At long last, after several months of waiting, the delicious and ineffable le fooding arrived in New York. Hurray! I went on Friday and I actually took a half vacation day to make sure that I had plenty of time to get to Long Island City. I purchased a VIP ticket which included an hour of Champagne before the rest of the masses showed up. Entering P.S. 1's courtyard was somewhat of a magical experience. I came from the back of the building, through the lobby and walked out onto the terrace which overlooked a perfectly manicured dark, green grass "lawn" with cones of fur rising high above it. How can I better explain it? If you skinned King Kong, dried it off, and stretched King Kong's fur over giant cones and legos, you would have something like the black furry shapes that hovered above us at P.S.1. The colors were remarkable: a blue sky, white cotton puff clouds, black King Kong cone shapes, grass, and Veuve Cliquot's orange and black.
The music was perfect. Benjamin Moreau, of the Kolkoz duo and Le Baron in Paris, played fantastic vintage French music which gave the scene a bit of a French country club feel with a wink. For the first hour, from 6 p.m. until 7p.m. the people who bought $60 tickets wandered around with their free Veuve Cliquot and we sampled goodies prepared by all the chefs at each of their tasting stations. The chefs present were: David Chang of the Momofuko empire, Yves Camdeborde of Le Comptoir du Relais in Paris, Wylie Dufresne of wd50, William Ledeuil of Ze Kitchen Galerie in Paris, Sean Rembold of Diner in Brooklyn, and my absolute new favorite, Christophe Pele of La Bigarrade in Paris. By 7pm the crowd started pouring in.
I started off with some kind of pork-related soup. Pretty soothing. Eventually, I met up with my friends and we went for Christophe Pele's barbequed sirloin steak, which was so good we pretty much made his station our go-to stop for the night. Such a simple plate: grilled steak, next to a tiny arugula salad topped off with scallions, lemon zest and a seriously delicious vinaigrette. We went back three times.
We also had Grilled marinated pork ribs from Chef Ledeuil - quite delicious. I had fried corn with scallop butter by Sean Rembold and loved the corn. The line was too long for the ice cream, so we had cheese instead.
Tonight, I went back for more of le fooding and fell in love with it all over again. For starters, the dj Benjamin Moreau is tres mignon (very cute), like a hot Charlie Chaplin. Secondly, the steak with charred aubergine by Inaki Aizpitartre was extraordinary. And tonight I got to have some of the best ice cream ever - salted hazelnut gianduja and Bourbon vanilla- hand made/homemade by the pastry chef and restaurateur Nicholas Morgenstern of General Greene in Brooklyn.
As delicious as everything was, I wanted to go home and try my hand at Christophe Pele's sirloin steak. Recipe to follow.
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