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. I'll list the courses, but it won't tell you much:

Edible menu - essentially, our menu, with J's mom's name printed on it, on a thin edible Italian flatbread.

salmon and sesame: The cool shtick here was that the sesame oil had been frozen into little white balls by liquid nitrogen, so you used it as a topping on the salmon and then it melted in your mouth. The really amusing thing was watching smoke coming out of everyone's mouths. This was also really spicy - left a strong burn in the mouth.

beet with bacon: I'm not a beet girl, but the whipped red and yellow beet puree actually worked well, especially ornamented with tiny chunks of smoked bacon.

swordfish and popcorn: The popcorn was pureed into a sauce, don't ask me how. Tasty, very much so, but not especially exotic.

cucumber with lemon and basil: The cucumber was a shot of cucumber-lemon-basil juice. There was something else that went with it, but I can't remember it.

smoked pork shoulder with frozen fried rice: Sort of the "main" course. Very tasty Chinese style BBQ pork. The fried rice had been frozen, pureed, and extruded into noodle form - good but weird.

pasta and quail: So, this was actually chicken-fried quail with smoked-cheddar mac'n cheese, where the mac was crispy and had been frozen. It was good, but very rich and gooey, and, like almost all of the dishes, was at room temp or below, which felt odd in this case, as I love the heat of mac'n'cheese.

fruit and bubbles; One of Moto's signature inventions is carbonized fruit, in which whole fruits get placed inside a carbon dioxide chamber and slowly infused with bubbles. In this case, it was watermelon, along with a vanilla-infused pear and a cinnamon-infused apple. Tasty, although watermelon does little for me. Very fun to feel the bubbles on my tongue, though,

two and three dimensional truffle: H. Cantu, the chef, really likes cotton candy, and this was a version of it. There was one white chocolate truffle filled with cotton candy-like liquid, served on a edible rice paper sheet that tasted exactly like cotton candy. It was delicious despite my distaste for all of the actual ingredients involved. The rice paper does not, however, quite work.

graham cracker and apple: One of my favorite courses, though not everyone agreed. Graham cracker foam, with a lovely apple sauce - soothing and really interesting texture-wise.

kiwi, mint and maize: This dish, which on another version of the menu was simply called "chili cheese nachos," was what really summed up and made the Moto experience for me. Picture a dish that looks exactly like your standard helping of chili cheese nachos, complete with the fake-cheese, the pickled green peppers and onions, the chunks of ground beef, etc. Except that the chips are sweet lime corn, the "cheese" is a flavored white chocolate and custard, the peppers are kiwi and mint, and the "beef" is milk chocolate. I wound up having to close my eyes when I took a bite, because otherwise my brain would keep sending massively conflicting signals to me. It's a gimmick, sure, but it's a really fun gimmick.

Packing peanuts: This was strawberry shortcake in the form of packing peanuts. That's really all one can say, except more tasty than I expect your average packing peanut is.



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.