I want to be clear, before any of this, that I enjoyed myself.
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I paid $340 a head — before wine, before tax, before the tipping screen swiveled toward me like a lie detector — for a 19-course tasting menu at a restaurant with no sign on the door and a reservation I bought off a guy on an app for an additional $95. There is a docuseries about the chef. There is a fermentation room you are allowed to look at through glass, like a NICU. I looked at it. I felt things.
By course six I was aroused. Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone at the table could have prosecuted. But something had begun, quietly, below the tablecloth, and it did not fully resolve until I was standing over my own kitchen sink four hours later eating cereal out of a mixing bowl.
An honest accounting of what I ate
A scallop under a glass cloche of applewood smoke, which the server lifted like he was releasing a soul. One quail egg, cured, on a spoon I was told not to touch with my teeth. A broth poured tableside from a copper vessel and described as “the memory of a crab.” A bite of wagyu roughly the mass and warmth of a AA battery. Sea urchin arranged on a river rock, and the river rock was not food, which they told me, and they told me kindly, and they told me at a volume the next table could hear.
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Bread service arrived at course fourteen. Fourteen. By then bread was not a food item, it was a hostage negotiation.
Somewhere in the back nine the sommelier leaned in and used the word “unctuous” about a Riesling, and then the word “animal,” and then the word “barnyard,” and I want to be a serious person about this: a nineteen-course tasting menu does something to the male nervous system that nobody has adequately warned anyone about. You are being fed constantly and never enough. You are being touched with warm towels. A stranger is whispering about minerality. Your blood is getting instructions from four departments at once and one of them makes an executive decision.
The drive
I left half-erect. That is the accurate clinical description and I refuse to soften it. Half. Not committed. Not deniable. A tent so modest it read as posture.
I sat in my car in the valet line at 10:40 p.m. with the seatbelt strap crossing directly over the situation, and I felt the specific loneliness of a man whose body has been thoroughly stimulated and not remotely fed. My stomach was making a sound I associate with cave systems. I had eaten nineteen times and I was starving. I had been seduced for four hours by a hospitality staff and now I was alone on the 405 with a receipt in my jacket pocket like a diagnosis.
I did not think about the crab memory. I thought about cereal.
Home
All my bowls were dirty, so I used the mixing bowl. Honey Bunches of Oats, because that’s what was in the house, and a splash of oat milk that expired in a way I chose not to investigate. I ate it standing up, at the sink, in the good blazer, at eleven at night, with the overhead light on — the harsh one, the one you never use, the interrogation one.
Nobody described it to me. Nobody told me what farm it came from. Nobody said the word “terroir” and nobody lifted a cloche and nobody watched my face for gratitude. It went into my body in fistfuls and my body said, immediately and without ceremony, thank you, this is what we needed, we have been trying to reach you for four hours.
The erection resolved during the second bowl. Not from disappointment. From closure.
I want to be clear that I enjoyed myself. I want that on the record because I have already booked the October seating, and I have already told two people about the fermentation room, and I will pay the resale guy again, and I will be back here at this sink in the good blazer with the mixing bowl and the interrogation light, half-hard and finally, mercifully, full.