Tasting Obsession: Lampreia
Hillel and I are bringing you a joint blog entry. He's covered Lampreia enthusiastically on his blog before, so he's leaving the words to me, while I leave the images to him.
When Melissa and I planned a five-day visit with our Seattle-based friends Pavel and Kathleen, we only had one thing on our must-do list. We wanted to eat at Lampreia. And we wanted to go with Hillel.
I learned about Lampreia through Hillel's blog of eating adventures around the world, and Chef Carsberg's Tyrol-inspired restaurant sits high on his list of favorite haunts. That's a noteworthy recommendation in its own right, but the cookbook from Carsberg and the tastingmenu.com team renewed my interest in eating at this medium-sized Belltown establishment. Hillel and I met at last year's Fancy Food Show—his frequent dining partner Lauren is a friend of mine from back when I was famous —and he and I have kept in touch. I knew he couldn't pass up a meal at one of his favorite restaurants.
He and his wife Debbie and their friends dine there often ("I've been here four times," said his college-bound sister visiting from the East Coast), and they urged us to let the chef cook whatever he wanted. This is good advice. With no menu, you can't build up any preconceptions about what the meal might offer. You wait, slightly giddy. A dish appears. What is it? You don't know until the waiter steps back, waits for conversation to die, and announces the new arrival, simultaneously quiet and triumphant.
The first dish we ate exemplifies Carsberg's cuisine. It featured Dungeness crab wrapped in Honey Crisp apples with an apple gelée and blackened sea salt. The subtle flavors and textures played off each other in a flawlessly choreographed dance, and created an unexpected synergy. Carsberg says he favors simplicity, but there's something of a wink there. The fresh and local ingredients may be simple, but not so the techniques and flavor combinations that are both classic and novel. You can taste his attention to detail, his obsession with getting things just right.
Why stop at one dish, no matter how representative? We certainly didn't want to. The paper-thin slice of fatty duck ham laid atop smoked white asparagus in the next course was a savory treat with nutty undercurrents, and the small baton of foie gras with a Sauternes aspic added an unctuous feel that enriched the dish without weighing it down. A curl of Meyer lemon peel refreshed the palate. It was a simple presentation with clean lines and perfect proportions. We sighed.
Then it arrived. The highlight of the evening for many of us. A raviolo filled with sheep's milk ricotta and a still-intact egg yolk. Around it, shaved ricotta salata, salted and aged for half a year. Truffles everywhere. It sounds simple, doesn't it? But as I broke into the pasta and punctured the egg yolk, it flowed over the two cheeses and re-released a heady truffle aroma. This dish was bass notes and earth tones and creamy fat, and the depth of these flavors resonated deep in my belly. The craftsperson in me tried to figure out how you get an intact egg yolk into a pasta shell. The gourmet in me just kept eating.
From that heady dish we moved on to a practically see-through pane of gravlax-style kobe beef, topped with a quenelle of an apple-red wine purée and a crunchy tomato wafer ("It's a communion wafer," said Hillel. "He found the recipe and adapted it"). I enjoyed this dish, sort of a deconstructed hamburger, but Pavel was less sure. He felt the purée overwhelmed the subtle flavor of the beef.
Pavel may have been our sole dissenter on the kobe beef, but Melissa and I felt that the kitchen made a slight misstep with the scallop with meyer lemon and sea salt. The presentation, a plump scallop resting on a baby bamboo steamer, appealed to my love of the cute, but the scallop was slightly overcooked, especially contrasted with the breathtaking scallop we ate at Union two nights earlier. And the salt's texture didn't blend as seamlessly as we had become used to. Taken in toto to some other restaurant, this scallop would probably shine as the star of the menu. This dish faltered only because Carsberg raised our expectations so high with the previous dishes.
When the waiter brought out plates with three tiny red scoops, we figured they were balls of sorbet. When Carsberg dripped some thick aceto balsamico tradizionale onto the mounds, we weren't surprised. True balsamic vinegar ($25/oz for the entry-level stuff) complements fruity sorbet surprisingly well. Imagine our surprise, however, when the pale red mounds turned out to be beet-ricotta gnocchi. The gnocchi were light and flavorful, though the beet added little but color. The aceto balsamico added a perky acidity and sweetness that rescued a dish that might have lost appeal otherwise.
At this point, the waiter asked if we'd like to move on to dessert, or if we wanted the chef to prepare another savory dish. I looked at Hillel, seated to my right. Was there some option here? I suppose the staff wanted to protect us from becoming overly full, but who could resist just one more? Maybe we left a little too stuffed, but we managed to find room for the Atlantic black bass "tagine" with smoked paprika and pork belly. This may have been Pavel's favorite dish, even more so than the raviolo. This dish brought us back to the world of a few ingredients in perfect balance. The pork belly, which added mouth-watering umami qualities, was super tender with just the slightest give.
The cheese course was a pecorino under a glaze of honey speckled with black seeds from tahitian vanilla pods. The melting slice of cheese came on a cedar plank. Honey and cheese is a great combination, and the vanilla added that heavenly muskiness that is so unlike anything else in the world.
At last dessert arrived, three strawberries stuffed with a white chocolate mousse, sitting in a thick strawberry sauce, garnished with a spiraling tuile. The raviolo may have been my favorite dish, but this is the dish I'll try to replicate at home, especially with strawberry season bursting upon us here in the Bay Area. The mousse was delicate and flavorful, and contrasted nicely with the ripe but firm strawberry flesh. Hillel, I think, was the first to forget decorum and slide his finger through the strawberry sauce. We had a discussion about licking plates. That's how good the sauce was.
Most of my readers know how much I love the mignardise course. Our little plate contained a cinnamon cookie, a lemon one, a chocolate truffle, and a tiny thumbprint peanut butter cookie with a chocolate mound. All the treats were light and airy, the perfect sweet end to an incredible meal.
I did notice one problem with the surprise menu. We didn't know quite how much wine we needed. Hillel and I each brought a bottle, I the superbly balanced 2002 Donnhoff Riesling Spätlese from the Oberhauser Brücke vineyard, Hillel an equally well-balanced Pride Merlot, possibly the best Merlot I've ever tasted. But it wasn't quite enough. Another bottle would have been nice, I think.
This meal ranks high in my pantheon of great life experiences. The sense of balance and harmony that registered with virtually every dish was astonishing. I envy Hillel, who not only lives close enough to eat there, but takes advantage of it often. Midway through the meal, he said to me quietly, "The people in this town have no idea what they've got here." I imagine he's right.
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