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The hostess at Vessel wears all black and speaks in a register normally reserved for the reading of wills. She leads you through a corridor where the walls are raw concrete poured in deliberate, expensive imperfection, past a shelf holding a single ceramic vessel — the vessel, presumably, the restaurant's one honest gesture toward its own name — and into a dining room so aggressively atmospheric it feels like walking into someone's MFA thesis after it negotiated a liquor license.
I sat down. A server materialized. He did not say hello. He said, "We'll be taking you on a journey this evening," with the gravity of a man announcing a terminal diagnosis. Not to me. To my next of kin.
I asked for black coffee.
He said they didn't have a coffee program yet but would be happy to bring me a chicory infusion.
I looked at him for a long moment. "It's cold water, Kevin," I said, into the middle distance.
He brought the chicory infusion. I did not drink it.
The chef is listed on every menu, every press release, every breathless food-media preview as "Rodrigo." Just the one name, like Cher, or a natural disaster. His biography reads: trained in Catalonia, two years under a legendary Basque master, a spiritual journey through coastal Portugal. The James Beard Foundation has him on their watch list. The food press has declared him, in their usual way, a revelation.
His name is Jud Simon. He grew up on the south side of Chicago, which I respect enormously, and is the son of a plumber from Bridgeport who, by all accounts, made an exceptional pierogi. I know this because I spent twenty minutes with a phone and a public business registration before I walked in the door.
I'm not saying the south side can't produce a great chef — the south side has produced men and women who would make the entire culinary establishment weep with shame. What I'm saying is that the invented accent — a slippery mid-Atlantic thing that veers toward Castilian when he visits tableside — is a performance tax the diner is being charged without consent. No itemized receipt.
The amuse-bouche arrived in what I can only describe as a tiny bronze coffin. Inside: a single mackerel collar, cured in citrus and juniper, resting on a bed of charred hay ash. It was beautiful in the way a very expensive mistake is beautiful. It was also, undeniably, delicious — the mackerel silky and forward, the ash adding a low, woody smoke that had no business working as well as it did.
I made a note. I revised the note.
The meal escalated.
Course three was a Jerusalem artichoke prepared three ways — one roasted to a caramel density, one raw-shaved into translucent coins, one turned into something that the menu called a "soil memory," which was, on inspection, a dehydrated powder that dissolved on the tongue like the ghost of a vegetable. The server explained, at length, that Rodrigo's grandmother had a garden. Jud Simon's grandmother also had a garden. It was in Bridgeport. I ate the artichoke. The soil memory, absurd as it was, landed like a chord.
Course five arrived inside a smooth river stone — a hollow prop stone, cast resin, containing a single butter-poached langoustine draped over a smear of cauliflower cream with brown butter breadcrumbs and a single tarragon leaf positioned with the care of a man defusing a device.
This is where I must be honest with myself and with you: the langoustine was extraordinary. Supple, sweet, finished with a restraint that is, in this context, almost shocking. Whatever Jud Simon is doing with the theater, he knows exactly what he's doing with the protein. The technique is real. The flavors are earned. The vessel — the prop stone, the bronze coffin, the conceptual plating — is a costume draped over something that does not need a costume.
Which made it worse, somehow. A fraud with no talent is easy to dismiss. A talent hiding behind fraud is a grief.
I found out about Scott somewhere between course seven and course eight, which is, in my experience, the correct place to receive bad news — late enough that you've invested, early enough to still feel it.
I had stepped out to use the restroom. The corridor to the bathrooms runs past the manager's office, whose door was ajar, revealing a corkboard inside with a printed LLC filing half-pinned to it — Vessel Hospitality Partners LLC — and the names of the silent investors were not entirely illegible.
Meadow, S.
I stood there in the corridor with the ambient music bleeding through the walls — something Nordic and minor-key, naturally — and I thought about The Anvil.
I thought about 2009. About the night Scott Meadow walked into a kitchen in River North where I was doing prep alone at two in the morning, building my menu from the floor up, and sat on an overturned milk crate and said, "Tell me what you need." He wrote the check the following week. Not a loan. A bet. He called it a bet. The Anvil ran for five years and closed on my own terms, which is more than most restaurants can say, and it happened because a man I trusted handed me a stake and asked for nothing in return except that I do the thing I said I was going to do.
I washed my hands. I went back to the table.
Course eight was a venison loin sliced thin as a secret, arranged over a smoked potato puree with pickled blackberry and a foam of something. The foam I cannot forgive; the foam is, has always been, an admission that you ran out of ideas and bought a siphon. Every siphon is a surrender. But the venison itself — the venison I could have eaten until I died. Properly hung, seasoned with the confidence of someone who has done this ten thousand times, cooked to a temperature I would have demanded in my own kitchen.
I ate all of it. I did not write anything in my notebook for a while.
Here is what I did not do: I did not call Scott. I did not compose, in my head, a review that would sand down the edges, that would praise the langoustine and the venison and quietly omit the prop stone and the false accent and the grandmother's garden monologue. I did not decide to torch the place either, to write the kind of piece that ends careers and gets read aloud gleefully at the tables of his competitors.
What I did was sit with it. The way you sit with any situation that doesn't resolve cleanly — not because you lack convictions, but because convictions, up close, in the specific rather than the abstract, are heavier than they look in theory.
Scott Meadow backed a young chef with a concept and a fake biography and a dining room designed to make people feel like they're in a museum of themselves. He has done this before. He backed me, and I was, I will say, considerably easier to defend.
The check arrived in a small ceramic bowl. There was no bill inside, just a folded piece of paper on which the total was handwritten in the manner of a personal note. A touch I would have found charming in 1997.
I walked out onto Fulton Market at ten-thirty on a Wednesday. The street still had the ambient roar of the industry district trying to remember what it used to be. I found a diner two blocks east and ordered black coffee — actual coffee, in an actual cup, from an actual pot that had been sitting on an actual burner long enough to qualify as a controlled substance.
I sat there until midnight.
Vessel is the best restaurant in Chicago right now that I wish I could dismiss. Jud Simon has real hands, real technique, and a real palate, all of which he has buried under a persona built from borrowed geography and a prop department. The meal is worth eating. The experience charges you for the pretending.
I have been asked, in the past, what separates a great chef from a good one. My answer has always been: the willingness to let the food be what it is.
Rodrigo, whoever he is, hasn't learned that yet.
Jud Simon might.
I left a cash tip and did not leave a note.
Julian Cross is a former two-Michelin-starred executive chef and Food & Dining Correspondent for IRREVERENT. He lives in Chicago and drinks his coffee black. No exceptions.
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by Julian Cross
The first rule of Chicago Ketchup Club is you do not talk about Chicago Ketchup Club.
The second rule is the same. There are approximately eleven more rules, all printed on laminated cards in a font best described as "Microsoft Word at a funeral," and every single one hammers the same point: do not, under any circumstances, tell anyone you do this.
I found out about the group the way you find out about most things you wish you hadn't — through a source I'll call a friend of a friend, who called it "a support group for people the city has failed." I thought he was being metaphorical. He wasn't.
My contact's name was Gus. Gus managed network infrastructure for a mid-size logistics company in Naperville. By day, he provisioned VLANs and argued with vendors about SLA compliance. By night — well. By night, Gus facilitated.
We met at a Portillo's parking lot off the Kennedy Expressway at 9:30 PM on a Thursday. He arrived in a gray Honda Civic with a reusable grocery bag in the back seat. He was wearing a fleece. He looked like a man who had made a decision he could not undo, made peace with it, and then — regrettably — made the decision again.
"You're not from the Tribune?" he said.
"I'm not from the Tribune."
"Sun-Times?"
"Food correspondent," I said. "IRREVERENT Magazine."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded, the way a man nods when he has already calculated his losses and decided to proceed anyway. "You can come to one meeting," he said. "You don't share names. You don't share anything."
"I understand."
He looked at the reusable grocery bag. I looked at it too.
"Is that—"
"Yes," he said.
The group met in the finished basement of a ranch house in Portage Park, which I am choosing not to describe further for reasons of journalistic discretion and also because it looked exactly like every finished basement in Portage Park. Drop ceiling. Sectional sofa. A 55-inch television showing a Bears game with the sound off. Eleven people.
They ranged from a woman in municipal finance to a retired high school biology teacher named Dennis who had been doing this, he informed me, since 1987. "I was at a cookout," Dennis said. "There was a bottle there. I thought, what's the harm."
Nobody answered.
I took a seat on the sectional next to a woman — late twenties, sleeve of tattoos — who was nursing a Modelo and staring at the middle distance with the practiced calm of someone who has accepted the terms of their own life. On her forearm, a tattoo had been worked over with black ink. The original design was still visible underneath if you looked: a hot dog in a bun, crossed out, the universal symbol for NO KETCHUP. The tattoo all the Chicago kids get. The vow.
"You had that crossed out," I said.
She looked at me sideways. "I had it crossed out."
"How long ago?"
"March." A pause. "I don't really want to talk about March."
The meeting opened with what Gus called "the ritual," which was, specifically, everyone opening a bottle of French's and putting exactly one squeeze on a Vienna Beef hot dog that had been procured from a gas station on Cicero. Just one squeeze. Just to remember where it started. Just to stay honest.
I watched eleven adults do this in near-total silence. The fluorescent light above the sectional hummed. The Bears game went to commercial.
Gus said, "Does anyone want to share where they are this week?"
Dennis said he'd done it at home again, twice, and he didn't feel bad about it but he wanted to say it out loud. People nodded. The woman in municipal finance said she'd done it at a family dinner and had to pretend it was for her kid. More nodding. A young man in a Cubs jacket — could not have been older than twenty-three — said nothing, just stared at his Vienna Beef, and I got the distinct impression this was not his first rodeo.
I was witnessing something structurally identical to a twelve-step meeting, except the substance was a condiment, and the harm was entirely aesthetic, and yet — and I want to be precise here — the shame was absolutely real. These were people who understood what Chicago meant. They had grown up with Superdawg, with the Vienna Beef gospel, with the doctrine handed down from every street cart and hot dog stand and argument in any sports bar in the 312: you do not put ketchup on a hot dog. You simply do not. The tomato lives on the devil's side of the bun. It is a food crime. It is what you do if you are eight years old, or from Ohio, or simply lost.
They knew all of this. They did it anyway. It was ritual, transgression, and absolution. This was their ortolan bunting.
The escalation, Gus told me later, was "organic."
What began as solitary practice — at home, alone, late at night, with the curtains drawn, the kind of thing you do with your back to the kitchen as if the refrigerator might judge you — progressed into something more elaborate. Someone brought a friend. Someone suggested a parking lot. Someone brought the French's and the sport peppers and the neon-green relish and the celery salt and the raw onion, and someone else brought the pickle spear, and at some point — this was the moment I felt the meeting tilt on its axis — someone brought the full Chicago. All of it. Every topping that makes a Chicago-style dog what it is, the sacred architecture of mustard and relish and tomato slices and pickled sport peppers and a proper dill spear and a dusting of celery salt on a poppy seed bun.
Plus ketchup.
The full Chicago, plus ketchup.
"We don't call it that to disrespect it," Gus said carefully. "We're not trying to say the Chicago dog is wrong."
"You are adding ketchup to the Chicago dog," I said.
He was quiet for a moment.
"We're saying it can hold more," he said finally.
I wrote that down. I wrote it down because it was the most coherent philosophical defense of the indefensible I had heard in twenty years in professional kitchens, and also because I wanted documentation that someone had said it out loud with a straight face.
The breaking point came in the third hour.
A man I had not previously noticed — heavyset, fifties, sitting near the television with the quiet authority of someone who had been to more of these than he was comfortable admitting — stood up and placed a glass bottle of Hunt's ketchup on the coffee table.
The room went still.
The woman with the crossed-out tattoo said, "Gus."
Gus looked at the bottle. He looked at the man. He looked at the bottle again.
"Rick," he said. "We've talked about this."
"Hunt's is a perfectly serviceable product," Rick said.
The silence that followed was of a quality I have not experienced since a tasting menu in 2008 where a line cook dropped a composed terrine and we all just stood there. It was the silence of people confronting something they had known was possible, had quietly feared, and were now facing without adequate preparation.
"This group," Gus said slowly, "uses Heinz."
"I'm making a choice," Rick said.
"This group uses Heinz."
"The tomato profiles are different, Gus. Hunt's is sweeter. It's a different product."
"Rick."
"I did a side-by-side."
"You need to leave, Rick."
Rick picked up his Hunt's. He looked around the room. Nobody met his eyes. He picked up his jacket from the arm of the sectional, tucked the bottle under his arm, and walked up the stairs without another word.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then Dennis said, quietly, "It was always going to be Rick."
I drove home at midnight along the Edens Expressway with the windows down and the city doing what Chicago does in late spring, which is smell like rain and exhaust and something faintly floral underneath, as if the place is trying to apologize for itself. I thought about Gus in his fleece, and Rick and his Hunt's, and the woman whose tattoo was a monument to a principle she had quietly abandoned, and eleven people in a basement choosing, week after week, the thing they had been told they were not supposed to want.
And then I thought about all of it for approximately forty-five more seconds before I decided I had no sympathy left.
They know. That's the thing. Every last one of them knows what a Chicago dog is and why it is what it is. The dog is constructed with the precision of a legal argument. Every element earns its place. The sport pepper is heat and acid. The celery salt is herbaceous bottom note. The neon relish is sweetness measured. The tomato — the sliced, not-ketchuped tomato — is fresh acidity, not a sauce, because a sauce overwhelms, and this dog was designed to harmonize. It took decades of collective iteration to land on this. It is correct. It works.
You do not add ketchup to a thing that is already finished.
I have eaten in forty-three countries. I have spent more hours in professional kitchens than I have spent sleeping. I have genuine sympathy for the idea that food rules are sometimes arbitrary and that transgression can be pleasure. I wrote as much three weeks ago about raw milk, which is a topic my doctor and I are no longer capable of discussing calmly. My doctor still isn't talking to me. But that's from the milk.
This is different.
Put ketchup on your hot dog at home, in the dark, where I don't have to see it. But the moment you form a club — the moment you construct a ritual and a mythology and a laminated card — you have asked me to take you seriously. And I do. I take you very seriously.
You are wrong.
Gus, you are a good facilitator. You ran a tight meeting. Your cheese-and-cracker spread was competent.
But you are wrong.
And Rick, wherever you are tonight with your Hunt's — you are worse than wrong. You are a man who found a community of people who understood his shame and responded by making it their problem too.
The Chicago dog was designed without ketchup because it doesn't need it. You don't add ketchup to a perfectly roasted chicken. You don't add foam to a properly rendered consommé. You don't take the thing that is finished and correct and add one more thing because you personally feel it's missing something.
The missing thing is you.
That's the secret. That's always been the secret.
The food is fine. The food is more than fine. The food has arrived exactly where it should be.
You're the one who hasn't.
Julian Cross is IRREVERENT Magazine's Food & Dining Correspondent. He previously ran The Anvil in Chicago's West Loop from 2009 to 2014. He is currently not speaking to his doctor.
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by Julian Cross
Editor's note: The CDC and FDA are explicit on this point: raw, unpasteurized milk can contain E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, Campylobacter, and a rotating cast of other pathogens capable of causing severe illness, hospitalization, and death. Do not drink raw milk. Do not do what Julian did. He is a trained professional who has made significantly worse decisions than this, and even he is not recommending it.
The woman behind the counter at Bovine & Bloom — the Wicker Park "milk bar" that had been showing up in my feed with the frequency and inevitability of a parking ticket — wore a linen apron and spoke about unpasteurized dairy the way a sommelier speaks about a first-growth Bordeaux. She had opinions about herd terroir. She used the phrase "living milk." She told me, with the absolute conviction of someone who had never worked a kitchen in her life, that pasteurization was "basically just violence against flavor molecules."
I ordered a small pour of their house raw whole milk, three dollars and seventy-five cents, served in a hand-thrown ceramic cup with a drawing of a very happy cow on it.
I asked the cow if it knew what I was about to do.
The cow, being a drawing on a cup, said nothing.
I drank.
It tasted like milk. Cold, slightly grassy, with a faint sweetness behind it. Full-bodied. Genuinely good. I want to be clear about this because I am a person who takes flavor seriously: it was excellent milk. It was also, as I would spend the next seven days learning in increasingly vivid detail, a complicated choice.
Day One. I called Dr. Hsu.
Dr. Hsu has been my physician for eleven years. She has seen me through a bout of food poisoning acquired from a sea urchin in a restaurant I won't name because I genuinely liked the chef. She has seen me through the blowfish incident of 2019, which remains under a gentleman's agreement neither of us discusses in writing. She was there, in a professional capacity, after the casu marzu tasting in Sardinia — research, I told her, and she said nothing, and then I spent three days producing gastrointestinal theater I am still processing emotionally.
She has never, in eleven years, sounded frightened.
"Julian," she said.
"I'm doing a week of raw milk. For journalism."
There was a silence of roughly four seconds, which for Dr. Hsu is the equivalent of another person screaming.
"I'm going to need you to text me your symptoms every morning," she said finally. "And if you develop a fever above 101, you go to the ER. I'm not negotiating on that."
I agreed to her terms.
She did not sound comforted.
Let me be direct about the raw milk situation in America, because someone has to be, and the people selling it to you at your local farmers market certainly aren't going to do it.
Raw milk has not been pasteurized, which means Louis Pasteur's nineteenth-century process of heating liquid to kill pathogens has been deliberately skipped. The FDA estimates that raw milk causes nearly three times more hospitalizations than any other food-borne illness source. The CDC has documented over 200 outbreaks linked to raw milk and raw milk products since 1993. Children, pregnant women, the elderly, and immunocompromised individuals face the sharpest risk; the outcomes can include kidney failure.
The wellness industry, in its infinite wisdom and its determined relationship with motivated reasoning, has decided this is a feature.
The argument for raw milk — and I want to steelman it, because I am a fair person — is that pasteurization kills beneficial bacteria, enzymes, and nutrients along with the dangerous ones; that properly handled raw milk from grass-fed, small-herd operations is categorically safer than industrial dairy; and that human beings drank raw milk for roughly ten thousand years before Pasteur and mostly survived. There are peer-reviewed papers supporting portions of this view. The beneficial bacteria argument has genuine research behind it. The safety-of-sourcing argument has merit if, and this is a significant if, you trust your source absolutely.
The problem is that the raw milk movement has been colonized by people who do not engage with the peer-reviewed papers. They engage with podcasts. They engage with influencers who have high cheekbones and very good lighting. They engage with a deep, ambient distrust of regulatory bodies that makes every FDA warning feel like confirmation of a conspiracy rather than a description of what E. coli does to your large intestine.
This is a distinction that matters. And it is the reason I am here.
Day Two. I drove to Hartwell Family Farm, two hours north of Chicago, just past the Wisconsin border, down a county road so flat you can see the indifference coming from three miles away.
Dwight Hartwell is not what you expect when you expect a raw milk farmer. He is sixty-one, taciturn, and deeply skeptical of anyone who uses the word "artisanal" without irony. He has twelve cows. He has been farming this land his entire life. His herd is tested twice a month. His operation is clean in the way that only operations run by people who actually care about the work tend to be.
"I know what the risks are," he said. We were standing in his barn. It smelled like hay and manure and something surprisingly not-unpleasant underneath, which I chose not to examine too closely. "I drink it every day. My kids grew up on it. But I also know that I know my animals. I know their health. I know how they're handled. You buy this from me and you're buying that knowledge."
I asked him what he thought about the wellness people.
He looked at me for a long moment.
"They're buying a story," he said. "I'm selling milk."
This felt like the most honest thing anyone had said to me in months.
I bought two gallons. I texted Dr. Hsu a photo of the farm.
She texted back: "This is not reassuring."
Day Three. I attended the Third Annual Raw Dairy Wellness Summit, held in a repurposed event space in River North that still had the exposed ductwork from its previous life as something industrial and honest. Ticket price: $185, which included a "curated tasting flight" and access to what the website called "educational panels."
The panels were not educational in the way that word is conventionally used.
I sat through a forty-five minute presentation by a man with a podcast called The Sovereign Gut who explained that pasteurization was invented not to prevent disease but to "centralize control of the food supply" — a claim that made me want to call Louis Pasteur's ghost and apologize to it. I sat through a Q&A in which a woman asked whether feeding raw milk to her infant was "intuitively safer" than formula, and the panelist, to his credit, declined to answer directly, which was the correct response but also left me deeply concerned about what she was going to do when she got home.
I drank four ounces of raw colostrum. It tasted like concentrated dairy and tangy regret.
The booths sold raw milk kefir, raw milk butter, raw milk cheese, a "raw dairy gut reset protocol" that cost $340 and appeared to be a branded reusable jug and some pamphlets, and something called "Raw Milk for Pets," which I stared at for a long time without speaking.
"Are you okay?" asked the woman staffing that booth.
"I'm fine," I said. "I just need a moment."
I texted Dr. Hsu: Raw milk summit. Very much a thing. Considered 'Raw Milk for Pets.'
She texted back, after a pause: Julian. Please eat a vegetable.
Day Four. Symptoms: none, so far. I was eating Dwight's milk with cereal. I was drinking it straight, cold, at the kitchen counter at 7 AM. I was making a very good béchamel with it that I immediately felt guilty about because pasteurized milk would have been fine for béchamel and the whole exercise was about drinking it raw.
I felt fine. I want to be clear that I felt fine. I also want to be clear that this is not the point.
This is the problem with anecdote as evidence: I felt fine, therefore the thing I did was safe. Millions of people have driven drunk and arrived home without incident, and this has done precisely nothing to reduce the death toll from drunk driving. Survivorship bias is not a health policy. It is not a culinary philosophy. It is not, however much the wellness industrial complex would like it to be, a substitute for microbiology.
I still texted Dr. Hsu every morning.
She was still responding.
Day Five. I went back to Bovine & Bloom.
I watched the customers. I watched the way they photographed their ceramic cups before they drank. I watched a man explain to his date that raw milk "reprogrammed" his gut in four days, a claim that requires a flexible relationship with both immunology and time. I watched a woman in activewear photograph the chalkboard menu for her Instagram story.
I ordered another small pour.
I talked to the owner. Her name was Calla. She was thirty-four, formerly in marketing, and she had started Bovine & Bloom after her own "gut reset journey," which had begun with a raw milk cleanse recommended by a podcast that I will also not name because its host has enough attention.
"I just felt so much better," she said. "My inflammation went down. My brain fog cleared."
I asked her who her supplier was.
"We rotate," she said. "We work with farms we trust."
I asked how she verified the farms.
There was a pause. "We visit them," she said. "We do site visits."
I asked if they did any bacterial testing on incoming product.
Another pause, slightly longer.
"We trust our farmers," she said.
I finished my milk. It was still very good. It was still not tested.
Day Six. Dr. Hsu called me. Not texted. Called.
"How are you feeling?"
"Fine," I said. "Genuinely fine. No fever. Normal digestion. I'm a little tired of milk, honestly."
"Julian," she said. "I want you to understand something. The fact that you are fine does not mean this was a good idea. It means you got lucky. Or it means Hartwell's operation is as clean as it appeared. Or both. But you have no way of knowing which."
"I know," I said.
"Do you?" she said.
She said it the way you say something to a person you have been arguing with for eleven years and have not once won an argument against, and she said it with the exhausted patience of a woman who has decided that documentation is the only victory available to her.
"Dr. Hsu," I said, "I need you to know that I deeply respect you and I understand that I am an unreasonable patient."
"Yes," she said. "I know. Text me tomorrow."
Day Seven. The last glass. I drank it standing at the kitchen window, looking at the Chicago morning coming through like it always does — low and gray and functional, no nonsense, no performance. I thought about Dwight Hartwell in his barn with his twelve cows and his bimonthly tests. I thought about the man at the summit with his podcast and his theories about food supply centralization. I thought about Calla and her ceramic cups and her site visits that apparently did not include microbiological sampling.
I thought about the fact that these are not the same thing.
This is the conversation the raw milk moment refuses to have with itself: the difference between Dwight and the Sovereign Gut guy is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of category. Dwight is a farmer. The Sovereign Gut guy is a content creator. Bovine & Bloom is a retail operation. The Raw Dairy Wellness Summit is a trade show for people who have decided that their distrust of institutions is itself a kind of expertise.
Raw milk from a rigorously managed, regularly tested small herd is a different product, bacteriologically, than raw milk sourced from "farms we trust" on the basis of a vibe. The wellness industry does not want you to understand this distinction. The wellness industry wants you to feel that your instincts and your podcast listening habits are equivalent to the kind of knowledge that comes from, say, knowing what E. coli O157:H7 looks like in a petri dish.
They are not equivalent.
I drank the glass.
I called Dr. Hsu to tell her I was done.
She exhaled in a way that sounded like she had been holding it for a week.
"I'm going to need you to come in for a panel," she said.
"I'm fine."
"Julian." Her voice had that quality again. "You don't know that. Get the panel."
I got the panel.
The panel was fine.
The milk was fine.
I am fine.
Do not do this. I mean it. I did this so you don't have to, and I had a medical professional monitoring me every step of the way, access to a farmer whose operation I could personally evaluate, and twenty years of professional food experience that has given me a calibrated (if somewhat battered) risk tolerance and a working relationship with my gastroenterologist.
You have the Sovereign Gut podcast and a $185 ticket stub.
I'm not judging you. I'm just telling you it's not the same.
The milk was very good. The farm was real. The stakes were real.
Everything else at that summit was a well-lit story told by people who have never had to clean a walk-in at 2 AM or explain to a health inspector why a specific surface reads hot.
Drink your pasteurized milk. Buy it from small farms if you can. It's still very good milk.
Leave the raw stuff to people who know what they're doing, and ask hard questions about whether those people actually do.
Julian Cross is IRREVERENT's Food & Dining Correspondent. He is fine. Dr. Hsu has requested that this not be taken as a general endorsement of his lifestyle.
CDC raw milk guidance: cdc.gov/foodsafety/rawmilk
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A Review of Mizu Omakase, Greenpoint, Brooklyn — Where the Fish Is Perfect and the Consequences Are Someone Else's Problem
GREENPOINT, BROOKLYN — The ophthalmologist said "degenerative." He had a pamphlet. Diagrams. I asked if I could finish my sixteen-course omakase first. He said that was not, medically speaking, the point. We disagreed. (We did not, legally speaking, disagree; he gave medical advice and I ignored it, which is a different category entirely.)
Mizu Omakase opened quietly on Huron Street in February, in a former mattress warehouse that now smells exclusively of cedar and restraint. Twelve seats. No website. Reservations require a QR code on a business card handed to you by someone you already have to know. Chef Kenji Haramoto spent eleven years in Kyoto, two in Hokkaido, and one inexplicable year in Scottsdale that he has declined to discuss. The result is a $310 tasting menu that justifies every dollar, which I say as someone who is, by several professional estimates, going blind.
The early courses are impeccable in the way early omakase courses always are: a single Kumamoto oyster with yuzu foam; a sliver of madai on hand-pressed shari; a whisper of hirame so delicate it arrived on what appeared to be polished obsidian and tasted like the memory of salt. I took notes with the trembling reverence of a man at vespers. My ophthalmologist's pamphlet sat unread in my coat pocket, wilting.
(A note: the CDC has issued guidance — a warning, technically — regarding POH-VAU, a new ocular condition from CMNV virus exposure via raw fish and shellfish. It starts as photosensitivity, then macular compromise, then, in advanced cases, the kind of vision loss that makes reading a menu difficult. I mention this in the spirit of full disclosure and not because it affects my assessment of the hamachi. Please consult actual CDC guidance if you are considering eating sixteen courses of raw fish while symptomatic. I am a professional. Do not do this.)
The hamachi was extraordinary. Fatty, clean, with a micro-slice of serrano that registered as heat exactly four seconds after you had already swallowed. Haramoto does not warn you. This is correct. Warning ruins the lesson.
What is not correct — what constitutes, in my assessment, a war crime against rice — arrived at course nine: toro, undeniably magnificent toro, the color of a bruised sunset, served on what the server described, without shame, as "deconstructed shari foam." Foam. Haramoto had taken shari — the literal ground upon which civilization stands — and aerated it. There was a sphere. There was a pipette. There was a microherb I could not identify and did not want to. The toro deserved better. The toro deserved a silent room, properly pressed rice, and a critic who still had full use of both eyes.
I ate it anyway. I ate it twice. Haramoto noticed my expression and sent a second plate, which I took as either apology or challenge. Either way, he was right.
The uni arrived late, as God and Hokkaido intended. Santa Barbara uni is a fine product. Hokkaido uni — Haramoto's, served from the box on rice pressed seconds before reaching me — is a spiritual event. Cold, sweet, slightly alive-tasting in a way that sounds like a complaint but is not. It dissolves. You don't eat it so much as receive it.
My ophthalmologist had texted twice. I silenced my phone.
The meal closed with a tamago that was unnecessarily perfect — sweet, custardy, structurally flawless in a way that felt like showing off — and a single piece of anago that I am still thinking about three days later, which is significant given that three days ago I also received a referral to a retinal specialist. The anago did not care about my referral. This is the correct attitude for anago.
The deconstructed shari foam is a problem and Haramoto should know better and I have told him so here and in person. The rest is close to perfect. The uni alone is worth whatever the ophthalmologist says Thursday. The anago is worth the follow-up.
I have been told I may lose my sight. I would lose it again for the uni.
MIZU OMAKASE — ★★★½ out of 5 — Somehow. Inexplicably. Would return. Am returning. Have already made the reservation.
12 seats. $310 omakase, sake pairings additional. Reservations by referral only. Huron St., Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Closed Tuesdays.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Julian Cross is IRREVERENT Magazine's food correspondent. His opinions are his own and, in at least one documented case, his physician's nightmare. This piece is satire.
- 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 split 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 that scholars have missed. He asks if I'm enjoying the journey. I tell him I've been on better 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.