The GP wrote:Mr. X and I are looking forward to this dinner. 8:00 PM works for us. Can you give me an idea of how we're doing this? Family style? Chef's choice? Do we have a target cost per person?

Thanks.

-Mary

Sorry Mary- I didnt see this until after Kathryn, our coordinator, was gone for the day. Chef is preparing a special menu for us which can be adjusted for dietary concerns. It will be plated rather than family style. It will be $55.00 as it was last time we did a dinner there. Just as a note my fiancee can't be there due to a prior obligation she forgot about. So you get just me I'll be coming straight from work, so I'll be wearing jeans and a white polo for those who don't know me.

Jonny

Great! See you tonight.

All- I'm going to be offline around 5:15 or so. Thus if you need to reach me please call me or I will check lth periodically from my phone. I'll also get to Otom a bit early (and possibly have a drink at the bar) so as to beat most of you there

So I got tasked with the writeup Thanks to GP, Mr. X, and Jesteinf for coming out last night. It was great to meet you all.

Last night we were treated to the "Kitchen table" at Otom. We were seated in the circular table in the alcove of Otom where they had mounted a projector to let us watch a live video feed of what was going on in the kitchen. Due to technical issues with the Russian Space Station we lost the feed a few hours in to dinner, but it was fun to watch the kitchen in action.

Dinner began with an amuse bouche of peanut butter, bannana puree, on a peanut butter cracker with a carbonated grape on top. Wonderfully fizzy, sweet, and a nice way to start. This was served with the Duval Leroy Brut. I love this champagne. Tons of earth, nice elements of chardonnay providing for that green apple/citrus blend that is so wonderful for early on in a meal.

1: Butter Poached Shrimp, black beans & chili with puffed rice & jalapeno noodle.

This was a pair of shrimp poached at 145 degrees to give them wonderful deep flavors of the sea and butter combined. This was served over a vegetarian chili puree, some black beans on the side, and a jalapeno and lime extruded noodle wrapped around the shrimp. This brought out all the flavors of shrimp gumbo to me. It's a very hearty dish without being too filling.

Served with the August Kesseler "R" Riesling. This is a great riesling for the money. For those looking for wines heavy on minerality and somewhat dry, go pick this wine up. You can thank me when it gets over 80 degrees in Chicago and you're sitting out on the porch drinking this. It's a nice pairing for delicate flavors such as shrimp. It didn't overwhelm the dish at all but added nicely to the dish.

2: Lyonnaise Breakfast Salad, "bacon egg" curly escarole & grain mustard vinaigrette.

Can I just say that I love lyonnaise salads? Anyways, this salad was your typical escarole blend and the grain mustard vinaigrette was great, but the star of the show here was the use of eggs. Bacon is rendered with cream, shallots and seasoning, then pureed, forced into a balloon then frozen in the same method that Cantu was making the beet freeze on Iron Chef America. It's served in a way that makes it look like an egg, even though that's the bacon. It's cold with a liquid center, which is unusual for bacon, but the flavor works and the texture is a nice combination with the salad, albeit a touch difficult to eat without a spoon. Maybe a spork would be good with this dish? Also an egg yolk that appeared to be in gelatinous form was served with the salad to get the yolk flavor.

Served with Colterenzio Luma Pinot Blanc/Chard/Sauv Blanc blend. I;'ll be honest that this pairing was just ok to me. It's not a wine I'm at all familiar with and I tried to do a little research on it before writing this but I couldn't find anything. So I'm not much help on this one. Generally I don't tend to love still white blends so I'm not much help with that either.


3: TV Dinner, chicken fried bean drumstick, carrot and edamame pie, cauliflower and coffee gravy.

Very interesting dish served on a TV tray. Kidney beans have been pureed and molded, then deep fried to look like a chicken drumstick. This sits in the main section of the tray. The carrot and edamame pie looks like a slice out of a chicken pot pie and is completely vegetarian. That was my favorite part of this course. Great texture/flavor components. The cauliflower was pureed and thickened to look like a colored version of mashed potatoes. On this is a coffee gravy. Such an interesting flavor combination going on here, but I think I'll let GP discuss this since she was all over it I think Only negative comment about this dish- our portion sizes were huge. I wish they would have been a bit smaller. Like 1/2 the size or less.

Served with an Olivier Leflaive Chardonnay. A great wine, and very drinkable, but perhaps something a bit more robust would have worked better here. I liked it more as we ate the dish, but I wonder if this would have been a great opportunity to do a cocktail pairing instead.

4: BBQ Pork Belly, smoked bread, spicy shard & pork beans.

Easily the course that stole the night for me. Simple, traditional pork belly done in the way Chef Nash knows best. The bread was cubed and had a great imparted smoke flavor, and the shard on top. All of it was sitting on some BBQ sauce- a very simple sauce but perfect for the dish. The pork beans are made from pureed pork pushed into bean molds to look like beans, but much like at Moto these look like one thing and taste like another.

Served with a Stone Paddock Syrah. This is just a wonderful simple Syrah made for applications such as pork belly. Great earthy notes, with some spice to it. A great BBQ wine.

5: Coconut-Pineapple Paradise, inverted pineapple, sand dunes, coconut lotion & pina colada

This was pineapple cake served along side a dusting of "sand" made from lime, freeze dried pineapple I believe, and some coconut. The lotion came from a thickened coconut sqeezed on some vanilla ice cream and the pina colada was a pina colada shooter served with an umbrella. This is a great nod to the summer and to all the greatness that came from places like Trader Vic's.

Served with a King Estate vin Glace Pinot Gris. There couldn't be a more perfect pairing for this dish than this. Great sugary notes of tropical fruit. Just wonderful.

6: Milk 'n cookies, chocolate chip, mascarpone, caramel bananas, vanilla wafer ice cream.

I'll admit, I was stuffed at this point and couldn't eat much of this dish, so I am going to leave this to the others to describe.

All in all a great night, and thanks to chef nash for showing off for us!

Thanks to jpschust for setting this up. It was a really neat introduction to Otom. A few thoughts to add on the night...

The "kitchen table" setup was really cool and I hope they're able to nail down the technology to make it work for a full meal.

I wasn't nuts about the Lyonnaise salad when I started eating it, but it definitely grew on me as I ate more. The "bacon egg" was certainly interesting. I actually kind of missed having a runny yolk for the salad.

The TV Dinner was a lot of fun. The carrot/edamame pie was my favorite part. Again, entirely too large of a portion. I ate about half.

The pork belly was really really good. If I had to find fault, I would say that my piece was a little on the fatty side. But if that's the worst thing you can say about a piece of pork belly, well...

I enjoyed both desserts. I especially liked the pineapple cake on the beach plate. I was insanely full by the time we got to the milk and cookies, but somehow I managed to eat the whole thing. The nilla wafer ice cream went really well with the cookies and bananas.

Again, a great meal. I will definitely return to Otom to try out more of their new menu.

Hi. Great write-up and impressions, guys. So is this meal sort of a run-through/preview of what we should expect for the event on 4/30 that Homero invited people to? Looks like the "live broadcast" indicated in the invitation could mean the live feed from the kitchen?

fusionfan wrote:Hi. Great write-up and impressions, guys. So is this meal sort of a run-through/preview of what we should expect for the event on 4/30 that Homero invited people to? Looks like the "live broadcast" indicated in the invitation could mean the live feed from the kitchen?

Possibly. I think there may have been a sneak preview or two, but I'd expect a different experience for 4/30.

Jpschust – nice write-up. Much better than anything I would have done. It was great meeting you and Jesteinf last night. We really enjoyed the dinner at OTOM and hope to go back soon. I loved the virtual kitchen table. Chef Nash and team seemed to relish their jobs. Service was fantastic all night. And the food was delicious and fun.

We would be remiss in not mentioning the pre-dinner cocktails. I don’t recall what everyone had (outside of my glass of Malbec), but I know the cocktails Mr. X enjoyed were inventive and tasty.

I don’t have much to add to what jpschust and Jesteinf have said. Wonderful flavors throughout, generally great wine pairings.

In the TV dinner course, I agree that the carrot/edamame pie was excellent. Tender crust, flavorful filling. As jp noted, I was a big fan of the cauliflower with coffee gravy. The cauliflower was robust and the coffee gravy was rich with flavor. The kidney bean drumstick was okay, but I managed to finish all of the pie and kept dipping into the cauliflower and gravy.

My favorite course of the night was also the pork belly. The barbecue sauce had a nice spiciness to it and complimented the pork belly and fried bread and spicy shard well. I loved how the wine interacted with this course. The Syrah worked beautifully.

Of the two desserts, the Coconut-Pineapple paradise was the clear winner for me. As a beach volleyball player, I can say that I’ve never had sand taste that good. The cake was moist with wonderful pineapple flavor and the sand was great fun to eat. The pina colada shooter didn’t really do it for me, but I was also starting to reach my completely sated point. The wine pairing with this course was also phenomenal.

The final dessert looked great, but I was too full to really enjoy it. After all of the invigorating flavors in the earlier courses, it was almost a let-down. Not that I didn’t make an effort to eat about half!

Thanks again to jpschust for setting this dinner up. I look forward to hearing about the April 30 dinner.