There’s a Potbelly in NYC now! Now if only we can get an Alinea Chicago won’t have anything on us.
High five, Mayor Emanuel and Chicago, for your open data initiative!
Beyond fulfilling a promise from the transition report, why is any of this important? The overarching answer is not about technology at all, but about culture-change. Open data and its analysis are the basis of our permission to interject the following questions into policy debate: How can we quantify the subject-matter underlying a given decision? How can we parse the vital signs of our city to guide our policymaking?
NYC has a similar initiative. Follow it on Tumblr here.
And for more on the City 2.0, check out my posts on Honest Buildings and this year’s TED Prize.
Next: elBulli preview (!!)
Let me tell you something I really admire about Emily. She’s the kind of person who is unafraid to be wildly enthusiastic about something. She had a meal at Alinea — at it literally changed her life. As she explained to us at dinner, I realized I had a new passion in life. How often does that come along? And how often do we embrace it as she has — reading all she can about high-wire dining, watching documentaries, even doing something as simple as writing thank you notes to the chefs? (When I read that she did that I was amazed — and a bit ashamed I never thought of it. Why wouldn’t you thank the person who has created this experience for you?)
The thing that really floors me is that she’s not just a fan — she’s become a true friend to Chef Dave and other great minds behind Next. I get so shy around people I admire that I know I come off as aloof. She’s inspired me to break out of that shell and be more generous with my feelings. Who doesn’t like a high five?
Emily’s good will made us the lucky recipients of a special treat: two preview courses of Next’s next menu, elBulli, an homage to what many agree is the greatest restaurant of the modern era and probably of all time (copyright Kanye). At its height, elBulli received two million requests for reservations annually — and it was only open for six months out of the year (the other time was spent developing new techniques). Chef Ferran Adrià recently closed elBulli’s doors for at least two years to devote himself full-time to experimentation. Rumor has it Next is bringing in elBulli chefs to cook along side them.
Tickets to elBulli are going to be nearly impossible to get (they’ll only do one seating a night), and though we hope to try and squeeze our way in somehow, we’ve resigned ourselves to enjoying the meal vicariously through those that do get in (rooting for you, Emily and Simon) — and recreating it with our crazy friends here in NYC (who’s with us??).
Next’s elBulli meal will be some 30+ courses, each representative of one of the restaurant’s major culinary breakthroughs or classic courses. Chef Dave presented our first preview course: olives. As you entered the beautiful hill-top restaurant, he explained, you gazed upon a wall of jars of olives (an ordinary sight in Spain) and were later invited to try some.
But these are no ordinary olives.
They’re liquid olive essence suspended in gel spheres that burst in your mouth, thrilling your taste buds with the most concentrated olive flavor you’ve ever had. Chef Adrià invented the technique in the 1990s (maybe even the late ’80s) and it has become widely adopted — M. knows how to do it, and has used them in martinis (genius!!). Here’s a video of Chef Adrià explaining to Mark Bittman how he makes the olives.
Emily’s face in the picture above pretty much says it all. The play of the familiar with the absolutely unexpected is awe-inspiring.
Our second sneak peek was at a 1998 course, the Spice Dish. Before us was a bowl of cold green apple puree with 12 spices arranged around the perimeter like a clock. We were invited to taste each one and guess which spice it was from the card provided: pink Szechuan peppercorns, threads of saffron, tiny mint leafs, slivers of ginger confit, and so on. Chef Dave explained that Chef Adrià was inspired by the experience of eating at a Chinese restaurant and being exposed to a bewildering array of unfamiliar flavors.
The simplicity of the presentation — and the incentive to do well on the pop quiz — forces you to take a moment and really taste. Of course, a quiz worked very well within the Childhood theme. The tenacious little straight-A student that I presume Emily once was came right out, and her husband sweetly obliged by marking her test with an A+. I hope it’s hanging on her fridge right now.
Next: Childhood
It’s been a long time since I asked someone out on a date. The good news is, not a lot has changed in the three years since I bowed out of the single’s market. Doing it by email is best. Make it witty but not labored. Suggest something cool, make a joke, and you’re out (anything more and you sound desperate). Then refresh, refresh, refresh your inbox ‘til they write back.
So it was when I asked M. out way back when — and so it was when I asked Emily if she and her husband Simon would like to join us for dinner at Next while we were in Chicago. It wasn’t out of the blue — we had already talked about “getting drinks” — but dinner is a commitment, we had never met, and they’d already experienced the Childhood menu.
Well, dear reader, she accepted — bells most exuberantly on. (They don’t call her emphasisadded for nothin’.)
And we had such.a.blast!
Quick background: Next is a sister-restaurant to Alinea that openend last year to much excitement and acclaim. The entire concept and menu change every quarter. They’ve done Paris 1906, Thailand, and Childhood, which we were at the tail end of. Right now, Next is closed in preparation for the menu-to-end-all-menus: elBulli. The golden ticket. When seats got on sell next month, they’ll be the hardest reservation on earth — and we got a sneak peek! But more on that later.
The first thing you see when you take your seats for the Childhood meal is a half-smoked cigar, a pair of reading glasses, and a finished crossword puzzle. At each place are three cocktail glasses with garnishes and one last swill of cocktail. It took me a moment but when I realized what we were looking at I grinned with delight: waking up in the morning after your parents’ cocktail party, perhaps you had your first taste taste of booze as you surreptitiously swiped a sip….
And then, a gift, with the instructions not to “shake it too hard” (so of course we did). Inside, a very grown-up PB&J: raspberry pâtes de fruits and peanut butter crisp.
The first proper course: chicken noodle soup. The noodles are literally made of chicken. They melted into the broth, oozing their essential chickenness, creating a fabulous emulsion as you stirred together the broth and mousseline of chicken. Imagine the most exquisitely concentrated chicken soup flavor you’ve ever had — then triple it.
Next, a playful update of fish sticks with cod, corn crisp, and pickled cucumbers. On the bottom right, crispy bits of cod skin tasted like the StoveTop Stuffing my socialist parents never served (and which I craved all the more).
“Can you guess what this is?” the waiter asked as he removed the glass tube and a creamy pile oozed onto the plate.
“Mac and cheese?” M. guessed (Emily and Simon having recused themselves).
Indeed it was. Mac and cheese with flavors of hot dog, compressed apple, Iberian ham, crispy cheddar, tomato caviar, and good ol’ Kraft Mac & Cheese, to sample and mix in as we wished.
Then, an imaginative course of wild mushrooms and Swiss chard with white truffle powder that evoked that great and glorious gift of childhood — the Snow Day. I could almost feel the crunch of the snow underfoot. (Alinea, Aviary, and Next do such wonderful things with the natural world.)
Short rib starred in a high-wire take on the fast food hamburger — not far in concept from the one that M. imagined for the Modernist Cuisine Top Chef challenge.
They nailed child-of-the-80s nostalgia, from the music (soundtracks from Star Wars, Fraggle Rock, and Jurassic Park) to a course served in old-school lunch boxes. (Here I am with my Smurfs lunch box in 1984, looking a little worse for wear.)
Inside each box were a black truffle Oreo, Wagyu beef jerky (Emily brought hers home to her lucky little baby), hazelnut and chocolate pudding, a modernist fruit roll-up, and a Thermos full of grape juice.
And a note from mom or dad, of course.
Next, a sarsaparilla float.
And then the now-notorious foie-sting — frosting made of foie gras, somewhere between savory and sweet, that you get to lick from the beater — and cider doughnut holes, an homage to Michigan, where both Chef Achatz of Alinea and Chef Dave Beran of Next grew up.
What would Childhood be without a campfire? This one was made of sweet potato logs that were edible after the fire went out (amazing). We were served deconstructed sweet potato pie and were invited to roast our marshmallows over the fire. I like mine nice and burnt (patience was never a strong suit).
Finally, hot chocolate with a little nip on the side (some things are better when you’re an adult).
Before we went, Chef Dave gave us a quick tour of the kitchen. We were all set to go downstairs to their main kitchen — the one they share with Aviary where all the really crazy stuff happens — but then Emily got a look at the clock. It was nearly 2 AM! They had to relieve the poor babysitter at home. Next time! we said. (There is always the promise of next time at Next.)
All in all, an absolute knockout punch to end a fabulous weekend.
I’m winding down (although if you can believe it, I haven’t covered every cocktail — you can find them on Flickr if you’re so inclined).
Before I go, four last sips:
Huckleberry & Cranberry.
Hot Chocolate.
and a Dreamsicle of rum.
Dreamsicle is right. What. A. Night!
Horchata & Two Turtle Doves. The first is a traditional Spanish and Latin American drink of milk and cinnamon — this one had tequila and rum, too, and was slummin’ it in a take-out cup — the second a duo of decadent rum cocktails that the Aviary team created for the holiday season, one with white chocolate, the other with orange and macadamia. I loved the juxtaposition between high and low.
As I mentioned, Aviary doesn’t have a bar — it has a restaurant-quality kitchen that is visible through a wall of slats. We had front-row seats at the two-person kitchen table, and we watched them breathlessly for hours.
Four chefs stood at their immaculate stations, creating about five cocktails each. Some peeled orange rinds and coiled them into siphons, some arranged garnishes with tweezers and surgeon-like precision, while others shook cocktails two at a time (they do still shake cocktails, you know). Nearby were the rarefied equipment of their craft: a sous vide bath, a blast chiller, and countless ISI siphons to make foams (the really crazy stuff — the infusions, the ice molds, the distilling, and lord knows what else — takes place in the kitchen downstairs, which M. got to visit the following day).
The expediter kept the operations running like clockwork: burning wooden planks with an industrial torch, artfully arranging boughs of pine in boxes. Y’know. Just your run of the mill bar stuff.
Putting the cider in Oolong & Cider: cinnamon, verjus, and apple brandy with aromatics in a beautiful, custom-designed glass infuser. The cider deepened in color and flavor from a sunny peach to the dusky orange you see above.
Basically, my tried-and-true Irish cold remedy — at a whole new level.
Oolong & Cider. Siphon was the theme of the trip — we had siphoned coffee at Intelligentsia, siphoned dashi at Alinea, and siphoned oolong at Aviary. Pistachio, brown sugar, herbs, and lemon also lent their flavor to the pear brandy in the chamber below.
If this was how they taught chemistry, maybe I would have paid more attention.
Manhattan & Bitter: playing with scent. A rum Old-Fashioned in a sealed bag filled with the aroma of Kaffir lime, black tea, and cinnamon. I was invited to snip it open with a little pair of scissors, letting the scent wash over us (you’ve got to love a cocktail joint that keeps scissors on hand as serving ware).
On the other side of the table, a glass filled with the scent of a (literally) smoking barrel awaiting a Manhattan of amari and apple brandy. Like snuggling up in the big old leather chair of the cigar-smoking grandpa I never had.
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