MASA

I have currently stopped eating because I have a confirmed reservation at MASA, in the Time Warner Bulding in Manhattan on April 22nd.  I am going with a super special rockstar I met on the whole lil gay cruise I went on a month or so ago.  If you have never heard of it before, tisk.  If you haven't read my blog entry from a long time ago, double tisk.  If you shake your head after reading this entry about MASA and its extravagance or how it has easily and instantly become America's best and most expensive restaurant, triple tisk.  If you have never been excited about a restaurant before, don't talk to me.  Seriously.

NYMetro: "There are no menus at Masa; the chef adjusts his meals according to the availability of ingredients (white-truffle tempura is a specialty in the fall) and his diners’ whims. These meals are intricate, lavish cultural entertainments, part nourishment, part entertainment, and part ancient performance art. They’re designed to be enjoyed in a state of blissful suspended animation, and sitting at the bar at Masa, with a world-class chef preparing food for you, that’s more or less what happens. After the tuna tartare, I was presented with aji mackerel sashimi tossed in shiso blossoms. This palate-cleansing course set up a whole salvo of rich, uniformly delicious dishes that began with uni risotto (rice plus sea urchin plus copious amounts of truffles and truffle butter), continued with a meltingly sweet version of Kobe-beef sukiyaki, and culminated in an extravagant shabu-shabu composed of fresh lobster and lobes of foie gras.

Of course, a normal Japanese person wouldn’t dream of cooking foie gras in his shabu-shabu. But then Takayama isn’t overly concerned with normal people, and what he is selling is more than just a meal: It’s a personalized aesthetic experience of the most rarefied kind (though New York is not, and is never likely to become, a cultishly devoted sushi town like Tokyo or L.A.). Masa’s sushi is flown in daily, some of it in plastic organ-donor containers, from faraway places like Alaska, Spain, and the Sea of Japan. Like Alain Ducasse before him, Takayama has a very specific clientele in mind, patrons willing to pay huge prices to enjoy the work of the latest culinary diva or auteur. He devises the menu, prepares the food, and, unlike M. Ducasse or Nobu Matsuhisa, who are busy jetting among their numerous establishments, he sometimes even serves it to you.

The sushi is uniformly exceptional, which isn’t surprising since each bite costs roughly as much as a first-class cut of steak in many restaurants. The pieces are presented singly, like small works of art, framed on a round palette of black slate. There are milky slices of o-toro, silky ika (squid) touched with drops of yuzu, silvery little kohada (a type of herring), and glistening, pearly shrimp (ama ebi) with their tails stuck in the air. When Takayama makes a toro maki roll, he jams it with fistfuls of tuna belly. (As he did this, I asked him which restaurants he’d enjoyed since arriving in New York. “Peetah Lugah Steakhouse,” he said, smiling a big showman’s smile.)

It was a memorable meal, as different in style, dimension, and scope (and, of course, cost) as a TV rerun is from a first-class Broadway show. But when I returned a few weeks later, my experience changed in a number of significant and not-so-significant ways. Perhaps it was because I’d already sampled the meal (Takayama’s menu tends to change seasonally, as opposed to weekly or even monthly), or perhaps it was because I was dining with my discerning wife. A refugee from the land of midwestern malls and cineplexes, she was mildly horrified at having to walk through a glorified shopping center (“Is that Muzak?” she whispered) for the most expensive meal of her life, and as a dutiful, empathetic husband, I became mildly horrified, too.  “You realize,” she said in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, “I could have bought a ticket down to Florida, chartered a boat, and caught my own tuna for the price of this meal?” She’s more or less correct: We spent $834.31, including tip, sake, and two $10 bottles of mineral water. (The bill for my first meal, at the bar—with the Kobe-beef sukiyaki—was exactly the same.)"

I have eaten at Peter Lugher and I have to say it was a waste of time/money/beauty.  MASA is delicious and I know I will come away raving like the NYTimes or nearly everyone who has eaten there.  You have to read the NewYorker article that one food critic wrote about his experience in MASA.  It is absolutely hysterical.  The article is here on my blog but here is a glimpse before you make the jump to it:

"Unfortunately, we were running late. This worried me. I had been trying to get a reservation at Masa since 1987, seventeen years before it opened, as I knew that one of the prerequisites of dining there was a knowledge of the future. I also knew of the restaurant’s strict “on-time” policy. Babette and I arrived exactly one minute and twenty-four seconds late. We know this because of the Swiss Atomic clock that diners see upon arrival at Masa.  The maître d’ did not look happy. And so we were asked, in Japanese, to remove our clothes, in separate dressing cabins, and don simple white robes with Japanese writing on the back that, we soon found out, translated as “We were late. We didn’t respect the time of others.” Babette’s feet were bound. I was forced to wear shoes that were two sizes too small. The point being, tardiness is not accepted at Masa. (Nor, frankly, should it be.)  The headwaiter then greeted us by slapping me in the face and telling Babette that she looked heavy, also in Japanese. (No English is spoken in the restaurant. Translators are available for hire for three hundred and twenty-five dollars per hour. We opted for one.)"

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[BillyBudd]

PUBLIC COMMENTS:

I'm gonna be in NYC that weekend, boyfriend with his parents - lets hang out (!) no more of this Boston bullsh*t (no offense). I promise not to spoil your appetite.