A lot to cover about the last week. I took Friday and Monday off to do a golf trip with our senior citizen buddies down in Sebring, FL. One of the guys, Ray had a lymphoma removed a few months ago and went thru chemo after that but is still up and active. They even gave him all kinds of meds for the nausea, pain and other afflictions that people usually suffer after chemo. But good ol’ Ray is not a mere mortal; he hasn’t needed to take a single pill yet because he hasn’t experienced any of that stuff! He did lose all his hair though; there’s no pill for that particular symptom. So it was pretty damn inspirational seeing this guy and all our other senior golfing buddies kicking my ass in golf every day out there. And the best part of the story- Ray made a hole in one on Sunday! Pretty fuggin awesome.

The restaurants weren’t that good down there but I managed to order exactly the right thing at each place we went- prime rib on the first night, then a seafood combo platter of mainly fried items but with king crab legs on the side and then on Sunday I had the surf and turf at the hotel. All were pretty good, but poor Twoin ordered the wrong things each night and was miserable. To make matters worse, he sprained his wrist and got some sunblock in his eyes during the weekend too. By the last day his eyes were all puffy and red and he was walking around with his eyes half closed most of the time. After the final round, he walked into the clubhouse and into the bathroom and was startled to see an old lady standing there. Greg pulls him out of the LADIES room and apologized to the woman “my friend’s eyes are all fucked up, he can’t see anything”! But that’s not the funniest part. As they walk to the men’s room, Twoin says to Greg “Damn, that was the ladies room? I took a shit in there this morning!” Hahahaha…man, absolutely hysterical!

Overall, the trip was cool. Good to hang out with feisty seniors, and me and Twoin cleaned up at poker each night. I played my usual semi-tight game, picking my spots to get my chips in the pot, while Twoin has developed a maniacal calling station technique that actually works for him. I guess you could call it small ball poker, but since he only folds maybe 1% of the hands, and not until the river, it’s hard to call it that. In any event, it was fun drinking and playing poker each night without worrying about getting up for work the next day. Great stuff.

As pleasant as the trip was, I had something even better waiting for me upon my return- a dinner at the restaurant I’ve been waiting four years for, Morimoto NYC. Yes, it had been about four years since we drove to Philly to eat at his restaurant and he told us he had picked out a location in the meat packing district in NY where he was going to make his triumphant return. Well, Tuesday was the opening night and I managed to get a reservation at the sushi bar for Wednesday night. I convinced my new super cool friend P to skip work and join me for dinner and off we went for the finest meal of our lives…

We started with drinks at the ultra modern bar downstairs. I had the 10 year old Morimoto brand shoju which tasted like a cross between sake and whiskey with distinct caramel overtones. P had a Dewars on the rocks (I told you she was cool) and then we headed upstairs to take our seats. I then ordered a bottle of the Morimoto 5 year shoju which had a totally different personality- bolder with a little bit of a pleasant biting heat to the finish. The omakase listed on the menu at $120, but Morimoto was working all the way at the far right end of the Z-shaped sushi bar and we were at the left. Clearly the move here was to order double the cost of the listed omakase in order to ensure the Iron Chef would prepare our food himself, so I asked the waitress if we could do that. She informed me that to get anything above the $120 omakase, I would have to reserve a seat at the 8-person omakase table, the one at that far right end of the sushi bar. But knowing that in Philly I could get any level of omakase from anywhere in the restaurant, I had her get a manager to speak to me. The manager went and spoke to Morimoto who nodded and gave his approval. Whew! I didn’t fight to get this reservation only to get served by his underlings!

So dinner began with a toro tartare served on a tiny wooden board with caviar and five different accompaniments which I can’t exactly recall. One was definitely fresh wasabi and another seemed to be something like a fig paste. All worked well with the toro and it was certainly a terrific starter. Next up was a set of 3 lacquered boxes in a wooden caddy, each box containing a different sashimi. One was chopped sweet shrimp, one was yellowtail with a 10 year aged soy sauce, and finally a toro with a 20 year aged soy sauce. The fish was as rich and velvety as you could imagine, and the aged soys were thick as balsamic vinegar with a mild slightly smoky saltiness. I never had soy like that before and it was a real treat. At about this point, P was really starting to enjoy herself and that really made me smile. I could watch her take each bite and see in her eyes that she was really getting the same pleasure out of it that I was. I love seeing people that can experience culinary pleasures to the same degree that I do. It’s as if we taste in color and others taste in black and white. I need to be around people that can taste in HDTV!

I wish I could do a play by play recap of every dish, but I’m sure I’m forgetting a few, so I’ll just go over what comes to mind at the moment. Besides, I’m pretty emotionally spent after such an incredible evening that I just wouldn’t have the energy to do all the dishes justice. Anyway, the most subtle and delicate of the dishes was a little glass of freshly made tofu with sliced black truffles. Yummm… Perhaps the best overall dish of the night was a mound of brown barley type rice with a big ol hunk of succulent lobster claw meat and a filet of what I think was poached red snapper. This mound of rice with fish was sitting in a bowl of mild but flavorful broth, and topped with the most glorious of items- yeah, you guessed it, seared foie gras! 🙂 P had never had foie gras before and I’m glad I was there to share that first bite with her. Man that dish would have been a superstar on any menu even without the foie gras, but with it, gosh it was elevated from orgasmic to life-changing. There is simply no way to describe how amazing that dish was. Every ingredient, even the brown rice, had its own distinct beautiful identity yet melded so perfectly as if to say “we’re so confident in our individuality, we have no problem sharing the spotlight with each other”. It really did look like a dish you’d see Morimoto make on Iron Chef. They all looked that way, but this one more so than the rest. I really didn’t think anything could top that dish, but then came the beef. I’m assuming it was Wagyu beef although I don’t recall hearing them mention it although they might have and I just didn’t hear it. P and I were so lost in the pleasure of the moment that we didn’t even notice when Morimoto had walked over to bring the trays to us. We were startled and a little embarrassed so whatever the waiter might have said to describe the dish, I wasn’t so much listening to it as I was watching P giggle. There were 3 thin slices of beef draped over a smooth rock which I recognized as the same hand selected rocks that Morimoto in Philly used to heat up and bring to the table for you to cook abalone on. Here at Morimoto NYC, the rocks were just used to carry the raw beef, and the cooking was to be done on a stone disk resting atop a box which I assume contained some sort of hot coals or other heating element. The beef was seasoned with just salt, pepper, and something that looked like maybe garlic powder but was nowhere near as pronounced in flavor. All I can say is that after you cooked it up rare, the sweet melted fat in the meat and that perfect level of seasoning made it one of the greatest bites of gourmet food ever. Yes, it might even be better than the grilled uni from Sushi of Gari! Each slice melted on the tongue and had such a sensual and intoxicating effect. My god, it really moved me nearly to tears. You just can’t understand it unless you go there and have it for yourself. P understood it; I could see it in that dreamy look she had on her face. I can’t even imagine how I must have looked. I remember thinking to myself, “did I really just taste that or am I dreaming?” It was an eager and exciting anticipation putting the second and then the third slices onto the stone to cook. And after it was gone we just looked at each other like we had just had sex. Didn’t even need to say a word; we just knew we had just shared something beyond description. I know this all sounds ridiculously dramatic and overblown, but I don’t care; you go there and have the same dishes we had and tell me if it doesn’t move you!

The rest of the dishes were all terrific, but couldn’t compare with that beef. For sushi we had toro, yellowtail, uni from Hokkaido and one featuring wasabi sprouts. The uni from Hokkaido was almost reddish in color with a sweet and very mild flavor, probably perfect for an American palate (the Japanese usually prefer the stinkier funkier varieties). Somewhere along the line I switched from shoju to carafes of the Morimoto daiginjo sake, the same stuff I fell in love with at Morimoto Philly. There was also two dishes that acted as an intermezzo, one a flash frozen chocolate ice cream, presumably flash frozen with liquid nitrogen. The other was a combination of a sorbet, an ice cream and a heavy foam with candied paper thin slices of apple for garnish. Along with that was served a really pleasant and mild green tea. Oh and another dish which I almost forgot (and I don’t remember exactly where in the succession of dishes it actually came out) was a cup of rich and dark crab bisque made from a type of hairy crab. A single crab leg adorned the cup and there were additional chunks of crab meat in the bisque itself too. That’s about all I can remember. Dessert was a banana chocolate item with a pineapple confit; not spectacular but a very nice and not too heavy end to an extraordinary meal. All told, it was about a four hour meal. Four hours of such blissfully sinful indulgence that I feel truly emotionally exhausted from it. What an evening!