If you don’t want to hear every single thing I put in my mouth during dinner at The Dining Room in Pasadena, Michael Voltaggio’s (Top Chef season 6 champion) current (but not for long! He leaves July 18th) restaurant, I apologize, because that’s exactly what I’m going to tell you.
Damn. This is going to be long, you guys.
Thing one was that everyone at this restaurant makes you feel like you want to tell them everything. I’m an overchatter, especially in formal settings, and you better believe I made everyone including myself uncomfortable at times by saying things like, “Wow, this water is truly delicious.” I thought about it for ten minutes before ordering the bottled water, that’s how infrequently I put on the dog. Try to see all of this through the eyes of Augustus Gloop at Willy Wonka’s chocolate extravaganza, okay?
The bread. First, there were two breads, bacon (yes) and sourdough (yes). The bacon was a puff of bacon-tasting, non-bacon-chunky brioche that I want to make a sofa out of, take a picture of, sit on for a laugh and then eat. In one day. The bread came with three butter choices, salty Vermont, unsalty French, and Goat. A+ to butters from every corner of the globe and every kind of mammal. Another bread appeared somewhere along the way, and this bread was like a truffle popover. Goat butter was a recommended pairing, but I used all three because that’s what Jay-Z would have done. These breads were fantastic. As my grandfather used to say about (an entire) dinner, paradoxically, this bread was “a meal in itself.”
The amuse was a tomato sort of lollipop with a little sprig of microgreen (microbasil? I don’t know, what am I, a botanist?) and what I like to think of as a “caviar cream puff.” If the caviar cream puff came to you on an appetizer tray carried by a cute little child, you would beat up the child in order to bring the tray of cream puffs to some friendly local master chef who could exactly re-create the recipe. You would feel you had no other choice.
There were seven other courses so I feel the need to breeze by some of them in order to not be “that guy” about this dinner; if your curiosity is burning you should flip through the photos on The Dining Room’s Yelp page, which was what I did before I left for Pasadena tonight. I will tell you this: the foie gras terrine in a strawberry-yuzu glaze with arugula cake and what I think were maybe vinegar gel-caviar pearls was the craziest thing I’ve ever eaten. It was amazing and imaginative and bizarre; it really worked but was a little like eating a petit four of foie gras. Something fun about doing a chef like Voltaggio’s tasting menu is that you will eat things that you will almost definitely never eat anywhere else, and you trust him to know what he’s doing so you just go for it. This was the weirdest ingredient party I’ve ever been invited to, and probably the prettiest plate I’ve ever seen.
My favorite of the seven plates ended up being a tie between the halibut cheeks (baby leeks, red curry, coconut crispy-rice, which was like a crispy coconut-y pudding) and the…wait for it…suckling pig with banana polenta, ramps, and red onion. What was so perfect about these courses was how transporting they were: they were totally evocative of some other place (luau? Heaven?) while at the same time being something I’ve never come close to having tasted before. I haven’t been to culinary school, obviously, and my cooking usually amounts to throwing a ton of wine in a pot with some other stuff or cooking a huge hunk of meat at a low temperature and then stuffing it in puff pastry. I’m as evolved as, say, an iguana in terms of culinary prowess. So it’s wicked fun to see things like banana and polenta and ramps having a jam session on some suckling pig, a morel over there, a saffron-braised cippolini onion over there.
Peter and I acted like we’d never seen food before. “And here we have some sorbet.” “SHUT UP, this TEXTURE! It’s so COLD!” Dessert was insane, but not even as insane as the pre-dessert, which was a root beer float of dippin’ dots-style ice cream. There was a lot of freezing things in nitro and making jelly out of sauerkraut. I’m fascinated by molecular gastronomy-type foods because science and eating are two of my favorite things to think about, and it takes a pretty decent imagination to think of making caviar out of vinegar, pork-rind-like crisps out of gruyere. That’s why eating at these kinds of restaurants is so much fun, too: now I’m going to want to mash potatoes but make them taste like macaroni and cheese, and then I’m going to fill them with air and make them into potato macaroni meringues and jam them full of surprises!
There was a post-dessert. You can imagine my reaction. The post-dessert was a chocolate lollipop filled with Pop Rocks, a chocolate macaron, and some kind of jewel of a gummy candy in an edible rapper.
“You can EAT the WRAPPER?” I asked the sommelier as he tried to escape.
Before he could answer, I had eaten it. As I sipped my Langham bottled water in the car, I thought to myself, man, this is the best water I’ve ever had in my whole life.
