I thought there were 28 courses but we could only remember 24. So maybe it was 24 courses. At any rate here they are, probably in the wrong order:

i / Amuse-bouche : zucchini, mango, saffron, and chamomile

ii / Kudos for not only room-temperature (ie spreadable) butter, but two kinds of butter - goat's milk and cow's milk (I liked the cow's milk better - it tasted like the cultured butter jessica and I made over IAP)

1 / Heart of Palm in five sections : vanilla pudding, fava bean with preserved lemon, garlic bulghur wheat with a garlic chip on top, prune puree, pumpernickel bread with black truffles (a note here: this was so much fun to eat! each piece was placed on a pedestal, and the way they tell you to eat the thing is to tip it back into your mouth as if you're taking a shot)

2 / Salmon : a dollop of frozen sour cream with microplaned salmon on top (this was resting on a charger and you picked it up by the sorrel leaf implanted in it to eat it)

3 / Soy : eggplant semifreddo, wax beans, and octopus with the most wonderful soy froth (and I usually don't go for froths and foams, but here it was wonderful)

4 / Striped bass : striped bass cooked in a custard (that was basically like the most wonderful chowder you've ever had, taste-wise) with water chesnuts and mussels, served in a bowl that was set into a larger bowl filled with rose petals - when they served it they poured hot water in the outer bowl and you smelled roses as you ate

5 / A1 : all the flavors/ingredients of A1 steak sauce, dissected and separated out, served on little mounds of mashed potatoes and connected by a paper-thin ribbon of potato, which was fried at the end and rested on slices of perfectly-cooked rib-eye (interestingly, you don't have any say in how well-done you want the meat, although i think you could send it back if you really wanted to)

6 / Chanterelle soup : chanterelle soup with, um...ok, I can't remember. Sorry.

7 / Zucchini cake : served on a wire and you leaned forward to eat it, no hands allowed; it had a bit of angelica root confit on top (do any of my Carlisle friends remember our superhero dinner party and the kryptonite cake? that's what color it was...)

8 / Lobster ravioli : lobster puffs (like cheese puffs - actually they were like those shrimp chips you get with the crispy chicken in a chinese banquet) on top of bright orange coconut milk ravioli, on top of chunks of lobster and "young coconut," in a lobster lemongrass consomme (say that five times fast!)

9 / Tobacco : a spoon with a little rectangle of tobacco custard on it, and a blackberry resting on top of the custard (strange to have my first taste of tobacco in a custard - it was foreign but not bad)

10 / Lamb : lamb pop (this phrase brings to mind josh's lamburger menu) - lamb coated with a mild mustard and preserved lemon, deep fried and served on the "squid" piece of food servery that the pb + j used to be served on - it's a circular base with a bunch of wires poking out from the middle point on the base, and then they umbrella out and hold the food

11 / Eucalpytus : eucalyptus yogurt, apricot puree, lemon thyme, and a milk custard all encased in a glass tube with open ends and you suck the whole thing out like a jello shot

12 / Sunflower seeds : sunflower seed soup (or was this part of the chanterelle soup?) with little capsules filled with sunflower juice and a slice of plaintain

13 / Cherry : served in a trumpet-shaped aperitif glass, a little cylinder of cherry sorbet with a stem sticking out of it as a handle

14 / Snap peas : snap peas, ham, fresh tofu, and crispy yuba, all served in a bowl set on a pillow of lavender air, so it surrounded you with provence while you ate

15 / Squab : squab breast and its foie gras (oh my god...so good....) in a cream-based sauce and caramelized onions, with a garnish of watermelon and fennel gelee, with grated licorice on top, served in a bowl that was shaped like an angular hourglass so you kept on finding more food

16 / Oysters : oyster cream and sevruga caviar with "chervil broth" on top (i'd never had oysters or caviar before, and wow, the caviar tastes like the ocean, concentrated...)

17 / Bison : bison topped with frizzled onions and shaved black truffle (crunchy!), with new potatoes and pistachios (ok, not really a fan of pistachios in any form)

18 / Bacon : wonderfully crisp bacon with micro-thin apple streamers attached to the end with a bit of fresh thyme, hanging from a wire seesaw - it looked like a bow and arrow, rocking back and forth on the curved part

19 / Maytag blue : maytag blue cheese (please, stop with the "bleu cheese"! we're in america, not ameriance!)...read the earlier entry for the complete description, but it looked like a smaller, rounder version of those chinese pastries that have the ground peanuts and sugar on the inside (the outside is a chewy type of skin made from rice flour and they're dipped in coconut flakes)

20 / beignet : served on a spoon, a single large bite of beignet filled with buttermilk that was flavored with lemon verbena (this was possibly the best doughnut type thing i've ever had, beyond that first krispy kreme that is...)

21 / corn cake : also described already in the original post, but i'll just reiterate here that this was absolutely amazing

22 / raspberries : served on this bowl/platter that was really a large platter with a small shallow bowl-like indentation in the middle, rather like a classy chip-n-dip type deal, but much nicer than the stuff people would churn out in ceramics classes at my high school

23 / chocolate : served on a long plate with the "cake" on one side and the semifreddo on the other, with sauce and candied dandelion bits in between - now i know what to do with all of those dandelions in the lawn at home

24 / vanilla : um, this was also described fairly descriptively in the previous post; it was served in a double-type glass