Behind the Scenes at a Lab Dinner, Part 3

In the third part of this series, we finally delve into what it’s like to both serve and eat 33 courses at a Cooking Lab din­ner. Part 1 chron­i­cled the shop­ping trip to the Farmers’ Market, and part 2 detailed the amount of prep work such a din­ner takes.

Small Portions Add Up

This din­ner can­not be fully appre­ci­ated with­out first look­ing at the epic size of its menu (click each page to enlarge):

This menu could very well be an entire restaurant’s menu, but each guest would be served each course as a small “tast­ing.” While the prospect was daunt­ing, our guests were excited to begin.

I actu­ally think I went about this the right way. I didn’t sam­ple every­thing and stood most of the time, which burns more calo­ries than sit­ting does. With the excep­tion of the pis­ta­chio gelato (which I will eat when­ever pre­sented to me), I stayed away from dishes I had already tried, such as the eloté, the Modernist ver­sion of the clas­sic Mexican street food. It begins with a dab of spicy mayo and is lay­ered with but­ter pow­der, made from mix­ing melted but­ter with N-Zorbit, which swells the but­ter with so much starch that it becomes pow­dery, and topped with freeze-dried corn ker­nels and ash. It’s like a Pixy Stix for grown-ups, and, just like with the candy, it is impor­tant not to inhale as you put the spoon in your mouth.

I was most look­ing for­ward to finally try­ing the famous pea but­ter, which is made from cen­trifug­ing frozen peas so that they sep­a­rate into three dis­tinct lay­ers: juice, starch, and a rich, creamy sub­stance that can only be likened to but­ter. This, as I had imag­ined, and as many guests have writ­ten, was what the Platonic ideal of peas might be. Served along with corn but­ter (which, sadly, I didn’t get to try) and ham but­ter, Nathan took the oppor­tu­nity to show off the cen­trifuge to our guests. Rather than ask­ing them to get up and look at what really does look like a wash­ing machine, he’d taken the rotor out, along with a few bot­tles of lay­ered peas and corn, and brought them tableside.

Serving the ultra­sonic fries as one fry atop a cup of bone mar­row mous­se­line, was, in my opin­ion, a bad move. The pair­ing was ter­rific, the fry is a must-have for any­one vis­it­ing the Lab, but who can eat just one French fry, espe­cially when it’s the best French fry any­one has ever had? Yet, there were 29 courses to go, so one fry it was.

Each of these dishes was assem­bled at rapid speed, since as much prep work as pos­si­ble had already been done. Yet the chefs used pairs of long tweez­ers to care­fully place each piece of food on the plate. Because the MC team has a lot of pride in their pre­sen­ta­tion, when a mound of geo­duck noo­dles fell over (not on the floor, mind you, but just slid­ing over into the bowl) on the way from the counter to the table, it was brought back. Shouts of “Refire! Refire! Refire!” exploded from the kitchen as the chefs scram­bled to con­coct a new plate-up, and I hap­pily snagged the flubbed shell­fish for myself. A few extra sec­onds were not remiss dur­ing this course, as Nathan once again vis­ited his guests, this time bring­ing out a whole geo­duck (pro­nounced “gooey” duck). Most guests had never seen one, even though they are so com­mon in the Pacific Northwest that they have actu­ally become over­fished. Nathan explained that we get ours from “Oyster Bill,” as he’s known in the Seattle restau­rant com­mu­nity, who rep­re­sents local fish farms. This par­tic­u­lar geo­duck was grown on a sus­tain­able farm called Taylor Shellfish.

Taki, whom I’d met the day before at the farm­ers’ mar­ket, would have been proud of the beau­ti­ful arrange­ment of veg­eta­bles in the Spring in Autumn Stew, which started off a series of soup courses. When I say “soup courses,” I use that term loosely. The Noble Root course served root veg­eta­bles on a plate with an espresso cup filled with our Caramelized Carrot Soup on the side. I had been absent the day they’d shot the pho­tos for our Rare Beef Jus recipe, so I grabbed a spoon­ful when the stew was served. It was saltier than I’d imag­ined, despite the fact that no salt had been added to it. When I saw the lit­tle cups of what looked like Guinness (a dark liq­uid with a large dose of creamy white foam) come back only half eaten, I won­dered aloud if the Mushroom Cappuccino had not gone over well. No, one of our vet­eran servers told me. This was the time in the din­ner when peo­ple started to get full and took only tastes of each small portion.

This is also about the time in writ­ing this post when I real­ize that to do it jus­tice, I must stop and pick it up again next week. There are just too many good courses, too many inter­est­ing details, and too many fun guests to write about.