Alinea

[Oleg]

Just go.  Pay them whatever they ask.  Pilfer your kid's college fund.  Forget your wife's birthday and your anniversary for a year.  Commit wire fraud.  Whatever it takes.

[morpheus]

Best dining experience I have ever had.  Period.

[morpheus]

DPD.  Hat tip to Tank.  The sommelier there is brilliant...

[thehawk]

So, what did you have?

[Richard Chuggar]

Intrepid Reader:  Yetti

I'd rather go grocery shopping

[morpheus]

So, what did you have?

We had exactly what they serve.  There isn't any choosing, except for the wine pairings.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

Intrepid Reader:  Yetti

I'd rather go grocery shopping

The important thing is that Yeti has yet another idiotic opinion to walk back.

By sometime tomorrow I expect him to be ridiculing his backwards hillrod friends and family for their inability to appreciate adventurous Michelin-three-star cuisine.

Also important: that the Black Truffle Explosion is fucking out of this world.

[thehawk]

So, what did you have?

We had exactly what they serve.  There isn't any choosing, except for the wine pairings.

The menu does change from time to time, and trying to understand the courses at Alinea from its descriptions would be like truly understanding Moby Dick soley from being told "its a book about a whale".

[Eli]

By sometime tomorrow I expect him to be ridiculing his backwards hillrod friends and family for their inability to appreciate adventurous Michelin-three-star cuisine.

"Everyone else went out to Applebee's but I stayed home because all I wanted was a basil-infused mozzarella balloon. These people suck."

[Wheezer]

Intrepid Reader:  Yetti

I'd rather go grocery shopping

Intrepid Reader: Tdubbs

Get a haircut and stop acting weird.

[CBStew]

DPD.  Hat tip to Tank.  The sommelier there is brilliant...

I want to know if he tied that knot around a golf ball?

[J. Walter Weatherman]

So, what did you have?

We had exactly what they serve.  There isn't any choosing, except for the wine pairings.

The menu does change from time to time, and trying to understand the courses at Alinea from its descriptions would be like truly understanding Moby Dick soley from being told "its a book about a whale".

There are actually some slight differences between that menu and ours from last night.

Working from the menu I came home with, here's last night to the best of my reckoning, wine pairings in italics...

Lemonade wind chime

Waiting for us the moment we entered off of the street, glasses floating a clinking musically in a water bath. Just a few sips; enough to get us down the corridor from the street entrance to the door to the dining rooms. Which corridor was carpeted with natural sod.

Steelhead roe St. Germain, long pepper, kinome
Gimonnet Brut with Lillet Blanc and Pineau des Charentes

Served in a glass straw with the roe at one end and a foam at the other. Eaten by sticking the straw into a middle of a big block of ice and slurping everything up in a single go.

The wine pairing was a champagne with just a touch of aperitif.

Oyster leaf mignonette

King crab passion fruit, heart of palm, allspice

Lobster carrot, chamomile

Razor clam shiso, soy, daikon
Georg Breuer 'Terra Montosa' Riesling, Rheingau 2009

These four courses were served in individual shells and brought out all together atop a huge pile of fresh East Coast seaweed. Only the freshest

The oyster leaf, a leaf that tastes naturally like oysters, was served just as a real oyster might be, in an oyster shell with mignonette sauce. The lobster was perpared with a chamomile tea foam.

The wine pairing was a surprisingly dry and deep riesling.

Woolly pig fennel, orange, squid

Served on an antenna. One bite, no hands. I don't normally love fennel, but this was great.

Tomato watermelon, chili, basil
Ginga Shizuku 'Divine Droplets' Junmai Daiginjo-shu, Hokkaido-ken

Maybe the best-tasting salad I've ever eaten in my life, mostly because of the natural flavor of the tiny tomatoes that starred in it. There were some frozen parts to it, IIRC, but otherwise nothing too drastically 'molecular'. Amazing looking, even better tasting.

The wine pairing was a smooth and very drinkable saki.

Corn huitlacoche, sour cherry, silk
Donna Fugata 'Lighea' Zibbibo, Sicilia 2011

The corn was liquefied. Huitlacoche is apparently a grey fungus that grows on corn. Served with fried corn silk, which was deliciously sweet, and sour cherry reduction.

Otoro thai banana, sea salt, kaffir lime
Chehalem '3 Vineyards' Pinot Gris, Willamette 2011

Served in a large glass bowl that reminded me of nothing if not the classic 60s/70s Ball Chair, with kaffir lime foam that I recall tasting like something in the neighborhood of sweet cucumber.

Burn morels ramps, asparagus, smoked date
Descendientes de J. Palacios 'Pétalos' Bierzo, Spain 2009

Mushrooms harvested in the aftermath of forest fires. Served on four rocks sitting atop a charred log. The whole assembly came out warm to the touch, presumably from the oven.

Hot potato cold potato, black truffle, butter

Signature Alinea dish. Creamy potato shot in a wax bowl. The skewer the hot potato is on is threaded through the bowl. Pull the skewer as if pulling the pin on a grenade, hot potato falls into cold potato soup, eat in one sip.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

Lamb ........?????............!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Domaine Leon Barral, Faugères 2009

Each of us received a plate with three medallion-like servings of three different cuts of lamb cooked sous vide and served with a jus.

The lamb was to be eaten with our choice of 60 different garnishes laid out in 6x10 grids on glass platters (two for the table of six). Googling this up, it appears to go by the name of "Lamb 86". An internet person has attempted to identify and catalog all 60 garnishes.

Our server warned us that we should go with a maximum of two garnishes per bite and said that the whole idea was for each person to have a unique tasting experience.

I believe it was this wine pairing that boasted a strong "barnyard" aroma. (And how.)

Black truffle explosion, romaine, parmesan

The black truffle explosion. Another signature dish. A black truffle ravioli that explodes in your mouth. Ridiculously good. Holy fucking umami.

Anjou pear onion, brie, smoking cinnamon
The Rare Wine Co. 'Boston Bual—Special Reserve' Madeira

The burning cinnamon stick served as the utensil: smoldering at one end (giving off a spicy smoke), the other ingredients speared at the other.

Ginger five other flavors

Five tiny clumps of ginger and whatever arrayed on five antenna-like skewers fanned out from a shared base. We were instructed to start at "12 o'clock" and work our way from there. A couple were quite spicy, others were mild.

Blueberry buttermilk, sorrel, macadamia
Paolo Saracco Moscato d'Asti 2011

Served in an elaborate glass vessel, almost a vase-like bowl. It was like a broad platter on top with a small hole in the middle leading to a round bowl underneath, which I guess contained the sorrel, an aromatic herb. It arrived at the table with a small glass ball covering the hole and rattling loudly as vapors escaped from the lower bowl. We pulled these stoppers off and the servers proceeded to pour liquid nitrogen into the holes, causing the entire table to be blanketed in clouds of vapor. We were left with a tea-like liquid in the bowl (drank that with metal straws) with the other stuff on top.

The wine pairing was the first of our dessert wines. A sparkling white.

Balloon helium, green apple

A helium-filled balloon of translucent green apple taffy. Exactly what it sounds like. Depleting our national strategic helium reserve, deliciously.

White Chocolate strawberry, English pea, lemon
Boroli Barolo, Chinato

An elaborate grand finale. The servers moved us all to one side of our table as they laid down a big silicone table cloth. A pair of chefs came out and decorated the entire table with freeze-dried strawberry and English pea powder, dollops of different creams (including a delicious vanilla bean cream), and a sprinkling of edible flower petals. The finished it off by throwing a couple of big hollow white chocolate balls down on the table, shattering them, the chocolate shards becoming our primary utensil.

The final wine pairing was an impossibly sweet, but still rich and drinkable, red digestif.

All of the wine pairings listed above were the "regular" pairings. Morph opted for the cheddar-stack-upgrade to their "reserve" pairings, which swapped in older and fancier wines for only a few of the courses. Presumably these are listed on his take-home menu.

The unexpected bonus from Morph going full cheddar was that on one course our witty repartee distracted the sommelier to the point that he apparently forgot which hand was which and accidentally poured the reserve wine for everyone. The upshot being that he then grabbed more glasses and poured us our intended wine, too. So everyone got a taste of both that round.

[Wheezer]

The oyster leaf, a leaf that tastes naturally like oysters, was served just as a real oyster might be, in an oyster shell with mignonette sauce.

You wrote this copy from scratch?

[Wheezer]

Blueberry buttermilk, sorrel, macadamia
Paolo Saracco Moscato d'Asti 2011

Served in an elaborate glass vessel, almost a vase-like bowl. It was like a broad platter on top with a small hole in the middle leading to a round bowl underneath, which I guess contained the sorrel, an aromatic herb. It arrived at the table with a small glass ball covering the hole and rattling loudly as vapors escaped from the lower bowl. We pulled these stoppers off and the servers proceeded to pour liquid nitrogen into the holes, causing the entire table to be blanketed in clouds of vapor. We were left with a tea-like liquid in the bowl (drank that with metal straws) with the other stuff on top.

OK, now wait a second. Sorrel of course is the basis of germiny. It makes perfect sense to cut the sweetness of the blueberry (and the buttermilk, I suppose, but one does not know whether it was cultured or true buttermilk), but why was its vessel percolating?