![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Agricole pt. 2
Aug. 18th, 2011 04:37 pmWent to Bar Agricole again last night. Maybe I'm getting narrow but this place serves very specifically my idea of what fine cuisine should be like. Straightforward presentations, nothing architectural or contrived. Medium sized plates that are sharing-friendly. Their consistently interesting ingredients make for one of the most impenetrable menus I've seen, but none of it is bullshit. Most interesting and exotic, yet so close to home, was the noyaux ice cream, flavored with apricot kernels. Best bet is to bring your smartphone and look it all up on Wikipedia while you dine.
Our table was late and I got kind of cranky so they kept us there with free champagne and appetizers. Glad we stayed, I had a dish of spaghetti with sea urchin, little yellow tomatoes, and bits of fried pork fat, and OH EM GEE was it delicious. My dining companion had a seabass filet, and I had to convince him that the skin was there because it was part of the dish and should be eaten! I really love the sows-ear-to-silk-purse approach to cooking because, like the apricot pits and the fish skin, the most wonderful flavors are sometimes in the lowest places, it just takes a lot of skill to tease them out. (It's hard. Believe me, I've had a LOT of failures along those lines.)
Curiously, my client for the ranch dinner a few weeks back is the chief provider of produce for this restaurant. If you check out the "Our Farms" slideshow, the very first photo shows the spot at Heart Arrow where that dinner was served. So if I drive a hundred miles for a $20 salad, turn around, and drive all the way back to where it was grown, does that make me a "locavore"? LOL.
Our table was late and I got kind of cranky so they kept us there with free champagne and appetizers. Glad we stayed, I had a dish of spaghetti with sea urchin, little yellow tomatoes, and bits of fried pork fat, and OH EM GEE was it delicious. My dining companion had a seabass filet, and I had to convince him that the skin was there because it was part of the dish and should be eaten! I really love the sows-ear-to-silk-purse approach to cooking because, like the apricot pits and the fish skin, the most wonderful flavors are sometimes in the lowest places, it just takes a lot of skill to tease them out. (It's hard. Believe me, I've had a LOT of failures along those lines.)
Curiously, my client for the ranch dinner a few weeks back is the chief provider of produce for this restaurant. If you check out the "Our Farms" slideshow, the very first photo shows the spot at Heart Arrow where that dinner was served. So if I drive a hundred miles for a $20 salad, turn around, and drive all the way back to where it was grown, does that make me a "locavore"? LOL.
