I have been standing in front of a basket in the produce section of the Columbus Circle Whole Foods for two minutes. There is no identifying name card or price tag on it. If you didn't know any better, you probably wouldn't even notice the contents of this particular basket. But even though Whole Foods has neglected to put a price on them, I have an idea of their going rate, and I have been eyeing them covetously for what seems like an eternity, gently picking them up one at a time to estimate their weight as I run and re-run cost-benefit analyses in my head.

Whole Foods is selling fresh cèpes, also known as porcinis, the king of mushrooms. They are showing some wear and age, slightly browned and wrinkled--a copule of them are even bruised. But they smell like a hardwood fire in a thousand-year-old forest after the rain, and they are enormous. I have never seen whole, fresh porcini mushrooms for sale in New York. I remember reading somewhere that porcinis are being intermittently foraged in Oregon, but I think most of them still come from Europe, and then only in dried form. Will I ever have this chance again? How much could they possibly cost? In another aisle, chanterelles are going for over twenty dollars a pound. Could porcinis be as much as forty? How many could I afford to buy?

I walk up to the checkout aisle, my covetousness turned to shame. I have four huge cèpes in my basket. I picked up a few other items too, in an effort to justify to myself what I expect to be a grocery bill of over fifty dollars by lowering the mean per-item cost. As the clerk tallies my purchases, I brace myself for an embarrassing total. But it doesn't come. Instead, the clerk asks me for less than fifteen dollars for my mushrooms, some assorted greens and herbs, and a modest cut of meat. I pay her and take my groceries into the subway, wondering if I've been had. Arriving home, I take out the mystery item and examine it thoroughly. They still look like porcinis to me. How did I get out of Whole Foods with these things for less than twenty bucks?

I examine my receipt. There is no entry for porcinis. Instead, there is a charge of just over three dollars for just over a pound of portobello mushrooms. Now I know that it's the checkout clerk, not I, who's been had. Portobellos are easily distinguished from porcinis by looking at the underside of their caps. Where portobellos have dark, brittle gills underneath, porcini, being members of the genus boletus, have no gills, but rather a spongy network of microscopic pores through which they disseminate their spores. My shame now turns to guilt, as I realize that the checkout clerk simply didn't recognize what I was trying to buy, and mistakenly charged me for a far less expensive item than the one I was actually purchasing. Almost immediately, I begin rationalizing my good fortune by recalling law school lectures about unilateral mistakes of fact, but mostly I'm just overjoyed that I was able to spot these prizes and acquire them so cheaply. I am somewhat comforted by the fact that the checkout clerk's mistake is unlikely to be discovered, and thus that my gain will not come at her expense.

I use the caps of my practically-free fresh porcini to make a hearty ragout, coarsely dicing them and sautéeing them in olive oil with garlic and thyme, adding a bit of homemade chicken stock, sea salt, black pepper, and a dash of sherry vinegar. The ragout, served on slices of crusty bread, is a magnificent and rare meal in itself. And the experience is a vindication for my sometimes overbearing, sometimes pedantic, sometimes snobbish attention to gastronomy. Knowledge has value, and in this case my knowledge (or the poor checkout clerk's lack thereof) carried a price. When I contemplate a lifetime of seeking out this type of knowledge and account for the hidden pleasures it allows me to discover, I have no doubt that my life will be richer for the effort. More often than not, my exploration and experimentation leads to disappointment or frustration, but every once in a while it yields a moment of perfect, sublime satisfaction. On balance, it's a price I'm more than willing to pay.

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50 Clinton Street
New York, NY 10002
(212) 477-2900

My youngest brother is in culinary school. After years of preparing for a secure but unfulfilling white-collar career, he said to hell with it and followed his passion. He's happier now than he's ever been, and a couple of weeks ago it was his birthday. Because courage like his should be rewarded, and because the allocation of life's material pleasures to those who lack such courage is as commonplace as it is fundamentally unjust, my other brother and I decided he deserved an extravagant night of New York gastronomy. One destination came to mind immediately.

Walking down Clinton Street on the Lower East Side, you could be forgiven for not noticing WD-50. Situated next-door to a unisex hair salon with a bright pink sign, the restaurant's facade is an unassuming plane of brick, glass and wood. The only identifying mark is a bronze-on-bronze panel perpendicular to the featureless oak door, so subtle you can't read it from more than three feet away. Inside is a sleek dining room in which all axes lead to the open wall in the back, where chef Wylie Dufresne--unmistakable with his signature ponytail and mutton-chop sideburns--bounds about his immaculate kitchen. He is busy creating the most challenging fare in Manhattan.

The restaurant I have most often heard WD-50 compared to is Per Se, and the comparison is more fair than you might expect. Dufresne certainly has the chops to go toe-to-toe with Keller, having cut his teeth as sous-chef to Keller's four-star rival Jean-Georges Vongerichten. And both Dufresne and Keller have a penchant for joke dishes: deconstructions of old culinary saws that elevate them to the level of haute cuisine. But Keller's gags, confined as they are by the champagne wishes of his clientele, always come off a bit too precious--his "macaroni and cheese" topped with butter-poached lobster; his "oysters and pearls" sporting a half-ounce of osetra caviar. Dufresne, in contrast, is unabashedly honest in his references to the Jewish delicatessens of his neighborhood--a tongue sandwich becomes pickled tongue with fried mayonnaise (WD-50's most famous dish); corned beef on rye with mustard becomes corned duck on rye crisps with mustard. There is no layering on of truffles or cream or foie gras, nor is there any need. Indeed, the foie gras offering at WD-50, often cited as a disappointment by critics, has very little to do with the foie gras, which is prepared perfectly. Rather, the smooth, cool, buttery liver is competing with the sourness and bitterness of dried grapefruit pulp and the eerie discontinuity of pale liquid caramel infused with dried seaweed. For Dufresne, the luxury of foie gras, like the comfort of a deli sandwich, is simply a frame of reference for experimentation. And the point of experimentation in his kitchen is not simply to please, but to challenge.

When I say WD-50's food is the most challenging in Manhattan, I am not referring to the difficulty of its preparation (though it obviously is the product of the highest culinary skill). WD-50 is a challenging place to dine. There is no comfort food, no velvety cream sauce, no oozing ganache, no porterhouse steak. Flavors are stripped bare and placed in close proximity where they are free to behave as they will. Tender, meaty octopus tangles with almonds and pesto. Rich dark mole is reduced to a transfer-strip of "paper", to be judiciously combined with a juicy roast chicken. Pork belly is served dry and firm, not so much the star of the dish as a meaty accent to the rotating cast of garnishes that are served with it. The sweet cherries of clafoutis are body-snatched by unctuous dark olives, while the eggy cake remains as an echo of the classic dessert. Nothing here is to be expected, everything is a revelation or an amusement. Even dishes that don't quite work are educational. WD-50 is a funhouse for foodies.

For my brother's birthday, there was no better place to be than in this restaurant. What Wylie Dufresne does takes chutzpah. For every curious foodie that revels in the experience he offers, there will be three or four casual diners who are scared away. Fortunately for him, he has the backing of his his father (an experienced restaurateur) and his mentor Jean-Georges. As my brother learns the skills of his chosen trade, for one night he saw the limits to which they could be stretched by someone who isn't afraid to take risks. It was a lesson in courage for a kid who's already shown a lot of it. As for me, I'm happy I could help get him in the door. See, the world will always have its use for those of us who play it safe. We make possible the courage of those we love.

Posted by jeremy at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

For many of us it started our freshman year of college. We would cruise Bleecker Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, or Broadway between 116th and 106th Streets, not knowing any better, just looking for a place that would serve us. We learned to start early, before ten o'clock, before the bouncers manned the doors with their age-identifying flashlights. Once we were in and had a drink in hand, the bouncers just meant that we couldn't leave. Not that we wanted to. We stayed all night, drinking pitchers of the cheapest beer, shots of well tequila, and drinks whose names had words like "sour", "sex", and "screw" in them: drinks obviously designed for children trying to sound grown up. Drinks for people who don't really like drinking.

The bars had different names, different decor, different addresses, but they were all essentially the same. The kids came either from Manhattan colleges or suburban highschools. The boys were frat-boy casual: denim and plaid wrapped around an old ratty t-shirt; 50 percent chance of a baseball cap. The girls aimed for sexy-not-slutty, usually missing the target to one side or another. They wore jeans that were tight in awkward places, tops that were either low-cut or short-hemmed. Each girl had an accessory to conceal whatever bodily insecurity she had recently discovered. Behind the bar there were twelve types of vodka but only two types of wine. The music and the crowds were loud enough that we couldn't really understand what anybody was saying, but there wasn't much need for verbal communication when an evening could only follow one of two patterns: (a) get drunk, then get laid; or (b) get drunk, then get sick.

The crushing repetitiveness of this routine (coupled with the overwhelming prevalence of pattern (b) over pattern (a)) got tired quickly, and eventually we discovered a neighborhood spot, where they never carded us and they always had our favorite beer on tap, a spot that the bridge-and-tunnel kids and those obnoxious freshmen hadn't found yet. The jukebox was never too loud, and it had all our favorite songs on it, although whether they were our favorites before we heard them on this jukebox is something we can't remember. The regular bartender learned our names and slipped us a free drink from time to time. Drinking became less of a quest and more of a way to spend a quiet evening with friends and lovers, slowly nursing a beer and trying to develop a taste for whiskey, gradually slipping free of whatever obligations we thought were so oppressive at the time and sinking into a warm, fuzzy forgetfulness.

By the time we enter the high-flying world of young Manhattan professionals, drinking has become a career skill. The bars are different from those of our college days only in the most superficial respects. The sticky wooden bar has been replaced with sleek back-lit glass; the rickety barstools with velvet upholstery, the din of college alt-rock with the din of last summer's hip-hop. We still can't hear what anybody is saying, but we've perfected the art of looking interested in conversations we neither understand nor care about. The men are business casual, all of them sporting identical flat-front pants and spread-collar shirts in a rainbow of pastels. There is not a baseball cap in sight; the over-under is on sport jackets. The women aim for sophisticated-but-sexy, still missing to one side or another. They now have entire wardrobes designed around the insecurities they nurtured in college. Their accessories are carefully calibrated to telegraph both the wealth they expect from the future and the youth that is fading into the past. En masse, we scour Manhattan for the latest twelve-dollar cocktail. Martinis, cosmos, mojitos, saketinis, sidecars; as soon as you develop a taste for one, it's time to move on. Those of us who worked so hard to learn to tolerate whiskey can now tolerate only the finest single-barrel bourbons and 18-year-old malts. Those of us who drank Bud Lite by the pitcher now sneer at anything less than a dozen microbrews on tap. It's the same game, it's just gotten more expensive to play.

Most of us don't make it back to the neighborhood bar much anymore. We see less of friends and lovers, and our once-fuzzy forgetfulness has taken on a razor's edge. If we went back to our neighborhood joint today, would the regular bartender would still recognize us? And would we still have a taste for the house pour?

Posted by jeremy at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)