thought this was about the noodle bar in the east village...........

left shoe shuffle wrote on May 6^th, 2008 at 5:38pm:







To Dine at Momofuku Ko, First You Need Nimble Fingers
by FRANK BRUNI
Published: May 7, 2008
WHAT you’re about to read may prod you to try for a reservation at Momofuku Ko, so it’s incumbent on me to say this right off the bat:



You can’t fixate on a specific night. You can’t fixate on a specific hour. You must have patience, an efficient computer and nimble, fast-moving fingers, because the way to grab one of the 12 coveted seats is to click-submit a reservation request at precisely 10 a.m. precisely six days before you aspire to dine there and then hope against hope and dream against dream and promise the cyberspace gods your firstborn male child if they speed your electronic wish to Ko before all the other electronic wishes get there.

Drat! The gods must be lazy. It’s 10:00:09 and the computer is saying that every reservation has just been taken. Try again tomorrow, and the day after that. Promise the gods your chocolate Lab as well.

Ko doesn’t come easy, and that’s a big part of why it is, and will no doubt remain, the most talked-about new restaurant this year.

But it’s noteworthy beyond its addling all-computer reservation system and the intense, revelatory pleasures of its partly Asian, partly French, wholly inventive food.

Under the direction of the young chef David Chang, who has been celebrated to the point of deification, Ko boldly investigates how much — or rather how little — ceremony should attend the serious worship of serious cooking.

Although dinner at Ko is a two-hour, eight-course, full-throttle commitment, it’s also an experiment in subtraction, in calculating which niceties can go without the enjoyment ebbing as well.

Proper tables and place settings? At Ko you belly up to a plain counter that wraps around a plain galley kitchen, and your chopsticks rest on a wine cork.

Lumbar support? At Ko you straddle a backless stool. Lovely scenery? There’s a plywood wall to your back and, in front of you, cooks so close you can count their beads of sweat as they not only prepare and plate your food but also hand it to you. You can feel the heat from the stoves like a sunburn on your brow.

There’s no hard liquor, no tea, no regular coffee and above all no choice. You eat dishes of Ko’s choosing in the order it chooses, and most everybody around you is having roughly the same meal.

The omakase experience at sushi bars is one point of reference; another is the feng shui of the French chef Joël Robuchon’s counter-centric L’Atelier restaurants. But Ko makes the interface between you and the cooks even more casual, more blithe: you sit like an Abdul in judgment of their ability to carry the Led Zeppelin tune blaring from the speakers, because try to carry it they will.

Ko pares down stuffy atmospherics in a particularly thorough way. It wagers that for a younger generation more focused on food than on frippery, a scruffy setting, small discomforts and little tyrannies are acceptable — preferable, even — if they’re reflected in the price.

They are. For $85 you get a number and caliber of dishes — including a wacky and wonderful blizzard of cold foie gras flakes and a cheeky panna cotta whose sweet, milky flavor mimics the sublime dregs of a bowl of cereal — that might cost $150 in a more formal environment.

You don’t get start-to-finish enchantment, but that’s not a function of insufficient coddling. It’s a function of where you set the bar for a restaurant that must master only a cluster of dishes on a given night, and that compels you to surrender so fully to its authority.

Under those terms there’s a promise of unwavering transcendence, and Ko in its early months serves a few dishes that merely intrigue along with others that utterly enrapture. It also falls prey to some inconsistency.

Twice I was blown away by the first savory course, which follows an amuse-bouche of an English muffin soaked with whipped pork fat. It showcases uncooked fluke in a wash of buttermilk, yuzu and Sriracha that struck a thrilling balance of round and sharp notes, silky and spiky effects, coolness and heat. On top of this mix were enough toasted poppy seeds to give it a pleasant grittiness and a pointillist skin.

But the next time I had this dish, with scallop filling in for fluke, the Sriracha was a tamer presence, and the sauce was slightly watery.