Molecular Gastronomy + Dancing

This weekend was a culinary tour de force, stretching from the down-home baseball fields of Red Hook to the avant-garde kitchen of Wylie Dufresne. Erin was in town which always means good things foodwise and funwise. I really don't even want to write about anything but the INSANE meal Erin, Gretchen and I enjoyed at WD-50. Gretchen's roommate Sam works in the cold appetizer station, so we were advised about what to order. First we got wacky cocktails. My first drink was some cantaloupe thing which was only ok. For my second cocktail, I ordered the most delicious fizzy refreshing gin drink that contained egg whites and bay leaves. It was astonishingly tasty.

For an amuse-bouche (the first of two), we got some kind of raw fish with tahini, seaweed chip and apricot marmalade. It was a tasty exiting way to start of the evening and really got my excited for the rest of the meal.

For appetizers, we got three things:
Corned duck, rye crisp, purple mustard, horseradish cream

Fried quail, banana tartar, nasturtium
Grilled octopus, avocado, juniper, lychee-campari


The corned duck was fucking fantastic. The quail was also really good and crispy on the outside but rare and juice on the inside. I wasn't wild for the octopus. The avocado was really dense and pasty and it kind of freaked me out honestly.

We then had our second amuse which was the single weirdest thing I've ever been served at a restaurant. It was some kind of Derridean pizza, where the pepperoni had been reduced to powdery balls and the crust was made out of some kind of black chip. I have no idea. Erin rightly pointed out that it tasted like the inside of a Combo. Pretty gross. Good in theory maybe, but just really really disgusting tasting.

For our main dishes we all shared the following:
Ocean trout, fava bean, forbidden rice, rootbeer-date, lovage

Pork belly, smoked yucca, romaine, papaya
Lamb loin, potato noodles, mustard crumbs, pretzel consomme

The lamb was definitely my favorite of the main dishes. Everything worked really well together and the lamb was cooked perfectly. The yucca with the pork belly was deliciously smokey and crispy. The trout was also really tender and juice and went nicely with the crispy forbidden rice (which has a long story behind it, the gist of which is that I'm a princess now).

Desserts were a little underwhelming and also too wacky for my tame palette. We had:
Fried butterscotch pudding, mango, taro, smoked macadamia
Coconut mousse, cashew, cucumber, coriander
Local strawberries, pandan, popcorn sorbet
Having just hosted the Sweet and Savory Picnic Potluck the week prior, I was all ready to try out some exotic combinations. But my excitement was quelled when I put the first bite of popcorn sorbet in my mouth. I just. I don't know. It was gross. The fried butterscotch pudding was amazing, but it was accompanied by taro which I don't think I ever want to taste again. The coconut mousse also had some really salty component with it that did not seem to mesh at all. Maybe I'm just unfamiliar with these flavors, but for the desserts it seemed like Wylie just put a bunch of really sweet and really salty things together and hoped people wouldn't notice that they tasted terrible. The strawberries were amazingly fresh though.

After we ate, we got to go to the kitchen briefly to say hi to Gretchen's roommate Sam and meet Wylie. It was so exciting!!! He was really nice and Sam was adorable!

I'd definitely go back to WD-50. It was just a really fun dining experience. 80% of it was super tasty and the other 20% was at least interesting.

We left the restaurant to go to Adrienne and Chapman's party in Hell's Kitchen.

The first of a bevy of parties these two are throwing the coming weeks, this was a celebration of the absence of the downstairs neighbor. We danced extra hard on the floor to celebrate.

The next day we ate this and some other junk. I can't think about food anymore.