per se: on being jaded

i've just returned from a lovely, languorous lunch at per se. initially i had doubts that i even wanted to try to go to per se; after all, i've been to the french laundry, and it seems that the two are not particularly different (especially given thomas keller's extreme attention to detail). to me it has always seemed that per se is just the east coast outpost of the original. if i had to choose a place to go where it's hard to get reservations, it would probably be momofuku ko. (a note on reservations: did i just luck out when i called babbo to make a reservation? i mean, i guess it's a wednesday, but it's at a convenient time and everything. i suppose it was three weeks later than i had been thinking to make the reservation.)

as fate would have it, one of jessica's friends managed to get a lunch reservation. then they had someone drop out of their party of four, and voila, suddenly i was going to go to lunch at per se. why the sudden change of heart? well, at the end of the day, i really was curious to see if per se is different from the french laundry. and i also wanted to hang out with jessica, since i hadn't seen her in a while. for those who are wondering how i can justify that much on one dinner, well, i really do enjoy eating food that is interesting and prepared with impeccable technique. much as i like to believe i'm a good cook, i'm really just a good home cook - i've got nothing on these four-star restaurants. and i know enough about food to know when the kitchen is doing something really spectacular, and with every posh dinner i've had (about once a year), it has been worth it. i think that what i'm getting out of the dinner is more than just food; it's the opportunity to see what someone else is thinking about food: what it is, what it should be, and how you should eat it. i love high-concept food when it delivers, when a chef is thinking about a certain problem and that a particular dish is the solution to that problem.

so, lunch. per se is rather nouveau riche with respect to interior design. it's as if the interior designer made a list of all of the different styles and objects that were of interest, and then just threw them all together in the restaurant without any restraint. there are all-glass tables, french-style blue doors, walls made of rough-hewn stone, a reception desk that's a chrome spiral, a glassed-in wine cellar...you name the style, per se has it. still, i do always love a restaurant with padded armchairs, as if you're in someone's very posh living room, or are going to spend a while at the restaurant (or all of the above) - it automatically makes me feel like lingering.

we all got the chef's tasting menu, and shared a bottle of navarro vineyards' gewürztraminer juice (yeah, it's nonalcoholic - it's made from the same grapes as the vineyard uses to make wine, but it's not fermented). so there you have the basics, and now i'll do my rambling recounting of lunch by course and random musing.

to start, we had the traditional thomas keller amuse bouche: gougeres and the marinated salmon cones. i could have sworn that the gougeres i had at the french laundry were hollow; the ones at per se had some sort of creamy, cheesy filling that had obviously just been piped into the gougeres. they were lovely, as usual, and the filling was really wonderful. the marinated salmon cones sparked copycats all over the country, but are always fun and tasty. the cone is a savory tuile that has black sesame seeds in it, and is filled with creme fraiche and topped with a small ball of marinated salmon ... paste? it's not exactly a paste or puree, since the salmon is raw; it's just...ground as if it had been ground by an ant-size meat grinder. this actually kind of grossed me out the first time i had it, because it's a familiar shape that causes me to expect a certain flavor - ie, sweet - to come with it when i eat it. it's also a little weird to be eating cured salmon as a puree. but this time i wasn't fazed at all, for some reason. it's interesting, too, to see the same ingredients in a dish at alinea, but with a preparation that's totally different - grant achatz does frozen creme fraiche topped with shaved frozen salmon, topped with a chive stem that you use to pick the whole thing up with. so it's the same ingredients, but the preparation totally changes the way they taste.

"oysters and pearls" (sabayon of pearl tapioca with island creek oysters and sterling white sturgeon caviar)
this first course is a gold standard of thomas keller's repertoire, and for good reason - it's consistently fantastic. the sabayon is creamy, the caviar is salty, and the oysters are divine. also, it's fun to eat with a caviar spoon. let's revisit those oysters - i still have had oysters just a handful of times, and have only recently come to like mussels. the oysters in this dish are poached in butter, and they're wonderfully tender, with the most fantastic flavor. if you aren't sure if you like oysters, these oysters will convert you. i get a slightly crazed smile on my face just thinking about them.

sauteed hudson valley moulard duck foie gras (tokyo turnips, tellicherry black pepper shortbread, watercress and mulberry "gastrique")/salad of marinated "topinambours" (glazed bing cherries, petite sorrel and sicilian pistachio butter)
two of us had the former, and two of us had the latter - i had the former, but tasted a bit of jessica's sunchoke salad. "topinambour," incidentally, is merely the french for "sunchoke." not really sure why the french is required here, other than to make the restaurant seem more posh. our waiter described it to us as a sunchoke salad, probably because he correctly assumed that there was no chance that we would know the french for sunchoke.

so at the french laundry, there was also a foie gras course, but it was the peach melba foie gras, where i believe the foie gras is poached rather than seared, as it was here. i've only had foie gras a couple of times, the first being at the french laundry, and the most recent before today being at o ya. i must say that while the texture of poached foie gras is wonderfully smooth, the joy of eating seared foie gras is pretty much always superior. when it's seared, the interior gets all melty but there's still a crust to the exterior, so it's like eating a chunk of really delicious fat pretending to be meat. there are people who don't like the idea of eating fat, but they obviously haven't had seared foie gras. the turnips and berry puree (i believe we had a huckleberry gastrique, not mulberry, but i could also have just misheard) were nice with the foie gras, especially the berry puree, but the foie gras was clearly in the spotlight. of no particular use to me was the black peppercorn shortbread - it was very buttery and given the fatty nature of the foie gras, i didn't feel a need for the added richness of the shortbread.

this course was a choice between the foie gras and the sunchoke salad, and i am always lucky when i eat with people who like to share tastes of differing courses. i'm not really for or against sunchokes, but they were fine here. of more interest was the cherry with pistachio butter - just the correct balance of sweet and salty. plus absolutely beautiful color on the cherry, contrasted with the green of the pistachio butter. the pistachio butter marks the first time i've really liked pistachios, and the texture of the butter was unrivaled: unctuous, silky, somehow very substantial on your tongue. just beautiful.

extra course: um...a tuna-like fish (texture-wise) with pickled ginger and radish. something like that. it was good. i don't really know why we were given this course, but i know that it was good. pan roasted fillet of gigha island halibut (violet artichokes, compressed lemon cucumber and grapefruit "ravigote") i am not really sure how the term "ravigote" applies to this dish, given the wikipedia entry for ravigote. we can dwell on that later, though, after i describe this to you. first of all, the colors were lovely, with the pink grapefruit and the orange-yellow seared crust of the halibut. the halibut was fantastic: perfectly cooked, but more impressive was the seared crust. this is why these restaurants are so impressive - when the food is cooked in such a way that i can't even figure out what technique they used. the halibut had no coating of any kind, yet the seared surface was crisp and caramelized. i mean, seriously crisp, almost as if just the very surface of the halibut had been deep fried. i have no idea how they did it - is it just a matter of searing the fish at the right, very high temperature for the right amount of time? i know that i can't cook like that. the grapefruit was a perfect pairing for the fish - i'm really liking grapefruit these days. the artichokes and lemon cucumber seemed a little superfluous to me, but maybe that's just because i liked the fish/grapefruit combo so much.

butter poached nova scotia lobster (caramelized mission fig, heirloom beets, and wilted butter lettuce with summer truffle emulsion)
i have also only recently started liking lobster; i flirted with liking it on and off, all throughout my childhood. now i'm very sure that i like it; the deal was sealed when i had a lobster roll at pearl oyster bar. in fact, that lobster roll still stands as the fondest memory i have of lobster: cool, lightly dressed, sweet, tender...gotta hit that place up again. back to per se: the shape of the lobster they used was just so pleasing to the eye, you have no idea. i just wanted to pick the hunk up with my fingers and cram it in my mouth, bite by bite. it was glossy with sauce, and in the shape of half a plump doughnut with no hole, and it was so beautiful. when i was eating it, it was a little difficult to cut, actually, and i don't know enough about lobster to be a particularly good judge of texture, but i thought it was slightly stringy. beautifully tender, but somehow still a little stringy; i know that lobster in general does have strands the way mammalian meat does, but it was still just a little bit disappointing. i really liked the butter lettuce and the summer truffle sauce - the butter lettuce had the absolute perfect amount of bite to it, and the summer truffle sauce was just delicious with the lobster.

cavendish farm's "caille en crepinette" (confit of young fennel, medjool dates and fennel root puree with quail jus)
wikipedia tells me that "crepinette" is a type of french sausage made of chicken, veal, pork, or lamb, wrapped in caul fat. crepinette does not describe this dish at all, unless the quail leg was wrapped in caul fat? it did seem to me that the quail leg was deboned and then rearranged around one slender leg bone, so perhaps it was wrapped in caul fat to keep everything together, like a ballotine. it reminds me of the chicken wing ballotine that i had at o ya - the chicken wing was deboned, and then stuffed with more chicken. that idea still blows me away, you know. back to our quail - the quail leg came with these tiny dates that clearly had been shaped from original medjool dates (which are quite large - these were the size of a smallish green grape), and were lovely and sticky and hard to cut. i like fennel, but it didn't seem particularly successful here, and i hate when chefs throw around the word "confit." why, exactly, is this a confit? i hear the word and i think of duck legs cooked in duck fat. anyway, this was fine, but not exactly mind-blowing. that chicken wing at o ya wins pretty handily.

marcho farm's tenderloin of nature fed veal (greenmarket carrots, young pearl onions, and kendall farm's creme fraiche "pain perdu" with veal sauce)
let's talk a bit about veal. i have to say that i never really eat veal, because the thought of eating a baby animal that's been kept from moving to ensure the tenderness of its meat is kind of revolting. normally i have no qualms about this sort of thing, but i generally draw the line at veal. well, i definitely didn't read the menu carefully enough because i had no idea there was veal on it. i don't really like the flavor of veal, either; it's not a strong dislike, just more of a preference to eat something else. if i had noticed that there was veal on the menu, i would have asked them to substitute something else. but you know, it was there, so i ate it. i suppose i could have sent it back, but in terms of etiquette i felt that the window for that had shut quite some time ago. i think that for me, the best parts of this dish were the veal, the bits of veal...cheek? (it was braised, so it had more bite to it), and the pain perdu. the pain perdu seemed to be cubes of a soft, buttery bread - most likely brioche - that were soaked in creme fraiche and sauteed until golden. i'm not really sure how anything can really be soaked in creme fraiche, but that's my best guess. the fact that i didn't particularly feel a need to eat the veg (but i did) brings up the issue of unnecessary elements of a dish. i felt that these were a rather generic way to get some sort of vegetable into a meat dish. and i say this: if you want to have a dish that's all meat and no veg, because it simply doesn't need any, then go right ahead.

di bruno brothers' "burrata" (marinated jewel box tomatoes, arugula coulis, and nyons extra virgin olive oil)
the name of this dish annoys me in its use of quotation marks. of all of the things i hate about thomas keller (and this list is very short), i hate his use of quotation marks. we know that the menu is an interpretation of the techniques that are listed; i do not need quotation marks to tell me when you are being more playful with a technique. that's why i'm eating the food: to find out what your interpretation is. even more annoying is this quotation mark situation: the word burrata does not need quotation marks because the dish genuinely included a slice of real burrata. there's no interpretation there: it. just. is. was there something fake about the burrata? something not genuine? seemed pretty much like a burrata to me. i'd never had burrata, actually, so this was a treat for me - the interior creamy part is pretty awesome. cool, creamy, just slightly mozzarella-flavored...i could definitely eat this all day. let me also say that this dish came with two tiny little toast points that were perfectly crispy, and that the tomatoes were the best tomatoes i have had in about a year, easily. the last time i had good tomatoes was when i had heirloom tomatoes in a tosci's blt, when they were taste-testing them and gave us samples. you know you've got a good tomato when you can taste that it has spent oodles of time in the sun. and did you know - the tomatoes were peeled! who peels tomatoes?! in this case it was totally warranted, because it allowed you to just taste tomato without having to chew through the skin of the tomato.

plum sorbet (santa rosa plums, ginger pudding, plum consomme and gingerbread crisp)
this was quite nice, and i love sorbets (this was a creamy sorbet, so really more like ice cream) and plums. plums and ginger are always a fantastic combination - i've done a gingered plum shortcake in the past - and this was no exception. there was a bottom layer of something gingery - it could have been a poached slice of ginger - that i wasn't a huge fan of. the ginger pudding was an english-style pudding, though, which more than made up for said strange slice of stuff.

"peanut butter and milk" (bitter chocolate mousse with salted peanut cream and reduced milk ice cream)
this was almost a showstopper! i mean, it was great, and i thought it was perfectly executed; i just wanted it to somehow be slightly more exciting. the peanut butter was fantastic - roasted, salty, absolutely beautiful perfect texture: unctuous, buttery, but still somehow substantial. the reduced milk ice cream was also quite wonderful - it tasted very simple and familiar and was the perfect accompaniment to the peanut butter and chocolate. the chocolate was probably the weak point for me - there was a mousse and also a chunk of chocolaty stuff that was almost ganache. the mousse was good but forgettable, while the chocolate chunk was a little too dense. but flavorwise, this delivered pretty well.

"mignardises"
thomas keller, you punctuation maniac, there you go with the extra quotation marks. please stop. if you want to broadcast that this word is french and not english, just put it in italics like the rest of the world - no need to be fancy (and...wrong). the mignardises at the french laundry back in 2006 were not quite as spectacular as they were this afternoon, which seems somehow wrong since we're more in a recession now than we were then. the mignardises are kind of like the end of a fireworks show: the crew is done with all of the carefully orchestrated stuff, and now it's just time to bombard the crowd with all of the leftover fireworks. so first, they brought us mini creme brulees and pots de creme. then, coffee and tea. then, chocolate truffles on a silver platter, flavors pointed out by our server with a very tastefully shiny brown card instead of her finger (i had grapefruit and fennel, which were really good). then, a bowl of chocolate covered, cocoa dusted hazelnuts, and a bowl of tiny, striped, house-made sugar candies wrapped in twists of cellophane. then, a silver tiered dish containing caramels in the top, cherry nougat in the middle, and more truffles (coconut, dark chocolate, caramel) in the bottom. i'm pretty sure we sat there for an extra hour just talking and stuffing our faces with sweets.

the scene
a word about the all-important scene: i am always interested to see who exactly waltzes into these posh establishments. even the group i was with was rather unorthodox: four grad students. i mean, where do grad students get the kind of money to pay for a lunch like this, on the stereotypical grad student's budget? i don't know. i mean, i do: thank you, us government, for my stimulus check. i am always surprised, though, when i find fellow students who are interested in food at this level, because it's an expensive habit.

about other people: i love to see how people dress for places like this - people break out their sunday best. there was a woman with the most inappropriate black velvet sack-shaped purse (in my opinion, even lunch at per se does not require that kind of fake formality), a woman in a super-trendy draped sweater dress (awesome), a girl in a chiffon-type polka-dotted summer dress (very pretty but somehow out of place). the woman who takes the cake, though, was the one sitting at the table next over from us. first of all, i do think that bra straps should stay hidden at nice restaurants, and that any exposed lingerie should at least be very pretty; i also think that see-through dresses are a faux pas at nice restaurants. this woman struck out on both counts. i didn't really want to know exactly what kind of thong she was wearing, but i do know. and the lighting in the restaurant was dim; i would hate to know what happens in broad daylight. let's just not go there.

was it worth it?
i guess you really have to qualify "worth it" when you answer this question. i don't actually think the food was worth it - i remember the food being more interesting at the french laundry, to be honest. but i do think it was really wonderful to relax away from the bustle of new york with people who were great to talk to. it was also really wonderful to be able to hang out with scientists, because it's nice to get a break from architecture now and then. so in terms of company, and as an experience, it was worth it, but the food fell short. the food just seemed too conventional for new york, and i found myself wishing it was more creative. i really wanted to like per se, but i don't think i'll be back.