review: o ya, and further education of my palate

o ya / 9 east street, boston / 617-654-9900 / tu-th 5-10pm, f-sat 5-11pm / $100-150 tasting menu, a la carte small plates range from $8-$45

i can identify significant points in the development of my palate: the fresh ricotta from chez panisse, the moment at which i began to like cilantro, the year in which i began to like lobster permanently, the one when i started to like mussels (ok, that hasn't quite happened yet but i'm getting there). there is the moment when you realize that as a child, you were this petulant being with picky eating habits. the greatest error of my childhood may have been the ketchup i used to douse things with: rice, pancakes, dumplings, you name it - my motto was "everything is better with ketchup." yeah, folks, that's right: pancakes. it's actually still kind of good, although now i realize that there are many better things to do with rice than mix it with ketchup. ok, now i'm kind of grossed out. yeah.

i look back upon significant meals that i've had, and my knowledge of different flavors has changed so much between them that i often wonder what it would be like to have a long-past meal in the present. would it taste different? better, worse? would i be able to recognize more flavors, more complexity?

for me, gourmet japanese food is about subtlety, which requires a somewhat discerning palate that i may or may not have. accordingly i worry that i may not be able to detect this subtlety, that i'm missing the point of a certain dish. especially in contrast to american food, even like the french laundry, the flavors are much more "out there" than they are with japanese food. i think that this is probably the case for some of what i had this past friday evening at o ya, but for the most part i do think my palate is educated enough to recognize wonder when it comes along.

so first, a rundown of what i had at o ya! i ordered a la carte, while the other four in my party ordered the tasting menu (14 courses). i will say that the menu is somewhat overwhelming: there are so many different things that you're looking at it and you're not sure where to look for a good solid five minutes. ok, more than five minutes. i think i was unable to comprehend the entirety of the menu for the whole dinner. what i ended up ordering was a combination of things i had read about in frank bruni's review and the boston globe review, and things i thought looked interesting.

i had:
scarlet sea scallop (white soy yuzu sauce, yuzu tobiko)
fried kumamoto oyster (yuzu kosho aioli, squid ink bubbles)
house smoked moullard duck tataki (foie gras kabayaki, arima sansho)
onsen egg (dashi sauce, truffle salt, homemade pickled garlic)
okinawan style braised pork (boston baked heirloom rice beans, homemade kimchee, soy maple sauce, kinome)
yuzu brined ballotine of chicken wing (napa cabbage & shiitake stuffing, homemade kimchee)
seared petit strip loin (2 oz, bone marrow chiwan mushi, toasted garlic sake soy sauce)
grilled sashimi of chanterelle & shiitake mushrooms (rosemary garlic oil, sesame froth, homemade soy)
foie gras (balsamic chocolate kabayaki, raisin cocoa pulp, sip of aged sake)

notes on service
we had a pretty good waiter, and service was generally impeccable. there were a few moments when our waiter was occupied with another table and a different waiter brought out our dishes, and they didn't get explained or they were brought to the wrong people; this oversight did actually diminish the experience a little bit. but overall, service was great and our waiter gave just the right amount of detail when describing the dishes. brownie points for being able to coordinate my a la carte menu with those who got the tasting menu - it's almost always the case that if one person gets the tasting, everyone has to get it because it just gets so complicated. this kitchen is pretty awesome for putting up with us.

i will say this, though: as a young diner, i have had the experience so many times where the waitstaff underestimates how much i know about food, and i end up feeling like i'm being condescended to. this happened most notably at hammersley's bistro, and is the reason why i would never go back to hammersley's. i would just like to put this out there for waitstaff at fine restaurants everywhere: please assume that know a lot about food, food science, current cutting edge food preparation techniques, etc, and i will ask you when i want to know more. this will make me feel better about myself and more likely to have a good dining experience, and thus provide a better tip. just because i'm only 25 doesn't mean that i don't know about food. i do, and in many cases, dear waitstaff, i know more than you. so stop condescending to me and everyone will be the happier for it.

ok, rant aside, let's get back to the food and a course-by-course roundup. while i'm at it, i'll do a rating (out of 10) for each course. and a note about eating: i attempted to deconstruct each course when there was more than one piece, so that i could taste each thing individually, then taste it all together. for dishes so complex, it seemed only right that this would be the modus operandi of the dining experience. when you eat at an experimental place like this, there is so much curiosity about how the food is made that this is the way to eat.

scarlet sea scallop (7)
this was the first dish and i thought it was pretty good. the scallop is scarlet because it's dipped in beet juice. i don't think it really did that much for me, but the scallop itself was sweet, and tender unlike any scallop i'd ever had before. i love scallops, which are so finicky in cooking because they get tough so fast; so it was a joy to have a raw scallop with such a fine texture. oh, and tobiko is always welcome in my house, ever since i tasted it for the first time at my freshman advising seminar professor's house at dinner. it's so fun to crunch these between your teeth and get the ensuing rush of flavor. yuzu: too sophisticated for my palate, still.

fried kumamoto oyster (9.5)
god, this was good. the oyster was perfectly fried, just the right amount of breading, perfectly golden, crunchy, anything you could possibly want in a fried food. i wish i had gotten the raw kumamoto oyster for comparison - everyone else did, and i was lucky enough to get tastes of everything i didn't order myself, except for the raw oyster. raw oysters, as you can imagine, are hard to share because you're concentrating on slurping the whole thing in your mouth at once. ok, back to the oyster: it's surprising how well fried tempura-like stuff goes with rice. and the aioli was fantastic: mayo-based sauces go so well with fried food that it's almost a crime. i tasted the squid ink before eating the thing and couldn't really detect that much in the flavor, another testament, i think, to the shortcomings in my palate. but this was just a wonder of textures: soft, slightly toothsome rice, crispy oyster, melt-away squid ink foam, creamy/oily/unctuous aioli. i would happily eat this every day.

house smoked moullard duck tataki (6)
this was so-so, and only moderately memorable. the smoked-ness was entirely present and much appreciated; but it did seem a little out of place in this restaurant. it's interesting because most flavors are so delicate that having duck - a very strongly flavored, earthy type of meat - was a definite counterpoint to all the fish. i found the duck to be just slightly stringy, but overall this was good.

onsen egg (10)
jesus this was good. the egg is poached sous vide at 66 degrees fahrenheit for a while, until somehow the yolk is creamy and just slightly past runny (runny being the consistency of sunny side up eggs), with a texture that could only be described as gorgeously unctuous. while the yolk is busy being unctuous, the white is like this ephemeral substance that has physical form when you put it in your mouth, but then immediately melts away into delicious nothingness. the egg comes in a broth of scallion-soy sauce, which is a delightful foil to the egg, and provides just the note to cut through the richness of the yolk. to top it all off, you eat it with a spoon - and you all know how much i love eating things with a spoon. possibly the only drawback was the fact that the bowl was made with a matte glaze so that your spoon made an uncomfortable sensation in your bones when you scraped the bowl with the spoon. you know, o ya seems to be on truffle overload - there was truffle oil on so many things (note to restaurant: STOP before it's too late!) - but the truffle salt was great in this dish, just piquant enough yet rich at the same time. and the pickled garlic - i am not usually a fan of chunks of garlic, cooked, raw, or pickled, but this was gorgeous. it must have been young garlic - it had that kind of texture and flavor, like the young, fresh garlic we had at eva's garden.

okinawan style braised pork (8)
this was the nod to the restaurant's location, and it was pretty good. it was also served with a spoon, in case i wanted to scoop up the juices, according to our waiter. the pork was nice and tender, but i think it was the overall flavor combination that made this dish, and again, the texture combination of soft (the pork) and crunchy (the kimchee). the juices were quite good, and i ate a good amount of it after finishing the pork, although it did become overly sweet after a while - due, i think, to the maple syrup in the sauce. but this was a dish where the delicacy of flavors was all too apparent, and i can only hope that i fully appreciated this complexity. i didn't think the beans did much for me, though.

yuzu brined ballotine of chicken wing (9)
ok, just the conception of this dish was amazing: it's a deboned chicken wing (a chicken wing!!) that's stuffed with more chicken. seems like a greek epicurean feast item, doesn't it? well, this was just fantastic: it came to the table piping hot and perfectly crispy on the outside, and the inside stuffing was chicken-y and had great texture. let me just add some more brownie points for the concept of this dish: a ballotine is hard enough in the first place, and then a ballotine of a freaking chicken wing?! genius. pure genius. again, a disconnect in my palate because i don't think i was able to detect so much of the yuzu brining, but it was amazing all the same. this dish was so good that after a tiny taste, my dining companions thought about ordering their own, a la carte.

seared petit strip loin (9)
i saw the photograph on the website of a wagyu beef dish, and the photograph made the beef look just so amazing, with this otherworldly sheen that you just couldn't imagine beef having. i've heard so much about wagyu - which has become rather trendy - that i felt that i had to try it, despite a price tag that was really hard to swallow. i could have gotten short ribs ($24) but was convinced by one of my dining companions to get the real deal (2 ounces, $45) to get a better sense of texture and flavor. and that photo on the website: just go look at it. you'll see what i mean. so the dish: it was four slices of wagyu, glistening, and a marrow bone full of marrow cooked in some mystery way. the wagyu? great. it came with some herbs and thin slices of garlic. i would say that it was fantastic, but i don't know that wagyu is really as amazing as it's purported to be. then again, it could be another shortcoming of my palate: i don't know. and god, the marrow, well...i've had marrow once before, at craigie street, where it came in the form of little blobs of fat rolling around slices of roasted flank steak. at o ya, it came almost in the form of a custard, providing even more richness to the wagyu. it all tasted so beefy that you can't imagine that a mcdonald's patty was ever beef.

grilled sashimi of chanterelle & shiitake mushrooms (7)
you know, frank bruni named this dish as his favorite, but i'm not so convinced. not to say that it isn't good, it just didn't knock my socks off. perhaps my expectations were too high? it's true that the mushrooms were fabulous, sliced, sauteed, with a legitimate sesame foam, and some texture contrast in the form of tiny bits of sesame brittle. it just wasn't the edifying experience i wanted it to be. the most impressive aspect of the dish was the study in textures - the mushrooms being perfectly cooked, they provided just enough bite but not too much, and the sesame brittle was a great foil to the softness of the mushrooms.

foie gras (10)
this is the dish that frank bruni describes as being so good, he ordered a second round after finishing the first. and it lives up to the hype. i haven't had that much foie gras, and the previous time i had it (at the french laundry) it was more like pate in texture than at o ya. at o ya, it's seared on the outside for a bit of crunch, but on the inside it's totally like a burst of amazingly flavored fat. yeah, fat, i went ahead and said it: i really enjoyed eating fat. the slight crunch of the exterior, the bit of wasabi hidden between rice and foie, the balsamic glaze: all of these things made this course work so well. also, the aged sake was quite nice with the heavy/high-flavored foie, since it was on the dry side and worked well with our food flavors.

one more gripe: eating at o ya is a little bit of work! i had to keep on referring back to the menu (which our waiter had kindly left us copies of) to check and see all of the things i was eating! this is not an ideal situation, but was very educational as i was able to really think about what i was eating. then again, for the purists out there, having to refer to a menu constantly would be a huge bother and detraction from the dining experience. oh, and full disclosure: i wanted to take photos but the lighting was too low for it! also, the presentation was pretty good, but not nearly as beautiful as alinea's plating, which was always a tour de force of presentation.

overall commentary: i love experimental food, and i loved o ya. i don't think i'll be returning for a while, but this more a circumstance of my bank account and less of an issue with the restaurant itself. it's a pleasant place to eat, with the courses spaced for you so that you don't get everything at once, and everything is perfectly paced for you. it's a completely relaxing space, due to the lighting and off-the-beaten-path existence.