TODAY'S SURVEY

POLL: Menu Design

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What style do you prefer
for your menus?

	Highly graphical, no logo
	Highly graphical, my logo
	Simple design, my logo
	Other

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A Primer on The Indian Food Revolution

All the Fine Dining World's A Stage

We were shown into a warm, wood-lined room with a view out over the lake, where in the darkness a mother-of-pearl moon hung low and heavy. A table had been laid for a dinner of many courses. I sensed that other than ourselves and those here to serve us, the house was empty. As soon as we were seated we were each brought a taster on a glass plate frosted with ice: a disk of white chocolate the diameter of a golf ball but only a few millimeters thick. On top was piled half a teaspoon of Osetra caviar.

"The chef has told me we must eat this in one go," Max said as if challenging me. I looked down at the plate. The dish was clearly intended to make the eater feel by turns curious and uneasy. Fish and chocolate? Together? What empty-fridge desperation had dreamed up this nightmare? Instead I felt excited, like a skier who has been off the piste for far too long staring once more down the slope. I knew how to do curious food. The muscle memory was all there. It was just a matter of pushing off. We slipped the white chocolate disks into our mouths.

The taste was sublime. There was the clean measured saltiness of the eggs and the sweet creaminess of the chocolate, and then a separate flavor that emerged shyly out of the two. It reminded me of the savory backtaste of the salt caramels I had once loved back in London, only more so. White chocolate and caviar made me homesick.

I said, "That was extraordinary."

Max looked up over my shoulder and gestured for the server to step forward. He placed before me a printed sheet. I read it.
"A chocolate menu?"

"My friend also lent me his chef," Max said proudly, "and I've had him hunting around for a few chocolate dishes that we thought might amuse you."

After the white chocolate and caviar came a soothing gamy soup of woodcock, flavored with dark, unsweetened bitter chocolate, chili, and crisp pieces of pancetta. That was followed, as a fish course, by lobster on the half shell, in a pungent lobster jus the color of terra-cotta. Once it had been placed upon the table, another server approached holding a fine beige muslin pouch, one hand gripped tightly about the neck of the bag, the other held flat underneath where it bulged with what looked like ground spice of some kind. He leaned over and, with delicate precision, shook the bag across my plate, dusting it with what turned out to be a fine, earthy cocoa powder that only pointed up the sweetness of the shellfish.

For the meat course we were served thick pink slices of venison, carved tableside and laid one across the other over pieces of caramelized fennel and Jerusalem artichoke, the whole drizzled with a fruity chocolate sauce that played terrifically against the ripe field-and-meadow flavor of the meat and the anise kick of the fennel. We finished with a delice of chocolate with a glazed shell that glistened and shone beneath the candlelight. At its heart was the most ear-ringingly intense chocolate mousse I had ever tasted, and to keep the mouth alive, the base had been filled with shards of popping candy that fizzed and crackled on the tongue. I ate this meal like a man who has just discovered the pleasures of food, holding each mouthful for a second longer than necessary so that the flavors might have a chance to develop, eyeing the menu between courses as we talked, trying to guess what result the combination of ingredients listed on the sheet might achieve. I felt settled and unburdened by the ballast of anxiety which I realized had been weighing me down for weeks now.

-- from Eating Crow: A Novel by Jay Rayner, published by Simon & Schuster, September 2005.

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