In the meantime, I’m about to take a little trip to NYC and Baltimore, and I plan to blog (in brief) about my dining experiences.  Lined up already are outings to Tabla, Babbo, Public, and Eleven Madison Park.  I’ve been to Tabla and Babbo several times and I’m a big fan.  Public I’ve only been to once, but my parents have been raving about it.  Eleven Madison Park is more of a special occasion restaurant, but given that the chef Daniel Humm just won the James Beard award this year for Best Chef: NYC, it seems worth the splurge.  I’ll report back soon.

Or to put it more succinctly: Uni (sea urchin roe) ice cream cone, Cauliflower chocolate soup, Jellyfish pad thai, Parsnip custard with candied sweetbreads…nuff said.

There are some “downsides”: BYOB, hole in the wall across the street from a palm-tree-festooned rim shop, no wait staff (the chefs serve the food), the music gets loud and veers toward hip-hop as the evening wears on, it’s impossible to get a reservation because they don’t pick up the phone and their voice mailbox is frequently full, but I’ve had success calling around 11-12 in the morning.

Of course, these are not really downsides, they are facts of life that make dining at Schwa a unique experience.  Last time I went I picked up a few good bottles at the Cellar Rat, an indie wine shop a few blocks away…ask the owner for Schwa-oriented recommendations (Alsatian Pinot Gris and Belgian beer are two confirmed matches for the Schwa palate).

Here’s an e-mail I wrote about my last experience there:

This blog posting describes a meal that’s almost the same as the one Amal, Ijlal, and I had at Schwa last night:

http://skyfullofbacon.com/blog/?p=168

For Andreas and Rose’s info: The only differences are (1) the amuse — instead of grapefruit sorbet, we had a little anchovy served with a drizzle of menthol, (2) instead of the jellyfish pad thai, we had little pasta pockets filled with curried cauliflower (I think) topped with cocoa nib served in a cocoa nib consomme, and (3) instead of the pork belly dish, we had chicken liver (as written on the menu), but the other components of the dish are exactly the same.

Interestingly, I agree almost entirely with the blog poster’s assessment of the dishes.  My favorite dish, hands down, was the same as his: the chicken liver dish (his was pork belly, but the dish is essentially the same), and my second favorite was the parsnip custard with candied sweetbreads.  (We had this dish when we went last year, too, but I was too drunk then to properly appreciate it…I made sure that didn’t happen this time.)

The marriage of flavors and textures in the chicken liver dish (unctuous creamy liver, crunchy rutabaga pearls, mustard, beer foam, bitter greens, peanut brittle), which Carlson paired correctly with the Belgian beer we brought, was nearly orgasmic for me.  Rose doesn’t like rutabaga, but maybe I could convince her to try it with peanut brittle.   The parsnip custard with caramel and passionfruit sauces was just divine — I think we should try making something like this at home — and the sweet take on “sweetbreads” was simply ingenious. Maybe that’s why they’re called sweetbreads!

The cauliflower curry pasta dish was another of my favorites: the pasta was a little al dente for my taste, but the cocoa nibs and cocoa nib consomme were wonderful.  I said afterward that I need to get Rose to put chocolate in her cauliflower curry.

The quail egg ravioli was wonderful as always — actually, I liked it even better this time than before.  And I loved the amuse, which truly amused: it brilliantly brought both a palate cleanser (mouthwash, essentially) and appetizer (intense fish flavor) together into one bite.  Who knew that such superficially antithetical flavors could be synthesized into such a harmonious union?  Aha, but that of course is the theme of all my research!

I agree with the blog poster that the lobster-persimmon dish (although
*beautifully* presented) was something of a misfire, and I too started to enjoy it much more once I focused on some subset of the components instead of the whole, which didn’t gel for me.  I thought the duck-chocolate-pumpkin combination was pretty tasty, but not terribly original (it essentially tasted like duck in an unspicy mole sauce), and I agree I would have liked a bit more of it.

I would group the rest of the dishes into the category of delicious, but not incredible.  Some of the early ones (e.g. the beet risotto — another great idea, btw, to try at home) were undeniably tasty, but the most magical thing about them was how well they paired with the excellent Alsatian Pinot Gris I picked up at a nearby independent wine store.

All in all, Carlson and company are still in top form.  Amal and Ijlal said they want to go back again before they leave Chicago — I don’t blame them.

And here’s a really interesting article about the chef Michael Carlson and the nervous breakdown he suffered a couple years ago (in between my first and second visits to Schwa).

Price Range: Expensive (approx. $130 USD w/o wine, BYOB)

Rating: A+

Anyway, here it is.  Looking back, I might add or subtract a few to this list, but it’s a pretty good list.  As you can see, I’m a bit obsessed with certain directors (e.g. the Coen brothers).  Of course, times do change.  I haven’t been a big fan of the Coens’ work in the 2000s, with the exception of The Man Who Wasn’t There.  The same could be said (more or less) for David Mamet and Hal Hartley, two of my other favorites from the 90s.  And as for Woody Allen’s interminable Soon-Yi period…the less said the better.  So it goes.

My favorite 10 films of the 1990s:

1. Barton Fink (Joel & Ethan Coen)
2. Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, written by David Mamet)
3. Europa (Lars von Trier)
4. Trust (Hal Hartley)
5. Miller’s Crossing (Joel & Ethan Coen)
6. The Big Lebowski (Joel & Ethan Coen)
7. Homicide (David Mamet)
8. Happiness (Todd Solondz)
9. The Player (Robert Altman)
10. Metropolitan (Whit Stillman)

The next 40 (in no particular order):

Underground (Emir Kusturica)
The Lovers on the Bridge (Leos Carax)
The Quiet Room (Rolf de Heer)
Truly Madly Deeply (Anthony Minghella)
Spanking the Monkey (David O. Russell)
Delicatessen (Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro)
Crumb (Terry Zwigoff)
I Stand Alone (Gaspar Noe)
The Kingdom (Lars von Trier et al.)
Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh)
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (Errol Morris)
The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer)
The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel & Ethan Coen)
Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai)
A Simple Plan (Sam Raimi)
Simple Men (Hal Hartley)
Amateur (Hal Hartley)
The City of Lost Children (Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro)
Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch)
Flirting With Disaster (David O. Russell)
Barcelona (Whit Stillman)
Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley)
The Insider (Michael Mann)
Venice/Venice (Henry Jaglom)
Last Summer in the Hamptons (Henry Jaglom)
Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen)
Husbands and Wives (Woody Allen)
Manhattan Murder Mystery (Woody Allen)
Rushmore (Wes Anderson)
Dead Alive (Peter Jackson)
Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino)
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (Peter Greenaway)
The Rapture (Michael Tolkin)
Gray’s Anatomy (Steven Soderbergh)
The Celebration (Thomas Vinterberg)
Drowning by Numbers (Peter Greenaway)
Institute Benjamenta (Brothers Quay)
The Game (David Fincher)
Three Lives and Only One Death (Raoul Ruiz)
Buffalo ’66 (Vincent Gallo)

As soon as you enter, you are struck by a strong whiff of delectable fermentation, not unlike the cheese store in Saarbruecken (although considerably more pleasant).  There’s a huge cheese case near the entrance, and the cheeses appeared to be in beautiful condition.  The restaurant has a cozy, slightly rustic feel, and the menu is quite diverse.  This is not your typical French brasserie with all the expected stuff.  A number of the dishes involve various cheeses in unusual combinations with various meats.  There are the expected fondues and raclettes, but they are available in more variations than one might expect.  (I would seriously consider returning and getting the fondue made with Époisses de Bourgogne, one of the greatest of all cheeses!)  Finally, there are also a number of cheese plates available, and frankly I have no idea what the differences were between them.  Usually I can make some sense of a French menu, but the descriptions of the different cheese plates were Greek to me.

Anyway, we ended up ordering off the special 3-course fixed-price menu, which is actually a very good deal.  For about 24 euros (I believe), you get an appetizer, main and dessert.  (In several cases, the mains on the regular menu were roughly 24 euros, so getting the other 2 courses for free is an excellent deal!)

For appetizers, the choices included a salad, a cheese-profiterole dish of some sort (that no one ordered), and a really unusual dish consisting of Muenster (the real stuff) melted over potatoes and dusted with cumin (!), paired with a little shot glass of beet cappuccino!  WTF!  Strongly approving of such unorthodox fare, I of course had to order that last one, and was not disappointed.  Aside from the unfortunate problem that the potatoes were only lukewarm by the time I received them, the flavor combination of Muenster and cumin was very nice, and it paired beautifully with the little beet cappuccino (which was basically like beet-flavored whipped cream).  I give this dish a B+.  If it had been served at the proper temperature, I would rate it A-.

For mains, there was either a cheese plate or a fondue-like dish with melted Vacherin and various things to dip in it.  (There was a third option, but I forget what it was.)  One of my dining companions ordered the Vacherin dish, which was quite nice, but one-note.  I was very happy that I ordered the cheese plate, which came with small servings of 10 different cheeses, covering a wide range of different cheese types.  While none of them was wildly outside the bounds of my cheese-eating experience, they were all great, and I was only on a first-name basis with about half of them.  (Well, it’s possible I knew more of them, but the waiter explained what they were in French, and I could only parse the names of half of them.)

For dessert, the options were: roasted fresh figs with lavender honey and ice cream, a chestnut trifle, and creme brulee.  My dining companion ordered the chestnut trifle, which had a lovely, subtle flavor.  I ordered the figs, and was quite pleased, although it seems impossible for roasted figs and honey not to taste good.

The wine list was not huge, but seemed reasonable.  We ordered a carafe of some Alsatian Pinot Gris, which was sweet but not cloyingly so.  I love the golden color and texture of Pinot Gris, and it paired quite well with all the unctuous cheese.

On the downside, Rose didn’t feel like ordering a cheese extravaganza, and instead got a simple mesclun salad and some cheesy potato pancakes.  The potato pancakes turned out not to be super-cheesy, but actually tasted a lot like latkes.  They were fine, but nothing special.  That said, the restaurant cannot be blamed for not having enough vegetarian options.  A significant part of the menu was either vegetarian or could be easily made vegetarian, and my 3-course meal was entirely vegetarian.

In short, La Cloche à Fromage is definitely worth at least a day trip to Strasbourg.  Be sure to call ahead earlier in the week to make a reservation.  There were no empty tables at lunch, and in fact the first time we visited Strasbourg we tried to get into this place for lunch without a reservation and failed.

Price Range: Moderate (20-40 EUR)

Rating: A-

There’s not much to say about a place like this.  The food was really good, and there were a number of different options, including two different vegetarian options for main course.  While I wouldn’t say the food was wildly interesting, it was certainly very satisfying.  And although Rose wasn’t totally happy with her menu choices (see her blog), the other vegetarians we dined with were.  Highly recommended.

Price Range: Upscale (25-45 GBP)

Rating: A-

The rather bizarre name of the restaurant reflects the menu structure. There are two options for a starter, followed by a fixed soup, then two options for a main course, followed by a fixed cheese course, and lastly two options for dessert.  Nonetheless, 21212 is a stupid name for a restaurant.  It sounds like a zip code.  If I were them, I would change it.

I have very mixed feelings about 21212.  On one hand, I thought a number of the dishes were quite interesting, and displayed a lot more character than most of the food at The Kitchin.  To be honest, I would be more interested in returning to 21212 in a year’s time than in returning to The Kitchin, even though overall my experience at The Kitchin was better.  I think in a year or two, once the chef works out the kinks, 21212 may be one of the best restaurants in Edinburgh, but currently I cannot quite recommend it.

Problem #1 is that the dishes generally either had too much going on or too little going on, to the extent that I don’t really remember what most of the dishes were.  That is not necessarily a bad sign. Some of my favorite restaurants serve complex dishes that are hard to pin down.  But some of the dishes at 21212 were hard to even make sense of while you were eating them.

Generally, my dining companions seemed to feel that the starters were the most successful of the 5 courses.  (My friend Leaf said that his scallop appetizer, which I did not taste, was the culinary highlight of his trip to Edinburgh.)  The soup course, a shellfish bisque with a lot of foam, didn’t do much for me, although others liked it.  The main courses were not very popular, although I really liked mine.

This seemed to be a common tendency.  There were several dishes that produced rather polarized responses, with one person loving it and another finding it very disappointing.  Perhaps the oddest point in this respect was a strongly spiced “mini-scone” (which we referred to as the “doughy thing”) that was buried inside the all-over-the-place beef main course that most of us ordered.  I thought the scone was awesome, and for me it made the dish come together, but everyone else hated it.  (Same thing for the bread that was served with the meal, which I adored but others found too strongly spiced.)  I’m not sure what to make of this phenomenon.  In some ways, I think it’s a good thing, because it indicates the chef is doing something different. But it is unusual to see it happen in such an expensive restaurant.

Problem #2 is that the courses were of strangely unbalanced size.  The first three courses were quite small, smaller than I would have expected given that it’s a 5-course menu, not 7 or 8 courses.  But the cheese course was huge.  Four big slabs of cheese were brought out to be shared.  Frankly, this course was disappointing.  Three of the four cheeses were totally standard cheeses that I get in my local cheese shop in Saarbruecken.  And why was this course so huge while the others were so small?  For me, this disparity is a key reason I cannot currently recommend the restaurant.

But I would keep an eye on 21212.  It was the most interesting restaurant I ate at in Edinburgh, and I expect it will improve over time.

Price range: Expensive (75–100 GBP)

Rating: B / B-

After looking at the menu for all of 30 seconds, my 5 dining companions and I decided to go for the 7-course “land and sea surprise” tasting menu, as well as the accompanying wine package.  For a first visit, I think this was a good choice.  (In general, tasting menus are a good way of diversifying one’s gastronomic portfolio, which is important when one is not familiar with a chef’s style.) However, having been to The Kitchin once, I think I would now know how to order well off the regular menu.

For me, the best dish by far (which was also easily the best dish I ate in Edinburgh) was the main meat course, namely “early-season grouse”, a local game bird.  It was served very simply, mostly de-boned, with some parsnip puree and a bland gravy-like “bread sauce” on the side.  It’s one of the best birds I’ve ever tasted, its meat almost liver-like in flavor.  Truly heavenly.

The “pig’s head and scallop” dish (the “pig’s head” consisting of a crispy pig’s ear sitting atop a little patty made from meat/fat from the pig’s head) was also very well-done, my second favorite of the evening.  According to the waiter, this is one of the chef’s signature dishes.  I’m not surprised, although to be honest I wouldn’t go out of my way to order it again.

The cheese course was excellent, including a number of unusual Scottish and French cheeses.  By the time the cheese course rolled around, people were pretty stuffed, so the waiter allowed us to share two cheese plates between 6 people.  (This turned out to be an appropriate amount of cheese per person, as opposed to the gargantuan cheese plate one typically receives in European tasting menus.)

The wine pairing (including 7 or 8 wines) was also above-average IMO, definitely worth the cost.

The other dishes included a fennel-cream amuse bouche, a smoked mackerel appetizer, a razorfish clam appetizer, a turbot-and-vegetables main fish course, and a hibiscus pannacotta dessert.  While these were all very good (and some of my dining companions declared the razorfish dish the best of the night), I was frankly somewhat underwhelmed.  All these dishes were quite delicate and IMO rather character-less.  I could have received them in any fine dining establishment.  They didn’t speak to me.

So, all in all, I was somewhat disappointed.  The food was all very good, and of excellent quality, but for me only the grouse was truly memorable.  If the restaurant were about 30% cheaper, that would be enough for a strong recommendation, but at The Kitchin’s rather high price point I can only give a moderate recommendation.

Price range: Very Expensive (over 100 GBP)

Rating: B / B+

I will be posting a series of entries on various restaurants we went to, starting with the most expensive and working down to the cheapest.  Most of the restaurants we tried were actually quite good, although none was earth-shattering.  Stay tuned.

Seriously…I just took a two-week trip to North America, spending several days each in Montréal, New York, and Los Angeles.  I ate in great restaurants in all three cities, savoring 12-course tasting menus, dazzling wine pairings, unearthly risottos, and heart-stopping portions of meat, all of which I will discuss in forthcoming posts.

And now all I can think of when I go to bed at night is the ice cream sandwiches at Diddy Riese in Los Angeles.

It is like something out of a dream: An ice cream and cookie shoppe that charges a shockingly low $1.50 to serve you one of the best and simplest desserts there is: a freshly-made ice cream cookie sandwich.  Yes, for less than it costs to buy a cup of coffee or a bottle of water, you receive two fresh-baked (and remarkably good) cookies surrounding a mound of delicious Dreyer’s ice cream.  For the uninitiated, Dreyer’s ice cream (no relation to me) is what Edy’s is called on the west coast.

Oh, Diddy Riese: it was only 10 days ago when we first met thanks to that great matchmaking website TripAdvisor.  I was looking up Westwood, CA (where UCLA is), in the hopes of getting a grip on the local restaurant scene.  Frankly, it was not very inspiring.  None of the high-end places in Westwood looked terribly interesting and all had rather mixed reviews.  Some cheaper ethnic places were recommended, but again nothing to write home about.  The only eatery in Westwood that was universally acclaimed was…an ice cream and cookie shoppe?

It’s not hard to find.  Just look for the joint with the 20-minute line around the block.  When I first saw that, I wondered whether Diddy Riese wasn’t pulling a Sweeney Todd.  I mean, for God’s sake, it’s an ice cream shoppe!  And how else can they charge only $1.50 for an ice cream sandwich if they’re not concocting their cookie batter through some nefarious means?

Well, all fears were eventually allayed, for it was love at first bite.  The servers recognize that their sandwiches are so stuffed to the brim with ice cream, and their cookies so soft and fresh, that there’s no way in hell the things can hold together, and they just serve them by default in styrofoam cups.  You can take a few bites in sandwich form before the damn thing crumbles into a wonderful ice cream/cookie mashup.  Truly heavenly, at least if you have any place in your hardened heart for cookies and ice cream (and your heart will surely be hardened after enough trips to Diddy Riese).

In the course of 3.5 days in L.A., I managed to visit Diddy Riese 3 times, and tried several different cookie/ice cream combinations (you can pick any two cookies and any flavor of ice cream, and they’re so cheap you might as well get two different sandwiches and eat half of each, as I did on two of my three visits).

My top two recommendations are the peanut butter cup ice cream sandwiched between two peanut butter cookies, and the espresso chip ice cream sandwiched between two white chocolate macadamia nut cookies.  Both were exquisite.

Why doesn’t every ice cream shoppe in America sell this stuff?  I would pay four times the Diddy Riese price for something this good!  I think the issue is that the Diddy Riese sandwiches are ten times better than any other ice cream sandwich I’ve ever had, and the reason is to a large extent the cookies.  Diddy Riese is always busy, so their cookies get eaten very shortly after they are baked.  If the cookies were not soft, crumbly, and fresh, the cookie sandwiches would not have been nearly as memorable.  That said, although I am a Häagen-Dazs snob, I have to admit that Dreyer’s ice cream proved to be a surprisingly effective collaborator in these masterworks.

Although Diddy Riese has the look and feel of a chain, there is only the one location in Westwood.  If you are in L.A. for any reason, it is definitely worth a detour.

Rating: A+

Just bought a bunch of CDs, so I’ll be reporting on them as I make my way through them.

Anyway, for starters: Steve Reich’s “Different Trains” is fantastic.

I’m a fan of a lot of minimalist music, at least what I would call “high minimalist”, i.e. music that uses repetitive structures as a basic language but that then actually does/says something or goes somewhere with that language instead of just repeating its grammatical constructs ad infinitum.  For example, I think early Philip Glass gives minimalism a bad name, but some of his later stuff (such as the string quartets, especially the 5th, available on a great recording by the Kronos Quartet) is superb.

Anyway, I’d somehow managed to avoid listening to Steve Reich, one of the classic minimalists.  But at least judging from the Kronos Quartet recording of Different Trains, this was a mistake.  The piece (from 1988) is really beautiful, and won the Grammy in 1989 for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.  (Note: I don’t really care about awards, but some people do, and so I will typically try to highlight when things I like receive accolades.)

The piece is scored for a string quartet playing against various tape-recorded sounds.  Opening with strings chugging along to the blowing of a train whistle, it is strongly reminiscent of a train venturing out into the open frontier.  But soon enough the core conceit of the piece is revealed as we hear an elderly woman intone “From Chicago to New York”…

The entire piece is structured as a sequence of short episodes based on the melodic patterns of brief fragments of recorded speech.  In the first movement (“America — Before the War”), the speech is limited to brief snippets like “the crack train from New York”, “different trains every time”, “1941 I guess it must have been”.  Then, to the accompaniment of wailing sirens, the second movement (“Europe — During the War”) ushers in the voices of Holocaust survivors, who boarded trains to a very different end.  Finally, the third movement takes place “After the war”.

On first hearing of the piece, the technique of turning speech into music, combined with the unabashedly minimalist aesthetic, comes across as somewhat funny.  But I must say it gains a lot of power on repeated listening.  What’s more, while the piece feels at any instant like very classic minimalism, and maintains throughout a constant train-like pulse, it actually covers a wide variety of melodic and emotional ground.  The voice imitation technique gives Reich an “excuse” to keep changing from one tune to another while staying faithful in some sense to the basic minimalist ideal.  Somehow, it actually reminds me a lot of Stephen Sondheim’s music for the great “Sunday in the Park with George”, which was composed only a few years earlier.

The Kronos recording is paired with a recording by Pat Metheny of another Reich piece, “Electric Counterpoint” for solo electric guitar (overdubbed).  While not as interesting as Different Trains (it’s more “easy listening” minimalism), it provides quite a pleasant cooldown after its truly stunning companion.

Rating: A

UPDATE: I just found this link to a radio broadcast of ThoughtCast’s Jenny Attiyeh listening to and discussing Different Trains with members of the Borromeo String Quartet.  It’s 7 minutes, and gives one a good sense of the piece through several musical snippets.

It’s interesting to hear the thoughts of the actual musicians who have to play against a pre-recorded tape.  One thing that particularly amused me was that the players liked the third movement best.  I had exactly the same feeling — the whole movement seems to unify the emotions of the first two parts perfectly and the ending (“And when she stopped singing they said ‘More, more’ and they applauded”) is especially moving — but this Gramophone review of the recording from June 1989 feels that the last movement “runs out of steam” (so to speak).  I suspect the string players like this movement the best primarily because some of the repeated string phrases actually contain more than two or three notes.

Another interesting point was the feeling the players had that the piece was very daunting at first due to the high degree of repetitiveness.  The cellist says it’s only natural to want to make any piece of music she plays very “living” and so just looking at the piece on the page, she was rather intimidated.  I think what makes Different Trains work is that, as I said above, the piece is monotonous locally but very much “alive” structurally.

Incidentally, I don’t think the same can be said for another seminal Reich piece, “Music for 18 Musicians”.  I’ve been trying to listen to that one, but so far I’ve found it a much tougher nut to crack.