In Two Months and Eight Hours, We Will Be Sampling One Of The Best Tasting Menus IN THE WORLD!!

YAY!!!  I have a dinner reservation for The Fat Duck in Bray, England!!  I might have to abstain from the daily click marathon of the Momofuku Ko website today, because if I also landed a reservation there, I might explode with culinary joy.

OMG!  I did it!  After a dozen back-to-back calls to the UK reservation line, I finally got through, AND got exactly the meal time I wanted (7:00 p.m. on the 11th of November).  SO EXCITED!  Now we can spend the next sixty days drooling over the sample menus online.  I cannot wait!

Step 1: Make Muffins. Step 2: Eat Muffins. Step 3: Run Off Muffin Top.

Rhubarb is one of my favorite foods. It’s tragically under-utilized, and even on the chichi epicurean websites I frequent, there are too few recipes devoted to this wonderful edible. I am always thrilled when I see rhubarb on a restaurant menu (my last visit to Marseille was selfishly timed to coincide with the reappearance of rhubarb and pistachio panna cotta on their dessert list), and even more excited when it shows up unannounced (as at Les Halles with Mom last week, when I was delighted to find chopped rhubarb in our appetizer, Vol-au-vent aux champignons sauvages et salsifis).

I Am, Like, So Totally California

Disclaimer: I STILL have never been to California.  (This may be remedied as soon as July or August, when I am tentatively planning a trip out to the Left Coast.  In my dreams, I fly out to Seattle to visit Jess #1, and then spend an awesome week on a rented motorcycle, driving down the coast towards LA–via Portland and the Northern California redwood forests and the San Francisco Zoo–to visit Jess #2.)  In any case, though, you came here for a quality story based on actual real-life events, not a list of my vague summer plans.  So, onward.

I first read about the existence of date shakes in National Geographic.  They had an illustrated sidebar about regional American food specialties, and I noticed that in addition to a variety of foodstuffs I was intimately familiar with (Beef on Weck, Coffeemilk, Kringle), there were some peculiar delights I had not tried.  One of those was a California treat, the date shake.

I’m not really sure what else besides sitting in front of this pinned-up article for more than eight hours a day inspired me to actually make my own date shake this week, but I decided I had a craving for one.  In fact, I’d never actually eaten a date prior to this week.  Mom would occasionally bake date bread for Grandpa on Father’s Day or his birthday, but I am pretty sure I never ate any of that.*

Based on some half-hearted Googling and a quick search on Seamless Web, I determined that there were really no reliable date shake vendors in NYC (kind of surprising, actually, given how many other California trends seem to get imported).  Instead, the minute I finished up at work, I booked it to Whole Foods to pick up vanilla protein powder (thick and frothy without the saturated fat of ice cream) and dates, which were not available fresh, to my chagrin.  (Not that I would really appreciate the difference at this point… I just heard the fresh ones were good.)  I settled for the dried, pitted variety, billed on the plastic container as “Nature’s Candy.”  This was a promising slogan.

If I Blog Obsessively About Food, Maybe Ruth Reichl Will Adopt Me

I took my parents to Craft tonight for dinner.  I wanted to go somewhere interesting, but didn’t plan far enough in advance to get a reservation at wd-50 or Babbo, my first picks.  I’d been itching to try Craftsteak, but decided to book a table for Craft instead, anticipating that maybe Mom might be in the mood for something other than three courses of beef.

We arrived a little early, which gave us time to enjoy the restaurant while it was still quiet, and sample drinks from the bar.  The parents tried actual cocktails, but I dove into the wine immediately, starting with the only Riesling on the “by glass” menu.*  While Craft does have a decent wine list, and their extensive bottle collection is essentially on display in the coolers that border the dining room, the selection of wines you can order by the glass is rather abbreviated.

For dinner, Dad ordered the Crispy Fresh Bacon & Apple as an appetizer, a 28-Day Dry-Aged Sirloin as an entree, and Duck Confit & Onion Risotto as a side dish.  Both Mom and I ordered the tasting menu, which was served family-style (ahem, “Craft style”), in what seemed to be very small portions.  (By the end of the meal, as we labored through two dessert courses, we appreciated that the portions were actually quite reasonable.)  However, when Dad’s deep-fried bacon was brought to the table, we were all stunned to see five massive towers of crispy pork meat.  It was a LOT of bacon, by any measure, and especially after you saw the nominal amount of food that constituted two servings of the Tasting Menu.  Word of warning to other Craft-goers: the family-style portions are not consistent, and in a bizarre reversal, it seems like the richest food comes in the largest quantities, while the salads and vegetable dishes are quite small.  Tom Colicchio loves some animal fat.