fun passages from a restaurant review

I read these just for kicks, since I’m not interested in multi-hundred dollar restaurants and as a vegetarian am especially not interested in places that brag about their foie gras. But this is nice:

“Mr. Bruni was not unreserved in his praise. Per Se in its early days could be a marvel of pretension and clock-gobbling silliness. I had a dinner there that first year that appeared to seamlessly combine French pretension with control-freaky West Coast pedantry. I learned a lot about the provenance of the caper berries, the butter, a single frond of micro carrot green. There were tight smiles and stifled yawns.”

I didn’t realize that “control-freaky West Coast pedantry” was a concept, but I like it, and can well imagine it as a recurring event deserving of its own name.

And though it can get a bit Onionesque at times, I like passages like this:

“Each flavor is bright, distinct, amazing, but none is so purely intense, as reduced to its essence, as the dense, fragrant craziness of the figs.”

It loses control even more on page 2, but is still entertaining:

“And the beauty of Christofle flatware and Raynaud china, as well as a polished view of the Christopher Columbus statue below, the twinkle of gas firelight and the feel of linens ironed to the texture of freshly sanded pine, can be exactly analogous to towering sets and a thundering orchestra, to the kind of stagecraft that can lead to tears and applause.”

No one does Latour Litanies as unrestrainedly as food critics:

“Rabbit with cherry tomatoes and sweet corn, a wave of frisée and a beautiful swoosh of truffled hollandaise. Charred eggplant with compressed cucumbers, more red ribbon sorrel and fresh market peppers. Course after course arrived: tiny, rich little plates of food running into one another as if to create a montage sequence or a kaleidoscopic dream that ended in a castle of chocolates and macarons. You may ask to tour the kitchen afterward, or linger over coffee, or simply stare out at Columbus and his dour expression, and contemplate Nirvana.”

And this, you couldn’t make up:

“And I had a serving of shaved razor clams with sea urchin sauce and Osetra caviar in the beautifully renovated new dining room of Le Bernardin that was the most fully realized and delicious combination of flavors I have experienced in 2011. Maguy Le Coze and Eric Ripert, that restaurant’s owners, stand tall amid these ranks.”