orichalcum

So, A. was gone on business from Wed-Friday evening and left again Sunday afternoon and won't be back till Wed. evening. So we made the most of our 48 hours together, the only in the week. Coincidentally, julianyap, who we hadn't seen for six months, was also in town with his mom for a medical conference. Saturday morning, A. and Mac and I hung out and played games. Saturday evening, we left Mac at home and went to dinner with J. and his mom and cousins at Moto, one of the U.S. leading centers of "molecular gastronomy."

We went with low expectations but were overall very impressed. In a lot of ways, Moto is a magic show; much of the food is designed to look like other food (details below) or confuse and surprise you in other ways. You are clearly expected to be very impressed with all the liquid nitrogen and edible paper technology and so forth. And we were, but more importantly, the food also tasted very good. The service was also very good; we were particularly pleased by the fact that they responded to A's mention that he didn't drink alcohol by creating a non-alcoholic tasting pairing for him, ranging from a passionfruit-grapefruit spritzer to "45-second homemade root beer" to a lovely white-grape peach juice blend that would have made ladybird97 swoon. Next time we go back, if it's with J., J. and I are getting the alcoholic tasting, because the one minor flaw in the menu was acceding to his mom's more traditional taste in wine. (Not that there's anything wrong with Dom Perignon.) We were also surprised by the emphasis on American comfort food gone weird - this is definitely not an Asian fusion place, despite the name.

So, the options are the 5 course, 10 course, or 18 course tasting menus. We got the 10 course. ( More detailed review: )

I think we'll definitely go back, partially because this is a kind of food we can't get elsewhere easily. The 18-course menu might be a lot of fun, though we'd need to budget 4 hours for it.

Sunday morning we met J. for breakfast, getting up ungodly early to get to the city. On the way back, I randomly ran into my brother's mother-in-law, in town for business. I came home, A. came back for work for one last hour of hanging out, and then left again. :( I really miss him, but otoh, I have Brokeback Mountain from Netflix, which I never saw because he wasn't interested, and oodles of grading to do.

A more substantive and musing post will follow soon.