Yesterday, I shared with you a few rather enigmatic videos hinting at Next restaurant‘s Kyoto menu, which has its official opening tonight, and this morning, I posted a pic of the menu scroll itself, which had been tweeted by someone lucky enough to attend the test dinner.

But for those who want something a bit more concrete, here’s the video Next released today which explains more about the food (and the spirit of the food) during the latest incarnation of its ever-changing menu, similar to what was previously released for Paris: 1906, Thailand, Tribute to elBulli, and Sicily. (Oddly, there seems to have been no official video for Childhood, so this footage, uploaded by others, will have to do.)

This is what the lucky first night diners were able to experience earlier tonight in Chicago. (more…)

Tonight, Next restaurant will officially launch its Kyoto menu—and as I told you yesterday, I bought tickets for an upcoming Kitchen Table there even though I had no idea exactly what Chefs Grant Achatz and Dave Beran would come up with.

Well, early this morning, Graham Elliot tweeted a pic of the menu that shows what he was served during the test dinner Thursday night—and what I can expect when I return to Chicago in November.

Can’t wait to experience the umami!

I’ve been remiss in not yet sharing with you my impressions of the visits I made to Next, Alinea, and The Aviary (plus The Office, a speakeasy beneath The Office) during Chicon7, but recovering from the trip while staying on top of Blastr left me with no remaining juice to tell the whole amazing story of the restaurants Chef Grant Achatz has created. Rest assured, though … that will come.

For now, suffice it to say that I was so enamored of his constantly changing restaurant, Next—if you don’t eat there during each cuisine’s brief run. you’ve missed it forever—that I decided my three-star Michelin taste of Sicily wasn’t enough and so booked tickets for Kyoto the moment they became available this evening.

Booked? Tickets? Why, what could Scott possibly mean? What kind of restaurant sells tickets?

Don’t worry, all will be explained later, when I finish my write-up of the above gastronomic experience … this weekend, I hope.

In any case, if you’re wondering what awaits me during Chef Achatz’s Kyoto menu, perhaps the first video teaser he released will explain it all.

Perplexed? Then maybe this second clip will enlighten you. (more…)

I got back home from my Chicago Worldcon trip after midnight last night—or should I say, this morning—and while I’d love to write up right now how much fun I had, both at the con and elsewhere (like at Alinea!), it’s unlikely I’ll be able to compose my thoughts until the weekend.

After all, I did return from my trip to something like 5,000 emails!

So let these eight photos, one for each day I was away, stand in for the posts to come.

Wednesday
A note left on our table at the start of Next restaurant’s Sicilian meal

(more…)

Last night, after I made my reservation for today’s lunch at Family Meal—our second visit to Chef Bryan Voltaggio’s new restaurant In Frederick, Maryland—I discovered that my post about our first visit had been picked up by Eater, which had gathered the early reviews from the restaurant’s first month of operation. Each of the excerpts was given a header, and mine was “The Rave,” which indeed it was.

My report on our second visit won’t be quite as positive, though in a bifurcated way, because it’s almost as if Irene and I had eaten in different restaurants.

Technically, we were eating in different restaurants, because we arrived a few minutes before our 11:30 reservation, and breakfast service stops and the lunch menu takes over at exactly 11:30 a.m. But because Irene was interested in breakfast, and I was interested in lunch, and we were on the cusp, we were allowed to order from both menus.

Irene ordered waffles, without the blueberries or syrup they usually came with, wanting only butter and honey, plus biscuits and a glass of milk. I’ll get the bad news out of the way first, by stating that her two plates arrived without the honey, and the server had to go back to the kitchen to retrieve some, plus, even though at the time the order was taken Irene was asked whether she wanted the milk then or when the meal came and she replied that she wanted the milk with the meal, the meal came without the milk, and so Irene had to sit for a few minutes waiting for the milk to be brought to her. Those may sound like small things, but any time you have to wait to dig in, that does damage the experience.

And it gets worse … even though the biscuits we’d had with our fried chicken during our previous visit were a light golden color and dense but delicate, Irene’s biscuits this time were a dark brown, and crusty, and hard. Oh, sure, they were still made from wonderful ingredients, but they were rock-like, and she felt she could have used one as a weapon. (more…)

You would probably not have liked hanging out with me during these past 36 hours. That’s because I was so giddy about getting tickets to the Chicago restaurant Alinea that wherever my conversations with Irene headed, they always looped back to some aspect of the restaurant, whether it was the quest to get a table, the kind of food served there, or how thrilled I was to have actually scored tickets.

As I told you last month when I was first contemplating where’d I’d be eating during the Chicago Worldcon next month:

There are a few other gastronomical wonders I’m hoping for, such as the playground that is Alinea and the apparent perfection that is Next, but neither of those is a certainty. In fact, far from being locks, they may be impossibilities. But I can dream, can’t I?

Amazing, both of those dreams are going to come true!

The reason I’ve been so insufferable is this— (more…)

Bryan Voltaggio, the celebrity chef behind Volt, where Irene and I recently celebrated the 38th anniversary of the day we met, opened a new restaurant in Frederick, Maryland at the end of June—Family Meal, named after that meal eaten by restaurant staff before or after a shift. Unlike the tasting menu meals of Volt, Family Meal aims to serve comfort food. And since we were heading over to Maryland to run some errands and see our son, we decided to check it out before that new restaurant shine rubbed off.

After seeing some folks over at Yelp complain about long waits, most of which seemed to occur over dinner, I decided to check whether a reservation was needed for a Saturday lunch. When I called, I was told that they were recommended when possible, and that 25% of tables were set aside for reservations. So we made one for 11:45. We arrived a few minutes early, and were taken to our table immediately. (During the course of our meal, I never noticed more than one or two parties at a time waiting briefly, so there seemed no problem with long lines, at least not during lunch.)

Family Meal is housed in a former car dealership, and as you might expect, that means there’s plenty of parking.

But more important than that—there are crispy pig ears on the menu!

And when there are crispy pig ears on the menu, you eat crispy pig ears! (more…)

I’ve taken restaurant advice from Man v. Food plenty of times. Last year, I took restaurant advice from Food Wars. But it wasn’t until Comic-Con 2012 that I ate at a restaurant I learned about from boingboing.

Slater’s 50/50 is known for its signature burger made of 50% ground beef and 50% ground bacon, but what attracted my attention was the Burger of the Month for July (covered with astonishment by boingboing, The Huffington Post and a ton of other sites)—The ‘merica Burger!

Why were they all so aghast? Because The ‘merica Burger—as you can see from the sign below, which is hung between the restaurant’s restrooms—is composed of “100% ground bacon plus thick cut bacon, a sunny side up egg, our new ‘bacon island’ dressing all topped with bacon cheddar cheese.”

Yowza!

When I read the article, I wondered where the restaurant serving this limited-time burger was located, and after seeing it was in San Diego, I thought—Wait a minute! I’ll be in San Diego this month! So you know I had to try one. After all, when Kraze Burgers, a Korean hamburger chain, opened its first location in the U.S., I was there.

So late last night, once I was able to take a break from covering Comic-Con, I headed off to Slater’s 50/50 with frequent foodie adventurer Mike Willmoth at the wheel and his artist friend Franchesco riding shotgun. (more…)

Yesterday, as we were moving vast quantities of assorted cheeses from our non-refrigerating refrigerator into ice-filled coolers—we had no power due to the thunderstorm; perhaps you were in the same situation—I remembered an article written more than a century ago in which someone from the U.S. was gobsmacked that the French had more than one kind of cheese. I wanted to reread the piece … but that was easier said than done.

I love reading magazines from the late 1800s and early 1900s to see how things really were back in the day, and whenever I visit a used bookstore, the first thing I check out is whether any bound volumes are for sale. I couldn’t recall which of many old magazines I owned had printed the piece; all I remembered was that it was in a magazine that printed its stories in two columns per page, rather than just one—which left out all those volumes of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. I started with an 1852 volume of The National (nope, not there), then dove into The Cosmopolitan from 1902 (not there, either), before finding what I was looking for in the October 1878 Harper’s.

In Marie Stevens Howland’s article “Butter Stores in Paris” (strange how I only remembered the cheese, but not the butter), she was amazed that in France, not only did shoppers get to choose more than one kind of cheese, they didn’t have to live in fear that it would be terrible. She wrote:

One thing sure to surprise the American in Paris is the almost endless variety of the cheese. Here, our only idea of that article is generally the huge ‘factory cheese’ of the groceries. It has no special name, cheese to the average citizen meaning this only. He has to taste it before daring to buy it, for the name conveys little notion of its flavor or quality, and it may be mild or strong, rich or poor, though the price is the same. In Paris, no one dreams of tasting cheese when buying it.

More than one kind of cheese? Astonishing! (more…)

Irene and I discovered Volt Restaurant several months ago, and were taken with both the menu and its setting in a 19th Century mansion in downtown Frederick, but waited to eat there until we had an event worthy of such a meal—our celebration of the 38th anniversary of the day we met. (Which also happens to be the 38th anniversary of my first day working in the Bullpen at Marvel Comics.)

So on Sunday, we drove over to the imposing brick mansion, built in the early 1890s, which now houses Volt, for the seven-course kitchen tasting menu, which once the various amuse bouche were added in, actually came to ten courses.

While we were in the same room as the open kitchen, so we could look over and watch the cooking and assembly of each dish, we weren’t seated flush against where the chefs performed their magic. That privilege belonged to the seven diners (that night, anyway; I believe up to eight can be serviced) at Table 21, who were taking part in a 21-course tasting menu.

What follows is an embarrassingly incomplete description of the meal, for I forgot to snap a photo of the menu, and the one currently up on the site represents an earlier iteration. When I get my hands on the current menu, I’ll update what follows, but for now … (more…)