A dessert bar so popular that they are closed from Monday to Wednesday, don’t accept reservations, and don’t accept parties greater than four.
Talk about being selective!
Charl and I sat by the bar where we watch pastry chef and co-owner, Chika Tillman, and her assistant assemble dessert with the meticulosity of surgeons. As they wordlessly picked and primed each dessert component, one would have thought they were carrying out neurosurgery or handling single-cell microbacteria.
You get a Prix Fixe menu (and wine pairing) made up of an amuse bouche, a choice of dessert and petit fours. Our amuse bouche was a pineapple sorbet with peppercorn gelee. Am I suppose to enjoy this or break into applause for the sub-ingenous take on peppercorn?
Neither was technically possible, I'm afraid.
For our dessert of choice, Charl had the vanilla ice cream topped roasted bananas, with coconut agar agar and caramel soup while I chose the warm chocolate tart with pink peppercorn ice cream and red wine sauce
The warm chocolate tart would have been faultless had it not been for the fact that it wasn't warm at all. Still it was chocolate and watching it gush out of its tart shell was emancipating.
The roasted banana is hidden by the ice cream and too insignificant to induce any satisfaction. If I were to piece the nibblers together, it would not have been bigger than my index finger. The difference between caramel soup and caramel sauce is quantity. Multiply caramel sauce by about 20 times and you get caramel soup. So much for the novelty factor.
For our Petit Fours, we were handed chocolate truffle, coconut-coated toasted marshmallow and some grapefruit gummy. The first thought that came to my mind was, “That’s it?”
How do you even begin to understand the brouhaha surrounding something that missed the '-licious' factor? The entire experience felt oddly constrained as I felt like I had to be on my best behaviour or something.
One minute I felt like I was in some contemporary art gallery, incapable of understanding how random sloshes of paint constituted art; the next minute, I felt as if I had been sent to a posh boarding school, governed by anal-retentive no-nonsense minders.
Although our waiter was friendly, he wasn’t very helpful. There was an all-too-obvious lack of communication like he couldn’t even tell us what was going to be served in the petit fours and it seemed he didn’t dare ask either dessert chef (who were standing a good 10cm away) for fear of disrupting their Zen-like state of mind.
Maybe it's just bad luck since others seemed to have a more palatable -albeit more normal- menu. Forget neuroscience, molecular gastronomy and even Zen, this was one weird science experiment.
But we were happy to see each other. AWWW.
ChikaLicious
203 E. 10th St., New York
Phone 212-995-9511 (though they don't take reservations)
2 comments:
a pity you didn't enjoy yourself. had quite a lovely and cosy experience when I visited last year.
better luck next time, i guess... haha
Post a Comment