All of this sounds magical (especially the trout).
I have had some amazing food recently: everything at M3. I'm trying to remember the last time I had food of that complexity and surprisingness. (It's a word.) The trout came with a little cucumber salad to one side of the plate, which I did not eat because I am indifferent toward cucumber at best, but for another diner it would have added a cooler flavor and a crunchier, fresher texture; to the other was a little mound of avocado whipped with lemon juice with salmon caviar on top and that I left nothing of. Rush's bluefish was, seriously, a Turkish rice bowl: served in a stone pot like Korean bibimbap so that the rice formed that delicious savory crust on the bottom from the sizzling heat (we had just been talking about how you can order tahdig separately at some Persian restaurants, but here we didn't even have to ask) with pale sweet beets and redcurrants and some warm creamy sauce that we couldn't identify at the time; it turns out to have been terbiye, which I know better in its Greek variety as avgolemono. The bluefish had been made into dolma. The fish was neither too flaky nor too damp, but the corners of the grape leaves were crisp as if they had been grilled. They broke apart beautifully and the whole thing could have been eaten with chopsticks. Trying to mentally reverse-engineer the food was half the fun of eating it, especially since in so many cases we couldn't. See entire conversation about fennel.
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I have had some amazing food recently: everything at M3. I'm trying to remember the last time I had food of that complexity and surprisingness. (It's a word.) The trout came with a little cucumber salad to one side of the plate, which I did not eat because I am indifferent toward cucumber at best, but for another diner it would have added a cooler flavor and a crunchier, fresher texture; to the other was a little mound of avocado whipped with lemon juice with salmon caviar on top and that I left nothing of. Rush's bluefish was, seriously, a Turkish rice bowl: served in a stone pot like Korean bibimbap so that the rice formed that delicious savory crust on the bottom from the sizzling heat (we had just been talking about how you can order tahdig separately at some Persian restaurants, but here we didn't even have to ask) with pale sweet beets and redcurrants and some warm creamy sauce that we couldn't identify at the time; it turns out to have been terbiye, which I know better in its Greek variety as avgolemono. The bluefish had been made into dolma. The fish was neither too flaky nor too damp, but the corners of the grape leaves were crisp as if they had been grilled. They broke apart beautifully and the whole thing could have been eaten with chopsticks. Trying to mentally reverse-engineer the food was half the fun of eating it, especially since in so many cases we couldn't. See entire conversation about fennel.
Cheers to you and Rush.
Thank you!