Yes, I realize that posting a slew of photos and reviews of meals from 2021 several months into 2022 is…suboptimal. I’ve got the house to myself tonight so I figured… why not? There’s a true crime docu-series going in the background, I’ve got a camera roll full of food photos I dating back to my birthday last year…seems like the right time for a long-form post.
My last Vespertine experience — at least in blogging terms — was Oaxaca almost one year ago today. The following month, in April of 2021, the restaurant announced a collaboration meal with Eleven Madison Park. If that sounds familiar, it should! My mother, sister and I dined at EMP way back in 2014 [review]. I am not known for having a great memory, but there are elements of that meal I recall vividly, as it was (and remains) one of the most exciting and entertaining meals of my life. The tableside pig’s bladder, the “choose your own adventure” punch card, and the picnic basket were wild, whimsical and delicious. I had no idea what to expect from a collaboration with Vespertine, and it did not disappoint.
The meal opened, as one at EMP does, with a play on the traditional black-and-white cookie. Chef Kahn’s iteration featured a combo of white cheddar and pink lady apple. It’d be impossible for me to remember the precise taste/texture of the original experience at EMP, but it’s such a fun concept and the execution is so perfectly sense-confusing (it looks like one thing but tastes like another!) it doesn’t really matter. It was a bite I enjoyed seeing Christine take for the first time not really knowing what to expect. Afterwards, according to my camera roll, came a salad of sprouts, rye crumble, and a ginger-umami vinaigrette. Salads never photograph well. I do not photograph salads well. We’ll skip that one.
The meal required some cooking on my part. For the “main” — the green circle chicken stuffed with black truffle — I had to don my chef’s apron and get my hands very slightly dirty. While the chicken was cooking, we enjoyed two stunning dishes: Spring Garlic (custard with peas, favas, asparagus, and leeks) and Beets (ricotta and strawberry). The latter dish photographed pretty well. The former…not so much.
The meal concluded with a rhubarb tart (with cheesecake custard). No meal at Eleven Madison Park is complete without some complimentary granola to take home for the following morning, and Vespertine included some as well! Come to think of it, the mason jar with granola in it is another highlight from that 2014 EMP experience I will never forget. I still have the mason jar with me here in LA, which we now use as a change jar.
I’m not going to deign to sit here and try to determine how well Chef Kahn and his crew did at replicating the EMP experience. It was a unique meal that fulfilled all of my hopes for the evening. It both brought me back to one of the best meals of my life, and provided an adequate representation of that meal for Christine, whose New York City dining experiences I like to imagine are limited to the Guy Fieri restaurant in Times Square, Mustang Harry’s, and maybe Jekyll & Hyde once when she was a kid.
Don’t worry, she knows better than to read this blog.
Our next Vespertine experience was New Orleans back in September of 2021. The menu looked solid but man, oh man, it totally undersold the experience. This was an absolutely stellar meal. One of the best of the year. The Vespertine team really hit this one out of the park on almost every level. We drank (our own) Dark ‘n Stormys and had a grand old time devouring this feast.
If my memory serves, this was the first meal to adopt the new reheating instructions that have been in place ever since, and it’s so much easier now that there’s a standardized system for reheating all the food. Remember that time I was literally sweating over a truffle explosion? See the above chicken prep? Around the time Vespertine tackled the food of New Orleans my job got so much easier. Basically you just set your oven to 350 and heat things for different lengths of time. So simple. Boom. Sonic. Way better than Sonic.
Oh my God, that andouille & crawfish “ètoufèe” biscuit was earth-shattering. It only got better with the duck gumbo (!!!) and blue crab gratin. Even the blackened alligator sausage that came topped with homemade Creole mustard (I hate mustard with a passion) was divine.
An old Creole dish of slow-cooked Brentwood sweet corn, okra, smoked tomato, tasso ham, and jimmy nardello peppers was a masterclass on a plate. The colors, the textures, the juxtaposition of flavors, it was absolutely flawless. Christine’s not a bit shrimp person so the BBQ shrimp (inspired by Mr B’s bistro) with wild Gulf shrink cooked in “bbq” sauce of salted butter, fermented hot sauce, garlic and spices were ALL MINE. Dessert was an outstanding take on bread pudding that riffed on a classic Banana’s Foster, and (of course) beignets with chicory-coffee custard for dipping.
Just a few short weeks later Vespertine rolled out their Autumn menu. Maybe it was because we ordered it less than a month after New Orleans, but we didn’t fuss as much over the autumn menu and it wasn’t until I started looking at these photos that I really remembered what the standout dishes were.
The meal commenced with a creamy fall heirloom tomato soup (made from 4 varieties of heirloom tomatoes and a tomato vine-infused brown butter), 18-month aged cheddar Parker House rolls, and what was described as a shaved golden beet “pastrami” reuben. Once again the dish required some mustard on top (again, I hate mustard with a passion) but I took one for the team and ate it as the chef designed it. Next came a salad of yellow wax beans, Hungarian yellow chiles, torn squash blossoms, pickled onions, Murray farms finger grapes, and a dressing of sungold tomatoes and marigold flowers.
How fun was this queso fundido of chorizo-spiced mushrooms?! Oh man, this and the butternut squash-parmesan cannelloni were probably my favorite bites of the meal. The above-pictured mushroom dish consisted of mellted queso chihuahua, roasted chicken of the woods mushrooms spiced with chorizo seasoning, heirloom chiles from JF organics, toasted pumpkins seeds, and brown butter parathas. The cannelloni wasn’t much to look at (hence the lack of picture) but it was wonderful. Butternut squash pasta, rolled and filled with creamed swiss chard, in a slow-cooked butternut squash “bolognese” with sage and parmeggiano-reggiano. No meat in the dish but man was it satisfyingly meaty. I was floored.
The meal ended with a spiced walnut frangipane baked with concord grapes and a maple-sunchoke bear claw. Not being a dessert person, I’d never had frangipane or a bear claw before. Both were solid, but the melange of fall spices with the grapes and that salted marshmallow fluff made it the clear winner for me. I kinda remember sneaking bites of it throughout the following day. So awesome.
In October we got engaged! Holy fuck! How weird is that? Pretty wild, right? If I recall there either wasn’t a Vespertine menu in November…or they only did Thanksgiving and we had plans for the holiday. So our next opportunity to celebrate my finally breaking down and popping the question came during the first week of December with Vespertine’s Paris menu.
For this meal we popped a bottle of Chanin pinot we’ve been holding for a few years. Chanin pinot is a special wine for us because the first time we had it was at Vespertine back in 2018. On that night it was paired for us with a dish of yarrow and turkey I believe. The Bien Nacido Vinyard pinot is one that I’ll pick up whenever I see it (and I’ve sought out some pretty old vintages online so we have a little library to pick from) and we often pair them with meals from Vespertine as a reminder of our first time there. So, yeah, this was a special meal for us and it also happened to be one of our favorites ever.
The hors d’oeuvres were spot on, with the rilllettes au saumon fumé probably being my favorite? I don’t know, we had so many different combinations of bites it was hard to keep track of what was best. I will say that the least photogenic dish of the meal — the crème de champignons de Paris — pretty much broke my brain it was so good. I ate both of our portions because Christine liked the salad more than I did (sorry not sorry, the soup was so much better!).
I’ve never heard of tartiflette before but I’m pretty sure I’m going to make it for every Thanksgiving/Christmas potluck I’m invited to for the rest of my life. I must have said five or six different times that it was the best thing I’ve ever tasted during one of these Vespertine at Home meals. I mean, it’s hard to go wrong with a potato-bacon-cheese casserole, but somehow this transcended those ingredients and the sum of its parts was like, otherworldly. If someone from Vespertine is reading this, please send me a recipe so I can make this at home again. If it wouldn’t straight-up kill me, I’d put Vespertine’s tartiflette in a drip bag and hook it to my veins, IV style, for the rest of my life. And you know what? Now that I’m looking at these pictures I’m kind of remembering that the gratin de macaroni might have also been in the conversation for best bites of the meal. Christine is a huge mac-and-cheese snob and I think she ate all the leftovers the next day. I’d take that recipe too, Chef Kahn, if you’re reading this! Our main course was duck l’orange. It was a fine example of a classic French dish, and reminded me of my first (and only!) trip to Paris as a fourteen or fifteen year old back in the ’90s. After eating at McDonalds and Hard Rock Cafe for the entire trip, on our last night in the city my mom forced me to go to the little restaurant with her down some dimly little cobblestoned street. I remember almost nothing about the meal other than it was the only proper French meal of the trip, and I had some kind of creamy pumpkin soup and duck a l’orange for the first time. Both were amazing, and I remember my mom being furious that on the last day of the trip I finally ate something French and said it was the best meal of the trip. I was a picky eater for a long time, but baby look at me now!
Dessert was a box of petite fours. I think our favorite was one of the tartes, either the chocolate or berry one.
At the end of January, 2022, we enjoyed our most recent Vespertine meal. This most recent menu was inspired by Northern Italy. I don’t know if it’s just me or there was something different about this meal, but it made for some of the worst “food porn” photos I’ve ever taken. Maybe Northern Italian cuisine is less about the look and more about the flavors? Whatever the case may be I apologize for how unappetizing these pictures might look. I swear, it was a dynamite meal with a slew of splendid plates.
The antipasti and pane were combined (by us) with the primi while the rest of the meal warmed in the oven. I’ve never heard of Varhackara before (kind of a pate of lard and off-cuts of meat?) or baccala mantecato (salt cod) but both were fantastic. That the eggplant was the least compelling of the three and it was still awesome says a lot about how this meal started. Then the canederli (bread dumplings) came along and…oh fuck, how the fuck have we never had bread dumplings before and how do we get more? Christine still thinks these are like, the greatest thing she’s ever tasted in her life (I almost joked “the greatest thing since sliced bread” but I thought better of it — look at me, I’m maturing!).
Like I said, not the most compelling photographs I’ve ever taken. Or maybe I’m just out of practice. Anyway, the next few dishes included radicchio grilled over oak with piave cheese and honey, and Friulian soft buckwheat polenta topped with fresh mountain cheese cream and brown butter (finished with toasted dry polenta). The secondi (main) was uccellli scappati, heritage breed pork shoulder wrapped in pancetta and sage, slowly braised in wine with herbs and spices. I don’t think the pork needs any further description because it was as unctuous and rich and amazing as it sounds. The polenta was a standout as well, and I thought it was just as good as the bread dumplings if not better. The raddichio was okay but I might have screwed something up because it came out of the oven tasting very bitter. I was trying to wait for the cheese to melt fully and even after like 25 minutes it still didn’t look melted enough. Funnily enough when we spoke with some friends a few days later, they said they thought the radicchio was one of the best dishes they had. This only further solidified my theory that I screwed the dish up, and it has been haunting me ever since.
Remember like, four paragraphs ago when I described Christine as a mac-and-cheese snob? Times that by several orders of magnitude and you get to her level of snobbery towards tiramisu. I don’t really care for tiramisu but to her it’s the end-all-and-be-all of desserts. So, we had to order the supplemental offering from Vespertine. Me? I liked the olive oil cake the most. I thought it was just super yummy, and that whipped orange blossom ricotta was so, so good. But watching Christine and that tiramisu was like watching Augutus Gloop going HAM in the chocolate room before falling in the pond and getting sucked through a pipe to God-knows-where. I thought she was going to eat herself to death. Maybe she did. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen her since she ran into the bedroom with the tiramsu and locked the door. Considering that was back in January, maybe I should go check on her…
Thanks you Chef Kahn and everyone at Vespertine. 2021 was hard year for us, but you brought smiles to our faces and filled our bellies consistently, and hopefully there will be more smiles and full bellies in 2022. Maybe we’ll even get to see y’all in person at some point. Or, you know, if you want to cater our wedding we’d probably be down with that too.
