Entries associated with the tag "Moto":

Last week we received the press release about Joe DeVito, Adriana Carrasco, and Homaro Cantu's new restaurant Otom, the "moderately priced," baby brother to Moto, due to open in July. It said:

“While the name otom is a mirror image of moto, the food is not going to feature edible menus or liquid nitrogen,” says DeVito.  “No matter where you sit in the restaurant ­ at the bar or in the main dining room ­ there are no rules.  You get what you want!” 

I know. What in the wide world of Wylie Dufresne does that mean? Well, the publicist was kind enough to forward the menu, electronically, not lasered onto a tortilla or anything. So here it is. 

 
APPETIZERS

Braised trio of chicken leg, pork shoulder and beef short rib on a brioche  12
 
Hot wings, blue cheese and celery root puree                                               8
 
Vanilla prawn salad, creamy lemon dressing                                                     9
 
Romaine and goat cheese, white truffle vinaigrette                                     8
Seared hanger steak, hearts of palm and lime-soy vinaigrette                       9

Chicken soup, glass noodles and sweet Asian vegetables                       6
Aged Wisconsin cheddar grilled cheese with heirloom tomato                6

Seasonal fruits and cheese plate                                                                 15
 
 
ENTREES
 
Monk fish ravioli, wilted greens and brown butter                                            18
 
Whipped cream risotto with crab and basil                                                        20
 
Olive oil-poached salmon, fried noodles, blue foot mushrooms                    16
 
Seared snapper, leek confit and coconut rice                                                 16
 
Macaroni and cheese lasagna, smoked bacon and leeks                             14
 
Grilled New York strip and baby Yukon gold baked potatoes                   20
 
Lamb pot pie with cucumber yogurt                                                               14
 
Braised pork shoulder, beer-battered onion rings                                       20
 
Marinated chicken, sweet corn cream, home-style mashed potatoes        16
 
Braised beef short rib, cauliflower puree and baby carrots                        18

If we here at the Food Chain have seemed inordinately interested in Moto lately, chalk it up to anticipation. On Friday, Sula and I finally got the chance to eat our way through one of Homaru Cantu's notorious menus: gels, powders, packing peanuts, freeze-dried beef nuggets, and more liquid-nitrogenized food than you can shake an aromatic utensil at, not to mention the edible menu itself (left). A new review is pending, but in the meantime I wanted to share a few observations:

1) The waiters no longer wear lab coats--just regular old black suits, men and women alike--and only the bartender and hostess wore visible earpieces. Not sure when this all changed, but does this speak to some broader attempt to mainstream?

2) There are shockingly few people in the kitchen--half a dozen, I think. ("We're very efficient," one of them told me.) No Homaru in evidence.

3) There were shockingly few people in the dining room for a Friday night. We asked the hostess if Moto had experienced any sort of Iron Chef effect and she said the phones had been ringing off the hook. So I guess we'll just have to go back soon to see if it's true.

Sunday night, 8 PM: it's the long-awaited TV showdown between Iron Chef Morimoto and Moto's Homaro Cantu.  And Cantu is victorious!--though you'd never know it from the loser's edit he was getting right up till the bitter end. Here's the recap:

After the requisite overblown pomp and silliness of the intro, Cantu steps onto the set, looking delightfully nerdy with his headset and a little LED sign hanging around his neck. Special-effects fog swirls around as the secret ingredient is announced: beets, presented on a bed of dry ice and green marbles.

Beet-snatching frenzy ensues.

Cantu and his two sous chefs, who look all of 24, are outfitted in matching green outfits, complete with green clogs (I think). They're all wearing headsets; the LEDs pinned to their lapels scroll "Courage + humility + respect" in an endless loop. Not clear to me what the advantage of this system over, say, some nametags and Magic Markers is, but whatever. They've brought with them a Class 4 laser, a printer loaded with edible ink, a digital camera, cellulose packing peanuts, a variety of syringes and pipettes, and a cooler of liquid nitrogen.

Over the next 40 minutes, Team Cantu creates a six-course meal that kicks off with a maki roll of beets, rice, and nori, wrapped in edible paper printed with photos of sushi and topped with one of Cantu's notorious copyright notices. This is served with "synthetic champagne" that the judges have to mix up themselves by adding stuff from a syringe to a flute of . . . some other stuff. They pronounce it good. Next up is a hot and cold soup wth three kinds of egg (cooked, raw, and some kind of frozen egg-and-beet nuggets) and oodles of bacon. Next is surf and turf--Hawaiian sea bass and beef tenderloin--prepared tableside in his trademark polymer box and served with noodles dressed with the leftover liquid. This also pronounced delicious, though judge Melissa Clark does ask, "Where's the beet?" I guess somebody had to say it.

Next comes a frozen sphere of beet--made by injecting a balloon with liquified beet, freezing it with the liquid nitrogen, and burning the balloon off with a baby blowtorch--over yogurt with a spike of yuzu. This appears to be an across-the-board winner. Host Alton Brown, who spends most of the show maying snarky comments about "science-fair" cooking and referring to the Cantu kitchen as "Planet Cantu," is practically apoplexic. (When Cantu whipped out the sea bass he exclaimed, with barely concealed scorn, "Finally, something I recognize as food!")

The first dessert is a smear of mascarpone topped with beets and served with squeezy tubes of vanilla bean, Mexican chocolate, and citrus to be squirted into directly into the mouth. This is followed by chocolate pudding topped with julienned beets and served with caramelized wonton (caramelized with the damn laser) and flavored packing peanuts in a spoon whose handle has been wrapped with a sprig of rosemary. This all comes with a photo of the three chefs toasting each other with some horchata-citrus cocktail that's printed on horchata-flavored paper. Judge Jeffrey Steingarten says he wants to market this as horchata chips. Best line of the evening, when asked what his inspiration is, Cantu replies, "Our inspiration is USB cables and personal computers. And the naturalness of beets."

Morimoto also works some serious magic with his beets--his colors are supersaturated and he has a leg up with his ingredients, which include fatty tuna, salmon, wagyu beef, and mackerel. (Because, really, no matter how you flavor them, cellulose packing peanuts are just nasty. And, yes, I have tried them.) Given this, his impressive knife-fu (turning the tuna into mousse in short order), and some gorgeous classical plating involving lots of shallow little wooden boxes, he seems like a shoo-in to me. Plus, Morimoto tips his hat just enough to the future--using liquid nitrogen himself to put a crunchy crust on scoops of gold beet ice cream and tie-dying his napkins with beet juice--that the whole thing isn't the test of purity and tradition versus crazy gadgetry it's been cast as. By halftime I'm sure Morimoto has it in the bag. Shows what I know.

I can only imagine that the Iron Chef effect has to be comparable to, if not worse than, the Check, Please! effect. Make your Moto reservations now.

* Another of Alton Brown's witticisms.