I was overjoyed this morning to see Zach Brooks from Midtown Lunch reporting that Má Pêche (aka “Momofuku Midtown”) was serving food on the mezzanine level. (The full restaurant is not yet open.)
Being in the middle of Project Momo – where I am inadvertently visiting every Momofuku establishment in a ten day time span – I would be remiss in not going and trying out Má Pêche, even in this limited capacity.
Friday evening , I got to meet NYC’s favorite morning news anchor, Pat Kiernan, over poutine. If you’re looking for some sort of a reason why, follow these links in order. Longtime readers may remember my professed love from 2004, which did not go unnoticed. The group of six – three “winners”, two Gothamist staff, and Pat – spent two hours talking about practically everything. A condensed list of things worth mentioning:
* Poutine is a “delicacy” of Eastern Canada; Pat, being from Calgary and Edmonton prior to moving to NYC, has no particular attachment to the dish.
* Pat began working for TimeWarner at Pathfinder, which may have been one of the first major dotcoms to implode in the mid-90s. Pat’s primary project on the site – the Fortune Business Report – was brought to NY1, where it still regularly airs.
* Because Pat’s Papers hadn’t quite launched yet when I posted about it, I appear to have given Pat’s Papers its first inbound link, which caused it to finally appear in Google’s search results.
* The sleep schedule of someone who has to be in to work at 4AM can only be described as a meticulous science.
* I actually like poutine. I always find chili overpowering on fries, but a splash of gravy works pretty well. The cheese curds also give you a little more control over the cheese/potato ratio than standard cheese fries. That said, the bottom of the cup does get kind of congealed.
(Photos in this post mostly taken by Tien Mao.)
This past Friday night, Katie and I dined at Alinea, Grant Achatz’s restaurant in Chicago. Alinea is currently listed by Restaurant Week as the #10 restaurant in the world, calling it “arguably the most cutting edge food in America”. What follows is a list of what was eaten during our twenty-three course Tour menu. Page numbers are provided for reference where the dishes are listed in the Alinea book where applicable. Photos are not provided (save for one dish) as I as too focused on the food, but if you need visual accompaniment, two of my friends – Kathryn Yu and Ryan Adams – have Flickr sets from their tastings, and there’s certainly some overlap in the dishes.