Changing the seasonal style of your food can be just as fun as updating your fall wardrobe. While I was browsing on OTTE I was inspired to create a dish that complemented the tones of the upcoming fall collection.

I channeled my recent visit to the organic farm to create a dish that really showcased the raw colors and flavors of local produce. I thought it would be fitting to make a warm antipasti bruschetta that is a contrast to its summery, raw tomato version.

I used a mixture of roasted, sun-dried and raw tomatoes to create a melange of textures, the grilled Italian vegetables slightly charred for that smokiness, the rich purple waxy potatoes for depth, the creamy mustard mayonnaise to bind everything together, scooped onto crusty bread.

As a fun presentation while entertaining guests, I laid out the ingredients “deconstructed” so my guests can mix and match their own bruschetta.

Ingredients:
Multigrain Baguette, toasted
Italian Grilled Aubergines, marinated in garlic olive oil
Italian Grilled Peppers, marinated in garlic olive oil
Italian Sun-Dried Tomatoes
Pitted Moroccan Oil-Cured Olives, sliced
Roasted Tomatoes in olive oil
Satur Farms Purple Basil
Heirloom Cherry Tomatoes, diced
Purple Baby Creamer Potato (baked)

Dressing:
3 tbsp Mayonnaise
2 tsp Seeded mustard
2 tsp Dijon mustard
Squeeze of fresh lemon juice
Salt and Pepper

Garnish:
Aged Reggiano cheese, shaved

For the carnivores, these would go wonderfully with prosciutto. Serve warm on freshly grilled bread, spread with mustard dressing, combine all chopped ingredients and layer on top.

In the mood to shop for a fall wardrobe? Join me at www.otteny.com/fno !

Patrick and Quincy Horan

Chef Michel Nischan, Chef Joel Viehland

Outstanding in the Field is a “roving culinary adventure – a restaurant without walls”. Established since 1999, they have toured all around the USA in farms (and the occasional rooftop and greenhouses) to honor the farmers whose good work brings nourishment to the table.

Ingredients for the meal are almost all local (most sourced within inches of my seat at the table) and prepared by a celebrated chef of the region. After a tour of the site, we all settle in: farmers, producers, culinary artisans, and diners sharing the long table, served family style.

The 180 seat table extends down the beautiful surroundings of the Waldingfield farm in Washington CT as our restaurant decor, old friends and new found it to be something rather special. We give a sigh of relief to the one unwelcomed guest who didn’t turn up = the 40% precipitation warning from The Weather Channel.

Mushroom bruschetta with Beltane Farm’s ricotta salata

Gazpacho shooters from Walker Rd Vineyard, Gertrude’s Garden

Waldingfield farm fresh cucumber daiquiri

Heirloom tomato salad with cheese, balsamic reduction & olive oil

Chopped salad – fresh plum, sea island peas, baby carrots, chèvre, toasted almonds, frisée & mustard vinaigrette

Longmeadow Farm pasture raised chicken with heirloom onions, peppers, kale & chimichurri sauce

Kettle macaroni & cheese, farmstead cheddar, Pleasant cow cheese, house cured pork belly, artisan bread crumbs

Dressing room meatloaf, caramelized onion gravy

Walker Road Vineyard Red

Rosemary corncake with fresh blueberries and herb cream

Waldingfield farm was originally bought by Patrick and Quincy’s great grandfather originally as a dairy farm. Nowadays, it is the largest certified organic farm in Connecticut, stretching across 20 acres of land. Amongst a large selection of vegetables and herbs, there are over 30,000 heirloom tomato plants of different varieties that grow and flourish on Waldingfield Farm. Clever planting such as surrounding the fields with sunflowers draw bees into the area to kill off pests.

You can also purchase their amazing produce by visiting their farm stand.

Proceeds from the dinner we enjoyed also goes to forward thinking organization called Wholesome Wave – which helps low income communities get access to local nutritious foods, purchasable by foodstamps (with the built in incentive for shoppers of DOUBLING the value of those food stamps). The other program they have is the Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program, where community partners and Wholesome Wave are actually honoring prescriptions from doctors, in exchange for fruits and veggies at farmers markets.

For future events, visit:

http://outstandinginthefield.com/events/2011-tour/

Spoil-her Series: Simple recipes for men.

Under 5 ingredients, Under 20 bucks. Maximum brownie points.

Ingredients:

• 4-6 Scallops
• 2 small cloves of garlic, very thinly sliced
• 1 bunch chopped Italian parsley
• 1/2 cup white wine
• Angel hair pasta – enough for 2 people.

Directions:

Bring a pot of water to a violent boil, and heavily salt the water.

Cook the pasta, minus 2 minutes from cooking instructions on the packet.

Drain the pasta and store in ice water for safe keeping

Heat a pan with some olive oil or butter (or both) and once it’s hot, grill the scallops for about 45seconds on each side for a golden brown finish.

Season with chopped parsley, salt and pepper. Add sliced garlic, then add the white wine and evaporate it.

Set scallops aside, and add some breadcrumbs to the remaining sauce in the pan.

Add the pasta (without the ice water) into the sauce and toss for a minute or two, drizzle with extra olive oil and extra parsley.

Serve on a plate, with the scallops on top!

Restaurant manager James Spreadbury explains the Noma signature dish

René Redzepi was quoted about his experience working at the previous number one restaurant in the world, elBulli:

“I didn’t come back to Denmark thinking: I’m going to put a gel of a gel of a gel on my monkfish liver while I whip my guests with burning rosemary,” he said. “I just came back with a sense of freedom.”

The restaurant is situated by the water near the town of Christianhavn, in a converted warehouse space by the water. The whitewashed, exposed wooden beams and contrasted by the smooth dark wood floors. The decor is organic yet modern with very distinct Scandinavian designs – smooth wooden chairs with no perfectly straight lines and fluffy sheepskin throws on every other one, smoked oaked tables with no linen and the changing natural light from the floor to ceiling windows, first bright, then dusk, and then swallowed by the warm glow of the votives lightly reflecting off natural surfaces.

We were seated at our table, beautifully located on a window corner, decorated with a vase adorned with green, leafy herbs and branches, and usually large stalks of what looked like a cross between lemongrass and heart of palm across our charger plates. After navigating through a long list of boutique organic and biodynamic Champagne houses did our server explain that the first two ’snacks’ of our evening were in fact the ‘decorations’ on the table. The serving of the ’snacks’ move quite quickly, a different shared plate is presented in front of each diner, making it quite an interactive experience of exchanging your plate with another until everyone on the table has had their share.

While there was a shorter, seven course menu available, we opted for the twelve course ‘Noma Nassaaq’ menu for the full affair.

Bulrush
dipped in goats curd and hazelnut praline

Malt flatbread and juniper
Dipped in fresh cream

Moss and Cep

Cookie with lardo and currant
Presented in an old fashioned cookie tin

Mussel
Where the bottom shell is edible (made with malt flour and moulded in between 2 mussel shells)

Rye bread, chicken skin, lumpfish roe and smoked cheese
Served on felt, crisp rye bread on top, dry crisp chicken skin on bottom.

Seabuckthorn leather and pickled hip rose petals
Seabuckthorn is a type of berry which tastes in between passionfruit and apricot. The ‘leather’ is made similar to a fruit roll-up: pureed and air dried into thin sheets. This was very delightful!

Pickled and smoked quail eggs
Smoked on apple wood, the smoke puffs out like a magic show as you open the egg shaped box. Instructed to be eaten within 10 seconds of opening.

Radish, soil and herbs
A classic Noma dish – A terracotta pot plant with green leaves popping out from soil. We are told that everything is edible, by hand. Once we pull a cluster of leaves out, a rosy pink radish is revealed, alongside a brilliant green cream beneath the “soil”. The soil is made from beer, hazelnut and malt flour, the green cream made from sheep’s yoghurt flavoured with tarragon, chives and chervil.

Toast, herbs, smoked cod roe and vinegar
The crispy toast was sprinkled with salt and vinegar powder, which was a nice contrast to the fresh herbs

Æbleskiver
A common Danish Christmas dish, but in a savoury variation – warm beignets with baby herring and cucumber filling

Söl and rye bread
Warm bread served with lard and pork shavings

Shrimp and sea urchin powder
frozen, finely grated sea urchin, raw sweet baby prawns atop frozen seawater and river pebbles, dressed with dill oil and fresh biodynamic cream. Garnished with wild flowers and regional herbs. One of my favorite dishes of the night.

Scallops and beech nut, Watercress and grains
The dried scallop slices reminded me of the Chinese dried scallops, but sliced very thinly as a cross section. A very peppery and fresh cut grass sensation of raw watercress puree with lentils

Tartar and sorrel, Juniper and Tarragon
Another famous Noma dish that used to be made with musk ox instead of Danish beef. It is eaten with the hands as you use the sorrel leaves to pinch some of the tartare, smearing it in the tarragon sauce and then swabbed onto the juniper powder.

Langosines and seawater
Oyster mayonnaise, parsley and seawater emulsion, and rye crumbs. The Noma signature dish, where the barely cooked, seared to perfection langoustine is served on a warm basalt stone and is eaten by hand. The flesh is like nothing I have tasted in a shellfish before, perfectly sweet and plump, bursting with juices upon biting into the white flesh.

(added photo from Rene’s twitter account)

Oyster and the ocean
Steamed oyster sprinkled with horseradish, capers of elderberries, wild onion seeds, beach cabbage served in a pot filled with sea shells and pebbles. When the lid is lifted we are filled with the aroma of the sea through the hot steam.

White and green asparagus, Cream and Pine
Green asparagus sauce, pine tips (made with pine vinegar, pine oil and smoked with pine wood)

Pike perch and cabbage, Stems and ramson

The hen and the egg
This was a very interactive and fun dish where each person fries their own sunny side up duck egg. A side plate of herb butter, spinach, ramsons, and herbs was placed at our table. A hot skillet placed on hay was served alonside s a duck egg, a half eggshell containing salt, and some potato crisps. Our server squeezed a drop of hay oil onto the hot skillet and we were told to break the egg on top. A timer was set to 2 minutes on the table, and once the time was up, we added the herb butter and the spinach to the skillet. A sorrel sauce was poured over afterwards, and we crushed the potato crisp and sprinkled over the top. I seasoned mine with the salt provided.

Veal sweetbread and peas, Forest shoots and grilled garlic

Milk slice, sorrel
A perfect palate cleanser, where the sorrel carried us over gently to begin the desserts with frozen milk slices.

Carrots and sea buckthorn
Sea buckthorn flavored frozen spongey ice cream, shaved dried carrots, soft herbs

Brown cheese with beetroot ice, freeze dried black currents

herbal infusion tea, flødebolle
soft meringue covered in chocolate

Chocolate covered potato chips with fennel seeds

Bone marrow caramel
A package was given to us wrapped in brown paper, and revealed 2 hollow bones inside. With your fingers, you have to pop out the caramel on the bottom of the bone, sized like a smaller scallop, is a chewy caramel made with bone marrow. Different, and delightful.

One of the most striking differences I found at Noma was the relationship between the kitchen and the waitstaff. It does not follow the strict French institutional rules of a restaurant, nor does it have the heated, time constrained kitchen under pressure to please. To my delight, the floor and the kitchen work together harmoniously as one. Each chef knows just as much about the diners on each table as the servers (also largely due to the fact that each table, bar two, can be seen directly from the glass kitchen, which is a luxury that most restaurants do not have), and the chefs who are preparing the food are actually serving it directly in front of their patrons, explaining in detail how things are prepared with first hand knowledge. You can hear the genuine passion in their descriptions and not once do you get a snooty French accent giving you long fancy words while making you feel stupid if you asked for a definition. Once would think that this disruption between the front of house and the back of house would create some sort of chaos, but the semblance of it all was so effortlessly harmonious at Noma.

We didn’t get to meet Rene this time around, he’d just become a father to his second child only two days ago and thus he’s taking some time off. He also spends another bulk of his time researching and creating new menu items on his boat, which is berthed outside the restaurant. During our kitchen tour, Sam Neil has explained that Rene has trained each and every one of his chefs to taste every ingredient prior to cooking, so that Noma’s patrons are sure to be presented with each single ingredient at its very best.. All staff members take turns partaking in foraging trips three times a week, to travel to different parts of the country and collect edible plants of all sorts. Sometimes they would pick herbs on their way to work, or alternatively, a company van is available for any staff member to use on foraging trips. Sam explained the importance of tasting something at the prime of its season, and used the example of the broth he makes with onions that are in season – the taste simply cannot be replicated all the time. When he uses onions that are picked later in the season, the flavor profile changes, and he has to adjust the amount of onions used in the same dish up to triple the amount used previously, just to extract the same depth of flavor. At this moment, they have begun pickling fresh ingredients for the winter months.

Sam Miller and the indoor herb storage

We are told the story of Roderick Slone, the Scotsman who lives in Norway. He was originally trained as a cook, but now, in the bitterly and harsh cold winters, Roderick hand dives for sea urchins exclusively for Noma in -10°C waters, moving to the rhythm of the waves and placing each urchin inside a linen sack. The below freezing temperatures of the water means he can only dive 30 minutes at a time, one session after another, up to ten hours a day. The sea urchin we get to enjoy arrive from Roderick’s bare hands in the bottom of Nordic sea and onto our plates in under 48 hours, exclusively for Noma.

After an extensive tour of the various kitchen equipments, tasting different ‘ice creams’ from the paco jets, ingredient storage and just generally trying to enquire about the recipes for each dish, we stumbled upon a group of young stages, preparing for the bi-weekly project presentation. Each young chef is encouraged to design a project that they can present to their peers to express their creativity, their use of ingredients and the flavor of the project they create. Tonight, a hopeful razor clam dish served on celery halves is being prepared for the project.

Many people have asked, “how does Noma compare to elBulli?”. I have no answer, just as I have no answer to whether a wild valley is more beautiful then a perfectly manicured garden. The meal at Noma was profoundly delivering the heart and soul of true Nordic cuisine; and unless you are there – it is quite impossible to replicate such an experience, with the local ingredients, the setting, and most of all, such a heart warming team of passionate individuals who collectively deliver the Nordic terroir onto our plates. We all return home with very fond memories of this gastronomic experience.

Chefs at Noma

Can a girl be any happier?

Noma
Strandgade 93
1401 Copenhagen, Denmark
Tel: +45 32 96 32 97

I do believe there is such a thing as over dining. Especially since moving to New York City, the bustling streets and hectic lifestyles also changed the way I dined. Outside from all the daily free meals from the Google office, dining out was anything but back to basics. The dining options in New York are endless, the choice and excitement of each restaurant, cafe, lounge bar or food truck are comparable to the line of ladies queuing up outside the latest meatpacking nightclub on a Tuesday night, discreetly staring at each other up and down as they walk past the velvet ropes after the desperate episodes of flirting with bouncers. The endless variety means you can easily never visit a place twice and still have plenty new discoveries lining up outside your door, hoping to impress you more than the last. Some arrogant, some beautifully presented, some authentic, some playing so hard to get, you just want to burn your wallet just to have a taste, only to discover that it was totally not worth the hype.

Slowly but surely, things all start to blur into the same experience. Sure, I have fun, I enjoy the food – did I really just blow $1200 on a mediocre seafood platter, pancakes and various bottles of champagne for a ridiculous disco brunch at Lavo? Did the tasting menu at Per Se, Le Bernadin, Jean George’s, Daniel and all other Michelin starred French establishments seemingly blur the lines of their different menus all into one expensive affair with a foie gras this, and caviar that, and let’s shave white truffle over a fat lobster tail mentality? Decadence can be delicious – but also as terribly boring as the poached eggs at Marea, with crab meat, sea urchin anglaise topped with sturgeon caviar on an over-soaked brioche bun, or the next designer Kobe beef burger with short ribs, shaved white truffles and foie gras butter. My newfound Manhattan lifestyle living in my tiny studio apartment, ordering my groceries online and having everything delivered to my doorstep has made me forget to truly slow down and appreciate what I’m eating, where it comes from, and how it was prepared.

Guilty as charged.

I’m perfectly aware that I haven’t contributed much content to my humble little website here. Food bored me. Restaurants bored me. And since I am no longer working in food service or hospitality, the regularity of dining at the restaurants and interacting with the chef afterwards to talk about ingredients has disappeared. I stopped caring and I stopped sharing my food experiences with you in writing and instead, focused more on the company of a meal rather than the food, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

My visit to Noma was as refreshing as being deprived of living near the Pacific Ocean during a five month snow filled winter – to diving head first into the icy blue ocean straight from Sydney airport during my last visit home. I had learnt to adapt, accept and enjoy what was around me, but as I was presented with each dish, I was excited again, I wanted to know more – more about everything I could possibly see, touch, smell, hear… taste. Curiosity of how each ingredient was picked and sourced returned to me, along with how it was prepared and cooked.

If I’ve compared all the restaurants I’ve visited in the states as of late to fashionable, model like figures lining up outside a hip nightclub in the meatpacking district, then Noma would be an exquisitely beautiful Nordic lady whose idea of nightlife involved nothing of dressing to impress, overpriced drinks and being seen. Her style is exquisite even if she’s wearing nothing but a wrinkled cotton dress; makeup would only dull her flawless natural beauty. She stops to smell and appreciate the flowers and doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty in the garden.

After 1.5 hours of F5-ing my browser at 4am in the morning (that’s pressing reload over and over again for the non-nerds out there), the booking system on www.noma.dk finally presented me with an electronic booking form. My hands were shaking and my heart was beating fast – one mistake and I would have to wait another two months for a few hour’s chance to make another reservation. Noma opens their online reservation system on the 1st day of every TWO months, at exactly 10am Copenhagen time. Traffic to the website will inevitably be frustrating for you. It can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 hours, depending on your luck, your F5-ing skills and your patience. My tip is that if you want it bad enough and you’re persistent – it will most definitely happen for you (unless you’re on a dial-up modem, and in which case you probably won’t be reading this anyway). A table for 4 was secured, a Saturday night dinner, on a long weekend. I started asking around for people to join me on this epic meal – most thought I was crazy. “Copen-where?”, flying all the way to Copenhagen “just for a dinner?!”.

The only sensible thing for me to do really, is to assemble the good ol’ elBulli crew back for a bi-yearly reunion. All four of us, flying in from different cities of the world – New York, London, Barcelona, Stuttgart… without evening thinking twice, before booking plane tickets to Copenhagen to orgiastically share our love for a gastronomic experience.

I can clearly see your cringed face, judging the girl who’s visited elBulli twice and now bored with dining until the next number one. Spoilt? Indeed I am. Wealthy? Not even close – but I do know how to save for the things that I want to experience, and thankfully, now nearing the age of 30, I no longer need to pick up waitressing shifts outside of my 9 to 5 job just to scrape every tip I get – and blowing 9 months of hard work on ONE meal, but I digress.

The four of us all arrived the beautiful city of Copenhagen on the morning of May 28, “to stop by for dinner”.

It was a cloudy, drizzly day in Copenhagen and totally opposite to what weather.com had informed me the night prior to my flight, thus making my tiny shirtdress almost inappropriate. In shivering cold, the flaming torches outside the door and the candles behind the large glass windows almost made the restaurant so much more inviting with a “come hither – it’s warm and toasty inside”.

Greeted by a friendly Aussie by the door, I felt like I was home again. There are currently six Aussies working at Noma at the moment (represent!) and they are all immensely enjoying their time there. I later on learnt from Sam Miller they try their best to assign staff to their “tables from home” so that customers feel a familiarity during their dining experience.

Next: Noma – The Menu

Spoil-her Series: Simple recipes for men.

Under 5 ingredients, Under 20 bucks. Maximum brownie points.

Ingredients:

• Sashimi grade tuna, 1 fillet
• onion (white onion and green onion)
• ginger and garlic
• condiments – Soy sauce¹, sesame oil and chilli
• Optional: seasame seeds, avocado, jalapeños

Directions:

Finely dice white onion, green onion, ginger and garlic. If you do not want to use a knife, you can use a grater (I recommend a microplane.

Cut the tuna, against the grain, into 2cm cubes.

Combine all ingredients in a bowl.

Add 2 teaspoons of soy sauce, 2 teaspoons of sesame oil.

If you would like to add a twist to your poke dish, toast a few teaspoons of sesame seeds for that extra crunch.

To pack some heat, add chilli sauce, chilli flakes or jalapeños.

Mix well and serve! It also compliments nicely with crackers or tortilla chips as a nice appetizer.

¹Use tamari instead of regular soy sauce for the gluten free version.

Spoil-her Series: Simple recipes for men.
Under 5 ingredients, Under 20 bucks. Maximum brownie points.

Ingredients:

• 1 packet of milk chocolate morsels (I used Nestle)
• 1 punnet of strawberries
• Long bamboo skewers / satay sticks

Directions:

Melt chocolate according to packet instructions in a microwave safe bowl.

Slowly stir the warm chocolate until it’s smooth, as the choc chips tend to retain its shape out of the microwave.

Attach a strawberry to the end of a skewer and dip it in the melted chocolate bowl.

Rotate the strawberry for even coverage, and rest on wax paper for chocolate to solidify. It will only take a few minutes.

Do not leave these in the fridge, as it will cause the strawberries to condensate under the chocolate

Arrange them in a vase for maximum wooing.

Spoil-her Series: Simple recipes for men.
Under 5 ingredients, Under 20 bucks. Maximum brownie points.

Ingredients
2 x  Beef Fillet Mignon, Center-Cut (1.5″ – 2″ thick)
6 oz Portobello Mushroom Caps, Packaged
Bottle of red wine
Salt and Pepper to taste

Directions:

Start the steaks at room temperature by leaving them out 2 hours before cooking.

Using an oven safe pan or griddle (do not use anything with a rubber handle!), place inside hot oven at 500F to for pre-heating. Around 30 minutes should get it nice and hot.

Roughly chop mushrooms, and open your bottle of wine.

When pan is hot enough, using oven mitts (please be careful), place the pan on your stove top and place the steaks on your pan. The pan is so hot at this point, you won’t need to turn the stove on.

Sear steaks, one minute each side. While they’re searing, turn the oven off.

Place the entire pan (both steaks seared on both sides) into the oven for an additional 4 minutes.

Take the pan out, and remove the steaks from the hot pan. Salt them to taste. Rest them on a plate elsewhere, covered.

Using the remaining beef fat on the pan, place it on the stove on medium heat and cook the mushrooms. You can add olive oil to this if it gets a bit dry.

Sautee the mushrooms until they’re soft and glossy, season with salt and pepper.

Serve the mushrooms with your steak, with any leftover pan juices.
This is the most perfect, tender steak you’ll ever make!

Spoil-her Series: Simple recipes for men.
Under 5 ingredients, Under 20 bucks. Maximum brownie points.

Ingredients

1lb pack of Fresh Buffalo Mozzarella
3 Tomatoes
1 bunch Basil
Extra Virgin olive oil (drizzle)
Balsamic Vinegar (drizzle)
Salt and Pepper to taste

What to do:

Slice tomatoes.

Slice Mozzarella to a similar thickness as the tomatoes

Pick the basil leaves off the stalk.

Assemble on plate, first with the tomato, then a slice of mozzarella, then topped with a basil leaf.

Season with salt and pepper, then drizzle olive oil all over.

Lightly finish with balsamic vinegar, less than half the amount of oil.

If this dining concept was offered ten years ago, there would be much less appreciation for locally sourced ingredients. A restaurant serving edible flowers, weeds and strange vegetables freshly dug up by the head chef from the neighborhood? Preposterous! Fine dining was once all about the ability to source extravagant and exotic ingredients globally to sit on your bone china plate alongside perfectly polished silverware. Chefs heavily relied on their relationships with their purveyors and providores for a delivery of the finest fish from Tsukiji, the fleur de sel from the Caspian sea, the funghi from Alba. It was about the pride of being able to source something that the next restaurant couldn’t.

We can see a trending shift in the fine dining world with an opposite school of thought, a very noticeable concept made popular by the current number one restaurant in the world, Noma. Chefs are no longer just chefs, but inquisitive foragers of seasonal and local ingredients. They believe that an ingredient should be appreciated when it is at its season’s best, and consumed fresh without the complications of transportation and heavy refrigeration – all factors that takes away their true flavor. It is very true, that scent and sweetness of a freshly picked apple will never compare to one imported from Mexico sold at your supermarket. It is almost a concept of terroir in food, except that it was hard to preserve in oak, ripen with age and bottled for later enjoyment. It is now.

When I heard that Coi was a favorable choice amongst the foragers such as René Redzepi from Noma, I knew I had to visit, since my plans to fly to Denmark for a meal doesn’t seem to be on my plans for 2011. The waiter told me in conversation that fellow forager Peter Gilmore (Quay) from Sydney also dined at Coi just a few weeks ago.

You can only imagine my embarrassment when I was corrected by my ignorant and incorrect pronunciation of Coi (I said “Koi”). Coi (pronounced “Qua”) is an ancient Masonic French word that stands for serenity. Situated in the red light district of San Francisco, you’ll find the modern lettering and ambient light a contrast to the bright pink neon signs and photos of buxom blondes of the Hustler club right next door.

When you enter Coi, the textures and natural shades of mahogany red and bamboo green against the tiny displays of pebble configurations alongside dried sea grass indeed sends you to a hidden serenity.

The table tops in the first dining room were all polished cuts of the cross section of an old tree trunk, while the softer ambient back dining room where decorated with framed MRIs of the cross section fruits and vegetables – they make great guessing games in between courses (the answers are onion, cantaloupe, corn and pumpkin).

The menu is unlike the usual offering. On the left side of the page is a list of all the locally sourced ingredients from the area that will be featured for the night, and on the right, the tasting menu of how the featured ingredients will be performing on your plate. It has a very high vegetarian focus. In fact, out of the entire 12 course tasting menu, only two were seafood dishes, and only one contained beef. A word of warning to the carnivores – this may not be for you. There were even a few dishes reminiscent of fresh cut grass where you would think it was made for the cow to enjoy before you decide to eat the cow.

A few outstanding moments included the “Crab Melt”, especially during the peak of the Dungeness crab season, the sweet white flesh roasted with a transparent film of lardo, and a surprising drizzle of intense wheatgrass that perfectly cut through the fat. The “Savory chanterelle porridge” (first of all, extra points for not naming it a congee) was beautifully multi directional, the slippery chanterelle bringing a nice level of umami to the warm rice porridge, the accompanied sprinkling of the root vegetable “chips” made it that much more of a textural delight. I would be very interested in what Peter Gilmore thought of his own version of the “congee” in the Quay menu. I think Coi takes the crown on this dish.

Coi’s interpretation of the American coffee cake also deserves a mention. It was closer to a warm sticky date pudding, served with raw milk ice (and no traces of that pungent dairy taste) and light citrus notes of lime. The different temperatures and spectrum of sweet to creamy to sour gave the dinner a perfect ending.

May I present our tasting menu for the night:

Frozen Mandarin Sour
Angostura bitters, kumquat, Satsuma ice

Clam
Geoduck and manila, bull kelp, meyer lemon, wild fennel

Pasture
Beets roasted in hay, fresh cheese, wild sprouts and flowers

Crab melt, California style
Steffan’s Lardo, wheatgrass

Farm Egg
Cauliflower,  nettle-dandelion salsa verde (with an egg yolk center)

Earth and Sea
Steamed tofu mousseline, mushroom dashi, yuba, fresh seaweed

Savory chanterelle porridge
Crisp root vegetables, cress, sherry

Prather ranch beef
Potato, coastal grasses, Monterey cypress

Grilled cheese
Tomm d’ossau, rye, onion, pickled daikon
image unavailable

Fennel sorbet
Ruby grapefruit, campari, pomelo

Coffee Cake
Medjool date, raw milk ice, lime

You’ll look twice before you weed your garden again. Instead you’ll think “I wonder how that tastes?”

COI Restaurant
373 Broadway
San Francisco, CA 94133-4512
(415) 393-9000