French Laundry - 2005.11.07 -- *****

Yes the fabled French Laundry. One of the World's Best restaurant, one of the World's most celebrated chefs, probably the World's hardest reservation to make. And certainly one of most expensive meals a normal person would think of paying for.

Six of us dined on two different tasting menus, one 7-courses and the other 9-courses, with the addition of two amuse-bouche's and an extensive Mignardises selection. We certainly felt like we tasted the whole world in this four and half hour marathon dining experience. The evening was capped by an intimate trip to the ground-zero kitchen, and a friendly chat with the very down to earth chef-of-the-night, who was by the way NOT Thomas Keller.

Some of the dishes were absolute gems, like my first course Oysters and Pearls, and surely all of the dessert courses. Some of the dishes were merely "very good". And about one I could honestly say "unenjoyable", the steak course. But how many I would bestow the title "perfection"? Everything were, of course, fantastically complicated to prepare and featured parade after parade of eye-opening ingredients.

However, somewhere in this epitome of culinary extravagance, this conglomeration of all the superlative facets of dining out, the food, the service, the setting, the price, the hype, the best of everything, I have lost grasp of what was truly wondrous. It was hard to remember just days after the fact, whether I actually liked the dish, or I thought I aught to have liked it, or I thought I should've liked it more for the price I paid.

In the end, perhaps the reluctance to write about this once-in-a-lifetime experience says more than I could actually articulate.

For pictures, there's no need for me to duplicate the excellent shots Gabe took.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonx/sets/1328803/

$225 per person, all inclusive.