ANOTHER FINE MEC

Above is what I’m sure will be one of the more extraordinary things I eat this year.  It was listed on the menu as “wood sorrel, blueberry” which is true as far as it goes – both those ingredients are there on the plate - but there’s also a surprisingly sweet blueberry puree in there as well, wonderfully undercut by the amazingly intense tartness of the wood sorrel, like the juice from a whole lemon concentrated into a leaf.

I was eating at Trois Mec, the new restaurant about to be opened by John Shook, Vinny Detolo and Ludo Lebfevre, in an old pizza restaurant in a fairly bleak mini mall at the corner of Highland and Melrose.  They haven’t taken down the old sign yet, so it looks like this:

And the word is they’re planning to leave the sign there so that the restaurant will be, in some sense specialized of the word, secret.  I imagine lots of people will drift in wanting to order a cheap take out pizza, which may be amusing at first, though I imagine it’ll get old very quickly.

Also on the menu were roasted radish in sake butter with sea urchin, and “charred potato, buttermilk, pea” (that's it above) which involved doing something unprecedented, unfathomable and deeply wonderful with a potato, though I couldn’t tell you what.  Still, nothing quite beat that sorrel and blue berry starter. 

I love sorrel and I actually grow it in my own garden, and when I told this to John Shook (he’s the untattooed member of the trio) he said, “I’ll buy all you can supply.”  Truth to tell, my sorrel isn’t wood sorrel – it’s just plain old sorrel (possibly French sorrel); and in any case I’m not sure I want to get into the restaurant supply business.  I’m sure I couldn’t live up to their high standards.