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Dinner at Red Rabbit by Former Alinea Chef Ostrander
We celebrated a Winter in Lake Tahoe: a Culinary and Libation Excursion at the Red Rabbit Restaurant in Midtown last night. This restaurant is located across the street from my office at Lyon Real Estate, so we decided to park in the garage below my office. As a top producer, I have a free parking card that gets me into the garage after hours. I don’t use it very often, which is why I forgot that once the card lets you in, it will only let you back out. You can’t use it to get in again. And I left my keys to the office at home.
But that’s neither nor there as my husband figured out what to do and came to the rescue. We had contemplated taking a cab because there were 5 or 6 cocktails to sample during dinner. Former Alinea chef Scott Ostrander put together the menu and made us dinner at this special event. When we arrived, they were running a little bit behind so we had to wait be seated.
When the hostess asked us to follow her, I wondered where we were going because the restaurant is long and narrow. It’s in the old Red Lotus space. She led us outdoors to a screened in area heated by overhead lamps and a roaring fireplace. There were two long tables covered with white linens. The centerpieces were clear flower vases filled with blue lights at the bottom, and stuffed with white chrysanthemums, featuring tree branches sprayed white with little pieces of glitter stuck to the branches, nestled in with a few silver spiral cat toys. Part of the room’s perimeter was dotted by unadorned evergreen trees.
Our first course was a hot toddy, served on a round platter cut out from a tree. The platters served as chargers, surfaces sanded smooth and about an inch and half high, with the perimeter in its natural raw tree bark state. These were like the plates we had been served with at Alinea Restaurant last month. Except in Chicago it’s permissible to serve food on wood but it’s against the law in California — a food fact I did not know. We sucked on a cinnamon stick coated with honey on one end and tossed back the hot toddy.
The photo above is the salad of the earth, featuring beets, carrots, celeriac, wild flower 
petals, arugula nestled on a bed of what seemed to be pumpernickel bread crumbs sprinkled with mushroom powder. But I wouldn’t swear to it. This was followed by a rainbow trout that is quite possibly the best rainbow trout I’ve ever had (to the right). It’s from Lake Tahoe, of course. Ostrander served the trout on a piece of pine, covered with banana leaves (because you can’t serve food on wood), surrounded by heated pebble stones, on top of which we poured “lake water.” You’ll probably spot a photo of this in Sacramento Magazine because there was a photographer from that publication wandering around.
From the soil, our next course was mushroom soup, made from wild mushrooms, with a little cream, I suspect, floating on top. We were instructed to eat it by spooning the soup into our faces using two leeks sticking out of the bowl. My leeks were rather weak and didn’t work correctly or maybe I just wasn’t shoveling fast enough. Instead, I took a bite of leek and spooned into my mouth the delectable soup and was in heaven. Gobble, gobble leeks. Yum.
Our main course, venison, was served on a stark white plate with a big ol’ lump of mashed potatoes next to it. It looked like an entire loin and probably was since it had two ends. It was far more food than a reasonable person should probably consume but I ate almost all of it anyway, and my husband finished his. I don’t really like venison, I thought, but this was mouth-watering delicious and not at all gamey. I would order venison again now.
The final course was a snowman with a small carrot for a nose and a chocolate log. It came paired with a Cider Flip, which is apple cider and rum and I’m not sure what else, maybe an egg white but definitely cinnamon, and it was served warm. This is when I noticed the emperor had no clothes. Everybody at the table had the same expression on their face. That of agony. But nobody was saying anything. My husband, always a pillar of truth, turned to me and whispered, “This is terrible.” I agreed. The chocolate log was not really chocolatey even though it looked like a fudgey Tootsie Roll, it tasted more like bitter tofu, with the consistency of rubber. The guy across from said, “Hey, this snowman tastes just like a snowman.” And he meant it. He was right.
But as my husband pointed out, perhaps dessert was meant to be the Cider Flip, and the snowman / chocolate log was just decoration. The dinner was fabulous enough that dessert didn’t matter.
Scott Ostrander is going to Yountville.
A Night at Alinea Restaurant in Chicago
If my mother had been buried instead of cremation, she’d be rolling over in her grave right now about such excess. There’s no way around it — dining at Alinea Restaurant in Chicago is a bit extreme in terms of taste (unique, unparalleled), number of courses (there were 18) and cost (you will shudder, the wine flight alone was the cheapest part at $150 per person). It’s a food adventure, which is why I was drawn. It’s also a challenge to get a reservation. Challenges are what this Sacramento short sale agent faces each and every day. Challenge is my middle name. We were going to Chicago for the Thanksgiving holiday and, by hook or by crook, we very much yearned to snag a reservation at Alinea for Saturday night.
Every day we checked email to see if the restaurant had contacted us. Religiously, we signed daily into Alinea’s Facebook page and checked for reservations. Finally, on Friday night, we received an email that Alinea was releasing a table for four. The problem was we were a party of two. We tried to persuade family members to go but none had an interest. We called some of my husband’s old friends from grade school — I kid you not. We checked Facebook again and found a few couples who had expressed an interest in sharing a table. Bingo.
You don’t make a reservation at Alinea. You reserve tickets for dinner. And each ticket varies in price depending on the time of the year and occasion. Lucky us, for Thanksgiving, these tickets, with tax and gratuity added in, ran about $800 for 2 people. My mother would say think about the starving children in China. Instead, I thought about my last Bank of America FHA short sale: I deserve this.
The door is unpretentious. We opened it. Behold, a long hallway strewn with a bed of hay. Scattered pumpkins. Hay bales. Low lighting. Spiced apple scent. A round tub, waist high, filled with hot water and bobbing glasses of apple cider beckoned. We scooped up a small glass of cider and entered the restaurant. We were greeted and directed toward the kitchen on the right. A huge room filled with too many tables and chefs to count, a whirl of stabbing, stirring, pinching, cutting, slicing, dicing, chopping, tossing, mashing. Mesmerized, I entered the kitchen. I thought this was like The Kitchen Restaurant in Sacramento, and that I was encouraged to mix and mingle among the chefs. Wrong. Neophyte. Short of grabbing the back of my sweater to yank me back, I was escorted in the opposite direction.
We entered a room to the left of the stairs and were introduced to our table mates. There were about 5 other tables in the room. All of the other guests were seated elsewhere, which was a little bit disappointing because part of the fun, I presumed, would be to check out the guests. I wanted to get a good hard look at the kind of people who would spend $1200 for dinner, and that’s without the white truffle option at an additional $150 per person, which we were offered. But everybody in our room looked like normal, run-of-the-mill people.
Our seat mates were on their first date, we later discovered. She is an associate professor of marketing in Lansing, Michigan. He is a student in Boston. He thinks Chicago is the best place in the United States to live. He used to think that place was Seattle, but now that he’s been to Chicago, he would love to live in an igloo. She is absolutely beautiful with long dark hair, an infectious smile and a warm handshake and, as my husband pointed out when she left the table, she clicked off wearing what I would call to-die-for boots.
I don’t have the time this morning to describe every course. I’d still be sitting here by lunch and I haven’t yet had breakfast. So, I’ll do my best to briefly give you an idea. Four bowls about the size that would hold Cheerios were set before us, each filled with tiny pebbles, the type you would find floating along the bottom of a river stream. Into the pebbles was set a 4 x 4 block of ice with a hole drilled in the middle, but not all the way through. I stuck my finger in it. My husband said: That one is yours.
The waiter brought us each a glass straw about 3/8 inches in diameter and 10-inches long. The straws were filled with a pumpkin-squash mixture, a thai pepper and we were instructed to slurp. I finally removed my straw because stuff was stuck inside and sucked it from the other end. Voila.
One course was nothing but a leaf. A small leaf about the size of a nickel. An oyster leaf. But it was very oystery. This was followed by several courses of seafood involving king crab, lobster and a razor clam. If you’ve never seen a razor clam, they are long, like about 5 inches and an inch or so wide, sort of flat. You could play a musical instrument with each half if you wanted but I behaved myself because I needed my other hand to lift the glass of wine that seemed to be continually filled with nectar from exotic faraway lands and tended to by the natives.
I learned many things. I discovered that the fungus moldy stuff that grows on corn cobs — who knew there was even fungus to start with — is actually very tasty. But you’ve got to ask yourself, how hungry do you have to be to think about eating the mold off a corn plant? Well, I was ready to toast starving people everywhere. We also enjoyed a course made up of a very hot potato and pared with an extremely cold potato that should have been named a Minnesota winter meets summer in Sacramento.
The main course for the evening was lamb. Two round slices of rare lamb. Two round slices of a roulade, and two more round slices of fried lamb fat. Small circles, smaller than a baseball in diameter and slightly larger than a golf ball. With this course, we were given a tray of accompaniments, 60 (six across, ten down) dots, blobs, splats, tiny towers of taste extraordinaire. The idea was to sample each with a fork of lamb. Short of putting our faces on the platter to lick it clean, we pretty much managed to scoop off every morsel.
And the wine kept coming. Just as we were ready to pass out, the waiters brought us balloons made from green apple taffy and filled with helium. The balloons were edible and we were supposed to eat them. I poked a hole and slurped up the helium. When I spoke, the woman across the table from me broke into uncontrollable laughter. If I had closed my eyes, I would gone to sleep but before I dozed off I would have said this tastes just like an apple.
I kept my eyes open for the dessert. The last dessert. I show you a photo of it here. The waiter brought out what looked like a rolled-up sheet of silicone, unrolled it across the table. It fit perfectly. Then, a couple of chefs popped up out of nowhere and began to decorate the table. A spoonful of orange. A spoonful of lemony yellow. A spoonful of chocolate. Spoonfuls of other types of syrups and sweets, very psychedelic and groovy. Everything happened so fast and my head was already spinning from all of that wine, but I could swear two chocolate coconuts appeared and suddenly exploded before our eyes, dropping masses of chocolate, fudge chewy bits, white marshmallowy things, who the heck cared? It was dessert supreme, pushed to the extremes, with every flavor imaginable. It was like all of your favorite desserts mushed into one. I felt like Gollum coveting the ring: My precious!
This was the part where I could have easily put my face flat on the table and left it there until morning.
