The OWF "Eat 'Til You Drop" Tour: wd-50
Chefs have divided modern haute cuisine into two main branches: a group that celebrates pure flavors of ingredients and traditional practices, and another that uses the latest scientific discoveries to push food to new, unimagined places. One worships the perfect peach, the other, hard-to-pronounce chemicals that shift the molecular structure of foie gras and mayonnaise. Centuries of knowledge on one hand, vacuum sealers and laboratory-grade bain-mairies for sous vide cooking on the other.
Melissa and I have known about the "molecular gastronomy" movement for a while, but we hadn't eaten at a restaurant that practices the full spectrum of techniques. When we asked Hillel at tastingmenu.com for advice on where to eat in New York, he urged us to try wd-50, Wylie Dufresne's science-meets-cuisine temple on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
We ordered the tasting menu, which includes twelve courses and wine pairings, and settled in for an evening of amazement. Throughout the night, I kept asking myself "How did he do that?" My traditional French and Italian slant, coupled with the inevitable influence of California cuisine, gave me little context to understand the mechanics. How do you get a reservoir of warm beet consommé into the middle of a foie gras torchon? How do you make olive oil powder? How do you shape mayonnaise into a cube, and then fry it?
But this isn't just stunt cooking: Melissa and I enjoyed every single dish. The silky foie gras torchon oozed a warm beet liquid over the candied olives and pea streusel underneath. The tomato sorbet with olive oil powder and tiny little croutons—an homage to bruschetta—repackaged familar flavors into different forms and textures. We swabbed up the sweet carrot purée in the carrot-coconut "sunnyside up," a trompe d'oeil that looked and acted like a fried egg. We liked the food so much that we ordered a 3-course dessert tasting menu to fit in before the cocoa cotton ball mignardise (and yes, that pushed us well into gluttonous).
It does raise some questions: Is this actually a cuisine, or is it just playing with your food? Should chefs embrace these techniques, or focus on more traditional cooking, what Regina Schrambling calls "the simply extraordinary pleasure of great ingredients treated with intelligence, with only little tricks like passion fruit in a sauce needed to make halibut taste like something entirely new."
I think molecular gastronomy is the new fusion cuisine, which at its best created new culinary combinations that resonated throughout the kitchens of the world. Of course, at its worst it became a tired cliché, and I'm sure we'll be inundated with hip, new, and boring molecular gastronomy establishments within a few years. But the best will challenge us, excite us, and delight us. And those lessons will instruct other chefs who will pick and choose the techniques they like the best. Would I want to eat wd-50's food every night? No, nor even monthly. But next time we go to New York, I plan to visit Chef Dufresne again to see what new rabbits he's pulling out of his sleeve.
Next on the OWF "Eat 'Til You Drop Tour:" New York Recap followed by Bern's Steakhouse
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