Category Archives: Food

Foodie Review: Le Pressoir d’Argent

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bonjour mes amies! I had the distinct pleasure of dining at Le Pressoir d’Argent, Gordon Ramsey’s two Michelin star restaurant in Bordeaux, France, with six of my closest friends. It was an absolutely wonderful gastronomic experience and I am supremely lucky that so many people could share it with me.

The restaurant is located on the second floor of the Hotel Intercontinental and the man at the front desk showed us to a little alcove which contained the elevator that led us up to the restaurant. We were greeted immediately by a young woman with close cropped black hair and an inviting smile and shown to our seats. Our party having taken two cabs and ours arriving first, we selfishly arranged ourselves with our backs to the wall so that we may observe the goings on in the restaurant. I love watching restaurants operate. Good restaurants move in a motion that resembles a dance and Le Pressoir d’Argent moves like a waltz. The women all have short pixie style hair or pulled up into a severe bun and are dressed elegantly, but conservatively, and the men all have short hair and suits which match the conservative style of the women. The people bringing the food from the kitchen wear black gloves and stiffly walk the meals to the tables as others swoop in to distribute the courses to the table.

Le Pressoir d’Argent is know most of all for its lobster and the decor reflects that. The walls are adorned with sea shells and pictures that are almost x-rays showing close ups of various crustaceans are strategically placed around the restaurant. There was almost a Little Mermaid “Under the Sea” feel to it and given its heavily seafood menu, some of us could be heard singing “Les Poissons” from time to time. Les Poissons, les poissons, how I love les poissons! Yeah, we’re all class. My only complaint about the ambiance was the room was entirely too warm, which led to us guzzling 70 Euros worth of water. Ah, Europe and your non-free water! Given how much we spent for the meal, 10 Euros a piece for water isn’t a big deal, but you’d expect better temperature control for an exclusive restaurant like this. This is the only reason why I am not giving a five star rating. Everything else was phenomenal.

All seven of us had the six course tasting menu. The menu was provided to us in both French and English due to my very French sounding name, which was a very nice touch. I also partook of the wine pairing which was done blind. They would serve the wine with the course and the sommelier would come by at the end of the course and let you guess what it was. I got one right. Go me!

The Tasting Menu

I started the meal with a fancy drink whose name I cannot recall, but it was delightful and refreshing and served with a sturdy paper straw.

Oh drink! I do not remember your name, but you were delicious!

As expected in restaurants of the quality of Le Pressoir, we were treated to a few tiny delectable before the official menu started. I should really take notes because I don’t remember what they were either. The highlight was the almost sushi style tidbit with roe on top, but the skewer of meat served along side it was also wonderful.

This amused douche loved the amuse-bouches

We were also treated to a delightful salad of some sort before finally getting to the tasting menu. It was creamy and basily and almost too beautiful to eat.

Salad done right

Finally, we get to the tasting menu! First dish was Bazas beef tartar in oyster cream with Aquitaine caviar and sorrel. It was served on a bed of salt in a glass covered dish and smoke trickled out of the salt when the cover was lifted. Both Bazas and Aquitaine are the locations of where the beef and caviar, respectively, were sourced. It was served with a white wine that paired perfectly with it. I am not much of a white wine fan, but this trip to Bordeaux opened my palette to whites like none before have. The problem with a blind tasting and my inexperience with white wines is my not remembering which wines paired with which dishes and sadly, the picture I took of the bottles is a bit blurry. I am only slightly sure that this was a Chablis. I would gladly drink this wine alone.

Beef tartar

The second course was Saint-Jean-du-Luz spider crab served under avocado with pomelo, coriander, radishes, and a citrus dressing. Pomelo is a kind of citrus fruit. This was probably the most beautiful of the dishes and with the most subtle of flavors. I’m pretty sure this was served with a Riesling. I am not a fan of Rieslings and this one was no exception, but it did pair wonderfully with the dressing which cut the sweetness of the wine which is my primary complaint about Rieslings.

Spider crab hiding under avocado

Course three was wild turbot baked in seaweed with razor clams, cockles, bigorneau, Swiss chard, and fregola. Bigorneau are sea snails and fregola is a tiny pasta. This was also served on a covered glass dish with poofs of smoke when uncovered. Goodness was this delicious! So many wonderful flavors that mixed together so well! It was served with a white wine that I do not recall at all what it was, but notice that they served it in a red wine glass typically used for Bordeaux wines. I have only been served whites in a red glass twice and I always forget to ask why. I suspect it is because they are younger wines that, like reds often need to, require a bit more aeration than usual.

Tasty turbot

Course four was my favorite, not for the food itself, though that was spectacular, but the star of this course was the wine. This one I distinctly remember not only because it was the only red but because I guessed it right! Ok, I guessed the region right. Everything else I got wrong. It was a Bordeaux. It was bold and complex and I wish I could drink the entire bottle and would die happy if it was the only wine I ever drank again. When asked how old I thought the wine was, I guessed ten years, maybe fifteen, knowing that if he was asking, it must be fairly old. It was a 1993! This excellent wine was paired with roasted Pyrenees veal in organic cereal ragout and a side of wild mushrooms and turnip. This was excellent veal and well worth raving about, but I cannot stop thinking about the wine.

I really should have put the wine in front of the veal

And now for a slow intermission from the meal for cheese! Oh cheese, I love you so! We let our helpful server choose a nice selection of cheeses for us. I was too busy drooling all over myself to remember to take a picture of the cheese cart and too eager to dig in to the cheese plate to remember to take a picture of the pristine plate, though I did remember half way in. I can’t recall the names of all the cheeses of which we partook, but I have fond memories of the Stilton blue cheese, the Camembert, and an Epoisses that was made differently that your normal Epoisses, and this wonderful hard cheese which was probably my favorite, but I don’t at all recall the name.

A partially eaten cheese plate

The intermission continued with a surprise tour of the kitchen where we got to meet the head chef and the pastry chef. I have never done this before and it was quite cool to watch the well oiled (I assume with olive oil) machine of the kitchen humming on all cylinders. We were a large group and quite in the way so our visit was short, but enjoyable.

Yes chef!
Performing culinary magic

Course five was a perfectly pleasant palette cleanser of fennel sorbet in a green apple and mint emulsion. It was a welcome respite from the heaviness of the cheese and the veal. Fluffy and full of flavor. I did not get a wine with the sorbet and I feel cheated. Ok, not really, but it would have been really interesting to see what they chose to pair with it.

Sorbet with a see through top. Sexy!

It was at this point that the sommelier came out with the wines I had partaken of so far. He talked of the wines with passion and I pretended to understand him. I should have asked for him to stage the bottles in the order they were served, but was not thinking of it at the time. Maybe they were in reverse order? If that’s true the Chablis was in the red wine glass and the first white wine shall forever be lost to the blurry photos. I highly recommend that you go out right now and buy yourself a bottle of the 1993 Chateau d’Armailhac and share it with those you love best.

When you gonna let me be sober?

And now for the final course! Or is it? Dun dun duuuuuuun! Course six was a delightful desert of fig leaf parfait, juniper leather, roasted figs, and verjus. Verjus is the juice of unripe grapes. I have no idea what juniper leather is. It was served with a sweet almost pruny wine that I never did get the name of because we were quickly approaching hour four of our meal and the rest of my party was starting to get cranky and would soon need to be tucked in to bed. It was the perfect ending dessert course to a perfect meal.

It fig-ures?

But wait, there’s more! This was really my meal. Everyone enjoyed it, but no one would have been there if not for me. It was also relatively close to my birthday, give or take a few weeks, so everybody’s favorite vacation planner decided to tell them that it was my birthday. Le Pressoir d’Argent treated me with this stupendous birthday treat:

Happy Birthday to me!

Look how excitingly beautiful that is! Candle and all. And all fancy and such! At that point, I was wondering how all of us were going to be able to eat this giant cake boat covered in chocolate with a solitary half ball of ice cream sitting all lonely in the bow. Alas, the only edible part of the concoction was the ice cream. The rest was just for show and inedible. Beautifully inedible. The ice cream was delish. We also got some desertlettes, which you can kind of see in the boat picture there, but at this point of the meal I was so full that they didn’t make much of an impression.

The warmth of the restaurant was a small mar in an otherwise wonderful experience. The service was superb and the food was phenomenal. Le Pressoir d’Argent has charm that is equal to the charm of the city of Bordeaux itself. I am happy I was able to partake of both and to share them with a table full of some of my favorite people.

Foodie Review: Blue by Eric Ripert

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 5/5 Food Orgasms  6/5 Hurting Pocketbooks

The highlight of my recent trip to Grand Cayman was without a doubt a trip to Blue located in the Ritz-Carlton.  Everything in Grand Cayman is expensive.  Blue is probably the most expensive of them all.  I was afraid that I was not going to get anyone to go with me when I noticed the prices, but three of my friends were momentarily drunk enough and in full vacation mode and threw caution to the wind and joined me.

We each had the seven course tasting menu with wine parings.  Add on the various pre-dinner and post-dinner freebies, and it was closer to a ten course menu.  No wine parings for the freebies.  So sad.   Calling the meal divine doesn’t do it justice.  Alas, I will never be able to recall the names of the wines, but each paring was a magnificently chosen compliment to each course.

By far, and across the board, we all agreed that the first course, the tuna-foie gras,  was the best.  It was a thinly pounded layer of tuna lightly brushed on the bottom with foie gras and placed on top of a toasted baguette with chives.  It was transcendent.  I could easily have had seven courses of just it and been happy.  Also well worth mentioning were the poached halibut and the striped bass and the mousse that was served as part of the desert course.  It was all quite yum.  That isn’t to say the other courses were bad, but they were only excellent.  They included a crab salad, a lobster dish which, with the wine pairing, tasted better with every bite, and one course I don’t quite remember.  The highlights of the wine were my finally finding a Riesling that I enjoy, a very excellent Merlot, and a Tempranillo that was to die for.

Now that you’ve read this far, I’ll tell you the price.  The seven course meal with wine pairings and one pre-dinner cocktail cost $400 including a 20% tip.  Yeah, I know, ouch, right?  It is three times what I’ve ever paid for a dinner.  The big question is was it worth it?  Yes and no.  No meal is worth that much, but the meal itself was the best I have ever tasted and given the company and the enjoyment we all had, I believe it’s a good once a lifetime experience if you make more money than you should but less than being comfortable throwing down $400 for a meal.

Mmm, Food Desserts…

Oh, wait, no, that’s food deserts.  My bad.

A food desert is an area of residential housing that is underserved by traditional grocery store but often over-served by fast food stores.  These tend to occur exactly where you’d think they’d occur; in poor neighborhoods.  Being poor and living in a food desert makes it almost impossible to make healthy food choices.  Now, you would think that a great solution would be to bring grocery stores to this area.  A few studies have recently been released that show when a grocery store finally comes to a food desert, the dietary habits of the residents don’t really change much.  What’s going on here?

Well, first off, it’s only a couple of studies so there may be certain things not controlled for, but the studies certainly pass the smell test.  So why would poor people choose to still go to the fast food joint when there’s a much cheaper and healthier alternative right next door?  If you took $10 worth of groceries and $10 worth of McDonald’s stacked side by side the choice seems absolutely preposterous.  You can make many meals out of the groceries but only one from the McDonald’s.  Look closer, though.  See the problems?  That McDonald’s value meal is ready to eat right now.  No cutting vegetables or measuring out spices.  No stirring of sauces or browning of meat.  No washing of dishes or cleaning the kitchen.  It takes five minutes to get fast food while cooking and cleaning can take an hour or more.  And that’s just one out of three meals.  We are so used to having time that we don’t realize how much of a luxury time actually is.  And it’s a luxury that the working poor can not afford.  There are second jobs to get to and precious sleep to catch up on.  How are you going to throw fresh food into that mix?

So if grocery stores aren’t the answer, what is?  I’ve always been a fan of something along the lines of a slow food co-op.  The basic idea being that there is a kitchen somewhere that can cook very large portions of healthy meals and local residents can come in and pick up these meals for slightly less than what you’d pay at a fast food restaurant.  The kitchen is local, the workers are local, the patrons are local.  All that plus the locals can eat healthier and save slightly more than they had been with their fast food choices.

It’s a very simple idea.  Of course, how to implement something like that is well beyond my pay grade.  I wouldn’t even know where to start.  Churches would probably be a good bet.  It’s times like this when I wish I knew someone who actually knows something about these things.

Soylent Isn’t People!

Talk about dark, dystopian futures!  Entrepreneur Rob Rhinehart wants to change the way everyone eats.  That mostly entails eating, or rather, drinking his new product he cleverly called Soylent.  It’s a combination of powdered chemicals and nutrients meant to satisfy every need the human body requires nutrition-wise.  His goal is not to replace eating real food but to drastically reduce it.  Eat Soylent on the weekdays and have some nice meals on the weekends.

Things are off to a good start for Rob too.  He’s already passed the $2M mark in sales.  I think it was $65 gets you a week’s worth of Soylent mixture.  Not a bad price.  I, for one, can’t imagine a world without the every day variety of foods I now enjoy, but I’m an upper middle class first worlder.  I’d assume the poor or the third world would welcome something like this if the price could come down with the success of the product.

I think Soylent’s main problem with mass acceptability will likely be its taste.  The best review of the taste I’ve seen or heard was that you get used to it after a while.  “Soylent, you’ll get used to it!” doesn’t exactly have much commercial potential.  So far, it seems more marketed to those people who don’t have time to eat or simply don’t like to eat.  The former seems a limited market and the latter is just unfathomable to me.  There’s likely to be quite the upward battle in spreading from those two niches.

There is also the problem of Rob Rhinehart’s perceived future need for Soylent.  He claims that the world can’t possibly feed 10 billion people on normal foods.  That may be true given today’s food paradigm, but remove meat from it and we’re looking at a whole new ballgame.  I like his ambition, though.  He sees Soylent as eventually being provided as just another utility like water.

Ah, Pierogi Day!

It’s the weekend after Thanksgiving and Christmas is right around the corner.  That means Saturday was Pierogi Day!  It’s the day that my family gets together and makes pierogi for Christmas.  For you heathens out there who don’t know what pierogi are, they’re the Polish version of dumplings.  Take some filling of some sort, wrap it in dough, boil and there you have it, pierogi!

We specialize in two types of pierogi.  By far, the best is our kapusta pierogi.  And boy, is it good!  We also make a cheese pierogi.  We used to do dry curd cottage cheese, but that’s become impossible to find so my ever inventive brother came up with a cheese concoction of his own with alfredo sauce, pepper jack and mozzarella.  His version is much better than the cottage cheese version.  We usually end up making somewhere between 100 and 150 a year and we have become quite the well oiled machine.  This year we made about 130 in three hours.

But of course, the best part about Pierogi Day is taking the extras home with you.  I was ever so proud of myself that I refrained from eating a single one on Saturday.  This is a new record for me.  Today, I didn’t fare so well.  I may or may not have eaten 12 for dinner.  I strongly suspect that my cat ate some on my plate when I wasn’t looking.  I’m just going to say that she ate 10 of them.  I asked her and she didn’t deny it.  If history is any experience, the remaining 10 or so pierogi will be done by Wednesday.  And then I have to wait all the way to Christmas Eve to have any more.  Oh, the humanity!

And Since I’m Being A Shill For Dorkdom…

You should also buy All The Nomz!  It’s a cookbook with recipes from celebrity geeks, dorks, and dweebs.  Best of all, ALL of the proceeds go to charity.  Specifically, Child’s Play, an organization that provides toys and games to children in the hospital.  So not only do you get a cookbook, but you also get to help spawn a new generation of gamers.  Win, win!

Craft Beer Week!

This almost escaped my attention.  Craft Beer week started today!  So much for sobriety.  Revolution Brewery is taking over the Village Tap on Friday.  And Sunday!  Oh, Sunday!  Goose Island is having a block party featuring eight, count them, eight Bourbon County Stouts!  *drool*

One Monsanto To Rule Them All

The Supreme Court recently unanimously ruled in favor of Monsanto in a lawsuit that has far reaching implications for genetic modification and individual control of the food chain.  At issue was whether a farmer could buy soybeans from a grain elevator and plant them even though those soybeans were grown with Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready soybean stock.  The court ruled that the farmer violated Monsanto’s patent doing so.

There are a couple of interesting points to this.  First, the farmer does have a contract with Monsanto to buy its Roundup Ready soybeans and he did so for the traditional first planting season.  He then decided to attempt a risky second planting with the much cheaper soybeans he was able to purchase from a local grain elevator.  Second, 90% of soybeans grown in the United States are Roundup Ready.  Talk about a monopoly!  Third, the Supreme Court made it clear that all the thorny issues involved with this decision are only relevant to this decision and no inferences should be made as to the general legality of patented gene modification technology.

I call balderdash on that third point.  I am far from an expert, but I’ve never heard someone cite a case and the citation be rejected because the Supreme Court called no backsies when they made the decision.  Of course this decision is going to be used as precedent in the many cases to come!  The “this is not meant to be a sweeping decision” language is just political cover for an incredibly contentious issue.

Think about the implication here.  The Supreme Court has ruled that a company can create a self-replicating organic product and then decide how the offspring of that product is used ad infinitum.  I buy and plant Roundup Ready seed from Monsanto.  I plant those seeds and sell the resulting crop to person B.  Person B is restricted from planting the seeds I sold him.  Person B sells the seed to person C.  Person C is restricted from planting the seeds that person B sold him.  Monsanto can dictate exactly how those soybeans are used throughout the soybean’s life cycle no matter how many generations that soybean exists.  In theory, this means that Monsanto could dictate exactly what products are made with those soybeans.  Not that I think they would ever do something so stupid.

The farmer in this case almost certainly deserved to lose.  He signed a contract with Monsanto and he tried to skirt that contract in an inventive way.  The problem is HOW he lost.  The Supreme Court is saying that he violated patent law, not contract law.  Monsanto can and does go after farmers who plant non-Roundup Ready crops that happen to get cross pollinated with a neighbor’s Roundup Ready plants.  This Supreme Court decision declares that Monsanto has every right to do so.

This is one of those issues where the law definitely needs to be updated but there is so much money involved that there is almost unanimous political agreement that nothing will be done.  Self-replicating technologies should not be patentable.  If companies like Monsanto want to mess with genes to produce a superior plant they should mess with a few more genes and make those plants infertile.

It’s Restaurant Week!

It completely snuck up on me, but Chicago Restaurant Week starts today!  Yum!  Of course, this is my first time as a vegetarian so we’ll see how well it goes.

For those of you not in the know, Restaurant Week is a week of semi-affordable fixed price menu items at over 250 of the Chicagoland area’s best restaurant (and the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company).  It’s a great opportunity to try that really expensive restaurant that you always wanted to go to but can’t really afford.

It’s time to eat!

Wasabi Peas FTW

Oh, Trader Joe-san, why must your wasabi peas taste so good?  I once ate so many wasabi peas that I couldn’t taste anything for three days.  True story.  I guess you can say that I OPed.  Ha!