Ruth Tobias

There are bricks. There are woodplanks. There are blackboards. There’s a communal table. There are two-tops and four-tops, not too many, spaced just so. Voices rise & fall; things clink & other things rustle. The familiar charms of Table 6 are so simple they’re almost caricature. There’s an open kitchen; when I glanced in, I saw the perfect chef, a bit plump, a bit scruffy, grinning, a salmon-colored ascot set jauntily about his neck. No, wait. It was a handtowel draped over his shoulder. Damn. Still, it was pink; it might as well have been a cravat. He might as well have been drawn that way.
He certainly cooks that way, the way you’d expect a cartoon chef to cook—with warmth & humor on the one hand, seasoned judgment & precision on the other. He cooks like he’s cranky & jolly by turns, like
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only more French. His cooking shows he knows where humble meets haute. While, given bad directions, so many of his peers speed right through the intersection, he hangs out on its corners. That’s his turf, more than that of any chef I’ve encountered of late.
A case in point: the signature tater tots.

Where everybody else just keeps on adding truffle ad nauseum, he—Scott Parker, according to the website—studs his little cutie-patooties (yeah, I said it—see, I’m a softie when you get to know me & don’t serve me crap) with Marcona almonds, giving them at once extra crunch & suaver savor. Though I thought them slightly undersalted, they were otherwise perfect, right down to that smoky, slightly tart tomato jam—a jam to give that other jam I mentioned recently no mere black eye but a total Klitschkovian ocular meltdown:

Considering them along with the other cases in point, I’d go so far as to say Parker’s a master of texture. Everything balances the crispy with the creamy, the succulent with the firm until you’re just about to kiss your fingers and go, “mmmwwahhh!”, except then you’d have to admit this place was turning you from a secret softie into an open, running sap.
That goes, speaking of schmaltz, for the pot pie—sure enough “blitzed,” per the menu, with chicken fat & topped, per the Director, with a nugget of dark meat, “very juicy, very well-fried…a very nice touch” (hey, who’s writing this?)—

as well as my grilled striped bass atop a pool of malt-vinegar-infused mayo below a cylinder of celery-root kugel below a how-the-hell-do-you-like-that surprise piece of frisée tempura:

Between the two was enough technique to play a piano & paint a picture simultaneously from another room without eyes or hands. The pastry crust was rose-petal tender; the deep-fry batter was delicate enough to dip a feather in; the sauce had body & tang; the silky browned skin on the fish made me want to take it off & wear it, like the Ed Gein of piscivores.
Not having room for white-chocolate crumpets with blackcurrant jam (well, & not having trouble comparing myself to a screaming psychokiller), I went home a broken woman.
But I may be made whole again; salvation’s nigh. On March 16, Table 6 starts serving brunch. The biscuits come with lamb gravy. Pray they serve mine in a baptismal font.

***UPDATE: Swimclub 32 is now CLOSED.***

Choosing Swimclub 32 over Thëorie in episode 1 of Pimp My Meal!, Slim explained that the menu seemed to have “more dishes beyond the range of my kitchen skills” than did the latter. As dining criteria go, that one’s about as solid as they come; I don’t care to frequent any eatery whose kitchen would have me as a chef either—unless it’d let me make my famous grapefruit, pistachio, water chestnut & canned salmon salad, otherwise known as broke-ass delight. Sometimes I add gherkins. Actually, the Director has an old joke book in which the author advocates saving all the pistachios that won’t open until you have a serving bowl’s worth, then sitting back to watch hilarity ensue as your guests sweat to budge the shells. I always thought Hilarity Ensues would be a great porn name. Until the Oscars the other night, I’d never heard the thing Jon Stewart said about how you’re supposed to add your first pet’s name to the first street you lived on to get your porn name. Thing is, the first street I lived on was named for a locally beloved football coach, making my porn name Starshine “Bud” Wilkinson. Which would go over just fine, I guess, in the right clubs.

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hot hot hot!!!

Speaking of being hot in the right club, if you are or just want to feel like you are or just want the people you’ll be spending the evening looking at to be, & you or they intend on staying that way or at least feeling like you’re or they’re staying that way by drinking lots & eating little, Swimclub’s your place. The huge mirror hanging over the bar is itself gorgeous, providing a literal framework for its beautiful subjects.

But if, as for Slim (& myself in this post, for that matter), you describe “your place” as one that offers dishes you don’t have the talent or inclination to make yourself, you’d best beware the implied corollary to your definition: that the offerers themselves do have the ability & motivation to follow through.

Let’s just say one or the other trait didn’t characterize Swimclub’s kitchen the night we were there.

If that’s putting it more delicately than I usually have the talent or inclination to put anything, it’s out of deference to the bar staff, whose ability & motivation very nearly compensated. Though the wine list is small, its heart is in the right place, devoted to smaller producers & more obscure blends & listing plenty of bottles in the $30 range; our Verget du Sud was absolutely lovely, light & bright. & though it wasn’t on the cocktail list, our bartender/waitress—so bubbly I wish her name were Pippi, though the Director said it was Angelica when I asked later if we remembered to ask, but I think he was making that up because then he added, “Huston,” whom I’m almost positive she wasn’t—wasn’t only obliging but downright eager to make me an espresso martini, which she did with a full shot of coffee to counterbalance sundry liqueurs (IIRC, Kahlua, Irish cream & Frangelico). It was fine & dandy.

Not so this scene-of-an-accident-looking scallop ceviche.

I’m not sure it contained anything besides scallop & bell pepper. I’m not sure the scallop & bell pepper it contained contained scallop & bell pepper—those little bits just seemed like placeholders for where their flavors were supposed to go. If chiles & lime juice were supposed to be there too, they must have gotten stuck in the tomato jam, arriving only after all the other ingredients gave up on them & left.

Yes indeed, just like post-accident traffic, the cloying mess of that jam brought everything else to a standstill. The Director said it reminded him of something you’d put on a playschool afternoon snack, like maybe saltines & peanut butter—which, come to think of it, all mashed up together, would have made for a much more successful kind of ceviche.

Likewise, if it looks like a duck quesadilla & acts like a duck quesadilla, it may well be a duck quesadilla—but that still doesn’t mean it tastes like one (so maybe the below photo belongs here).

As the Director notes, duck has a fairly low “gaminess threshold,” one it was bound to pass as soon as it came into contact with those spiced mashed black beans (themselves admittedly delicious, moist yet sturdy & punchy), never mind 3 different dressings (mole, herb cream & annatto oil). Really, I’m all for paying triple for once-humble ethnic snacks tarted up beyond recognition, but in this particular case, workhorses like pork & chicken might simply have been better equipped to pull their own weight than was that languishing anatine diva.

Next up: the signature beef,

served raw for searing not on these rocks, which formed the base of the bar,

nor this one, which held the check,

but this one, heated to 650 degrees—

which begins to beg the question, why not call it Rockclub? The music’s loud & pounding enough.

Anyway, what can I say about this dish the photo itself isn’t tearfully confessing? Or, okay, maybe it’s me who’s cryingly ashamed of having paid over $20 for some dip, plus maybe 3 bites of beef—& not from the kind of cow that gets daily massages & sees a Jungian therapist in its field of 4-leaf clover, either, just your average New York strip—as well as less than 1 layer of red onion & less than 1/2 of a new potato, all of which I had to cook myself. On a rock. With sticks. To see me, you’d think I also wore dirt & spoke in a series of grunts. (Oh, wait.)

As for these mussels,

they were, sitting fat in their bath of coconut milk & Pernod, quite good. You know, just like everybody else’s mussels.

Slim, I fear this particular ride is beyond pimping. It’s no bombed-out jalopy, mind you—more like the kind of flashy European sports car whose erratic performance is irrelevant to those who can afford it; they just like to see themselves, & have others see them, sitting in it, whether or not it’s going anywhere.

***SAD TO SAY: THE DISH CLOSES AS OF 5/4/08. Read & weep.***

An old boyfriend of mine used to say that at all the worst moments. I just Googled it to see if he’d been quoting someone, & found myself watching the entire length of Mary Kate & Ashley’s “I Am the Cute One” on YouTube (I’ll spare you a link). Then I Googled something else he used to say, “Do you love Stevie Wonder? Yes I do, yes I do,” a move that likewise (despite “not matching any documents”—can anyone name that hiphop tune? Be much obliged) led in more unexpected directions than a Choose Your Own Adventure paperback (including toward countless fansites & forums for & parodies of CYOA itself, my favorite perhaps being this one, a link I’d be compromising my core values to spare you).
So, yeah, things are going smoothly here in the den of unemployment.

Anyway, if The Dish Bistro could talk it would say the same, with a similarly sassy little side-to-side tilt of the head. Of course, the people inside can talk, & what they have to say confirms as much. First the reservationist called me “sweetie.” Then, far from giving us the attitude The Director & I arguably deserved when we walked in the first night of Restaurant Week only to express our consternation that it was Restaurant Week—I’d forgotten all about it, RW being IMO a whole rigmarole of dumbed-down repertoires & harried service that defeats its own promotional purpose—the hostess cheerfully went to great lengths to make sure we were quickly seated at the bar where the regular menu was available. Then there was our bartender/waitress; an inordinate amount of time having passed between our appetizers & our entrees, she thanked us for our patience before uttering 1 of the 2 most stirringly mellifluous phrases in the English language, “This round’s on me”—the other being her opening line: “For tonight’s wine special, the Malbec is half off.” Which pretty much guaranteed that in no time we were half off too—our stools! Ba-dum-bum.

The menu likewise has charm written all over it, literally: each bears the signatures of owner Leigh Jones & chef Carl Klein beneath an inked inscription, “Enjoy!” It also credits by name, in not-so-small print, “The Crew Who Makes It Happen”—a gracious gesture if ever there was one, the sort that underscores for me just why, all else being equal, I’ll take the Dishes & Deluxes & Kitchens & Black Pearls over the Kevin Taylors & Spagos of the world any day. People work here, not just names & toques & suits.

Ironically enough, the only thing that didn’t strike me as totally adorable was the dishware, which kept reminding me I need to get my teeth cleaned.

As for the food on the dishware—I could pretty much write “appealingly simple” or “refreshingly straightforward,” followed by “enough said,” & be done with it; it’s that kind of good solid everyday stuff. But seeing as how happy hour’s a ways off—clock, you’re killing me here—I guess I’ve got some time to elaborate.

These here are the fries with truffled aioli & pecorino. While I usually like my fries like I like my male strippers, flashing a bit more crispy golden skin, surprising subtlety was what this dish had to show, no one earthy element overpowering another.

They may look a little disheveled (heh! no pun intended, but what the hell), but these roasted mushrooms, with their cipolline and more pecorino and fried shreds of polenta and schmear of, presumably, red wine–mushroom glaze, really came together, dark & meaty-sweet.

Mom, close your eyes: this here’s my lusty ham-&-cheese sandwich (she’s a JewBu so totally rolling over in the grave she doesn’t even have yet & may never, depending on which way she decides to, you know, go).

The imported ham was rosemary-cured, the Swiss aged, the mayo housemade. Only the bread lacked something…oh, flavor, that’s it. If it was indeed sourdough as indicated on the menu, it was self-hating sourdough determined to pass as white. A little rye or pumpernickel flava’d have gone a long way in my utopian vision of a diverse sliced-bread society. But at least it had a nice crumb.

The Director’s lamb pretty much speaks for itself. No, not Baa, I was cute—cute cute cute cute cute. More like I’m tender, warm & serene. Isn’t that a Stevie Wonder lyric? Guess I’ll go Google it for the next few hours.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, Two Mikes Don’t Make a Wright (although they do make for one fantastic fluke of a film, especially Mike Leigh’s diabolical segment), & mixed feelings about two venues in the WTF-were-they-thinkingly-named Big Red F Restaurant Group—Jax & Centro (as expressed here)—don’t make for high expectations for a third.

But it turns out that at Lola, which Slim picked for me to try in Part 2 of Pimp My Meal!, the pickings are anything but slim. They’re as gordo as they are guapo; though kudos are therefore undoubtedly due primarily to chef-partner Jamey Fader, as near as I could tell from our prime seats near the open kitchen—whence everything that emerged looked so vibrant, so multihued & multifaceted, as to nearly make the famished Director & me crema our ropa interior—it was sous chef Austin Hall who was running the show yesterday at brunch.

So my sincerest gracias go to him, first for this:

While I prefer thicker, slightly oilier, salt-dustier chips like the ones I used to get at La Verdad back in Boston,

(image swiped from the hopefully laid-back author of Minty Choco Chip)

& while the house salsa was routine, the salsa verde, made with tomatillo & what I suspected & confirmed was of all things green apple, was a sweet-&-sour startler; the one made with charred Fresno chiles & what I suspected but did not confirm were smoked tomatoes was so suave you almost forgot it was spicy, like Javier Bardem playing Dracula.

Thanks are due second for this:

Just for kicks, I happen to have read & re-read this well into my retarded 20s:

But now, in my insatiable 30s, I’m planning on eating & re-eating Lola’s inspiration therefrom. The open-face omelet that formed the basis for my Green Ham & Eggs had a moist, dense quality that was vaguely reminiscent of a Taiwanese oyster pancake, but instead of shellfish, it was loaded with chunks of chorizo verde—not as spicy as I’d have expected from the noun, but as herb-touched as I expected from the adjective—& topped with a silken layer of queso añejo (aged, queso fresco tastes less like feta & more like, I’d swear, gruyère). Swayed by a slightly puzzling but no less tempting array of all-aquatic add-ons—blue crab, fried oysters, grilled shrimp, lobster, smoked salmon—I asked for the latter & got not sliced lox but shreds of a lightly smoked (presumably in-house?) filet. Though I’d rather have had the crab hollandaise that was supposed to come with the dish but didn’t, perhaps due to an incorrect assumption that I couldn’t be so flummoxed by my own taste for the excessive that I’d want to mix sausage & cheese & crab & salmon all together, it (the salmon) was lovely, mellow as opposed to briny.

Best of all, though, was that hash—the onions caramelized to a crisp; the tangy spangling that was, I believe, browned & crumbled cotija; the whole thing nicely spiced; the cubes of potato themselves fried to melt-in-your-mouth (an adjective I swear to use only when it truly, totally applies, & who’d have thought it might ever apply to the funky spud? but there you have it) perfection.

Thanks third for the Director’s Lola Huevos, an awfully humble name for a dish of lobster enchiladas smothered in some sort of chipotle cream, along with refried beans & the scrambled eggs that get all the credit.

As huevos go, these are the equivalent of that tattoo of the big-breasted chick whose owner endowed it with actual implants—above & beyond sexed-up.*

*I realize it’s entirely possible that this metaphor is above & beyond sexed-up, especially considering I just heard the guy’s body rejected them. Perhaps this post will do likewise. Still, good stuff. Good coffee too, robust & thick. Oh, & tiny boxes of Chiclets come with the check—a cute-as-hell gesture, the equivalent of a guy making his tattoo of a chick wiggle her hips. I’ll stop now.

In cooking school I studied oenology under no less an authority than Master of Wine Sandy Block. Since then, I’ve taken course after wine-tasting course; spent hours shooting the shit with sommeliers; and lost many a poker round for caring less about whether I had a full house than whether Pinotage really offers hints of both lava & roasted marshmallow (mmm…I’m getting the slightest suggestion of S’mores assembled in the pit of a volcano…you?) or a Petit Verdot blend is in fact the ideal accompaniment to sauteed backstrap of venison with red molé (or was that star-nosed mole sauteed with blackstrap molasses? It’s all so confoundedly specific…).

The upshot: it’s entirely possible I know a thing or two about a vinous thing or two.
And yet I’ll never be able to couch a description of something made from grapes in terms of another fruit without thinking of the guy in Delillo’s Ratner’s Star calling a Cadillac the Rolls Royce of automobiles.
That said, it hit me last night, as the Director & I were sucking down yet another bottle of Emilio Bulfon’s Forgiarìn—I don’t know why we don’t just stick two straws in & make like ducktailed teenyboppers down at the 5 & dime—

that if it doesn’t taste like sour-cherry cola, I don’t know what does. (Oh, except cherry cola. See what I mean? Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally down with descriptors that function according to the logic of Hobbesian wit; there’s revelation in uncanny allusions to, say, the dash of black pepper in a Côtes du Rhône or the waft of pine needles from a Pinot Noir. But to say that grapes remind me of cherries is to pretty much shoot an air ball from metaphor’s own free throw line, no?)
That I should be launching into this monoblogue about the efficacy of the standard oenolexicon (or at least my grasp thereon) right now makes sense, I suppose, given that the most salient feature of Forgiarìn is that it was unheard of until about firthy years ago (per the English translation on the Bulfon website). While those buttery Chards go rancid & that jammy Cab reminds you to scrub between your toes, the gross clichés for a wine made from a grape that hasn’t been cultivated since the time of Pliny the Elder have yet to be established. That goes for all the varietals Bulfon makes from the vines he rescued—with the help of ampelographic experts who traced their roots (no pun intended—what a weird thing for me to say) back to the Roman Empire—from ancient obscurity. As I understand it, he was until very recently the only winemaker in the world to be growing the likes of Sciaglìn, Ucelùt and another favorite of mine, the exquisitely balanced Piculìt Neri;

as I also understand it, Colorado’s one of the only states in the nation currently importing them. I stock up at Divino; I humbly suggest you do likewise, & then we can have ourselves a description-off. Winner gets a bottle on me.
***We’ll return with our special guest after this brief intermission***
So there we were, knocking back our wine & noshing on a slapdash deli platter—slices of black pepper–coated salami, wedges of morbier & aged gouda, mixed nuts, crackers—when we heard a sort of scrabbling coming from behind the magazine rack. We pushed it aside & saw this:

No wonder the mouse in our house hadn’t touched the peanut butter we put in its trap—he was waiting for something to spread it on.

“The Wild Cheese”

A head of cheese raised by wolves
or mushrooms
recently rolled into
the village, it
could neither talk nor
walk upright.

Small snarling boys ran
circles around it;
and just as they began
throwing stones, the Mayor
appeared and dispersed them.

He took the poor ignorant
head of cheese home,
and his wife scrubbed it
all afternoon before
cutting it with a knife
and serving it after dinner.

The guests were delighted
and exclaimed far into the night,
“That certainly was a wild cheese!”

…O Tate, Tatankhamen, Tateuncommon, Tater Tot, you certainly are a wild poet, but how much wilder would this poem have been had you hit Racine’s come weekend brunch for a superalloy* of a Bloody Mary and this salad (I know, it’s blurry—see “Bloody Mary”) ere its composition?

How might the young hooligans have bullied this salad that foams at the mouth with not only white cheddar & fontina but also avocado & banana, popped wheat & sunflower seeds, almonds & cashews? & how might the mayor’s wife have dressed its wounds (with honey mustard, perchance)? & would not the poem then end,

The customers were bloated
& belched far into the night,
“That certainly was a Nutty Cheese Salad!”

Point being, say what you want about Racine’s, this is one startling signature, the soft & fruity & the nutty & crunchy going rabid in your mouth & you being helpless to restrain them, & now they’ve infected you to the point where you’re seriously considering adding it to your as-yet-unfinished Top 5. You won’t, of course—you know its superiors by far in inspiration & execution alike are out there, waiting to be tasted—but you’ll go so far as to admit in your sillier moments you’d consider it.

*According to my dictionary, “a heat-resistant alloy with superior mechanical properties, often having aerospace applications.” That sounds about right, the Director & I having ordered our share of rounds, & besides, this Chowhound.com thread, beloved as the site is to me, is making me want my prose to o’erflow with all that’s ugly, egregious and otherwise apparently transgressive. In fact I hereby swear to slip “unctuous,” a word I happen to find useful in its particularity, into every other post, appropriate or not, the way in that one episode of One Day at a Time that firecracker Ann Romano, as played by Bonnie Franklin, got mad at Schneider the super & sneered at him, “Yo-GURT! Yo-GURT!”, though how the invocation of a dairy product functioned as a diatribe against this man among men is lost on me now.

In case you’ve been living under a rock—which, after all, as Boulderites, you may well be (look, mother Earth, no footprints!)—this bit of common knowledge bears repeating:

Although it’s this bit of perhaps less common knowledge that caught my nystagmic eye: according to The Kitchen’s website, “We give the open bottles of wine to our staff at the end of the night.” No wonder they’re called ecoholics.

But just because I’ve already implied it doesn’t mean I’d go so far as to say The Kitchen fakes it so real it’s beyond fake. (Now that’s having your sticky toffee pudding & eating it too, which I did, & it was all it was cracked up to be—as adorably spongy as it was ridiculously sticky & pecantastic to boot.)

I’d say rather the sheer simple goodness of the food says it all about chef-partner Hugo Matheson’s ethicurean stance & its distance from mere posture—from the brand spanking newness of this soup,

tasting of the very branches whence the tomatoes & the olives (see oil drizzle) sprang, to the most curiously heartfelt, painstaking approach to a salad ever,

with its chewy golden raisins & crunchy hazelnuts, smooth globules of goat cheese & sharp shreds of radicchio, confetti of meaty purple Cherokee beans & nutty, news-to-me desi chickpeas & its unusually subtle yogurt dressing—all besprinkled with a brunoise dice of beets & carrots that practically made me choke up. Someone back there really cared about this fucking salad. & so did I.

I’d also say “with dolls called honey,” because that’s what I wrote in my notebook. That’s what it looks like, anyway, so it took me a while to remember that one of my lunch companions was telling me about these little dolls called Homies—whose novelty to me I guess goes to show I’ve been trapped under some sort of heavy object myself. Anyway, talk about ethicurean stances…

It’s a truism of contemporary cuisine—one I have pointed & will point out again & again, until it’s not—that appetizers trump entrees. The smaller the plate, the bigger & brighter the flavors; the bolder their combinations; the artsier their presentation. Why is that? Why are so few American chefs, even real innovators, willing to deviate from the meat-and-3 standard of the main course? How is it that they still defer to Chef Stouffer, the king of culinary compartmentalization?

The most obvious, depressing answer is that—for all the stats about salsa outselling ketchup & the news that some gastropundit or other voted “locavore” the most overused word of the year & the fact that your cubicle mate finally knows what panini are (even if he/she thinks he/she knows what a panini is)—the average American diner is still boring & conservative enough to insist on steak & potatoes & peas night after night after night.

Of course, said answer could be worded more diplomatically, with more dignity. Far truer, more judicious connoisseurs than I might argue that the palate, in all its symmetry, simply prefers order to chaos. It’s like our tongues are the floor plans for the grand theaters of our mouths, with some tastebuds in the loges & some in the peanut gallery & so on, all awaiting the Aristotelian drama that is dinner. Their interest needs immediately to be piqued, but it can’t just go on being piqued or they’ll pass out from all the excitement & confusion; it needs then to peak, to attain catharsis & reach harmonious conclusion. Intriguing appetizer, meaty entree, sweet dessert.

But see, I think of my mouth as a punk club and my tongue’s the mosh pit. My tastebuds want to crowd-surf & lose their shoes & have Rolling Rock bottles broken over their heads, then stumble home near-deaf & blind, not really sure what happened but exhaustedly ecstatic it did.

Which brings me back to Ocean, where I was immediately struck by the fact that, for once, the main courses appealed to me more than the starters. While the latter were mostly sushi-bar knockoffs & half-baked attempts to glorify bar snacks, the former seemed somehow harder to categorize (derogatorily or otherwise): at least on paper, they appeared more free-form, more about genuine chefly curiosity & less about hipclepticism, more playful yet less wink-wink.

Not to pat myself on the belly, but sure enough, our second course went to great lengths to compensate for our first. In fact, the blackened trout with “spicy cream corn” & invisible seared spinach (okay, it’s under the filet) almost succeeded.

I mean, obviously, a few more whole kernels would have been nice to maintain the distinction between this & this; my mouth’s not that punk. But looks aside, this dish was gorgeously more than the sum of its parts—the firm yet flaky forkfuls, the creamy spoonfuls, the buttery bittery shreds all presenting themselves in unison, more like an accidental casserole or trompe l’oeil stew than anything.

Where mine united, the elements of the Director’s dish, sesame-crusted ahi with wasabi butter, snap peas & straw mushrooms, overlapped beautifully—the rich with the bright, the crunchy with the smooth. All elements, that is, except one: the tuna itself, which, just like the yellowfin we’d started with, was utterly flavorless. To use my favorite contradiction in terms, it appeared to be missing. It was like a nutri-optical illusion; we could see it, we could even swallow it, but somehow our palates passed right through it. Or it was like it had post-aquatic shellshock or piscine Alzheimer’s. There just wasn’t any tuna left in that tuna. I could go on & on.

But I won’t. Suffice it to say 1 1/2 out of 5 (counting the bread basket) ain’t good. Happily, or at least less unhappily, Ocean upped its score with a bracing espresso martini…

& a slice of peanut butter cheesecake so light it was strangely refreshing, as though it were really sorbet only the member of a species with hypertrophied sensory mechanisms could detect. Like how bees see ultraviolet.

Going into semantic spasms, Ocean promises to “enchant the guest experience through the delight of interactive-style dining.” I didn’t get a chance to ask my experience if it felt enchanted, since it bolted just as the enormous check was arriving, mumbling a half-hearted “thanks” (followed sotto voce by “suckah”), and I haven’t heard from it since. Hmm, perhaps the mastermind behind the menu’s mission statement meant “enhance”? But to determine whether my experience had been enhanced, I’d have to know what “interactive-style dining” was, beyond just being able to, say, select among the items on the menu (you know, like when you get to click icons on your desktop! X-treme!)—and since the interactive style of our waitress was such that “interpassive” might put a finer point on it, I never did find out whether I was missing some stellar opportunity to kibitz on the line or join a round-table discussion on the soup du jour or something.

Well, you can bet your bippy—what- & wheresoever that may be—a little input from the Director & me couldn’t have hurt matters. For instance, we might have suggested using real yellowfin & jalapeno slices in the yellowfin & jalapeno dish, rather than part of some toy display from Gimme Gimme Pillow Toast .

We know those little Japanese eraser sets are adorable & all, but we were taught in grade-school not to stick either end of the pencil in our mouths for a reason: rubber & lead are very bland.

Unless, that is, they’re serving as substitutes for what was supposed to be squid fried with hot red pepper slivers. Then rubber & lead are super-spicy.

In all fairness, the idea here was dandy, crossing your basic calamari fritti with a refreshing salad of watercress & mandarin sections in a wicked orange-chile dressing. But for this kind of ham-handed deep-frying, we could’ve gone back to Dave & Buster’s & at least caught some hot man-on-man octagonal action while chomping on our breaded whatsits.

Oh, there’s so much more to say here, & said it shall be a few hours’ hence.

***

Hours since, I admit my attitude has not improved one whit. After all, among all my tests of a restaurant’s honor—to which I have alluded before and upon which I intend to elaborate fully in due time—Ocean failed the only 2 I administered it, 1 being fried calamari, the other being the bread basket we requested in hopes of salvaging something from the aforementioned yellowfin disaster—namely the oil-&-vinegar slick beneath it. That’s right, like some sort of Exxonian epicures, we tried to save the oil from being tainted by the fish.

Valiant motive, flawed measure. I know better than to ask for a bread basket; it’s like asking a slight acquaintance to wave to you on the street. The solicited gesture is bound to be stale & cold. Sure enough, turning & twisting each day-plus-old, vaguely country French slice would have done wonders for my carpal tunnel syndrome if I’d had it; then again, I’d have had to swallow my hard-won hunks plain, lest the glass shards that passed for butter pats slit those convalescing wrists. Of course, since the calamari was served sans utensils, re-injury resulting from repetitive hand-to-mouth motion would have been inevitable anyway. Said the Director: “Um, we don’t have any silverware?” Said our waitress: “Huh.” Replace the phrase “we don’t have any silverware” with “I don’t have any pants on,” and her tone would have been totally appropriate.

Now that I’ve spewed enough venom to paralyze a whole publicity firm, I’ll leave you with the promise of praises yet to be sung for Ocean. They’re few & faint, but they are worth vocalizing.

Upon lunching here with the Director at the invitation of a friend & Federal Boulevard flâneur (is there a nickname for this stretch of Asian & Latino markets & eateries of which I remain, as a relative newbie, blissfully unaware? Or have local developers with Dean & Deluca dreams truly yet to thrust the likes of FeBo or B-Fed upon us?), it occurred to me how deliciously delusional pho (in this case pho tai bo vien) can be.

1) These meatballs think they’re sausage, smooth & bouncy as coins on a bedsheet.

2) The noodles think they’re the bean sprouts—snappy, with hardly any give.

3) The broth thinks it’s any sort of tea—gently redolent of anise & lime, faintly bitter—except the one you might expect, ye olde freaky Victorian beef tea (i.e., broth for the smelling-salts-sniffing, laudanum-swilling, lace-encrusted set).

4) The scallions think it’s springtime in Saigon. Look how green! They’re practically reanimating—taking root & shooting forth anew right there in the bowl.

5) The medium has no idea how gut-implodingly extra-large it is.

Happy illusions all! But if this pho thinks it’s better than the bun thit nuong cha gio, it’s about to get bowled over (heh) by this other think coming.

The Director mixed in a little nuoc cham & a little chili paste &, voilà, a sort of goi was born—as in Vietnamese salad, not non-Jew, not least since lo, such a creature as might rise from the murky depths of fish sauce would more properly be termed a golem. As you can see, they don’t bear even the remotest resemblance.

Besides, this was tangy-sweet & salty & spicy & nutty & herbaceous & crunchy & soupy & chewy all at once. A golem is, I believe, only crunchy.