I've been very slowly chipping away at my quest to eat at every restaurant in downtown Kingston, and on Friday I managed to cross one of the last big names off my list. Casa Domenico (35 Brock St.) is about as upscale as it gets downtown, with prices to match ($10-15 appetizers, $25-35 entrees, wine starting at $32/bottle). That pretty much explains why it took me 6 years to make it there. Fortunately, it was (mostly) worth the wait.
The food at Casa Domenico is modern French/Italian, with tons of big, rich dishes and pricey ingredients (foie gras was in at least 3 of the menu items). I opted for bacon-wrapped scallops as an appetizer, which came served on top of a crispy potato pancake thing, with a sweet corn purée and crème fraîche. Everything was delicious, though the bacon tasted a little too much like it came from the A&P meat section. Not bad, but not what you'd expect on a $12 appetizer.
My entree was a tuna-three-ways type thing - tuna carpaccio with arugula, mustard seed crusted seared tuna with marinated onions, and black pepper tuna with foie gras and caramelized fennel. The carpaccio was kind of mediocre. Tuna has a fairly subtle flavour, and the olive oil basically drowned out the taste, and turned the texture from that soft, melt-in-your-mouth feeling that makes tuna sushi so darn good to kind of slimy. Fortunately, the rest of the dish made up for it. The mustard seed crusted tuna was perfectly cooked, and the marinated onions added a nice spicy kick. The black pepper tuna was also great, with the fennel giving it a bit of sweetness, and a thin slice of seared foie gras adding some ridiculously over-the-top smoky richness. I'm not the world's biggest fan of foie gras from an ethical perspective, and under most circumstances I can take it or leave it flavour-wise, but it definitely worked here.
I also had a few bites of the roast duck with mashed potatoes and duck confit, which tasted pretty delicious from my small sample.
For dessert, I had a vanilla crème brulée flambé, which was basically just regular crème brulée with some overproof rum on top, set on fire for presentation. The presentation was definitely cool, but the super-strong rum totally obliterated the vanilla flavour, and made the crunchy top (which is basically the reason you order crème brulée) kind of soggy. It was still tasty, but it took what would have been an awesome dessert and made it slightly less so. I had a bite of the tiramisu too, which tasted great (and was soaked in just the right amount of booze).
All in all, it was a great meal, and the quality was definitely in line with the prices. Highly recommended if you're looking to splurge.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Chefs and DJs - A Revelation
In a rare moment of mental clarity, I just made a huge realization. Cooking and DJing are exactly the same thing.
Think about it. The processes of making a dish and DJing a set are fundamentally similar, and both activities share a common set of skills. Anyone can put on an album, or throw some spaghetti in a pot with some canned sauce, but to differentiate yourself and provide a higher quality experience, you need to understand the interrelationships between different objects (songs for DJs, ingredients for chefs), and combine them in ways that work. Sometimes that means tried and true combinations - garlic and onions, hip hop and funk. Other times it means innovating and finding hidden relationships between seemingly opposing things. Grant Achatz mixes olive oil into ice cream with orange and vanilla, to mind-blowingly delicious effect. Sebastian and Kavinsky, who opened for Daft Punk on their Alive 2007 tour, warmed the crowd up with a mix of electro-house and Rage Against The Machine. Genius.
The analogy extends even further when you consider the development of a chef or DJ. To develop as either, you need to familiarize yourself with a huge database of existing objects. In general, the more songs you know, the more effective a DJ you are, because you can finely tune your setlist to achieve very specific moods and flows. As a chef, being familiar with a huge variety of ingredients lets you adjust your dish to perfectly evoke or complement a given experience. Sometimes you want to hit on familiar themes, other times you want to surprise people with something new. It depends on the audience.
And, of course, there are techniques for both. Learning the rules as a chef involves mastering cooking and preparation technique. Knife skills, ability with various heating methods, and presentation, among other things, all contribute. As a DJ, beat matching, equalization, and mastering the art of flow - sequencing songs to create a shifting dynamic without too many abrupt changes - contribute to your overall success. And, as with any art, once you have learned how to follow the rules, you can figure out when to break them (see above - olive oil ice cream, Rage Against The Machine dance music).
The one place where DJs and chefs are notably different is in their handling of requests. Chefs take them as a matter of course, since ordering from a menu is essentially requesting a certain experience. Most DJs I know (including me, back in my Clark Hall Pub DJ days), on the other hand, do not like requests. I chalk this one up to the fact that DJs need to create one experience that's palatable to an entire room, whereas chefs can target individual palates with each dish. Most (not all, but definitely most) requests just don't fit in with the flow of a party. Usually, the people requesting songs are the people who don't like what's currently being played, and if you're a competent DJ, you've figured out the vibe of the room, and are playing to the majority. Football team social? Odds are you will be playing dirty rock and roll, liberally spiced with top 40 hip hop, with a side order of songs from whenever the people at the party were in high school. It's the DJ equivalent of spaghetti bolognese. Simple, predictable, popular with just about everyone. And, almost invariably, someone will come up and request some Tom Waits, or Black Flag, or *insert incredibly specific European techno subgenre here*. Please don't do that.
It is interesting to note that many of the world's foremost chefs aren't offering menus in their restaurants these days. Tasting menus are becoming extremely prevalent, in which you pay one price for a multi-course menu that is decided ahead of time. This is basically the chef's way of adopting the DJ ethic of knowing your craft really well, and then asking the customer to trust you to put together a high quality experience.
Finally, since the internet is basically a repository of every idea you could ever hope to think of, I am not the first person to notice this relationship, though I did arrive at it independently (I am the Liebniz of the chef-DJ relationship). Heston Blumenthal, chef and owner of the Fat Duck, host of In Search of Perfection, and subject of my personal man-crush, has created a dish where he combines seafood with an iPod loaded with sea sounds to activate the auditory region of the brain while eating. And this guy totally beat me to commercializing the idea. He calls himself DJ Chef ("Spinnin' the beats while cookin' the treats"), and claims to be the only entertainer in the world who will simultaneously DJ and cater your special event.
The only DJ/chef in the entire world, eh? I think I've finally got myself a plan for after I finish this silly masters in engineering.
Think about it. The processes of making a dish and DJing a set are fundamentally similar, and both activities share a common set of skills. Anyone can put on an album, or throw some spaghetti in a pot with some canned sauce, but to differentiate yourself and provide a higher quality experience, you need to understand the interrelationships between different objects (songs for DJs, ingredients for chefs), and combine them in ways that work. Sometimes that means tried and true combinations - garlic and onions, hip hop and funk. Other times it means innovating and finding hidden relationships between seemingly opposing things. Grant Achatz mixes olive oil into ice cream with orange and vanilla, to mind-blowingly delicious effect. Sebastian and Kavinsky, who opened for Daft Punk on their Alive 2007 tour, warmed the crowd up with a mix of electro-house and Rage Against The Machine. Genius.
The analogy extends even further when you consider the development of a chef or DJ. To develop as either, you need to familiarize yourself with a huge database of existing objects. In general, the more songs you know, the more effective a DJ you are, because you can finely tune your setlist to achieve very specific moods and flows. As a chef, being familiar with a huge variety of ingredients lets you adjust your dish to perfectly evoke or complement a given experience. Sometimes you want to hit on familiar themes, other times you want to surprise people with something new. It depends on the audience.
And, of course, there are techniques for both. Learning the rules as a chef involves mastering cooking and preparation technique. Knife skills, ability with various heating methods, and presentation, among other things, all contribute. As a DJ, beat matching, equalization, and mastering the art of flow - sequencing songs to create a shifting dynamic without too many abrupt changes - contribute to your overall success. And, as with any art, once you have learned how to follow the rules, you can figure out when to break them (see above - olive oil ice cream, Rage Against The Machine dance music).
The one place where DJs and chefs are notably different is in their handling of requests. Chefs take them as a matter of course, since ordering from a menu is essentially requesting a certain experience. Most DJs I know (including me, back in my Clark Hall Pub DJ days), on the other hand, do not like requests. I chalk this one up to the fact that DJs need to create one experience that's palatable to an entire room, whereas chefs can target individual palates with each dish. Most (not all, but definitely most) requests just don't fit in with the flow of a party. Usually, the people requesting songs are the people who don't like what's currently being played, and if you're a competent DJ, you've figured out the vibe of the room, and are playing to the majority. Football team social? Odds are you will be playing dirty rock and roll, liberally spiced with top 40 hip hop, with a side order of songs from whenever the people at the party were in high school. It's the DJ equivalent of spaghetti bolognese. Simple, predictable, popular with just about everyone. And, almost invariably, someone will come up and request some Tom Waits, or Black Flag, or *insert incredibly specific European techno subgenre here*. Please don't do that.
It is interesting to note that many of the world's foremost chefs aren't offering menus in their restaurants these days. Tasting menus are becoming extremely prevalent, in which you pay one price for a multi-course menu that is decided ahead of time. This is basically the chef's way of adopting the DJ ethic of knowing your craft really well, and then asking the customer to trust you to put together a high quality experience.
Finally, since the internet is basically a repository of every idea you could ever hope to think of, I am not the first person to notice this relationship, though I did arrive at it independently (I am the Liebniz of the chef-DJ relationship). Heston Blumenthal, chef and owner of the Fat Duck, host of In Search of Perfection, and subject of my personal man-crush, has created a dish where he combines seafood with an iPod loaded with sea sounds to activate the auditory region of the brain while eating. And this guy totally beat me to commercializing the idea. He calls himself DJ Chef ("Spinnin' the beats while cookin' the treats"), and claims to be the only entertainer in the world who will simultaneously DJ and cater your special event.
The only DJ/chef in the entire world, eh? I think I've finally got myself a plan for after I finish this silly masters in engineering.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Islands
There has been a bit of a post drought around here lately, which our team of Superfluism analysts believe was caused by a combination of solar flares, sharp rises in grain prices on the global market, and electoral irregularities in Lake County, Indiana. Not to worry, we believe we have ironed out the kinks.
Montreal, Quebec's Islands have a new album called "Arm's Way" coming out soon, unless you have the internet, in which case it is already available. If you don't have the internet, but are reading this anyways, that's strange.
The last Islands album "Return to the Sea" was eclectic, a little rough around the edges, poppy, and a pretty darn good album. I've only listened to the new one a few times so far, but it sounds like there's been a fair amount of stylistic maturation. The song structures are much more involved, and occasionally tread pretty close to full out prog-rock territory. It is also super-produced, with tightly packed layers of instrumentation on just about every track. "Pieces of You" is a good example - it has bass clarinet. Sweet. Also, the song title is an intentional homage (?) to the Jewel song of the same name, only the pieces in this song are literal pieces of people, which makes this song considerably creepier than most of the Jewel catalogue.
Montreal, Quebec's Islands have a new album called "Arm's Way" coming out soon, unless you have the internet, in which case it is already available. If you don't have the internet, but are reading this anyways, that's strange.
The last Islands album "Return to the Sea" was eclectic, a little rough around the edges, poppy, and a pretty darn good album. I've only listened to the new one a few times so far, but it sounds like there's been a fair amount of stylistic maturation. The song structures are much more involved, and occasionally tread pretty close to full out prog-rock territory. It is also super-produced, with tightly packed layers of instrumentation on just about every track. "Pieces of You" is a good example - it has bass clarinet. Sweet. Also, the song title is an intentional homage (?) to the Jewel song of the same name, only the pieces in this song are literal pieces of people, which makes this song considerably creepier than most of the Jewel catalogue.
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