Manresa

For no special occasion in particular, just in a general celebratory mood, we decided to get the tasting menu at Manresa! They're a restaurant in Los Gatos with two Michelin stars.

We got all dressed up and I borrowed a fancy digital camera and we had the most epic dinner ever!

First up (i.e. the first "presentation", as they called them) was a chili jelly petit four:

(the jelly cubes are underneath the macaroon-shaped things). The chili was pretty interesting!

Next up was a beignet with fried kale and goat cheese.

The inside was quite surprising. I guess I expected it to be crispy with a doughy middle, but it turned out to be pretty soft and have some kind of filling.

Next: an abalone jelly thing. First we were given tiny wooden spoons and then two servers came out to present it to us and removed the lids simultaneously!

Very interesting. There was some abalone chunks on the surface, but the rest was puréed in a pudding-like substratum underneath the orange jelly visible in the photo. The taste had the same sort of essence-of-ocean that you get from, say, raw oysters, but instead of slurping mollusk organs out of a briny chalk shell you are exploring a highly-processed paste within a miniature hat box. I guess the bottom line is: somewhat surreal, but delicious.  SC says: The orange citrus jelly cut the saltiness perfectly.  It was still pretty intense, a few shades off this side of bitter, but ended up quite pleasant and interesting despite that.

Next we were presented with a bread dish.

Some kind of butter/cheese, and three types of bread: an olive bread, a dark multigrain thing, and a sourdough. They would continue bringing bread throughout the meal.

Next: Rice, an "aromatic herb", granola, and peas, in a specially shaped plate:

I like to the that the plate was shaped this way to assist in scooping up the last of it. It was like a salad, I guess. Light, with just a little bit of oil. The crunchy granola was a nice touch and the peas were done perfectly.

Next: clams, beans, smoked avocado purée.

Also some unidentified (mushroom?) chips and a leafy thing. It was pretty awesome. And the avocado was definitely smoked (I didn't know you could do that...).  The flavors were so intense!  SC's favorite dish.

Next, the first big meat dish: chicken, egg, porcini mushrooms, and chicken dashi (which was poured for us at the table).  SC thinks this was a play on the mother-and-child donburi theme.

There was also this stalky onion-like thing that was excellent. The dashi was amazing. So rich! And the texture of the chicken was perfect and the SC was supremely impressed by the impeccable temperature control: everything was at exactly the right temperature for this whole dish to work together. This was awesome.

Next: fish! Japanese sea bream, garlic sauce and radish and bread crumbs.

Meh. The warm plate was nice; really got the aromas up in your face. The fish was good, but... Well, I think maybe growing up the way we did (SC with lavish dinners in Hong Kong and myself with a dad who excels at both catching fish and cooking them) has led us to assume that this is just how fish should be, and that anything less is simply substandard.  Well, it was actually more mushy than flakey, so it still didn't achieve our usual (somewhat high) fish standards.

Next: suckling kid goat with fava beans and whey.

I don't think I've had goat before (it's a little hard to tell because the Chinese word  for sheep and goat is the same, so I get the two confused sometimes), and this was quite good! There were some curds (or maybe it was cheese?) in the dish and that went well with the goat. The whey foam made it kinda hard to see what was going on.

Next: spring lamb, a seaweed thing, fried root thing (they say the names so fast, and they're so unfamiliar that I just can't seem to remember them), and morels:

Oh my god morels are awesome. The flavor is just amazing, and along with that little slice of lamb on top (upper left of the picture), biting into it is just... well, it's hard to put into words how delicious it is. In a meaty kind of way. Like, if you took the best steak I've ever had and condensed it into a single bite. Also the seaweed thing (hiding under the lamb slices on the right) went perfectly with the lamb (I wish it hadn't been hiding, because I didn't get any with the first slice of lamb), the garlic was great just all by itself, and the fried root thing was delicious as well. So much goodness on this one plate!

To signal the end of the savory dishes, we got an herbal tea as a digestif. I didn't catch all the names of the herbs in the tea, but the first one was mint and the last one was stevia.

The first dessert course was a cucumber sorbet, geranium, and strawberry soup. The strawberry soup was poured in at the table.

SC didn't like it because the green thing was a little too interesting, and combined with the sweetness of the strawberry soup made the whole thing unpleasantly odd. I thought it was pretty good! I think the geranium was this candied swirl atop the sorbet. And the strawberry soup wasn't too sweet.

Next: panna cotta and crème fraîche on bloomed red quinoa with rhubarb.

Sooo good! Underneath the quinoa was salt, and this combination (frozen crème fraîche, toasted quinoa, and salt) was perfect.  Even SC thought so, and she doesn't normally like sweet things. Light and a little sweet and crunchy and just a bit of salt at the end. The panna cotta was great, and the rhubarb came in two forms: a raw slice off to the right, and this long strip that had been processed into a form that unfortunately reminded me a little too much of 山楂餅.

Finally, to bring the whole meal full circle, we got madelines with strawberry jam cubes.

Pretty cute! I liked the first one better, though.

Yay! It was an awesome experience. The atmosphere was great; I think we were a little worried it would be snobby and whatever, but we were actually really comfortable there and the staff was friendly and the other diners were having a good time... It was a lovely dinner. Exceedingly pleasant. Though we did end up seated in a portion of the restaurant with a lot of Asian diners around us...I wonder if that was intentional on their part.

And then they gave SC some cookies (apparently only women get them, because I didn't get any, and at another table that was all women, everybody got one), which we brought back to our cats:

And also some some caramel candies, which I must still have one of in my jacket pocket.

Technical notes:

So dinner for two, with tax and tip, no wine, came out to $460. Yeah, it was expensive. But we got so much more out of this than nine $50 dinners (which is normally an extravagant meal for us). On the other hand, that's like phở every week for five months.

For the pictures, I used a Canon 5D Mk II at 3200 ISO with a 50mm f/1.4 lens. Most of these pictures ended up being at f/3.5 though (shutter speed 1/60). You need the depth of focus (also you can't trust modern focus screens beyond f/2.8 or so). The 5D was great at this high ISO, though, and that was pretty crucial.

Lessons learned regarding food photography: (1) Use a shorter focal length with a closer focus limit. I had to make some pretty awkward poses to get the dishes in focus, and the huge aperture of this lens turned out not to be that critical. (2) White balance. Very warm lighting in the restaurant, and it didn't quite occur to me the fallacy of checking the LCD for white balance...while my eyes are still accustomed to the warm lighting. And there was even a white tablecloth that I could have used as a reference! (3) Some exposure compensation is probably in order.