That aside, the discussion I had earlier on the practical and artistic aspects of menu planning has me going back and re-evaluating the my earlier endeavors under similar criteria. Turns out I don’t do so well. The menu progression that I created and executed a few years back happens to be one of only three that does work: it “makes sense” and doesn’t have any gustatory jolts along the way.

The “Baie Comeau” was a meal I was asked to make for someone actually from Baie Comeau (no, not Brian), but with constraints which I uncharacteristically accepted to work with rather than my customary “don’t worry about your dietary quirks because I’ll serve it anyway” approach:

• no tentacles
• no tentacle suckers
• no squishy or chewy animal bits
• no cucumbers
• no legumes/pulses
• no melons

Not sure why I said yes. Some were related to difficulty in digestion but none were in the religious or death-inducing categories that I would pay attention to. There was something I just set aside outright after thinking long and hard about it, because I heard “balle au nez”. What I did ignore completely was the suggestion that maybe I could make cinnamon and chile jumbo prawns with mango chutney and Chilean sea bass with caramelized onion mashed potato and pancetta. Those elements are just so… 2005.

The first menu

• quail-sickle

Okay, so it was a very short start.

My original idea for quail never got off the ground but no one ever likes the idea of presenting a little bird on a stick. I mean, the technique works with squidsickles, why shouldn’t it work with quail? You can even get them off the konro that way in Japan and Taiwan.

The second menu

I actually shopped for this menu, which in hindsight 2 years later would have been really cool with some octopus suckers incorporated into the amuse-bouche:

• Strawberry gazpacho with shrimp
• Lobster and foie gras
• Ikura and peas salad
• Duck
• Strip steak
• Cheese
• Some kind of pineapple-based dessert

Foie gras is one of those things that’s always available in Québec (and with no dose of PETA), and since it’s duck foie gras, duck is also readily available. Ditto cows. It was also early summer so Québec lobsters were full and plentiful.

The second iteration ran off the rails pretty quickly after that. That strawberry gazpacho?  It was actually a great idea from my pal Amy as it met all the criteria of being a refreshing early summer dish. The unfortunate situation with à la minute shopping is that there’s always the outside possibility that one hits a pothole, or in this case, fruit mold on pretty much all the strawberries I found at the market (that I distinctly remember). Lots and lots of fruit mold.

The ikura and peas got scratched by the major requirement for fresh peas and fava beans, neither of which were available at the time I was shopping. At this point things were starting to resemble a shopping “fail” I had on Granville Island (also back in 2005; I created two menus to cook for friends and couldn’t find ingredients for any of it).

The eventual menu

• Tsukemono
• Lobster with spring vegetables
• La panolplie des asperges! (cuz it sounds classier in French)
• Chinese 5-spice roast duck
• Strip steak
• Cheese
• Pineapple

The interpretation

Tsukemono : This was more of a ración size but it made for an interesting saladō kickoff. Click the photo to expand. Top right: yama-imo with shoyu glaze (soy, mirin, sake) to demonstrate the love of nebaneba shokuhin (slimy foods). Middle: black tomatoes with komochi konbu (herring eggs on kelp – though I could have glued on the eggs if I had some transglutaminase, I didn’t because it’s actually bought this way). Top left: takuan (daikon rice-bran pickle; generally you buy this unless you happen to own a daikon farm). Bottom right: red carrot shiozuke (salt pickle).

Lobster with spring vegetables : Well, the lobster made it onto the menu. Québec lobster is supposed to be identified by claw bands that say “aliments du Québec” when you visit your local grocer or fishmonger. In all honesty the one I got was a 650 g /1.4 lb female with white claw bands with no writing on them so I have no idea where they nabbed it. This is a variation of something that I made during the Omelette Atonement (another menu experience), but with a couple of minor adjustments, notably in that everything tastes better with some foie gras on it. I’ve also included snap peas, red carrots (at $2.49 for six micro-carrots you better believe I’m going to include them), Québec green asparagus and Peruvian white asparagus. Sauce was a nigori sake reduction. Plating? Blech – composition needs work because it’s visually unappealing.

La panoplie des asperges! In hindsight this is slightly atypical of me since I don’t normally make a standalone vegetable dish because it encourages less-desirable behavior (you know, vegan-ism) but early summer also means local asparagus and I lucked out and found some wild asparagus. If you look carefully past the long pepper, you can see the regular green and white spargle underneath (actually spargle stalks – I used the tips for the lobster). Also finished off with the nigori sake to offset the slight bitterness.

Chinese five-spice roast duck : I remember at the time that I had been visiting Asian grocers on my quest to find bentō ingredients and was constantly passing by the roast ducks. I really like those ducks but getting one wasn’t suitable for this meal because I wanted to actually make one just to say I can. I wound up buying a magret, which may or may not have been the smartest thing to do because one magret costs about as much as a whole roast duck but at least this way there was less stuff left over. The magret itself was dusted with five-spice, long peppers and salt, put into a sous-vide bag with some butter for 3 hours at 57ºC/135ºF and then finished in a pan with a little bit of butter. What was roasted was the skin: crocheted onto a cake rack, roasted for 7 hours at 60ºC/140ºF and then finished off with hot oil and the blowtorch. I didn’t have time to make pancakes and didn’t want to serve just a pile of scallions so it was a microgreen salad with a Meyer lemon vinaigrette and some streaks of hoisin cut with mirin and sake.

Strip steak : A summertime favorite for a lot of people is steak off the grill served with sautéed onions and mushrooms. I have no grill (still saving deposit bottles for that Napoleon PT600RBI with the ceramic infrared burners) but I do however have an induction burner and I do have a grill pan. I decided to use the grill pan for something else. So, one 5 cm /2 inch-thick 680g / 1.5 lb strip trimmed striploin, one frying pan and just a little bit of butter for that Maillard reaction deliciousness. Served with caramelized onion purée (that goo on the plate; made with caramelized onion, demi-glace and nigori sake) and pied bleu and girolle mushrooms that were sautéed in the leftover foie gras fat (and just a little bit more butter).

Cheese : La Sauvagine, a mild soft-crust cow milk cheese from St-Raymond-de-Portneuf in Quebec, and an ash-covered Valencay goat cheese from Poitou in France.

Pineapple : yeah, pineapple – one of the three options within my dessert repertoire. Originally to be another implementation of the chest-clutching buttery roasted pineapple goodness, but it transmogrified into grilled pineapple because I wanted to see what a Le Creuset grill pan coul do. What I found is that the iron content in this grill pan allows the induction unit to heat the thing to over 329ºC/625ºF (gee, does it sear?). The pineapple pavé was marinated in soy sauce and mirin before grilling and it’s served on a sauce made from the leftover marinade, nigori sake, pineapple juice, honey and piment d’espelette. The basil does indeed go well with it (it wasn’t an afterthought).

Photos

[View with PicLens]

Notes

As I said, this is one of exactly three menus progressions I’ve made which worked harmoniously – no jarring flavors, good transition from dish to dish, no outliers. So what did I learn from this? Nothing at the time, but 2 years later, that I was actually quite lucky that it turned out the way it did. Especially the pineapple.

When I look at this now, I could have had several fails, notably with the tsukemono and the duck as they’re the most overtly Asian elements of the meal. What saved them was probably starting with the tsukemono to reset the palate, and a very restrained use of five-spice for the duck.

It is also a continuing reminder that have to work on oh, plating since everything looks tired and dated. Except when asparagus is involved - that’s just like one really bad basketball game gone wrong.

Tokyo! Metropolis of Japan, operating theatre of Kidō Keisatsu patoreibā Special Vehicle Section 2…

Anyhoo, travel is winding down for the year and it will be the second straight year that I failed to regain SuperÉlite status with Aeroplan. Ask me if I’m happy - it’s going to be another 12 months where someone I know can kick my sorry a$$ off the plane if he/she needs a seat. Or an upgrade. I’ll eventually write up my sidetrip to Charlotte and other places where I’ve been there, done that, but that will take a while as I’ve got photos to process beforehand. And there are a lot of trips. In the meanwhile, I’m scribbling about Tokyo, where my brother is currently running amok in the Land of Gundam.

I’ve been to Japan, but the experience has usually limited itself to Narita T1 or T2 as part of the to/from portion of the long-haul to Taiwan. One of these days I’ll actually go and visit, stomach growling, cameras in tow, and lots and lots of cash at hand (if you didn’t already know, Japan is really expensive and is generally an all-cash society). In the meanwhile, I’ll live vicariously through him.

His outbound trip was apparently uneventful, with the first leg from here to Hell on a flight packed with a Japanese tour group on their way home. Then some time bouncing between the gate and Pearson’s International Maple Leaf Lounge before getting the confirmation for the Business Class cabin.

I miss Air Canada Business Class. It’s not as nice as the Business Class seating of the Asian Star Alliance partners and can’t compete with on the service side with Austrian Airlines, but AC’s new 77Ws have fold-flat seat pods, noise-cancellation headsets, real glasses, a good selection of wines, palatable meals and nice staff. Well, AC staff have always been good to me, it’s just nicer to be sitting in the front of the plane.

Priority luggage didn’t quite work as expected upon arrival at Narita but the remainder of the arrival went smoothly. In his words, “Shinjuku is crazy busy. It’s packed with people. I mean packed.”

I’m not quite sure what happened since his arrival apart from successfully picking up a SIM card, but today’s adventure included a visit to the Park Hyatt Tokyo. This hotel is probably best known to people who’ve never been as one of the major backdrops in Bill Murray’s Lost in Translation, but it also houses a restaurant called the “New York Grill” (the link’s in Japanese). Okay, so… it’s a steakhouse. Or more to the point, it’s a very nice steakhouse on the 52nd floor of the Park Hyatt.

The photo looks very nice and I’m fairly certain that the view of Tokyo must be spectacular and rather surreal/serene from that high up. The Park Hyatt doesn’t offer an English version of the New York Grill’s online menu (BabelFish and Google both choked), but from what I could figure out from the Japanese menu, it’s a steakhouse (d-uh) with a twist. So what about dinner?

このレストランはすこしたかい。

Just saying.

However, both set menus and carte options are available as is an extensive wine that has the distinction of being the largest Californian wine collection in Asia. I don’t have all of the specifics of what he had but I have two highlights:

Foie gras terrine appetizer,
described as being “very tasty”. By the way, don’t expect a whole lot of waxing poetic – he’s on vacation and isn’t going to have time to do the 1000-word “what I did in Tokyo” book report for show and tell.

Unlike the more common torchon or terrine presentations, this terrine is cut into a wedge from either a pie or sheet pan mold. It appears to be topped with a clear aspic and is served with black truffle shavings, filberts, micro-salad, crouton and a sauce reduction (not sure but from the photo I’ll guess either a sweet wine like a Banyuls or port, Minus-8, or balsamic vinegar).

Grilled sirloin of Kobe beef,
which was most likely Tajima-ushi (但馬牛) from Hyōgo Prefecture.
このステーキはやわらかくてジューシーですね。!
Cow-wise, this was the real deal: high-marbling Japanese beef, not the Australian wagyū or the American wagyū/Angus crossbreed common on North America tables. I was quite surprised by the very simple plating but it was accompanied by a red wine sauce, onion compote, arugula and even more black truffle shavings. When it comes to truffles, I guess the spirit of Ryōri no Tetsujin still  lives on, but I’ve been assured that steak and the truffles were also delicious.

ごちそうさまでした ! In spite of the potential hurt that the menu may imply, the whole experience didn’t wind up costing and arm and a leg. Apparently it was only a leg, and not even a full one… maybe up to the knee.

Later on the sked: Tsukiji, L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon and hopefully a ramen-ya because そうめんはうどんよりほそいです。 If I’m lucky I’ll get a photo of the noodle equivalent of El Dorado.

Quick Links: Tokyo Part 1 (you’re reading it now) • Tokyo Part 2 • Tokyo Part 3