THE GURGLING COD: Trapeze Artists

Spring seems to have put a youthful bounce in the steps of the gents of DI/DO. As it stands, Apple's pieces, week after week, read like one of the Make-a-Wish foundation trips for grownups that Dan Savage said were a bad idea: "I have a month to live--assemble the Periodic Table of Bacon, and next week all the meat on a stick the continent of Asia can produce." Oh, and lunch with a clown. It's like the Kidz Bop version of Liebling. (My rancor, may stem , in part, from having a job that does not involve traveling all over the world to sample the finest in food and drink; in fairness, when Apple is on, he is still very good, like the Smithfield ham and choucroute garni pieces.) But stablemate Bruni seems to have picked up on the circus obsession--avant garde food is a trapeze act. The Brunoisie will be quick to pounce, but I'd argue that the Times would do well to keep Bruni on the avant-garde beat, as the redonkulousness of his prose matches the pretension of these chefs much as muscadet matches mussels. When your subjects say

"We could take that bacon strip and lay it on a plate, but it would be lifeless," Mr. Achatz said. "It would be dead. You hang it on something that sways and it becomes alive. It becomes interactive. It becomes sculpture."

no one will really notice if you refer to "a jagged landscape with discreet canyons and buttes of molasses, raisin purée, dried garlic, dried tomato and more...." Then again, Bruni still delivers for his fans with astonishing reliability:

The next of nearly 25 courses, a strip of partially dehydrated, butterscotch-coated bacon, arrived dangling like a Wallenda from a teensy trapeze. My friend and I were instructed to yank it from the wire with our fingers, a maneuver with a crumbly coda. She felt sure that a shard of hers had gone missing. She later found it - inside one of her pumps.

Alliteration, confusion, too much information. Textbook. Others may well dwell on the bison bong, but this moment does show the affinity of Alinea and Bruni:

Of the many ways restaurants have expressed their appreciation for bison, none is quite like Alinea's.The dish might well be called Reefer Mammal. Or Stoned on the Range. Ribbons of bison meat filled egg-size indentations in the surface of a horizontal glass tube, the hollow interior of which contained burning sticks of cinnamon. Smoke seeped from the open ends of the tube, infusing the air and summoning associations well beyond the gustatory.

Bruni has found his kitchen muse--chef and critic alike appear indifferent to the inhibitions of lesser mortals: some chefs might not present bison in a graffix vitrine; some critics might have hesitated to include the phrase "reefer mammal" in a published review. Not Achatz and Bruni. They are two (deconstructed wasabi) peas in a (freezdried pomegranate molasses thread) pod. Skip Alinea, even if an editor from Details says it may be America's best new restaurant in F&W, and head over to De Cero, where my homegirl Jill has a cod special on.
*Image from this excellent LOC collection.