the other Dave Cameron

Lunch at Momofuku Ko on 29 January, 2010

I was lucky enough to snag one of the 12 seats at the famously-difficult-to-get-into Momofuku Ko last week and, while I’m sure I’ll be annoyingly raving about the experience to my foodie friends for weeks to come, here I’ll just say that it was all just as profoundly uplifting, informative, entertaining, and absolutely delicious, as you would expect a 3 hour / 16 course lunch at a Two Michelin Star restaurant should be.

By the end of the meal, after watching the preparation and assembly of each dish unfold, and tasting the results, what I took away from the experience were the basic, simple, obvious (yet too often overlooked) practices that are behind great dining:

• Always be Tasting: lead chef Peter Serpico was constantly tasting and adjusting his sauces and his proteins, checking doneness, checking balance, tasting his cooks’ sauces; there was no slouching, no assuming it was right. His sous chefs did the same. Nothing was served that hadn’t been tasted first.
• Bad ass skills: nothing was prepared in front of us using much beyond traditional kitchen techniques - chopping, slicing, frying, grilling. Much of the complexity came from the extensive prep that obviously happened prior to opening, like the beef cheek cooked sous-vide for two days and sliced paper thin, the ice creams, the gelée, the broths, etc. But even just assembling these dishes, they didn’t rely on fancy serviceware or use tweezers to place microgreens just so. They just cooked, plated, and served impeccably, and we loved it.
• Respect your ingredients: when we were served each dish, we were always told the major components, and whenever possible the origins of those ingredients. Benton’s bacon, Elysian Fields Farms lamb, oysters from Vancouver, sea urchin from San Francisco. And each dish celebrated the flavor of each ingredient, brought them together toward balance of texture, aroma, colors, and flavors. Sauces might have 14 different components, but you’d never know. When you’re starting with the best, freshest, cleanest, most flavorful ingredients possible, you don’t want to hide them. You celebrate them.

If you’re really curious, you can see my notes on the whole menu here. They don’t allow you to take photos of the food, and that’s probably best for everyone. However, they didn’t say anything about the restroom, which is where I snapped the photo above. If you want to judge a chef by his cookbooks, than I think the titles you see here, along with the fact that they’re lovingly shelved above a toilet, tells a lot about where David Chang and his crew are coming from with their cooking.

I can’t wait to go back.