Eat the Art at The Modern.

Modern Women Behaving Badly.


Last night my friend Lisa and I had an exquisite dinner at The Modern, NYC. Here is a place where food is art and art is food, or something along those lines. For those of you who don't know, the restaurant inside of MoMa is the brainchild of Alsacian chef Gabriel Kreuther. After having spoken on the phone many times with sous chef Luke for their daily fish orders, I can finally put a face to the name. A very cute face, actually.


Being a po-dunker country gal from the cape, I am not yet accustomized to fine dining. We decided to sit on the bar side of the restaurant, which was still fine in my eyes. Funny thing about this restaurant is that the bathroom is multi-sex, meaning for boys and girls. SO when you are washing your hands it’s like a party! One cool dude that was in attendance even sang a little “What’s New Pussycat” to us, which delighted our pea-sized brains.

Recently the MoMa was awarded one of the best places to work in NYC from Time Out Magazine. One MoMa employee who was interviewed mentioned that working there was like getting a Ph. D. in Fine Art and getting paid for it. I think that sounds like a pretty good deal.   

The food was excelente. We tried all kinds of fish dishes. It is cool to see products from the Pierless warehouse come to life. The bluefin tuna tartare was delicious. Sweet, fresh, crispy, crunchy and creamy all at the same time. The tiny squares of tuna were so delicately chopped. It tasted so good, like candy.  The cod dish was out of control, the home-made tartar sauce really took me back to the good old days, with a caviar addition. Lisa (ex-vegan / wildcard) was feeling adventurous. She even tried the lobster papardelle! Cheers to that. I would have been mortified if she didn’t eat the fish, but she did and I am quite proud of her. Also, the snapper dish they gave us was so rich and bacony I thought I was on Bacon Island with tropical baconut trees. Good times, good vibes.
 

In Cod We Trust.

After dinner and a glass (ok, I had two) of what I like to call Italian Paint Thinner. A dear friend of mine coined this term for Fernet Branco when I forced her to drink it one too many times in the Argentine Andes. Love that stuff. If you want to win my tiny blackened heart, buy me a few rounds of the paint thinner.

Finally we had the tour de cuisine. We met lots of smiling people wearing white kitchen jackets. We saw huge metal stock cauldrons, some gorgeous marble countertops, and a whole refrigerator full of produce! I even encountered their stash of thumbelina beets, which obviously caused a cute-overload.

Chef Gabriel Kreuther’s idea for The Modern was to create food that could parallel the works of art within the famous MoMa. This elegant expression of eating was the sum of my experience.




  

Artichocke Soup is Art.