Dinner @ Paradigm

If you've been receiving your UrbanDaddy emails you know that we covered the opening of Paradigm this week. I was fortunate enough to attend their first dinner Thursday night and it was sensational. Fellow food fiends were also in attendance and famous Chowhound poster Frodnesor offers his thorough report here. Frod did such a great job of summing up each dish there's not much for me to do except offer my dimly-lit pictures and a few observations. For better pics check out chef Chad Galiano's blog, where he gets to take the photos inside the kitchen, where the lights are actually on.
Course #2 was "breakfast" - creamy egg sous vide, Iberico ham, potato crisps and coffee espuma. Loved the espresso which had a creamy mousse-like texture. The potatoes were luxury potato chips - packed with flavor and feather light.

Next up, watermelon sashimi. In both taste and texture chef Kurtis Jantz managed to mess with our heads in the best possible way. At first glance, the dish really looked like tuna, but then the fermented black beans looked like watermelon seeds. Oh, it was wacky. The melon was enlivened by the fermented garlic sauce and the pea tendrils were dotted lovely fragrant coriander seeds that added another dimension to the whole dish.

My favorite dish of the night, the scallop.

Amazingly flavorful crust of powdered cocoa butter, accompanied by vanilla milk froth offset with a bit of agave to cut the richness, this was a spectacular combination. The green tea lemon gel and the cucumber rolled to resemble a magic carpet gave this dish a quirky elegance.
A highlight of the evening was the food entertainment aspect of the dinner. Periodically the chefs would do some of the prep in the dining room using their impressive gadgetry. Here chef Galiano creates sea foam from a tower of dashi broth using some sort of tube and gas contraption. Very Mr. Science.

The sea foam was for the lobster dish, composed of compressed lobster meat cut into bricks, mustard sand and sea bean. Visually this was a charming dish (though my pic does it no justice), really highlighting the playfulness of the chefs. They said at the beginning that this was a way to show how they play around in the kitchen and it really came through with this one. I was smitten with the sea bean, it looked like a mini-sea plant and had a really chewy texture, very unique. The mustard sand was packed with flavor, but the lobster seemed a bit too chewy.

The hamachi sous vide. I couldn't get into it. Some people at the table really dug the supersoft texture but I just wasn't loving it. I'm a fiend for crunch though, and the black olive streusel delivered on that front. Full of concentrated olive flavor with a rough texture. The artichoke butter and feta dust were other lovely notes that enhanced the fish.

Dessert!

The pb&j was a crowd pleaser. A peanut cookie bar topped with salt, a scoop of frozen peanut cream and accompanied by peanut cream made by cooking peanut butter for 12 hours and straining it until chef Fabian extracted its true peanut-y essence. The jelly came in the form of raspberry caviar and raspberry gel. An amazing dessert in both conception and execution.
The cereal 'loofah' didn't impress as much. The spongy cereal cake was light but lacked flavor. Its plate-mates of honey, lavender gum and cassis jelly were a nice melding of contrasting flavors, but I wish the anchor of the dish was more compelling.

And a yuzu marshmallow to end things on a citrusy note.