I ate eggs twice last weekend
I hate eggs as a stand alone food item although I do like things made from eggs. Despite this, I wound up eating eggs twice last weekend.
The first serving of eggs came Friday night at wd50 as part of a tasting menu. For those of you who aren't fans of Iron Chef and the like, Wylie Dufresne the chef/owner of wd50 on the now-tourist-choked Lower East Side does all manner of interesting things with food under the not-very-well-liked label of "molecular gastronomy", which essentially is a catch-all term for a type of cooking where chefs use chemicals and cooking methods to take traditional food items or dishes, deconstruct them and present them in a different manner. So my first batch of eggs this weekend was "eggs Benedict" - essentially 2 cubes of egg yolk jello with 2 cubes of "fried mayonnaise", essentially 2 cubes of fried panko with a liquid center of mayo inside. Oh yeah, and there was some really tasty bacon chips with it. Still didn't love the taste of the egg yolk but the dish made me laugh so I call that a win.
The second serving was in a somewhat different setting. On Saturday afternoon we went to a hole-in-the-wall Egyptian place in Astoria called Kebab Cafe that is known for excellent offal preparation. Basically, it's a kitchen with a handful of tables in it where you the guy at the stove tells you what he's got and you tell him what you want. We were a large party so we just got pretty much every appetizer on the menu including sweetbreads, fried lamb brains (crunchy, creamy and delicious), tongue and some amazing whole grilled sardines with sweet onions. The egg came as part of my favorite dish of the whole day - ground lamb cheeks topped with a poached egg that the owner scrambled into the cheek meat at the table. The taste of the lamb and spices overpowered the eggy taste while the egg added a luxurious texture to the lamb. Genius. That afternoon was one of the times I was happy to be a New Yorker. Where else could you sit in an Egyptian restaurant in a mostly Greek neighborhood listening to Calypso music on the owner's stereo?
The first serving of eggs came Friday night at wd50 as part of a tasting menu. For those of you who aren't fans of Iron Chef and the like, Wylie Dufresne the chef/owner of wd50 on the now-tourist-choked Lower East Side does all manner of interesting things with food under the not-very-well-liked label of "molecular gastronomy", which essentially is a catch-all term for a type of cooking where chefs use chemicals and cooking methods to take traditional food items or dishes, deconstruct them and present them in a different manner. So my first batch of eggs this weekend was "eggs Benedict" - essentially 2 cubes of egg yolk jello with 2 cubes of "fried mayonnaise", essentially 2 cubes of fried panko with a liquid center of mayo inside. Oh yeah, and there was some really tasty bacon chips with it. Still didn't love the taste of the egg yolk but the dish made me laugh so I call that a win.
The second serving was in a somewhat different setting. On Saturday afternoon we went to a hole-in-the-wall Egyptian place in Astoria called Kebab Cafe that is known for excellent offal preparation. Basically, it's a kitchen with a handful of tables in it where you the guy at the stove tells you what he's got and you tell him what you want. We were a large party so we just got pretty much every appetizer on the menu including sweetbreads, fried lamb brains (crunchy, creamy and delicious), tongue and some amazing whole grilled sardines with sweet onions. The egg came as part of my favorite dish of the whole day - ground lamb cheeks topped with a poached egg that the owner scrambled into the cheek meat at the table. The taste of the lamb and spices overpowered the eggy taste while the egg added a luxurious texture to the lamb. Genius. That afternoon was one of the times I was happy to be a New Yorker. Where else could you sit in an Egyptian restaurant in a mostly Greek neighborhood listening to Calypso music on the owner's stereo?
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