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At Estuary in Washington, D.C., chef Ria Montes cures pork shoulder with salt and sugar and then cooks it in sous-vide for two hours. Then she brushes it with a sweet-spicy glaze of sorghum syrup, fish sauce, yuzu, and chile flake, and finishes it on the grill.
The pork is served with pickled vegetables including cauliflower, onions, and spicy peppers, along with scallion pancakes that have tahini and sesame oil in the batter. Guests are meant to be used to eat the pork and pickles wrapped in the pancakes. It’s intended for two people.
“Food tastes better when you are eating it with your hands, and when you can share,” Montes said.
Price: $70
The annual cherry blossom festival is underway in Washington, D.C., and Kevin Tien, the chef of Moon Rabbit at the Intercontinental Hotel in that city is marking the occasion with this dish of sakura masu, or “cherry blossom salmon” imported from Japan, so named because the height of its season is also when cherry blossoms, or sakura, bloom.
He starts by heating a donabe clay pot in a hot oven and then brushing it with sesame oil. He then adds cooked koshihikari rice, a prized varietal used for sushi, and presses it against the sides and bottom of the bowl. He then puts the donabe over a medium-low burner and heats it until the rice begins to crackle and get crispy. Then he quickly adds in the middle of the pot an egg yolk from a Jidori chicken, pickled onions, sliced scallions, furikake and slices of smoked sakura masu.
He then garnishes it with shaved bonito flakes. The dish is finished tableside with garlic dashi (made by simmering dashi with sake, mirin, soy sauce, and garlic, and then removing the garlic) that makes the rice sizzle as it’s all mixed together.
Price: $38
For this variation on the Old Fashioned, Gary Evangelista, the new beverage director of The Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel, stirs together two ounces of bourbon with a 0.2 ounces of house-made toasted marshmallow syrup, three dashes of orange bitters and two dashes of chocolate bitters and pours it over a large ice cube. He garnishes it with an orange peel shaped into a rose, a Luxardo cherry, and a torched marshmallow heart.
Price: $18
At The Restaurant at Blue Rock in Washington, Va., chef Bin Lu finely shaves Tete de Moine cheese using a tool called a girolle. The petal-like shavings are then layered with finely shaved black truffle into a rose and placed on top of a pine nut praline (made by grinding toasted pine nuts, adding a little powdered sugar and griddling it). It’s garnished with wildflower honey that has been simmered until it caramelizes, along with Minus 8 Icewine vinegar.
Price: A $25 supplement to the $119 tasting menu
Charbel Adaimy, executive chef of Messhall in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, uses vegan Impossible Burger plant-based protein for this dish. He mixes it with garlic and herbes de Provence (thyme, marjoram, basil, fennel, savory, rosemary, and oregano), shapes it into a patty and griddles it.
He plates it with a purée of carrots, ginger, and turmeric that have been cooked in oat milk, along with a vegan version of demiglace made by caramelizing onions and then simmering them with red wine, thyme, garlic, and pepper. Also on the plate is a persillade of Dijon mustard blended with parsley and lemon zest. The steak is topped with “tiny fries” made by tossing julienne potatoes in paprika, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, filé, and cornstarch and frying them until crisp.
Price: $27
