Tuesday, October 31, 2006

On Eating

How far would you travel to taste the food of the gods?

It wasn't just the warm interior of the little restaurant nestled on a dark anonymous corner. Not the shiny tin ceiling, the full, animated room, the twinkly lights or the mirrored walls. It wasn't the wooden tables and chairs, and it wasn't the no-nonsense dinner ware, the flushed faces of the servers. It wasn't the open kitchen or the blackboard. Or the cold outside. It wasn't smiles on faces, or the excitement of dressing up.

It was the cloud-like foie gras and the sharp sweet wine-cassis reduction on the (almost raw) venison and the crispy tendrils of shaved leeks everywhere and the simplicity of the brasied lamb which was humbly named after a mouse and the bitter darkness of chocolate and sorbets too intense to describe in terms other than platonic because they captured something essential about fruit, something that made all other fruits seem like so many shadows.

I remember little of the conversation. I do remember that we nearly forgot our coats.

2 comments:

Hilaire said...

Oh my, that sounds amazing. I especially like the way you evoke *place*.

Pamphilia said...

Gee, thanks Hilaire! I kind of thought it was a bit over-the-top, but that is how good it was. I always end up turning into a Platonist over food. As in, "This is like totally the form of foie gras, the ideal that all other foies gras aspire to become," etc.

I think eating is the closest I've come to enlightenment.