Guess what? I managed to score a seat for dinner at Momofuku Ko on Tuesday night. Of course it was only possible because Tuesday happened to be Election Day and the seating was at 10pm. But still, God bless America.

Well, once again I was not able to take any pictures, and this time, I’m sure I have forgotten a dish somewhere along the line, thanks in part to the wonderful $85 wine pairing, but these are the things I do remember having:

Mini super rich bread-like thing next to an awesome fried pork rind
Mini encased sausage thing with a crisped bit of chicken skin
Raw fluke with poppy seeds and white soy
Lamb belly in a “soup” (pureed daikon I think?)
Coddled egg with generous amount of hackleback caviar, onion soubise, and mini chips
Pasta rags and mushrooms in a mushroom broth
Monk fish with uni
Venison with coffee
Signature shaved foie gras
Mandarin Orange Sorbet with bitter orange supremes and juniper
Pretzel Sorbet with Cheese Puffs

Yes the lamb belly was obviously from the same glorious Elysian Fields lamb whose chops I wrote about in my last entry. I was hoping to have the deep fried short ribs I had read about, but apparently that dish has been replaced. But having this lamb dish, I am soooo not complaining. I’m telling you, Elysian Fields is raising some magical lamb.

The soft egg dish was delicious but seemed to have too many things going on. I see caviar and I just want to eat it alone, but in this case it was sitting atop the slightly oozy egg yolk, just begging to be mixed with the tart onion soubise. A lot of delicious flavors there, but I’m not convinced they all worked together like that. Maybe I’m just too partial to the purity of straight caviar, I dunno.

The venison dish also had a lot going on, but it worked. The flavor of coffee was so unexpected and surprisingly well matched with the rare venison, and there were huckleberries to add a dimension of sweetness too. Well conceived and well executed dish, even though venison isn’t something that usually blows me away.

I’m glad I could have the shaved foie gras again too, just to be absolutely certain it was really as good as I remembered it. And damn, it certainly was. One thing I picked up on this time that I didn’t notice the last time is that the hazlenuts are not just toasted, it is actually pieces of hazlenut brittle. The added bit of sweetness definitely brings something to the game above and beyond what the lychee provides. Definitely a hall of fame dish.

The clever little dessert deserves special mention too. Although flavor-wise it wasn’t my favorite thing of all time, I gotta give props for the originality. I mean pretzel sorbet? Who thinks of that? When I think pretzels, I don’t think light and refreshing, yet there it was, a palate-cleansing sorbet that was unmistakably pretzel. Surrounding the plate were deep fried mini cheese puff like things that were delicious in and of themselves. Imagine what snack food cheese puffs would be if they were made with 99% cheese instead of puff. That’s what these were, and they were goooood.

So now that I’ve tried both lunch and dinner at Ko, I would say that lunch is a better value even though it is more expensive. The dinner courses are somewhat more substantial, i.e. heavier, but there are at least 5 or 6 fewer dishes, it takes half as long from beginning to end, and the vibe is slightly different. Don’t get me wrong; service and friendliness at dinner were still beyond awesome, but lunch just seemed like so much more of a special experience. Partly it has to be that lunch takes a full three hours, but it’s also that at the end of dinner they are actually cleaning up the kitchen as opposed to the end of lunch where there is still lots of cooking going on in preparation for dinner service. Also, we got a jar of pickled veggies to take home after lunch and didn’t get any parting gifts at dinner. In the end, I can wholeheartedly recommend both lunch and dinner, but if you can only score one Momofuku Ko reservation, make it lunch.