kevin barnett

My father treated a group of us at wd~50, a restaurant in the lower East of Manhattan. I chose the restaurant from Adam Platt’s Where To Eat In 2007 feature in New York Magazine. That led to me discovering Wylie Dufresne and his notoriety on the culinary scene.

Appropriately, the next evening during the finale of Bravo’s Top Chef, Wylie Dufresne shows up as a judge. I had been loosely following the season but knew of one contestant’s (Marcel) fan-boy admiration for Dufresne’s skills in molecular gastronomy. Anthony Bourdain wrote a classic commentary on the contestants in which he describes Marcel as “is there anything this guy won’t foam” and “he’s no Wylie Dufresne“.

I agree with the general consensus that Marcel was a chump and was happy to see New York’s Ilan Hall take the prize. The irony couldn’t be much sweeter than Marcel’s final dinner failing while trying a gastro-trick of encapsulating vinaigrette inside a bubble of sodium alginate for a salad — clearly designed to impress Dufresne.  But at the end of the day, Marcel served up a salad which is, as the judges remarked, amateur hour.  Apparently paprika and saffron is enough to win.

Enough on that tangent.

While studying the wd~50 menu, I had decided early on that I would be ordering one of Dufresne’s signature dishes: pickled beef tongue. It’s not my first time eating lengua as anyone who has ventured into a dive-taqueria with me (wait, is there a such thing as a non-dive taqueria?) knows. But pickled beef tongue? Absolutely. And paired with the strange cubes of fried mayonaise and crumbles of onion marmalade, it was an absolute hit. The tongue itself was shaved ultra thin and served much like an antipasta course.

The clear winner for the first course was not the tongue, however. Two others at our table ordered an appetizer consisting of pinenuts with smoked octopus and rabbit sausage. It tastes like none of those ingredients yet all of them at the same time. It’s a divine culinary experience that could only come from a mad scientist like Dufresne.

I followed my tongue appetizer with belly — pork belly. I had never had pork belly before and I can’t wait to have it again. It is everything there is to love about bacon but in a piece of pork. The portion was spot on so the richness was not overpowering, especially paired with the root vegetables.

Finally, the desserts were some of the more original platings and presentations I have experienced in a restaurant. My order can be best described as a chocolate ganoush ribbon stretched across the right 1/4 of the plate with puddles of avocado foam, chocolate cookie crumbs and licorish intersecting and orbiting. I was too mezmorized with the design to even concern myself with what the others at our table were eating. Also as a special treat, the server brought a small passion fruit sorbet cake with a lit candle. The servers failed to sing happy birthday, however.

wd~50 turned out to be everything I was looking for; a unique culinary experience with great food that I would never prepare for myself or anyone else in a million years. This is my favorite restaurant in New York.

I was just listening to The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

On the coldest night/day of the New York winter season, I watched an episode of Nova documenting the navigation of the Northern Passage by Roald Amundsen. Amundsen was a great explorer from Norway, who after becoming the first to successfully navigate the Northern Passage, went on to become the first human to reach the South Pole on December 14, 1911.

Amundsen credits his success to the knowledge he learned from his Northern Passage sail. During a winter layover on King William Island in which their ship was forced to be frozen in for several months, Amundsen met people from a nearby Inuit settlement. The documentary explores this fascinating exchange between Amundsen and the Inuits in which he learns their methods for surving in the arctic tundra.

A group of Netsilik Inuit inside their snow-block constructed igloo. Photo: PBS

The trick is Caribou fur. Clearly by no “accident”, the Inuits chose Caribou as their primary source for clothing because of the nature of the fur itself. The hair fibers are hollow so they are able to trap warm air while still remaining breathable. This allows the person wearing the furs to be quite active outside in sub-freezing temperatures, to stay warm and to remove the sweat from their bodies.

Similar to the air-trapping properties of Caribou fir, Inuits learned that building a shelter using blocks of packed snow (not ice) would provide enough insulation from the cold temperatures. I think to anyone accustomed to sleeping in any where outside the Arctic would have a hard time adjusting to the room-temperature of an igloo but clearly the construction is capable of survival - just enough to get by.

Other important skills Amundsen learned included glazing the dog sled rails with ice so that the sled could stay on top of the snow and to sleep naked, again with the caribou furs to keep warm at night. note: I knew about the sleeping naked technique before watching this documentary.

My grandmother’s family immigrated here from Norway so I feel that I should have been more informed on the adventures of Roald Amundsen. Clearly, I have some catching up to do. More interesting to me, though was the life of an Inuit: cut off from the progress of the modern world (this is changing), completely accepting of their environment and focused on nothing more than survival and community.

Nunavut, the Canadian territory which includes the islands and land masses on which many Inuit live, has an average temperature of 5°F in July and -25°F in January. Meanwhile, New Yorkers are suffering for at least one more day in the current single-digit wind chill.

I was just listening to The Good, The Bad and The Queen - Northern Whale