Birthday 2009

So, yesterday was my 30th birthday - the sort of a milestone best treated with food and drink.

Accordingly, we had lunch at Jean-Georges, not far from my firm at Columbus Circle, followed later by drinks at Death & Co.

Well versed through my reading of various boards in the mysteries of the $28 lunch menu (as everyone says, the best deal in New York), we each ordered a prix fixe, supplemented with a shared foie gras course and a shared dessert. I paired "tastes" (aka 3 oz. pours) of wine with each savoury course.

Before recapitulating the meal, though, I have a sort of mea culpa to make. The last time I visited Jean-Georges was five years ago. While my original post seems to have vanished into the ether, somehow, there is a link to it from another blog. The bottom line is that I didn't like Jean-Georges, and proceeded to badmouth it for the next five years.

It's unclear whether my tastes have changed or matured, or whether JG is somehow better, or what, but my experience yesterday was quite different. As someone at eGullet explained, it's the difference between an awkward summer associate lunch and lunch with your significant other on your birthday. The point, however, is that we thought our lunch was quite wonderful, and at a (for a 3 michelin star restaurant) gentle price.

Some notes follow:

Amuse Bouche: Fresh mozzarella topped with dehydrated pineapple (tasted almost like candy, that), a fritter of peekytoe crab, and a light soup of herbs. This last was refreshing and especially delicious, all fragrant aroma and light flavor.

1st course:

My soup of young garlic with frog's legs is the kind of thing I could eat every day and never tire of. It reeked, if one could possibly use that word of something so civilized, of garlic made elegant, dotted with micro greens. The frog's legs were perfect drumsticks, with the delicate flesh that characterizes frog entirely unobscured. Of course, one could just as easily eat this soup with snails, on a kebab perhaps (dip snail. Eat).

There's not quite as much to say about my fiancee's ribbons of tuna. This was thick ribbons of extremely fresh, raw, tuna, dressed with a cold, spicy, ginger sauce atop avocado puree. Preferable by far to some very expensive sushi we have had in New York in freshness and stridency of flavor. The ginger sauce was magnificent.

Wine: Trimbach Riesling. A dependable, affordable riesling I've had many times before (perhaps $15 a bottle at retail?), and it was as good as ever.

Second Course: We shared the famed foie gras brulee, as I was not in a mood to ingest a full foie gras course, and yet was still unwilling to forgoe it because the foie gras was the main source of my ire five years ago. It is a classic torchon of foie gras, whipped, forced into a cylinder, and poached, but then given sweetness with a crispy creme brulee top, and served with a sharp pineapple meyer lemon jam. On my previous visit, I had been overwhelmed by sweet and fat. This time, we were delighted, and whether it was the exceptional 2003 1er cru Chassagne-Montrachet white bordeaux we drank with it ($12.50 for the 3 oz. pour), which paired exceptionally well with the liver, or the fact that I was in a better mood, or whether simply because I only ate half, my impression of the course was completely different.

Third Course:

I like skate, the fish, very much, and indeed had cooked it at home just a day or two ago (pictures to come, eventually), and so I jumped on the opportunity to order skate with Jean-Georges justly famous chateau chalon sauce, a classic wine reduction lightened in the usual JG style to be almost refreshing. This is a great dish.

My fiancee had veal, cooked just au point, with a veal jus reduction. Nothing surprising here, but still extremely well executed and delicious.

Wine: I have forgotten the wine, other than the fact that it was from Bergerac. A strongly tannic red which softened under the dual sauces to soft deliciousness.

Dessert: We shared "chocolate", which paired a perfectly decent molten chocolate cake with exceptionally good vanilla ice cream and a peppermint broth, which was by far the most interesting part of the dessert. I would eat the broth alone, dotted perhaps with chocolate nibs, in far greater quantity than the other two components of the dessert. It tasted of mint ice cream, somehow, yet uncluttered with the flavors of cream and eggs.

We took a brief pit stop in my office at work, to digest and jabber, and then went off to our second stop for the evening, the ever fantastic Death & Co. on east 6th street. There, after suffering in between two tables of screaming banshees (the one talking in the loudest possible voices about a topic I could not understand, and the others comparing their experiences smoking hashish), we escaped to the bar for our second drinks. There, we met Greg Boehm of Mud Puddle Books, which certainly appears to be the premier republisher of old cocktilian books in America, whose dedication to cocktails is inspiring in the way that a devotee of anything is inspiring. Talking to Greg is like talking to a great baker or cobbler or someone of that sort, all combined with an adventuresome businessman. We also took the opportunity to jabber to the bartender as he made me an Oxacaca Old Fashioned, all peat and smoke, and my fiancee her new favorite drink, a City of Gold Sling. This all led to a discussion of my father's standby cocktail, the Singapore Sling, and how recipes for that drink have shifted and modulated over the years, with changes in taste and even changes in the recipes for gins.

Two terrific tips for ordering in a cocktail bar I gathered last night:

You ought to be able to order something interesting in any bar by specifying either "dark or light" and "shaken or stirred". The first indicates to the bartender whether you want rye or whiskey or light rum or dark, or whatever. The second indicates whether you want citrus or not, as citrus based drinks are shaken. I think I am usually a dark stirred person, though I love orange in my drinks (whether as bitters or as a twist or whatever).

Second, you can always ask a bar tender to make you something from the menu for which he is responsible. As it was explained to me, if the bartender's own drink is on the menu, you're likely to get his or her best effort.