Amuse Bouche
We started with this tasty little treat: A slice of cucumber topped with little bits of watermelon, a dollop of blue cheese and a little watercress. I think cucumber is pretty much the most foul vegetable and is nearly impossible to make it taste good, but this totally ruled. I guess because it mostly tasted like watermelon and blue cheese. And surprisingly, the delicate flavors of the cucumber and watermelon weren't masked by the strong blue cheese either.
Crispy Pork Belly
Dannng. I took one bite of this and started crying my eyes out! Honestly, not because it was so good, although it was. I was crying because I had a root canal that morning, and was very carefully trying to only chew on the left side of my mouth. Unfortunately I bit down really hard on the right side where the root canal was, and I haven't experienced that much (physical) pain in years. After regrouping in the bathroom for 5 minutes, I returned to the rest of my pork belly. It tasted like bacon, but with a completely soft, melt-in-your-mouth texture. I could eat this every day if money and cholesterol weren't issues.
Truffled Risotto
Hell YEAH! At long last, Jenny G ate some black truffles. 22 years in the making, right? This was extremely rich and decadent and I had a hard time eating all of it, tooth problems aside. But I suffered through it! Truffles taste like clean dirt and I can't believe that people pay thousands of dollars per pound for these things. I am so glad I finally got to try it, for real. Now I can really relate to real food critics, which brings me one step closer to my goal of one day being the restaurant critic for the NYT.
Cherry Sorbet
This was a little pre-dessert course. It was pretty tasty, but half melted when it arrived and extremely hard to get out of the bowl.
Chocolate Mousse with Passion Fruit Sauce
The Chocolate Mousse was encased in a hard chocolate shell, like a really fancy klondike bar. It was delicious, and the passion fruit sauce was the perfect tart balance to the rich chocolate. yummmmm. I should also add that my cell phone memory got full of pictures so that is why I have this crappy picture that Duane Reade totally cropped all funky so you can barely see the dessert that should be perfectly centered in the pic.
Pastries
This is the plate of pretty pastries the pastry chef sent out at the end. Some of them were pretty weird. Ariana, her mom and I all wanted to try each one so we bit these already bite sized treats into thirds. The one that was like a peach gummy bear was my favorite. Sorry about the cropping again. Totally not my fault.
Ariana's Birthday Picture
They put a candle on her plate! She got pana cotta. Angela got the pancetta and blue cheese dessert, which I unfortunately did not get a picture of. I am all about bacon/pancetta for dessert though. Look how pretty Ariana is!
