- Details
By Julian Cross | Food & Dining Correspondent
OUROBOROS: A Culinary Journey Through Grief — 47 Wythe Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. $385/person. BYOB. No substitutions. No refunds. No dignity.
WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN — The parking garage smells, correctly, like a parking garage. Oil stain topography on the floor. A single strand of Edison bulbs strung between what used to be a structural column and what is now, apparently, a dining concept. A man in a black turtleneck hands me a card that reads: You are about to begin a journey. Please silence your phone. Please open your heart. I silence my phone. I leave my heart where it is.
This is OUROBOROS. It is not, technically, a restaurant. It is an "immersive narrative-driven culinary experience interrogating the relationship between consumption and mourning," which is a sentence that someone typed with both hands and showed to a venture capitalist. The venture capitalist said yes. Thirty-two people are paying $385 apiece tonight. You do the math. I did. Several times. Each time, I got sadder.
We are shown to our seats by a woman who introduces herself as Denial. She is twenty-four, possibly twenty-five, and performs grief the way someone performs grief after watching two documentaries about grief. She sets down a small card that tells us tonight we will be guided through the seven stages. The food, she explains, is integral to the emotional architecture of the experience. I ask if the food is integral to the eating portion of the experience. She pauses. She has not been briefed on this.
Course one arrives in the hands of a man named Anger. He places before me a thimble of smoked oil on a small square of slate. I look at it. He stares at me. Neither of us speaks. After approximately forty-five seconds, he takes the slate back. That was dinner. That was twelve dollars of dinner if you amortize the check across seven courses and don't think too hard about what a course is.
Course two is described on the card as Bargaining: A Reimagining of Salt. It is, and I want to be very precise here, a pinch of fleur de sel in a tiny ceramic vessel. I eat it. I am bargaining. I am bargaining that at some point a calorie will arrive at this table.
Somewhere between Bargaining and Depression, I flag down the Artistic Director. He is a man of approximately forty with the kind of facial hair that wants you to know he has thoughts about Chekhov. He asks if I'm enjoying the journey. I tell him I've been on longer journeys to the vending machine.
"We're interrogating," he says, "the relationship between consumption and mourning."
"I'm mourning dinner," I say.
He writes something in a small notebook. I hope it's a grocery list.
Course four is served by a man who is weeping. Not performatively, or not only performatively — there's real moisture there, and I respect the commitment even as I resent the circumstance. He places before me a single radish on a piece of driftwood. The radish is accompanied by no sauce, no garnish, no explanation. It sits on its driftwood like a small pink accusation.
I eat the radish.
Here is what I will say about the radish: it was a radish. A good radish, technically — firm, clean, with the right amount of peppery bite. It had been washed. I'll grant them that. Somewhere in this building, someone knows what they're doing with root vegetables, and that person is being profoundly underutilized by the grief theater happening in the dining room.
Course five is called Acceptance and is a small bowl of room-temperature broth. The broth is fine. The broth is trying.
Course six — and I have omitted it for reasons of self-preservation — involved something I will not discuss.
Course seven involves a violinist. She appears beside my chair without announcement and begins to play something that sounds like Arvo Pärt being processed through a feelings machine. She is standing close enough that I can smell her rosin. She does not leave. The broth goes cold. She is still playing when the next course arrives, which is a single lychee wrapped in what the card describes as Memory.
The actress playing the broth course is twenty-three years old and extraordinarily committed. She walks to my table during what I believe is the Grief Interlude and places before me a teaspoon — a literal teaspoon — of warm liquid. She leans in close. "This," she whispers, "was my mother's."
I look at the teaspoon. I look at the actress.
"Where is your mother?" I ask.
The actress blinks. This is not in the script.
"She's," she says, recalibrating, "in the kitchen."
I nod slowly. "Tell her I said hello," I say. "And that I said the broth could use acid."
She returns to character. I return to quietly computing the per-ounce cost of what I've consumed.
The check comes in an envelope sealed with wax. The wax is black. The envelope has been aged to look like it was recovered from a shipwreck. I open it. It says $385. I laughed for the first time all night.
I want to say something generous here, because I am not, despite extensive evidence to the contrary, a nihilist. The parking garage was, structurally, a parking garage. The Edison bulbs were evenly spaced. The radish was genuinely a radish. The actress playing the broth course had excellent posture and, I suspect, real potential in productions that involve chairs and food that has been cooked.
But here is what I kept thinking, through the weeping server and the violinist and the wax-sealed financial crime: somewhere in this building there is a line cook. He is twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. He came up in somebody's kitchen — a real kitchen, with fire and timing and the specific terror of a Saturday night in the weeds. He took a job plating microgreens with tweezers at eleven o'clock on a Friday because the pay was decent and the hours were reasonable and he didn't ask too many questions. And right now, while an actor in the dining room pretends to have complicated feelings about a beet, that line cook is washing a radish.
I want to meet that line cook. I want to buy him a beer — a real one, not a narrative-driven one. I want to sit across from him and ask, quietly, if he knows what we've done. If he understands that we took something he was trained to respect — technique, heat, timing, the basic covenant of feeding someone — and wrapped it in a one-man show about loss, charged the audience $385 for the privilege, and called it dining.
Because OUROBOROS is not a restaurant. It is a hostage video with a wine pairing. The food is the ransom note, and you are expected to leave satisfied.
The radish, though. The radish was clean.
Two stars out of five: one for the radish, one for the line cook I'll never meet.
- Details
Our new culinary correspondent visits Brooklyn's most innovative tasting menu and has thoughts. Several of them unprintable.
By Julian Cross | Food & Dining | IRREVERENT Magazine
BROOKLYN, N.Y. — The restaurant is called PROMPT, which is either a statement of artistic intent or a cry for help, depending on how you feel about dinner costing more than your car payment. It occupies a converted warehouse on a street where, ten years ago, you could buy a burrito for four dollars and nobody would ask you to scan a QR code first. Those days are gone. In their place: exposed Edison bulbs, a hostess with the serene expression of someone who has already filed a trademark on her bone structure, and a small placard near the entrance that reads, "Your meal, curated by you. Interpreted by us. Imagined by AI."
I stood there for a moment. A long moment.
The concept, for those mercifully unaware: PROMPT is a twelve-course tasting menu at $295 per person where every dish is generated by a machine learning model trained on forty thousand Michelin-starred restaurant reviews. The model analyzes your social media presence — specifically Instagram — and builds a personalized tasting menu from the aesthetic data of your life. Your feed is your menu. Your curation is their cuisine.
My Instagram is black coffee. Knives. One accidental photograph of a cat that belongs to my neighbor Denise, which I have not deleted because I am not a monster.
I was seated at 7 p.m. My printed menu arrived on heavy stock in a custom sleeve. I read it with the specific stillness I usually reserve for news of a natural disaster.
The Menu
Course One: Deconstructed Espresso Foam.
I want you to read those three words again. I want you to sit with them.
The dish arrived as a white bowl containing what appeared to be the remnants of a dishwasher malfunction — a faint coffee-adjacent aroma rising from a structure that was, charitably, foam. Not crema. Not a shot. Not the thing that coffee is. A gesture toward coffee. The memory of coffee. Coffee as interpreted by something that has never had a bad morning and therefore cannot understand why the drink exists in the first place.
It tasted like a suggestion. I ate it. I noted it. I moved on, because I am a professional.
Course Three: Blade-Honed Yuzu Air.
"Air" is not a food. I want to be very clear about this. Air is what fills the space between food. Chefs began putting air on plates around 2004 and we, as a civilization, failed to stop them. This is our fault. We encouraged it. We called it innovative. We wrote think pieces.
The yuzu air arrived in a glass dome that the server lifted tableside with the gravity of someone unveiling the Pietà. Beneath it: nothing. Aromatic nothing. Citrus-scented absence.
I asked the server if the kitchen was aware that the dish had not arrived.
She explained, patiently, that the air itself was the dish.
I thanked her. I sat quietly for a moment that stretched in interesting ways.
Course Seven: Whiskers in Cream.
This one is Denise's cat's fault. The AI found the photo — tabby, indifferent, perched on a radiator — and apparently processed it as a flavor profile. The result was a small ceramic dish containing cream, something freeze-dried and orange-hued, and what I can only describe as a texture that recalled fur without, legally, being fur. There was a single dried violet on top.
The menu card said: "An ode to warmth. To the domestic sublime. To things we hold."
I do not hold Denise's cat. Denise's cat does not consent to being held. The AI had generated a dish based on a cat I do not own and a relationship I do not have, and it tasted like a florist's refrigerator.
I made a note. The note said: "No."
The Exchange
Between courses nine and ten, Atlas came out.
Atlas is twenty-eight. He has good hair — the kind of hair that has never sweated through a double shift. He has not, to the best of my research, worked a line. He trained the model. He built the system. He is, in the vocabulary of our current moment, the founder.
He asked how I was enjoying my experience.
I told him the meal had been interesting.
He said: "We trained the model on forty thousand Michelin reviews."
I paused. The pause lasted approximately four seconds, which in restaurant conversation is equivalent to geological time.
"Did you train it on how to cook?"
Atlas smiled the smile of someone who has been asked this before and has a prepared answer. "That's not really the point," he said.
"I noticed," I said.
He explained the system — the neural architecture, the flavor embedding vectors, the Instagram scraping pipeline, the personalization engine. He used the word innovative four times. He used the word experience six. He did not use the words heat, salt, acid, fat, timing, or technique.
I listened. I drank water. I looked at the wall.
The problem with Atlas is not that he is stupid. He is clearly not stupid. The problem is that he is operating under the sincere belief that cooking is a data problem. That if you read enough about food, you will eventually understand food. That the distance between forty thousand Michelin reviews and a properly rested duck breast is a matter of processing power.
It is not a processing power problem. It is a heat problem. It is a patience problem. It is a 6 a.m. on a Tuesday problem, when the delivery is late and the prep cook called in sick and you have to break down forty pounds of fish before service because nobody else will.
The machine has never done that. The machine will never do that. The machine does not know what it doesn't know, which is, in my experience, the most dangerous kind of ignorance.
Lourdes
Course eleven was a single piece of chocolate.
Not deconstructed. Not aerated. Not conceptualized or embedded or curated. A single piece of properly tempered dark chocolate, snapped clean, with a gloss that told you the temperature had been controlled with care and the chocolate had been handled by someone who understood that this moment — the moment before a person bites — is a promise.
I asked who made it.
Lourdes, I was told. Fifty-two. The pastry station.
I sent my compliments.
Lourdes did not come out. Lourdes was, presumably, still working. This is what people who cook actually do.
The Observation
Here is what I will tell you, for free, before you spend $295 on an AI's guess at who you are based on your Instagram grid:
The machine didn't ruin dinner.
The machine was the excuse.
Somewhere in Brooklyn, a child with a MacBook is laundering mediocrity through math, and we are calling it innovation. We are calling it personalized. We are calling it the future of dining, because "the future" is what we say when we want to do something that couldn't survive contact with the past. The past knew what food was. The past had a grandmother. The past had a cast iron pan that weighed eleven pounds and cooked things until they were done.
Atlas trained his model on forty thousand professional opinions. He did not train it on the moment a sauce breaks and you have to decide, in real time, whether you can save it. He did not train it on the look a senior cook gives you when you plate something ugly. He did not train it on the physical memory — the kind that lives in your wrists, not your head — of knowing when something is right.
Twelve courses. One edible. Made by Lourdes, who has held a saucepan, which is more than I can say for the algorithm.
It's cold water, Atlas.
It's cold water all the way down.
Julian Cross helmed The Anvil in Chicago's West Loop from 2009 to 2014, earning two Michelin stars before departing to pursue other interests, which he declines to specify. He takes his coffee black and his knives very seriously. This is his first column for IRREVERENT Magazine.