Celebrations

[beetiger]

There are only a few things I’m really willing to spend large amounts of money on gratuitously. One of them is travel; the other is fine dining. Give me the option to spoil someone I care about in the process, and you've hit my true weakness.

I decided to finish up a weekend of eating energy bars in lieu of food, pizza with incorrect toppings, peanuts out of the con suite, and late nights at Houlihan’s in fursuit by changing gears entirely, and taking lediva to Morimoto, the new restaurant in Philly opened by the Iron Chef Japanese, for our anniversary. (Two whole years, can you believe it?) It's probably the first time in my life I've gone to a place like this while it's still trendy, but once someone reminded me that it was there, I couldn't help myself.


The room is done in curving stone designs on the walls, the ceiling an undulating wave of wood slats, like the bottom of a boat through the funhouse mirror. The seating glows gently in bright colors that change slowly over the course of a few minutes from green to blue to purple to pink to red and around again, across the whole space, light gently coming up through the frosted glass table. Each table has a small lamp on it that gives a sense of lava lamp meets sex toy. The large number of black clad serving staff seem efficient, but not harried, despite running back and forth with plates of wonder, lobsters split through their middles and shrimp fried stiff and made into towers and bowls of sizzling rice, all of which were very easy to covet while waiting between your own courses.

Morimoto is well known for doing omakase type dinners, "chef's choice" tasting menus put together on the whims of the chef to show off personal skill or seasonal ingredients. I was afraid we wouldn't be able to do this, because I'm not able to eat raw fish right now (sigh!), but because it was a Sunday night and a bit slow, they were willing to do an all-cooked omakase for me, side by side with the standard one for LeDiva. I was thrilled to hear this.

Seven slowly presented, tiny but gorgeous courses took us well over two hours to go through. I wouldn't recommend doing this with someone whose company you don't really enjoy, and would recommend only going with a fellow hedonist. Omakase like this is at least as much a sensual experience as it is sustenance, and you need to get into the right mindset for it.

The first few dishes were fish. There was tuna and toro tartare, and thin slices of marinated hamachi, and glistening raw scallop for lediva.For me, a cocktail of shrimp and abalone with tiny vegetables marinated in lemon juice and olive oil, thicker pieces of hamachi steak seared just through that you could tell were obviously of the same quality that they served raw, and a tiny piece of the reddest sockeye salmon I'd ever seen, paired with a tomato wedge of just the same color.

I've known since I was a young girl occasionally taken to fancy events that you know a dinner is upscale when they serve an extra dessert in the middle, and sure enough, there was an absolutely exquisite sorbet course, a delicate frozen scoop of yuzu (a Japanese citrus fruit) with bits of candied peel, and wasabi, which blended much much better than you might expect, though you couldn't taste the wasabi supposedly in the tiny beignet which accompanied it.

After this, we got beautifully thin slices of Kobe beef done lightly with a teriyaki marinade, just barely cooked through. I've never actually had Kobe beef before, and was more impressed than I expected to be. I'd typically thought the premiumness of Kobe beef was mostly a story and a show, but I think this may have been the best red meat I've ever had. Julia asked me what made the beef so special, and I told her that the fat in the meat is marbled through because the cows get massages and beer. Everything's better with massages and beer, really. The meat was served with a yellowish root vegetable which we were told was "Japanese sweet potato", which I need to find out more about.

Then we waited a long time for sushi, five pieces each. This was the part at which I got sincerely envious. The anago and unagi side-by-side comparison on my plate was marvelous, and the chunk of crab certainly taken certainly taken from one of the giant appendages that you could see at the sushi bar, nearly the size of my own arm, was wonderful, indeed; but I couldn't help coveting the perfectly pink piece of toro over on Julia's side, which she claimed was the best sushi she had ever had. I believe it.

The dessert course was relatively disappointing, both because I was kind of hoping for a rice course separate from the sushi, and because it didn't really go very well with itself, a fluffy chocolate mousse and a soft but solid pear sorbet sharing a bed of apricots, suddenly seeming trendy fusion rather than naturally composed the way the rest of the meal was. I was tempted to ask for a rerun of the yuzu sorbet instead.


Still, a ridiculous amount of money, incredibly well spent. I'd gladly do it again, but not very often.