wd-50

For those who are food nerds, the name wd-50 will bring out the curiosity usually associated with molecular gastronomy. By that, I mean someone will either call it absolute bullshit or have dreams of futuristic plates of unusual flavor combinations and textures. For those who don't care as much, wd-50 is the restaurant run by Wylie Dufresne, who elicited a dreamy reaction from Top Chef's much reviled Marcel Vigneron. (Marcel later went on to rip off one of Dufresne's dishes). wd-50 is one of the few restaurants in this country dedicated to molecular gastronomy and avant-garde cuisine in general. Although I've eaten my fair share of foams, I've never been to one of these places, and so on a recent trip to New York, Lauren and I couldn't resist trying it out.

wd-50 is a restaurant that will, at the very least, get you thinking. When I hear people say that food can never be art, I want to start by having them eat this food. They'd probably think it was ridiculous, but the mere fact that it could instigate debate shows how artful it is. Sustenance could never inspire such good conversation, could it? When it's just curry, burgers or lo mein in your mouth, the thoughts you're having basically boil down to "Mmmmm." wd-50 will have you utter words like "postmodernism" and "subverting the dominant paradigm". I have mixed reaction to this type of food, and I'll discuss this more at the end of the post, but first I'll go through our tasting menu. I should note that, not being able to use my camera, I was worried that the beauty of some of the plates wouldn't come through in my descriptions. Thankfully, I found photos on flickr that a man named Peter had taken the night before we ate. They are great pics, and with his permission, I am using them for my post. You can see the pics here too. If you want professional pics, wd-50 has some on their website. So here goes, the tasting menu:

Cured hamachi, lemon leather, cilantro sorbet, paprika. This was supposed to be the amuse-bouche, but it played better as a small appetizer, as it has several components and more than a few bites. The hamachi was very fresh, and the lemon 'leather' complemented it very well. The cilantro ice cream was incredibly refreshing, and played with the paprika 'soil' for a perfectly savory ice cream. But the combination of all four ingredients (five, if you count the mustard seeds scattered around the dish) made an incredibly complex and refreshing layered bite. Needless to say, I'd never had such a combination of flavors before, but it was one of my favorite dishes of the night.

Pizza pebbles, pepperoni, shiitake. This was the first of several dishes that aimed to recreate lowly classics, and deconstruct and reconstruct them. I'm generally not a big fan of deconstructed dishes. When I cook, the process of cooking all the ingredients at once is what makes the eventual flavor of the dish. Deconstructed dishes tend to lose that feeling of cohesiveness and make the dishes lose their identity. sometimes it can work, especially when trying to expose very fresh ingredients. However, I tend to be let down by such dishes. This was another let down. The "pizza pebbles" had the consistency of the inside filling of a combo. With the 'pepperoni emulsion' and the tasteless shiitakes, it actually also tasted like the inside of a combo.

Knot foie. I knew Wylie Dufresne loved to play with foie gras, so I was very excited about this course. I absolutely love foie gras. First of all, it was a tour de force in presentation. The foie gras terrine was presented in knot form, and Lauren and I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how it was done. Accompanying the foie were home made rice krispies which recreated the crunch usually provided by toast. There was also kimchi puree and iranian raisin puree, which subtly complemented the richness of the foie. Of course, you can't go wrong with foie gras, but I really enjoyed this preparation.

Sweetbreads, cabbage-kaffir, water chestnuts. This was our least favorite dish of the night. It's not often that you go to such a high-end place and eat something that's actually bad. However, the combination of cabbage and kaffir lime should not be reproduced. It tasted a bit like sewage. I thought the sweetbreads were perfectly cooked, but without a sauce to back them up, they were a bit bland. Even the crisp pickled water chestnuts couldn't save the dish. However, the plate it came on was a lot of fun:

Beef tongue, fried mayo, tomato molasses. This was another classic that had been desconstructed and reconstructed. However, this time, it was spot on. The idea, I think, was to reproduce a BLT or burger flavor combination. The thinly sliced beef tongue had been pickled, which gave it a corned beef-like texture, but with a much lighter feel. Combined with the fried mayo and molasses, it gave the flavor of a most delicious BLT, and yet managed to stay refined and tactful. On the side were chopped up lettuce and something else for extra textural appeal.

French onion soup. Again, a deconstructed and reconstructed classic. This one, though, fell a little flat again. The bowl came with a beef broth and madeira wine combination, with two gruyere 'ravioli' floating in it. The ravioli were in fact actually a gruyere sauce encapsulated in a bubble using the sodium alginate and calcium chloride technique, by now a staple of molecular gastronomy fiends. This wasn't the first time I'd seen this technique, so I wasn't particularly wowed. Also, it added little to the dish in terms of consistency. Together with the broth, the ravioli were very unexciting. We figured that by dipping the rye crackers and onion paste that rested on top of the bowl, you did in fact get a nice onion soup taste. However, it was a lot of show for such a simple and unremarkable dish. Even the best French onion soup is still just a French onion soup, and I hope for a little more in that caliber of restaurant.

Surf clam, watermelon, garlic chive, fermented black bean. I'm not a huge fan of clams, so I was a little worried about the dish. However, this was surprisingly tasty and refreshing. The clams were perfectly cooked and tossed in a light vinaigrette. The 'compressed' watermelon added a nice crunch to the dish, and complemented the sweet clam flavor. Lauren didn't like the black beans, and while I admit they were strong, they provided a nice contrast to the sweetness of the dish. The chives just added more seasoning and gave it a nice flourish. Though we weren't amazed by the dish, it was a very nice seafood presentation and gave us a multidimensional flavor profile.

Lamb belly, black chickpea, cherried cucumber. At this point, all of the dishes had been rather small, and I was hoping for something large and meaty (please, no jokes). This really fit the bill. The lamb belly was thinly sliced up like bacon, and the charred, which made it deliciously chewy but not fatty. The chickpeas were presented in a parmesan-chickpea puree, and were also fried and place on the dish for texture. The puree and lamb went superbly together, but were reminiscent of more traditional flavor. However, combined with the cherried cucumbers (I'm guessing they were just cucumbers marinated in cherry juice), the dish was again almost refreshing. There were little strands of baby lemongrass strewn on top of the food to add a little color, though they didn't provide much more flavor.

Argan oil horchata, cantaloupe, carob. I was curious about this one, mostly because my only other exposure to argan oil was in Morocco, where they use it the soften their skin, particularly on their hands. I was expecting this to be some kind of palate cleanser, but it was more of a dessert amuse-bouche. This was Lauren's favorite course, and I don't disagree that it was delicious and extremely original. The horchata had a almond-like flavor and the carob gave it a very sweet kick. Inside the horchata was a little ball of cantaloupe sorbet.


Fried butterscotch pudding, mango, taro, smoked macadamia. This was our favorite dessert, and, like the other dessert, was absolutely beautiful to look at. The individual components were a little odd. The fried pudding was sickly sweet, and the taro ice cream was salty. Combined, though, and with the mango, they represented an incredible balance of contrasts that made the dish taste like mango pie a la mode, with the difference in the temperatures also providing an added dimension. The smoked macadamias were also delicious.


Soft chocolate, avocado, licorice, lime. As you can tell from the picture, the presentation was again pristine. The pastry chef at wd-50, Alex Stupak, was apparently stolen from Alinea, which is no simple feat. He's very young, but very talented, and his plates are incredibly artful. In this dessert, a chocolate ganache spiral was bisected by a licorice syrup, and flanked by lime sorbet laying on top of crumbled chocolate cookies. There was avocado cream dotted around the plate, which was more of a garnish than anything. The individual components of the dish were great, but I felt they lacked cohesion. Plus, I don't really like licorice, which didn't help with the dish. Still, it was damn pretty.

We ended the meal with brown butter-passion fruit marshmallows, which were intensely sweet but also delightful (see picture at the bottom of the post). Afterwards, we kept discussing the highlights and lowlights of the meal, but also pondered the value of molecular gastronomy. This may not have been the best meal I've ever had, but surely is was the most thought-provoking.

Molecular gastronomy has a bad name, I think. Often, chefs who are interviewed about the subject will respond with quips like "all cooking is molecular gastronomy" to deride what is really the postmodern progression of cooking. However, they all know what it means, and since El Bulli and its chef, Ferran Adria, who is widely considered to have pioneered the movement, is always at the top of chefs' 'great restaurants' lists, (along with the Fat Duck, another restaurant inspired by science) they are clearly intrigued by the process. Adria himself describes his restaurant as more of an experience than a meal, and this is about where I fall on the subject. By now, the techniques used by Dufresne et al are mostly all around 5 or 10 years old, and the challenge for them is to apply them to making great food. As wd-50 showed, this can be harder than it looks. As a stand-alone theme, it may take too much attention away from the food, which is the trap restaurants like wd-50 can fall in. Still, the playfulness and presentation of these meals, along with unusual flavor and texture combinations makes for a great experience.

In general, food is still not considered art in this country. I often hear people unable to see the difference between great fine dining and delicious classic food (ethnic food, burgers, etc.). Yet great chefs are creators. Their challenge is to make unique food that distinguishes them from a large field of other wannabes. Much like the artist, the chef expresses with his/her food a philosophy on dining. For a long time, chefs were constrained by the lazy palates of diners, who would rather eat dishes they were familiar with. Even when experimentation began, it was considered risky to stray too far from flavors that didn't provide a reference point to the diner. Slowly, though, diners opened up their minds to the possibilities of food. This course is similar to other arts: painters were, for a long time, first judged by their skills in accurate representation of real life. Even when new techniques came along, like impressionism, they were used to replicate scenes that their viewers could relate to. However, when artists like Picasso, or chefslike Adria came along, they broke barriers that led people to reconsider their comfort zones and see the world in a different way. This is, of course, a very trivialized view of art history, but the parallels are quite true, I think.

However, food isn't just art, and that's where my concern with molecular gastronomy for its own sake lies. Cooking is a craft, first and foremost. Before a dish can be anything, it has to taste good. For a restaurant to be amongst the best in the world, it must display a mastery of cooking alongside its originality. This isn't necessarily true for other forms of art. As my friend James puts it, the noise band Wolf Eyes are very avant-garde, but are they great musicians? Similarly, Jackson Pollock might be a great artist, but can he draw a nice still life? For them, it's irrelevant. However, food falls under the scrutiny of craftsmanship because we eat every day, and thus our palates are less easily won over by radical breaks from tradition. We also have very physiological reactions to food, which are harder to control than purely emotional ones (of course, this could open the doors to a debate about epiphenomenalism, but I say we not go there). To put it simply, the food has to taste good. This has often been most accurate criticism of molecular gastronomy by top chefs, such as Thomas Keller, who said that food needs to draw an emotional response to really be successful, and that can only be done by using flavors that are based in tradition, even if they are used innovatively.

I, of course, often think about what kind of restaurant I would like to open. I'd like to be avant-garde, but I also know that I want to be a great cook before I'm a great chef. For my food to resonate with my diners, I want them to understand the flavors, and to have an emotional and physical reaction to it. Could I do that by making foams and encapsulating liquids? Not if the food isn't great. I'd rather make the best pizza in the world that be at the forefront of nitrogen usage in food. My favorite meals have always come from places, such as Komi, where the creativity is just restrained enough by the quest for executing perfect flavors. However, I won't deny molecular gastronomy a place in my kitchen if I think it would enhance the appeal of a dish. The much-bashed Marcel Vigneron, in the Top Chef Season 2 finale, made a dessert dish of caviar and blini where the caviar was made with coffee using the sodium alginate technique. This was a great play on the caviar and blini classic, and I'm sure also tasted great. This was a great use of such advanced techniques. However, I'm not sure I could ever get to the point of Heston Blumenthal's inclusion of an ipod shuffle with his seafood dish to listen to the sounds of the ocean while eating it. Still, he makes compelling arguments for his use of such things.

Voila, a little bit of food philosophy for you. Here are those marshmallows:

wd-50
50 Clinton Street
New York, NY 10002
212.477.2900