neither here nor there

mobilia gallery; upland street; hungry ghost bread; housatonic; sparks street (geoff hargadon)

an incomplete list of nearly perfect meals

[march 2016]

new: studio in copenhagen

what is a nearly perfect meal? it is an idiosyncratic confluence of elements, the sum of parts. it has almost nothing to do with expense, other than that special dinners draw people together and place them in a suitable and shared frame of mind. this can be done anywhere, which is why this is not a list of restaurants but a list of meals. this can also be done for nearly any price, which is why some of these meals involve pancakes.

i now realise what everyone who opens an ambitious restaurant knows: it takes enormous effort to reproduce reliably what sometimes unexpectedly and serendipitously materialises when people get together to cook or eat.

in most of these cases, the food was confident and made with care, the beverages appropriate (but often not exalted), the company incomparable. some of these places i've been to many times, some only once. in every case, the particular perfection of the meal has not been reproducible in other places and at other times. your mileage may vary.

copenhagen
studio; frederiks have; kødbyens fiskebar; noma; ved stranden 10

nuremberg
essigbrätlein

paris
chheng sim; les deserteurs

london
10 greek street; 40 maltby street; otto's; st. john bread and wine; kandoo; brawn; taberna do mercado; morning coffee at mother's milk; saturday afternoon tea at postcard

tokyo
shunsui; gesshinkyo; tsuru ni tachibana (with updates from our japanese correspondent)

las vegas
chada

san francisco
kiss; quince; minako; greens; food inc (for their tuna niçoise sandwich on either a sunny day or a rainy one); pagolac; chapeau!; firefly; jackson fillmore; pancake sunday 5.13.07

berkeley
chez panisse; the cheeseboard

cambridge
hungry mother; bondir; cooking with fire and clay; morning coffee at hirise

malden
biryani park

palo alto
bay leaf cafe (yellow lentil sambar soup, on a wet day); homma's (outside on a warm summer night)

new york
shopsin's

lenox
nudel

boulder
the kitchen

marfa
cochineal

new orleans
galatoire's, the parkway bakery

osaka
hon-kogetsu

kyoto
mo-an

singapore
green pasture; fuli seafood

järpen
fäviken magasinet

washington dc
minibar

in new england

cambridge, massachusetts and oakland, maine.

the sky

amory street, cambridge, ma; and chichu museum, naoshima, japan.

the frozen north

a densely packed visit to nyc. while standing up, i discovered that entry-level dönnhoff, unfortunately, is not the dönnhoff worth drinking—for that, only the expensive dönnhoff will do. early on the morning of the second day, a damp flake fell from the grey wool sky, shortly followed by many of its little moist pals. much-loved, well-worn chuck taylors are not suitable footwear for crusty slush. a real-estate/seafood preservation magnate presented me a rare copy of a nyc-themed board game of his design in which players must perform a simulated mugging in order to win. or something like that. some empirical research conducted in the field indicated that caesar salad, veal parmesan, citrus-marinated rutabaga, and tarentaise with corn purée may all be appropriate foods for quiet and snowy days and nights. the next day, every acela express train was canceled, but i whined my way aboard an ice-encrusted northeast regional—which anyway has better seats—that eventually deposited me in boston. when i finally made it to cambridge, i was relieved to find it drier and colder, and with better mugs.

cambridge, ma

with appropriate reading material. outside, it is 1°F (-17°C).

hanson street, somerville, ma

receptacles

dwelltime

here is a quite nice paper cup by greg, at dwelltime. is art on paper cups in the zeitgeist? i stopped by the saatchi gallery last week and saw a clump of used coffee cups by paul westcombe covered in ink and colour drawings.

general magic

ed brought a little piece of technology history to coffee this morning. they had better logos back then.

tableau vivant

rivers of the windfall light

cambridge, ma; june 2013

"famous among the barns"; july 2008

michael david; "july 2005."

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

dylan thomas; 1945

in galbraith's house

the right beer at the right time

When the cool of the pond makes you drop down on it
When the smell of the lawn makes you flop down on it
When the teenage car gets the cop down on it
That time is here for one more year

jonathan richman, that summer feeling*

(for illustration only; what we're actually Drinking now is la clarine on the fifth day.)

(and if you're watching jonathan richman anyway, you can't not see the one with the camel outfit.)

resincloth hull

just lying around the media lab.

depth and security

Being in Boston ... it's a little bit like meeting someone who you know is smart and very accomplished but is at the same time not at all posh or flashy or arrogant but is, at the same time, very generous. It's easy to learn and get to know them, but then you realize that, oh, my goodness, as you get to know them, there seems to be no end, there's a depth to the personality that can only be because they're learned, they're knowledgeable, and they are not too self-conscious. Boston is like an old, wise professor who is very generous in teaching you and with whom you feel like you can continue to develop.

kairos shen, in the boston globe.

i agree wholeheartedly but this is not, perhaps, the universal experience of greater boston. also see: paul graham on cities and ambition.

consider the lobster

sources close to the matter tell us that the lobsters are swarming from the seas in such profusion that the bottom has fallen out of the market: an opportunity to make chili lobster in the fashion of the motherland. this usually onerous task is no chore if someone else does all the work, including boiling the animals and picking their flesh, and making the two sauces needed, leaving only the most nominal of shallot chopping and ginger grating to be done. it is worth pointing out that extracting the flesh from the shells before adding the sauce 1) allows eating at the table to be done without anyone getting squirted in the eye with lobster hemolymph and 2) leaves behind the raw materials for a lobster stock.

scomber scombrus

is the atlantic mackerel (also the boston mackerel). being low on the food chain and a habitué of cold waters, it is both rich in flavour and poor in mercury (though some disagree). on a whim (and spurred by the serried ranks of gleaming and bright-eyed fish at the lotte market), i picked up a few and caused them to be gutted on the spot but left otherwise whole.

last summer in denmark, there was much mackerel. (they were making a nordic version of garum.) i ate raw filets of it right after the whole fish were broken down, i ate it fried in richly flavoured unfiltered rapeseed oil on top of toasted rye bread, i ate it pickled in apple cider vinegar with paper-thin radish slices. mackerel is one of the best fish around: it loves acid and/or high heat more than leaner fish do.

at home, the mackerel turned quickly into long, thin filets. mackerel has a toughish skin, which can be removed neatly: with a sharp, narrow-bladed knife, skin-side down, cut just under the tail end to make a little tip of skin and flesh to hold on to. slide the knife along, pressing it down to the board, while pulling on the little tip. easier done than said. (this skin does become nicely crisp when grilled or pan-seared on high heat, but is distractingly chewy otherwise.)

the head (halved medially) and all the little trimmings went into a pot with water to cover. after gentle simmering, this produced a sweet, briny fish stock with a 1/4" thick layer of fish oil on top, worthy of the name fumet. soup tomorrow!

some of the filets went into a rice wine vinegar/salt/sugar pickle solution (with some garlic and ginger), some others went into a cider vinegar/cilantro pickle solution.

the last filets went, after a brief turn in a very hot pan and a squeeze of lime, into me.

the sandwich report

yesterday, we went to canteen on mass ave for lunch. the BLT was a marvel. thoroughly browned and ultra-crisp hot bacon, decent tomato thinly sliced, snappy leaves of bright chilled romaine, avocado, red onion shavings, pepper mayo and a vinaigrette, on a warm, split-griddled iggy's focaccia roll. additional saucing in the form of a soft-yolked fried egg. $9.35 after tax: execution success.

getting off at the wrong stop meant a short walk through downtown boston. on a bright, warmish winter day, this was not a hardship. on the way, i passed by foumami ("the asian sandwich bar") and stopped for a sandwich made on shaobing, a variety of chinese pastry. freshly made, shaobing are marvelously flaky and tender. they become tough and untasty if allowed to cool or if reheated in anything but a quick, dry oven. so it was for foumami's shaobing, pulled from a holding oven set at 170F. the bread was not rescued by the filling, an uninteresting clump of thinly sliced chilled pork loin flavoured with cilantro sprigs and some shaved cucumber. $8.51 after tax: execution failure.

in the north end, galleria umberto was selling out of its last items. i missed the pizza (by one slice!), panzarotti, and the arancini but managed to snag the last ham, salami, and ricotta calzone. it was milky, faintly salty, richly savory. $4.25 after tax: execution success

and then i spent a lot of someone else's money at the store we all dream of working at, buying some rather interesting stuff.

bondir

bondir was already confident, understated, unusual, coherent, and generous a few weeks after it opened in december 2010. i've been back many times since. always reluctant to write about it, i was hoping to keep it from being overrun by the hordes. we all know how well that works. we went back for dinner after a long break and bondir is better than ever. the highlights:

a warm, firm yet creamy sac of shad roe coated in bread crumbs then sautéed (possibly even shallow-fried) in butter, with a scattering of spinach leaves, bacon, red onion and kohlrabi batons dressed in a vinaigrette made with confit yuzu (which tasted like kumquats). the whole roe sac is presented, an approximately crescent-shaped mass about the length of a beer can. this can be intimidating to the diner expecting something like salmon or flying-fish roe. the first bite erases all trepidation: it has the crunch of a great japanese croquette, and a mild but permeating sea flavour. shad, as is common knowledge, is an anadromous fish and the subject of john mcphee's book the founding fish.

butter-poached lobster was the perfect texture, a soft and yielding crunch. the "celerisotto" underneath was outstanding: celeriac pieces cut down to the size of rice grains and cooked the texture of lightly al dente rice, in a light but creamy binding. the whole dish was dressed with an oily salsa verde, and adorned with raw discs of yellow carrots, brussels sprout leaves, and a few splinters of caramel made with kalamata olive. the faint sweetness of celery without its pungency, the strong green flavour of the salsa, the sweet brine of the olive caramel and the lobster. a wondrous combination.

chocolate panna cotta, which was a solid trembling on the edge of deliquescence. this is a simple but not simplistic thing, and its simplicity leaves no room for execution failure. edward espe brown says: "Preparing things simply is deceptively difficult, since there is no way to cover up our mistakes." (on execution failure in panna cotta, also see this diatribe.)

confit sunchokes on a piece of warm gingerbread with strips of quince leather and a lemon mousseline. the slowly cooked sunchokes became a translucent deep brown with the same chocolate and caramel overtones as the quince leather. with the warm spices in the gingerbread and the cool, tart lemon cream, the ideal meal-ender on a cold night. everything about this is tradition, tradition, tradition, and yet it isn't traditional. it looks unassumingly simple and yet it isn't simple. among the desserts, people seem to love the the tangerine dream, which is on the menu a lot: toasted meringue on top of gènoise layered with vermouth-infused tangerine pieces, and thyme-buttermilk ice cream. good, complicated-looking, spectacular, but too obvious! the much simpler-seeming desserts are where its really at: the crostatas, the cakes, the panna cottas.

francois chidaine's clos habert, a demi-sec 2009 chenin blanc from montlouis-sur-loire which was at once brilliantly acid and full of subtle sweetness. while i usually go straight for the acid, this one was best—taut and unctuous, lightly vinous—a little bit off the ice.

bondir's idiom is confident simplicity, inside which many complex and comforting layers unfold. service is unassuming and unobtrusive, competent, warm, well-informed, and unpatronising: a balance that any good restaurant seeks and few achieve. exotics and foraged ingredients are used often but in small, almost unnoticeable ways. they are not referenced in the menus but contribute bursts of unfamiliar or vaguely familiar flavour: allusion rather than outright statement. the casual diner passes by noticing nothing and enjoys the dish regardless; the gastro-nerd notices and his enjoyment is different but not deeper. the flashy-flash way to do seasonal food is to renovate the menu wholesale each day; bondir adopts the quieter approach of gradually introducing new components to each dish while retiring others. continuity with change, evolution instead of revolution. as with another instant favourite in tokyo, going back to bondir is an occasion for both pleasant familiarity and delicious surprises.