I am what you would call an equal opportunity foodie.
Expensive or fast food — it doesn’t matter. I’m all in. That’s not to say that there aren’t some problems that can come with this type of mentality when it comes to food. But I’ll address my expanding waistline in a future column.
Last week, my beautiful wife Maya and I celebrated our 34th anniversary. Unfortunately for me, I did not realize this important milestone was coming until about a week before. The time from when I realized this important date was coming and the day itself can officially be called the “Scrambling to come up with a plan” phase.
Fortunately for me, whether it was just my lucky day or the stars were aligned just right, it didn’t take me long to come up with a perfect way to celebrate. I managed to score a reservation at Lilo, one of four restaurants in San Diego to earn a Michelin star this year.
Now, to be perfectly honest, I was a little hesitant to reveal the name of this restaurant — not because we didn’t have an amazing experience (we absolutely did) — but because of some of the challenges I experienced during our visit there, which, if you read on, you will see are completely self-inflicted.
I just want to make it perfectly clear that as amazing as Lilo was, they couldn’t possibly address how clueless I can be at times.
I’ve been lucky enough to eat at a few Michelin-starred restaurants in my life, and they have all been amazing. There’s another thing they have in common. They tend to be pricey. And because they are pricey, I want to get as much value out of my meal as humanly possible.
How this objective manifests itself is that no matter what is served, I will eat it.
For example, Maya, and pretty much anyone who has ever met me, knows that that I absolutely can’t stand bean sprouts. They are vile weeds. Ever since I was a kid, if I was served a plate of noodles with bean sprouts on them, I would pick them out one by one using a magnifying glass if I had to.
Maya jokes that if she ever needed to “do me in,” she would simply sneak in some bean sprouts in a cupcake or something. What I’m trying to say is that in my world, bean sprouts would simply not exist if I had my way.
And yet, this becomes a conflict when I’m at a Michelin-starred restaurant. It’s the one exception where I could be served emulsion of bean sprouts topped with bean sprouts as jus layered with shaved bean sprouts a la mode and I would reluctantly scoop it in my mouth.
Fortunately, Lilo didn’t force me to make that choice. There were no bean sprouts in that night’s tasting menu.
However, here is where the challenges come in. Because I wanted to savor every bite and experience every nuance of flavor and texture of my meal, the challenge was the number of items served where I had no idea what was being served.
Each course was small, delicate, presented with a variety of ingredients, which the servers dutifully explained. But in my inexperience I had no idea what they were. Each course had a main ingredient — scallops, sea urchin, crab, which I definitely knew, but they were served with things I never heard of. What is lemon verbena? What is white alyssum? What is kohlrabi?
Each course was an adventure in flavor and I savored every bit of it.
But the real challenge was discerning which parts of each course were meant to be eaten and which were just part of the presentation. One course had two shells filled with seafood and other exotic ingredients but was centered on a plate with other plants and what looked like a river rock. Were we supposed to eat the plants? And I normally wouldn’t think of eating a rock, but maybe they made foam that was supposed to look like a rock? (It was just a rock).
Another dish was rock crab served with marigolds with an infusion of cucumber and lime, but was served on an intricate plate made entirely of ice. It was an ice plate. It was about the size of a small frisbee. Were we supposed to eat the plate or wait a while and drink it?
Next to the ice plate came a small plate with two black rolls that looked like cylindrical rolls of chocolate on a bed of more river rocks. By now, I already knew I wasn’t going to eat the rocks (“fool me once”), but what about the rolls?
Was I supposed to use the rolls to soak up the crab and the sauce from the slowly melting ice plate?
It took me a minute to figure out that those rolls were actually steamed towels meant to clean our hands after eating the crab.
Let me just say that I didn’t eat the towel, but if I had, as with everything else at Lilo, I’m sure they would have been scrumptious.
Chan, a Poway resident, writes about family and community life and shares humorous views of topics of the day.