You will not find overcooked mackerel in this culinary shrine. 'Overcooked,' declares Guillermo, thrusting it back. The cube has been meticulously set on a bed of braised baby leeks and julienned red and white radish and camps in a Lake of lobster stock. The mackerel is maybe the size of your thumb. Michelle, the pastry chef, sails by with an armload of sourdough rolls, narrowly missing Guillermo, Charlie’s number two, who is inspecting a mackerel morsel for tonight’s amuse. In pastry, face screwed in concentration, Tamara slices tiny chocolate slivers as if they were microchips. Faster on the line! We’re losing momentum!”Īt the grill, David snatches squab and, with surgical precision, spoons puddle of asparagus sauce. Picture 18 men and women in chef’s toques bent double over stoves and countertops, brows furrowed, hands flying. Then add razor-sharp knives and red-hot grills and scorching fire from vats of railing broth. Picture the intensity of a hospital emergency room and throw in the acrobatics of the Cirque du Soleil. Picture, if you will, a combat sub under attack. Faster! We need to get the hot line in the game!” One can only imagine the monastic quiet, the hushed calm that prevails behind the kitchen's soundproof double doors. His work requites a magnifying glass to appreciate. Make that micrograms, Charlie is a miniaturist. The Hudson Valley foie gns comes topped with sweet-and-sour cauliflower diced so fine a baby could swallow it. And try to find the food identify! Here is an entire blue-cheese soufflé in the shape of a thimble. Not one nest of plates, not two, but three! The dishwasher here must be the size of the Amoco Building. A paperless restaurant with no menu where diners would merely check in and entrust themselves to the artistry of the chef.Īnd what artistry it is! What mysteries of metamorphosis take place! Indeed, such is the alchemy that at times it is difficult to tell that food is being served Offerings arrive on nests of plates and napkins. He represented Charlie’s dream to run a restaurant where food evolved eternally toward perfection. Charlie's staff kept the kitchen open, and Ray has been back 100 times.īut George-George was one of a kind. A New York-Chicago commuter, Ray was hunting for a late-night bistro to grab a solo bite. Ray Harris, a financial executive for Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter, Discover & Company, is nodding contentedly over the African pompano with macadamia nut crust, bok choy, and a spicy coconut emulsion. Bragman, here on one of his dining excursions, is family. Jeff Bragman from California is back for his third evening in a row. At the 'ten' table upstairs a group of tough female lawyers have already gone gooey-eyed and are making soft yelps of pleasure. Perhaps the next George Rubenstein Lurks tonight in the dining room. And that’s to be the best restaurant in the world.’ ‘I have a goal so lofty it’s almost embarrassing to talk about. As if Pope Julius had died on Michelangelo. George gone? It is as if Johnson had lost his Boswell. And never once saw a menu! On New Year’s Eve, when George maintained a scrupulous vigil at home, Charlie Trotter’s delivered dinner with decoded diagrams so the food could be properly assembled. In the nine years that Charlie had been serving food n his eponymous restaurant on Armitage. With his passing, Charlie Trotter, 37, lost his greatest acolyte. Make that the late George Rubenstein, the opera patron and lumber magnate who died in December at the age of 84. How, then, is he to secure the tuna and scoop up the snap-pea purée with its microdots of 50-year-old balsamic vinegar? One thing is clear: the gentleman is no George Rubenstein. To use the knife and cut directly down, attacking the tower from the top, would surely ruin the construction: A ground-level assault, inserting a fork near the turnip base, risks the entire edifice. He peers closer his hand shuttles uneasily between his folk and his knife. But, ah-there's a problem.Ĭonsternation clouds the gentleman's face. Here is one now, marveling over a tiny braised turnip stuffed with morels and topped with seared big-eye tuna swimming in a snap-pea purée with fiddlehead ferns. It's the usual group of excited diners in the handsome two-tiered restaurant on Armitage Avenue.

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