Momofuku Ko-My-God

We just celebrated our fifteenth anniversary. FIFTEEN. WHAT?? It's crazy that I've spent almost one-third of my life married to The Boy, but there you go. We're still having fun, even during the medical crappiness of the last couple of years.

So how to mark the event? We left it kind of late to do anything big, partly because I was due to start the new ritual of weekly chemo and twice-a-day radiation and we didn't know how I'd feel. As it turned out, I was doing okay, so with just over a week to go, we found a hotel in New York and booked train tickets for the following weekend.

The big question, of course: Where to eat?

Scoping around for something new, I checked in with our friend Eric, who a) reminded us that he and his wife had recently had a fab meal at Momofuku Ko and b) pointed out that reservations for our Saturday night would open up the following day.

Okay, sold.

In theory, at least.

The deal with Ko is that they have 12 seats — not tables, seats — which become available ten days ahead at 10am. The trick is to be online at 9:58am and hit "refresh" constantly.

So I was. Click, click, click. Refresh, refresh, refresh. One minute to go ... 9:59:48 ... click ...

Ten o'clock. Click.

No availability.

WHAT??

Yep, them's the breaks. Luckily, I also knew to keep clicking; people cancel, spaces open up. And lo, after only another 30 minutes of hitting "refresh," I saw an opening. Click. Got it.

(And then another couple of heart-pounding, adrenaline-filled minutes where I had to fill in contact details and give a credit card number while a timer counted down 120 seconds. Aaagh, the number's wrong! Aagh, I can't spell my own name! This, it seems, is why I'm not cut out for the bomb squad.)

So, after a fun day in Manhattan, including a lovely pub lunch at Jones Wood Foundry (bangers and mash! Steak and kidney pie! Listening to New Yorkers concerned about the contents of toad in the hole!) and a romantic walk through a rainy, misty, almost-deserted Central Park, we headed to the East Village.

Okay, a disclaimer now: Ko is known for discouraging photography. As the website puts it:

may i take pictures?
no.

Which would hurt less if I hadn't found 600+ Ko photos on Flickr.

But whatevs. No lovely food shots here, but a few observations to give you a sense of the experience.

The room is long and narrow, and dominated by a counter running down the middle. On one side are 12 stools; on the other, three guys with sharp knives and a lot of stainless steel.

The music is eclectic — Wilco, Pink Floyd, NWA ("it's the big boss man's iPod," we're told) — though loud; we have to shout to communicate allergies to the staff, and we don't always hear all the details of each dish as they're presented.

That, combined with the fear of being yelled at for pulling out a phone, means we don't take notes. And it's hard to remember all ten courses plus snacky extras.

Still, there was:

Light-as-air chicharrón dusted with huitlacoche;
Melty Spanish mackerel contrasted with pickled shallots and blood orange;
Tiny, delicate shrimp with a texture I can only describe as creamy, something I've never encountered before;
A rich potato chowder with soft littleneck clams and andouille (just outside my current capacity for spicy food, but still fabulous);
Venison tartare, served under sunchoke and Brussels sprout leaves and over fermented black beans. No, shut up, it was insane. The venison was like maguro in texture, the beans added a deeper meaty angle, the leaves gave a crunchy foil to the soft flesh. The only thing even more better was the egg.

Ohhh, the egg. Soft-boiled, smoked, served with a generous spoonful of caviar on top of buttered onions. Simple, right? Oh look, here's a recipe. And a better picture.

The other dish often cited in discussions of Ko is the lychees with Riesling geleé topped with chilled, shaved foie. It's like a rich, grown-up, sophisticated sundae. Sadly, by the time it appears for us, I'm dragging — it's well past my bedtime — so I can't give it the full attention it deserves.

And I hardly touch the last savory course, a tender piece of duck with baby turnip and berries. Which makes me feel bad, especially as the poor guy firing up the first batch accidentally set the whole pan alight and had to start over.

Oh, a word on the chefs. There are some jobs I'm just not cut out for: teacher, nurse, anything in sales. Add to that: Cooking in a tiny restaurant where you're almost nose-to-nose with the diners. These guys had an incredible Zen-like approach, calmly, methodically prepping and plating, slicing translucent slivers of fish, using tweezers to pick out the perfect microgreen garnishes, trimming meat down to its tastiest essence, while dealing with distracting customer chit-chat. I'd last ten minutes before I was throwing plates across the room.

Desserts were lovely — a coconut-lime sorbet with meringue and banana and a sour-orange sorbet with panna cotta, Earl Grey and caramel — but seemingly not as creative as the mains. Which reminded us of dinner at Rosanjin, in which a dinner of dishes in a formal, traditional Japanese style concluded with ... cheesecake and strawberry ice cream. So maybe it's a thing.

After about two and a half hours, we rolled out, tired and full and happy. Ko goes in our Top Ten Meals of All Time.

And now I'm back to sucking scrambled eggs and milkshakes. At least I still have tastebuds, for now. Once they're gone, I'll entertain myself with looking at photos of dinner at Ko.

Other people's photos, anyway.

Testing taste with a tasting at No. 9 Park

The realization that my tastebuds were back was quickly trumped by the even better news that my post-treatment scans show no sign of cancer cells remaining.

I'm a little uncomfortable about using the phrase "cancer survivor" — I feel as though that title sits more appropriately with people who have seriously been through the medical wringer than with someone whose worst inconvenience was needing a turkey baster to eat soup — but please feel free to use it if you want.

To celebrate my all-clear, we went to No. 9 Park in Boston. It's where we went for lunch after my citizenship ceremony. A good place for momentous occasions.

And it seemed only fitting that we go for the tasting menu. So I think I can taste, huh? Time to make sure!

We ordered cocktails, and while we waited, they brought out what I guess you'd call amuse-foies: 2oz glasses of Philadelphia Fish House Punch (though I'm sure the version we had used apricot liqueur and brandy rather than the peach brandy mentioned here). It was a lovely summer drink: light and fruity without being overstated.



Then came the drinks we ordered: the perfectly balanced La Palabra (mezcal, Chartreuse, lime, Combier triple sec) for The Boy. For me, La Vie du Canard, which bravely tried Cynar and Cocchi (this year's St. Germain, apparently, as it's suddenly everywhere) with foie gras-infused bourbon.

The three spirits went well, and I'm a sucker for bitter drinks. But the intensity of flavors overwhelmed whatever the foie was supposed to do. Still, pretty.





And then on to the food, starting with a tender, Asian-style fluke crudo with miso and garlic,



followed by excellent monkfish with olives and intense fresh-roasted tomato,



and then dense, chewy wholewheat agnolotti stuffed with zucchini and topped with Pecorino Romano.



The tasting menu is seven courses, but we decided to add a couple more. Because we frickin' deserved it. Which is how we got to try both a creamy foie gras terrine that came with cherries, arugula and Vidalia onion:



and No. 9 Park's signature dish, the rich, sweet, decadent prune-stuffed gnocchi with more foie gras:



Next up: a tender piece of quail on a fried green tomato on ... something buttermilky, though I don't recall what. Good though.



And then a beautiful piece of ribeye with two accompaniments that were my favorite of the evening: a bright green, intensely flavored spring onion coulis and a fresh, summery corn cake.



You may have noticed that the light in the room was dimming during the course of the courses. By the time we reached the first dessert — a pool of tart, red, plum soup with bright, gingery tapioca — there wasn't a lot of ambient light for photos.

I did my best with the evening's last dish, a fabulous yogurt panna cotta with fennel ice cream and fresh berries, but the image is a pale (or at least dim) representation of the dish, which brought together creamy and crunchy, mint and berry, anis and sugar, and made them sing.



At least I know one thing for sure: If I can taste the tastes in a tasting menu, I can taste any tastes anywhere.

But I'll keep testing. Just to make sure.

Au Pied de Cochon: bonjour, canard en conserve!

Last weekend we took an almost-spontaneous (i.e. with only two weeks' notice) trip to Montreal. The drive up was a little rough — a six-hour trip after a full day's work — but we pushed onward, motivated by a constant drumming rhythm:

Duck-in-a-can, duck-in-a-can, duck-in-a-can ...

I wrote about our previous trip to Montreal, the highlight of which was dinner at Au Pied de Cochon, where The Boy realized his lifelong dream of eating poutine with foie gras and I discovered that my lifelong dream would be eating canard en conserve.

Now we were returning to fulfill that dream.

The only available table was at 9:00, which is later than we usually eat. So we prepared accordingly: we spent the day shopping on Rue Saint-Denis and took an afternoon nap. Oh, and we had an early lunch at Bières et Compagnie, a Belgian-style brasserie with 100 beers on tap and a lovely ostrich/duck/pheasant sausage plate:



(That was The Boy's lunch. I just had a simple salad.)



(Okay, it was loaded with Toulouse sausage. But salad nonetheless!)

Anyway, back to the main event.

Au Pied de Cochon was, as always, loud and busy. People at a long table in the window taking turns standing and making exuberant toasts. A group of six hip young guys, devouring plates of meat and passing around a plate of salad. An older guy with a graying ponytail and matching beard, looking like a world-weary corsair, steadily making his way through a plate of blood pudding.

We knew, of course, what our main objective was; but what else to order? Even with the best of intentions to be restrained, the menu at PDC almost dares you to try everything.

Come on, you haven't had the duck carpaccio before! What about the boudin and foie gras tart? Or the guinea fowl liver mousse? Or the Quebecois version of chicharrón, oreilles de crisse?

But we were good, and ordered salad.

Among other things.

Most notably, the cromesquis de foie gras:



They look innocent enough, don't they? But here's the deal: They're cubes of foie gras, breaded and deep-fried. The breading becomes an impermeable shell and the inside turns to liquid.

To eat, you put the whole thing in your mouth, close your lips, and bite. And suddenly it's as though the entire inside of your head is bathed in warm, soft, rich, deep, soothing liquid.

It actually, literally, seriously brought tears to my eyes.

As another snackeroo to begin, we ordered the plate of cochonailles. In fairness, we expected a small sampling of tasty pork bites. Earlier in the week, we were at Craigie on Main's Whole Hog dinner (see review from the people sitting behind us), where the tiny, delicate cochonailles looked like this:



So naturally we were surprised to find that at Au Pied de Cochon, the cochonailles looked like this:



Head-cheese terrine, two types of pâté (one of which is hidden beneath the bread), sausage, half a deviled egg, a lovely onion jam, something dolloped with mustard that I don't even remember, and that dark brown square, which is essentially salty beef-stock Jell-O.

But it's okay, because we also had salad.



Layers of fresh beets and goat cheese I could easily have eaten for dessert, had there been room for such a thing.

And then it came.



When they say "duck in a can," they mean it: the waiter brings a can, and a can-opener, and pours the contents out onto toast topped with celeriac puree.

My photographic skills are not sufficient, so I advise you check out Claudine's Flickr photo to see it in all its glory.

The magret: perfectly cooked, moist, meaty, delicious.
The foie gras: soft and tender and all the better for sitting in balsamic meat broth.

The cabbage: well, when the description essentially translates to "embuttered," what else needs to be said?

And despite the richness of the dish, serving it on toast somehow made it seem like home-cooked comfort food; as though there was really little difference between opening a can of duck and a can of beans to throw over toast for a quick lunch.

It was a luxurious and decadent experience, and one I highly recommend.

Interestingly, though, when I asked The Boy whether he'd order the same thing next time, he said no.

Not because he didn't enjoy it, of course (he later admitted he was disappointed that he had to share the foie gras with me; thanks, honey).

But as he pointed out, there are so many other things left to try: the foie gras burger. The lamb confit. The fries made with duckfat. The foie gras-stuffed pig's foot ...