Alinea and Per Se

I’ve had many wonderful meals in the past year, from truffle tastings to burgers, and I’ve commemorated the majority in these pages.  Yet the two that were perhaps the most sublime – Alinea and Per Se – have proven the hardest to write about.

The doors to Per Se

These are the sort of dinners that make me feel like I’m on vacation, with the real world far away.  During the meal, I can’t help but be carried away by the perfect combination of flavor, presentation, and service, and when I’m home again, I simply want to enjoy the memories rather than dissect the meal course by course.


Yet some dishes are so striking, so memorable, that I remember them in perfect detail weeks and months (and years) later.  At the French Laundry (Per Se’s elder, Californian sister), I remember a piece of butter-poached lobster atop pain perdu, a sort of savory French toast, served with housemade Russian dressing.  “Just like In-n-Out!” I exclaimed, to the waiter’s amusement.  At Per Se, there was a “Purple Cow” for dessert, a composed plate that included a concord grape mousse – refined yet as perfectly fizzy as grape soda.


Once, at Alinea, I had a morsel of pheasant tempura, with a bit of molten apple cider inside the crisp exterior, served skewered on an oak branch with smoldering dried leaves.  I’ll always be able to summon up a memory of the sweet-savory flavor, the crisp-melting texture, and the pervasive, autumnal aroma of burning leaves.  More recently, during the summer, we had a centerpiece of herbs on our table, which served as decor until halfway through the meal, when D and I snipped off the various leaves with tiny silver scissors and used them to garnish our tomato salads.  Such fun!

Before

During

After

Then, of course, there are the iconic dishes – so good that a dinner wouldn’t be complete without them…


Oysters and Pearls at Per Se


This is perhaps the best-known and best-loved Thomas Keller creation, served without fail at both the French Laundry and Per Se.  It’s probably also my very, very favorite dish I’ve ever had at a restaurant – creamy, oyster-scented sabayon studded with tapioca pearls, with poached oysters on top alongside a dollop of caviar.  Sublime perfection.

Black Truffle Explosion at Alinea


I adore pasta and truffles.  This is the classic combination, presented in a very unexpected way – the pasta surrounds a center of liquid black truffle juice.  When you bite into it (mouth closed!), the pasta bursts and the intense truffle flavor floods your palate. The Black Truffle Explosion takes just an instant to eat, yet I always linger over it.

Hot Potato Cold Potato at Alinea


The first thing to note is: that isn’t a porcelain bowl, it’s made of wax, and filled with a cold potato soup made with cream and truffles.  The “hot potato” is the potato sphere at the tip of the pin, with a slice of truffle draped over it; farther down on the pin are chive and Parmesan.  Alinea surely doesn’t stint on rich flavors.  To combine the elements and the hot/cold temperatures, you pull out the pin and let everything fall into the tiny bowl, and slurp it up as if it were an oyster.

Coffee and Doughnuts at Per Se

At Per Se, and since my photo is rather poor…

…I had to include the photo from the French Laundry cookbook

Tabletop dessert at Alinea



Nowhere else have I eaten a dessert from the table – I would say it’s “precisely-plated”, except that there are no plates in sight.  It’s clear as soon as the waiter unrolls a gray silicone tablecloth that something unusual is afoot, and then Grant Achatz or one of his chefs comes out to present the dessert.  It takes quite a while to cover the entire table with an artful landscape of chocolate and other flavors – a frozen chocolate mousse in the center, circles of warm chocolate mousse, dollops and swirls of sauces…  Once the masterpiece is complete, you eat directly from the table, scraping up every bit from the tablecloth.  Unconventional, but fun and satisfying in a primitive way, and of course delicious.