September 6, 2009 - wd-50

wd-50 on the Lower East Side in New York City, NY
http://www.wd-50.com/

I originally heard about this restaurant while browsing a Business Week magazine in something like 2005. Business Week doesn't usually write about restaurants (which makes sense since a restaurant doesn't really appeal to a national audience), but the review made it sound really good. So when we finally made reservations, I was ecstatic. We also had the advantage of booking during this recession, which meant that it wasn't too hard to get a table. We just booked it through open table and it only took about 10 minutes to find a good time.

More...

We ordered the nine course tasting menu. This is actually an amuse bouche, four appetizers, four main courses, an intermezzo, and two desserts (I don't know how that is nine courses either). For what it's worth, you can actually do a decent job of making your own tasting menu from the a la carte menu as most items on the tasting menu were off the regular menu. You could quite easily order the eggs benedict (a must), a foie gras, a couple entrees, and the five course dessert menu between a couple and walk out spending less than half the price of two tasting menus. But of course, you'd only get to try half as many things. Which would be the equivalent of going to the best place on earth and choosing to spend half your time sleeping instead of embracing every moment of your magical journey. No really, magical.

Our waiter was very unobtrusive when we were ordering our food. He left us alone, but made sure that we were attended to. He asked us if we wanted drinks, and when he saw that we were looking at the wine menu, he asked if we needed help. WD-50 isn't one of those pretentious places with a sommelier to steer you into the most expensive bottle. In fact, they didn't have a sommelier at all. To help with the wine selection, our waiter informed us that there was a house winester that could help us with any questions we might have. For real. A winester. Like a hipster sommelier? We're not sure, and we didn't utilize him, but I love the idea.



Our second course was the everything bagel. I had seen pictures of this on WD-50's website, so I was pretty excited to actually pick up this baby bagel and eat it. I very quickly ran into a small problem though. This bagel isn't made out of bagel. It's actually bagel flavored ice cream. How does this work? We weren't sure either, so we asked our waiter. I was expecting some answer like, "we have perfected the art of making bagel flavored ice cream", or maybe even, "blend an everything bagel into little crumbs then throw it in an ice cream maker", but what we got was a full description of the entire course which goes something like this.

Wylie starts by soaking an everything bagel in a vat of milk for something like 12 hours until it turns essentially into a milky mix. This bagely milk is then used to make ice cream. Once the ice cream has been made, it is shaped into a mini bagel cut in half. They then spray paint the bagel (with edible paint of course) with bagel colored paint (I'm totally going to look for this next time I'm at Home Depot). Finally, sesame seeds are dropped on top so that it looks exactly like a mini sesame seed bagel. I even tried to pick mine up, but when I stuck my finger in ice cream, I mentioned to Ellie that she would need her spoon for this. She thought I was just being strange, and decided to ignore my comment. She then picked up her fork and knife to cut a small piece off. Only when she tried to cut through melty ice cream did she discover that she wasn't cutting into bread, then figured out that I said something about ice cream.

So that's the bagel part of one dish. The dish also included salmon threads. Threading or dehydrating food actually became a quite common experience by the end of this meal, but at this point it was still very exciting (I can't believe I got use to threaded food). I'm not sure how he did this, but he basically took lox and turned it into the texture of that dried shredded pork that you find in Chinese pork buns, or the pink stuff in sushi (most commonly found in futo maki but I think I'm the only person left who orders that). The cream cheese was freeze dried and shaped like a tiny flat piece of cheese. It was like astronaut ice cream, but cream cheese. And it was on top of pickled onions, which wasn't my thing. I think there was something else under the bagel, and maybe a picture will help me remember the specifics. I just realized that I haven't actually talked about the food quality at all. The presentation was understandably phenomenal, and the food itself was of very high quality. It was certainly strange to have an ice cream course made out of a breakfast served as an appetizer for dinner, but the whole thing worked. Everything was "cooked" perfectly, and the flavors were very compact and complimented each other well (how could they not since we were basically served a lox and bagel with cream cheese).

The next course was foie gras, although it may be hard to tell from the picture. It was actually a pate, but the assumption is that Wylie pureed foie gras as opposed to using pate quality liver. He reduced passion fruit, and stuffed the foie gras with it. Then he dehydrated Chinese celery and I think sweetened some more Chinese celery. I've never actually had a whole foie gras dish to myself, as this is usually a very rich appetizer that Ellie and I split.

I was also expecting a small portion, but it was actually a huge amount of foie gras. As with most of his dishes, it was also very dense. So it was a very rich course, a large portion of the rich item, and it tasted like he had somehow made it more dense than foie gras is supposed to be, which is pretty incredible since it's just fattened liver. It was a flavor sensation all in my mouth. The passion fruit complemented it extremely well.


Course four was our last appetizer course. It was the egg dish. Our waiter was kind enough to substitute one of our egg ravioli dishes with Wylie's famed eggs benedict. And boy are we glad we asked for that. But before we talk about the eggs benedict, I'd like to say that I recall mentioning to Ellie that my egg ravioli course was the best course that I had so far. It was flavorful yet light, which was refreshing after such a large foie gras course. The ravioli was stuffed with scrambled eggs (as opposed to cheese or ground beef). And it came with a smooth charred avocado. It seemed like he bruleed guacamole. But guacamole from a Haas avocado picked off a California tree in April. I don't know how he got a hold of such a good avocado, but he did. This dish also came with "potatoes", which are those tiny little brown specks that look like carob pieces, or blackened course salt. I laughed in the waiters face when he told me what they were. They were pretty good though, and as usual, everything worked well together.

I'd like to mention that this dish got much worse when it was cold, and Ellie basically hated it. She had a few things going against her. She had just had the eggs benedict course, the dish was naturally much worse cold, and she likes food very hot. Much hotter than I like food. When Ellie gave me her remaining portion of this dish (after I had my eggs benedict portion), I also didn't want to finish it. This after just proclaiming that it was my favorite dish of the night. The eggs benedict was that good.



The fifth course was "cold fried chicken". In retrospect, this is the dish that I want to eat right now. After a couple weeks of thinking about WD-50, the cold fried chicken wins best dish. Although I didn't think so at the time. You surely can't tell from the picture as this looks like a pretty normal course (of course, the bagel looked normal too), but what's going on here is actually quite amazing. The chicken part of the fried chicken was boiled in a bag, with some kind of seasonings I imagine. Or a magic bag. It was then refrigerated, and at a later time was covered with bread crumbs. The chicken tastes like fried chicken, but it's very clean as it is never actually fried at all.

The thing sticking out of the "potatoes" is a chicken skin chip. This was sort of like bacon, or pork skin chips, but it was skinny so less grease stuck to it. The potatoes were actually ricotta cheese transformed into mashed potatoes. I'm not sure if it was made with one part potato and 3 parts ricotta, or if it was actually just ricotta, but it was extremely tasty and didn't really taste overly cheesy (it also didn't taste anything like potato which is why I'm not sure if this was made with potatoes at all). And it was topped with Caviar! It occurred to me that this was my first caviar experience. I think I'm going to go on a mission over the next year to try about five different dishes with caviar (or maybe I'll head to the caviar bar at the ferry building). I'm certainly not ready to fork out $150 for a caviar service add on to a tasting menu (as Cyrus offers), but I'd like to hunt down little tastings. Finally, the orange that you see on the plate was reduced Tabasco sauce. Somehow, this packed in additional Tabasco flavor but it wasn't exponentially hotter. Which was awesome.

We were then served a fish course which wasn't that great. I don't remember anything about it except that the fish was tough but undercooked. Neither of us were impressed and we agreed that it was the worst course of the night.

Course seven was duck leg. As you can see, it looks like a big ravioli. This dish was also very underwhelming. We agree that this was the second worst dish of the night. I'd like to point out that these were the only two dishes that weren't phenomenal. And unfortunately, they weren't even good. One of the sides was popcorn pudding though. I think he took a small amount of popcorn and a large amount of popcorn salt and used those as his flavorings for pudding. It was... weird. Not amazing weird, just... weird.

Our last savory was lamb. This was cooked to perfection. Really it was barely cooked, but the lamb was good enough for that to be plenty well done for me. Ellie also enjoyed the lamb immensely, even though meat that rare is usually only acceptable in duck. And even then it's pushing it. I'll comment more when I see a picture and remember the rest of the dish.