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By Pete, July 9, 2009 10:41 am

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then no matter how many pictures I post or how many words I write, NOTHING will do justice to what I experienced at Alinea. My only hope is to recall and capture through words, a tiny fragment of that splendid 3.5 hours for both myself in the future and for you.

Seeing how I called in to make reservation at the earliest allowable time (2 months ahead), it is fair to say that I planned my trip around Alinea. For those of you unfamiliar with the menu at Alinea, they only offer 2 menus, a 12-course tasting menu and a 20-course tour menu. Initially, my thoughts were that since we were already there, let’s just do the tour and chalk that up as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But upon reconsideration, I decided that there was no way I would be able to do a 20-course meal. So we decided on the tasting and got our reservations on July 3rd at 7:15pm.

I’m not familiar with Chicago at all. So when the cab stopped, I just followed Carol & Tiem, my friends who live in Chicago, to two gigantic doors that leads into an unmarked building. Had there not been a valet outside, I probably would have walked right past one of America’s best restaurants without ever knowing it.

A dimly lit, declining hallway awaits on the other side of the double doors from the street. There was no music, there wasn’t much decoration. It felt like that it was a transition place to give patrons a chance to leave the world on the opposite of the doors that they just walked through.

After getting seated at our table tucked away upstairs towards the back of the restaurant, we were asked again if anyone had any food allergies (they have asked, confirmed, and reconfirmed during the reservation process) and also whether we’d want to order wine or do the wine pairing. We figured since we were already there, we might as well go ahead with the wine pairing (When in Rome, do as the Romans do right??).

Alinea - A New Beginning

Before our food arrived, I mentioned to C&T that it felt a little stiff and pretentious in the dinning room. The room was pretty much silent!! The walls were not bare, but it was a very minimalist decoration. The tables were about 10-12 feet away from each other. Not only was there was no table cloth on the table, there was also no silverware. The only thing on our table was a mysterious “functional centerpiece”, three small square plates (one for each of us) sitting towards the middle of the table with a “pillow” on top of the plate, and a napkin with the alinea logo on it. So many things that I’ve associated with being at a restaurant was completely, and very noticeably, absent. I could almost hear the thoughts in my head as I begin to question if this was a mistake because I’ve always believed that food should be unpretentious and bring people together. As I am looking around trying to soak in the surroundings, I saw out of the corner of my eye that our first course is on its way to us.

The suggested weapon for the upcoming course.

After the jump, I’ll try, to the best of my abilities, to describe in as much details as possible about the food. I’ve included at least a picture of each course as well as the pairings (if there was one). So grab something to drink, sit back, and enjoy. =)

Continue reading 'Alinea – Meal of my Life…'»

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By Pete, April 27, 2009 11:35 am

Paella

Cigalas

Gambas

Croquetas

Churros

Jamón Serrano

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By Pete, April 19, 2009 10:28 pm

Tonight was apparently the grand finale of “Bistro  2404″ – a little hole-in-the-wall bistro located somewhere in my fantasy that just happened to be a few feet from where I sleep. The grand finale was, ironically, my choice for my “last meal on earth” – paella (and not just any paella, but paella made from lobster stock). If you’re a seafood fan and have never had a good paella before, there are 2 small containers in my fridge that you might be able to claim if you take Matt out.

After I added the last picture to the “Bistro 2404″ set (slideshow) onto my flickr, I decided to take a look back at how this all got started. The first picture was uploaded 11/22/2007 – when we opened up our house to Vox for Thanksgiving. I had agreed to make the turkey and I threw in a corn relish on the side. Then eventually, that led to having neighborhoods at our place (even though it was all guys and Jen). Then somewhere along the way, I joined the volunteer program at Central Market. Then the rest is history. Even though culinarily, I’ve come a long ways since November of 2007, I feel like I should really thank all the friends gracious enough to compliment me on my cooking and, more importantly – at times, brave enough to try ANYTHING I make (the braised beef tongue was a hard sell at first, but eventually all the roommates tried and loved it).

For those of you that have kept up with my blog, you might be wondering why I’ve taken my personally blog off my own domain and moved it here to wordpress.com. This is probably as good a time to tell y’all as any, seeing how I usually start blog posts and never finish it. So here I go… While I haven’t hammered out the details yet, I am excited to share that I’ll be starting a new blog/food project on my domain. Be sure to periodically check up here for when I’ll launch the new site. It’s going to be fun. =)

In all seriousness however, I should probably tell you all now that I’m not a rock star in the kitchen – there’re countless people better in the kitchen than me. I just think food is important. It was really over the course of the last year or so that I got to really see the importance of food. There’re many reason why I do what I do. I love seeing a random group of people get together for a meal, I love seeing friends being made, I love seeing the moment when people are getting introduced to new flavors, I love seeing people agonize over how awesome something taste, I laugh when people pass out after a meal. I abso-freakin’-lutely love all of that. So let me take this opportunity again to thank those that have helped me carry out this little fantasy bistro of mine for this. Here’s to all the memories of “Bistro 2404″ and all the potentials for the new place that still remains nameless.

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By Pete, April 24, 2008 10:48 pm

An article in the Wall Street Journal today calls for Americans to start stocking up on food as a mean of “investment” with the simple analysis that food prices have gone up higher than the interest rate. Here’s an excerpt:

Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you’ll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax.

Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the average American household is now running at 4.5% a year.

While I’m not sure if you can look at stocking up your pantry with food as an investment. But I can tell you that this “buy now while you can” attitude is so American. I, like everyone, am not a fan of paying $1.01 for something that was worth $1.00 yesterday, but I can’t imagine the idiots who would race each other to see who would be last in a nasty game to drive the prices up.

All of these commodity futures are there to price risk and protect prices of commodities in the future. So when the Asian countries saw that prices are going up, what did they do? Buy three times more rice than they usually do to “stock up” for the future. And the result? Well, a simple supply/demand analysis will easily predict that prices will (and have) soar.

This whole thing is amazing to me because it is not like there was a natural disaster and a large crop of rice was lost and there’s now a shortage. From my understanding, this is just a nasty chain of event that was started by the weak dollar. The weak dollar caused prices (based in dollars) to go up, and as countries saw prices going up, they started to add fuel to the fire by driving the demand up. And now you have the WSJ telling Americans, of all people, to start hoarding up food. In the end, who gets screwed here? The people who didn’t have food in the first place.

I propose that instead of going to the store and buying as if a natural disaster is imminent, why don’t we just stop wasting food?? It never cease to astonish me how much food we waste – start just by sticking your head in your fridge and finishing what’s in there before you run to the store and by more food. Maybe if we all do that there’ll be enough food for all of us and then some.

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By Pete, March 16, 2008 1:47 am

“When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade…”

Our office catered lunch from Rudy’s on Friday and on the way out of the office, I noticed a whole tub of unused lemons (originally intended for the tea) sitting on the counter. So I decided to take it home and try to cook with it.

On the way home (my 5 minute commute from the office to home), I was thinking about what I could do with all these lemons (and I knew I wasn’t about to make fresh lemonade). So I decided to stop by HEB and see if I could challenge myself out of my kitchen comfort zone this weekend.

So on Friday night, I made this awesome capellini with pancetta, shrimp & asparagus tossed in olive oil. It was glorious. So glorious that it wasn’t until AFTER I had downed the whole thing that I realized I forgot to take a picture of it. But I’m sure the people who got ate this with me can tell you that it was indeed good eats. I had made that dish once for a potluck along with Pat (minus a few additions/improvements this time around), so this didn’t really count as stepping outside my comfort zone.

So after dinner, we started talking about food (you know you’re with people who love good eats when you continue to talk about food immediately after you finish a meal). And Mian started talking about making geoduck. Caught in a moment of either extreme stupidity or extreme ambition, I agreed to try to make geoduck sashimi tonight. I was actually starting to have second thoughts thinking about it throughout the day, and fortunately we found that there were no live geoducks waiting in the tanks for us at the market when we went (after wasted way too much time playing video games).

So I decided to try to make classic (miso based) ramen with tonkotsu instead (If you don’t know already – I <3 Noodles!!!). We also added some tempura shrimp and vegetables to challenge ourselves. After our little experiment today, I can tell you that I’ll be very reluctant to pay what restaurants charge for tempura again.

Check out our creation:

I think if I really want to venture into uncharted territory, I’ll be trying to make a lemon cheesecake tomorrow. Let’s see how I feel. =)