Eve's Fungus Milkshake
Swamped -- yay March 1st NIH R01 Deadline (kerflump) -- but finally finished early this morning an entry about an Ann Arbor evening much earlier in the winter: an evening that started with fungus milkshakes and ended with spinning blades and was a most enjoyable evening from start to finish. Enjoy. :-)
eve the Restaurant just opened last year across from Yamato's, the Japanese restaurant my Japanese research mentor so highly recommended and often frequented. Winner of many "Best New Restaurant" awards in local papers, it was Jesse's idea to try it out before the orchestra concert began at 8, and glad we did!
You could tell that eve was the work of a chef who saw cooking as an art and food and flavors as paints with which to let creativity run loose. Instead of riffing off of one culinary niche, the food was like somebody decided to take a pinch of this and a pinch of that, this culinary concept, that food idea, and fit the disparate pieces together into something creative and new. Most restaurants are very clearly supposed to be something -- Grazi's is Italian, Yamato's is Japanese, The Chop House is hard-core steak; eve was good, and different. It's very hard to say that eve was like anything else. Which was the chef's intention.
Jesse and I ordered a little of this, and that, and the other thing, and enjoyed too all the little touches eve threw in. The bread with the three different kinds of uniquely flavored butters. The water in our waterglasses suffused with rose. eve took things that one has had a million times before -- nachos, pizza, burgers -- and reimagines them in neat ways in a cleanly contemporary setting. Of course, everything is much more enjoyable when it's shared with a good friend, and we enjoyed dinner muchly. But the one thing in a very nice dinner that truly blew our socks off was the fungus milkshake...
eve didn't *call* it a fungus milkshake, of course -- it was the soup of the day, the mushroom soup, which Jesse had decided to give a try and which, well, *whoa*. It was good in the same way that a really, really, *really* good thick milkshake is good -- the same kind of richness, and complexity, and sensory hit, just warm instead of cold and with mushrooms instead of chocolate. It was a cup of soup that made you think, "Okay, so *that's* why they let you open your own restaurant". The food at eve was all culinary experiments, some more successful than others: eve's mushroom soup wasn't just a hit, it was a monster home run that punched hole in the stadium dome ceiling on it's way out. It was, quite literally, from the last seven years eating at a lot of expensive and very expensive restaurants on business, the best cup of soup of any kind I've ever had in a restaurant. It was just like, *damn*.
We asked for the recipie. They e-mailed us the recipie. Neither one of us knows exactly what all the terms in the recipie mean, but we both know a Lady down in Toledo who does. Glee. :-)
Of the University of Michigan Life Sciences Orchestra I'd written before, as well as the richly restored Hill Auditorium, grand glorious orchestral hall in which, should Jesse and I earn that privelege, we will walk for our velvet hoods in the spring of 2007. The LSO's first concert of the year is actually the first concert in more than five years I've heard at Hill, and I was reminded just why Hill is such a revered place for music.
Everyone I knew was there -- the LSO's performances, even five years in, remain a major social event at the medical school -- and Jesse was amused by the number of folks who said hello. One of the undergraduates I had supervised in lab was a 2nd violin, one of my senior professors on the standing string bass, my friend David, co-founder, was on woodwinds, the list went on. In fact, one of *Jesse's* professors was playing cello as well. My mentee for this year in the PhD program was playing percussion, and so for the first time I really paid close attention to what the guys in the back were actually doing -- and found myself facinated by all I'd never noticed before.
It wasn't just that the percussionists played multiple instruments during the course of a symphony -- that evening, Mozart's No. 29 and Mahler's 1st. It was that, for individual notes, the percussionists -- Andrew among them -- would swap mallets. In fact, they had racks of mallets back there for their drums, which they would switch rapid-fire, creating different sounds depending, all of which I noticed for the first time in a lifetime performing with and listening to orchestras. It was a beautiful concert in beautiful surroundings, and very enjoyable.
Earlier that evening, walking back from Kerrytown to Hill Auditorium, we noticed that the grand Michigan Theatre -- the one we'd seen Return of the King in on opening night two years before (Into the West, 12/17/2003) -- was showing House of Flying Daggers (no spoilers forthcoming). Now, with the orchestra concert ending in time to catch the 10 PM showing, away we went. Who needed sleep, anyway? :-)
Again, the organist at the State played his usual pre-show concert, to much clapping and hurrah when the lights finally came down and the curtain drew back. And then the ass-kicking on screen began. In the same way modern special effects and modern blockbuster budgets have made the cheesy sci-fi films of the 1970's become the majorly cool-ass productions of today, the same influx of technology, technique and money have taken the low-budget production Kung-fu films of my childhood and made things like the gorgeous Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Hero. (Compare and contrast 60's Lost in Space to modern Firefly, or 70's Battlestar Galactica to modern Battlestar Galactica.) And let's face it, at the movies, ass-kicking -- and women who kick ass -- never go out of style. ;-)
Unlike most kung-fu films, House of Flying Daggers was shot in Mandarin Chinese, rather than the usual Cantonese -- I don't speak the latter, but sorta-kinda understand the former. I barely caught about 50% of what was spoken, but it was enough to know that the sub-titling wasn't perfect. It wasn't bad -- it certainly was adequate -- but there were definately times where I would have chosen a different translation. There were a number of times one of the main characters would deliver a hilarious, witty verbal smackdown, some subtle play on words which would make a native Chinese speaker go "Ooo, Burn!", that was completely lost in the subtitling. And I strongly, strongly suspect that something that got lost in the translation (and that I also missed) becomes really, really important for understanding the last few minutes of the movie. (No spoilers, but the ending makes a lot more sense to someone familiar with the conventions of Chinese films.) But it was still cool as all heck. There were all kinds of wicked plot twists. And apparently, the Redshirts (see definition) of the 9th Century Tang Dynasty wore forest green silk. ;-)
Milkshakes, music, movies -- marvelous evening, like so many others that so many of you have so kindly shared with me in years past. Wish you all could have joined us. :-)