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Chez Gabe

While there are a lot of good places to eat in the Twin Cities, there are three that get me really, really excited about eating. These are places where I feel the need to deprive myself at lunch so as to better enjoy dinner. The three places are Heartland, La Belle Vie, and the house of our friends Christy and Gabe. While not a professional chef, Gabe has devoted a lot of time to his hobby of cooking fine foods, and he is quite phenomenal. He celebrated his birthday recently by throwing a dinner party for himself, cooking a eight-course meal of haute cuisine with paired wines:
Gabe really outdid himself with this meal and grandly deserves a paean. First came the amuse bouche of sashimi tuna sitting in infused sesame oil and topped with an avacado mousse:
The first course was my favorite of the evening. It was a savory tapioca with oysters and caviar. (My surreal blog post from yesterday was completely unrelated to this dish.) It was delicious and complex (not to mention beautiful) and I could have eaten it all night:
The second course was a butternut squash soup topped with truffles:
The third course was a salad with duck, dried cranberries, pomegranite, and blood orange topped with vinaigrette made from the infused sesame oil:
The fourth course was my second favorite dish of the night, featuring truffle-filled scallops (making a white/black/white bow-tie effect) on a bed of creamed leeks. The leeks were melt-in-your-mouth good and yet delicate enough not to overpower the perfectly seared scallops:
The fifth course was a half lobster tail on a bed of orzo (not to be confused with ouzo):
The sixth course transitioned from dinner to dessert with a bar of white chocolate topped with caviar. This is apparently a pairing uncovered by molecular gastronomy, which found that caviar and white chocolate share a number of key taste chemicals:
The seventh course was another nod to molecular gastronomy. The dish appears to be a flaky off-white powder, but when placed on the tongue turns into a rich, chewy caramel. The picture does not come close to doing justice to this delightful effect:
The eight and final course was a light ice cream made from fresh strawberries:
Thanks, Christy and Gabe, for a wonderful evening! And while the extended dance videos with various people doing the Macarena or impressions of MC Hammer will have to wait for a future blog post, I will close with a video of the house dog (Yoshi) cleaning the caviar from the plates after course six:

Comments

  1. jackflak12:34 PM

    I make it a point never to eat at any place with "Chez" in it's name. (With the exception of House of Cheeze Nips)

    ReplyDelete

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