Blue Hill

My dinner at Blue Hill took place almost a year ago, but I figured it’s a timely article since the Obama’s just had dinner there over the weekend (actually, I had just finished dinner at Minetta Tavern and walked over to see what the fuss was all about because my mom and I saw a bunch of secret service agents milling around W 4th).

I had Blue Hill on my list of places I REALLY wanted to try because of their farm-to-table philosophy; if you go to the Stone Barns location, you can actually play with the pigs and walk around the grounds to see the vegetables you’re about to eat. I haven’t made it up there yet, but I really want to try their brunch while my mom’s here because I think it would be a nice day trip.

We started off the meal with lots of bread while we were deciding what to order (the menu isn’t that extensive, but we couldn’t decide on whether or not we should both do the tasting menu/if we didn’t both do the tasting menu, what would the other person order). Here is what I affectionally call crazy bread:

The bread reminded me of the awesome crazy bread from Little Cesar’s (and I KNOW that those pizza joints still exist because I went to one when I was in Napa Valley last year!). The bread was warm, crusty, and had a bite to it and the accompanying butter was so creamy and had just the right amount of salt. I think we had three servings of bread before we actually ordered any food!

We decided to go with one tasting and a couple of things from the a la carte menu so we could share and try more things off the menu.

The waitress brought us out some seaweed crisps and sugar snap peas:

And some little burgers filled with bean puree:

Both were good, but nothing awesome and nothing even close to the tastiness of the crazy bread and butter.

The first dish from my tasting menu was this morning’s Farm eggs:

So when I eat eggs, I don’t usually think too much about the flavor – I mean, the yolk is definitely better than the white, but what else are you supposed to taste, right? Somehow, the egg was the most flavorful and delicious egg I’ve ever tasted; the yolk was creamy, rich, and absolutely amazing.

I don’t think this was from the tasting menu, but an order of crab meat:

A very generous serving of crab meat in broth – the dish was served cool and was very refreshing.

After reviewing some of my Blue Hill pictures, I realized that we ate a LOT of food. Here’s the lamb we ordered:

The lamb was tender, juicy, and very well seasoned. Some people say that happy animals make tastier meat, so I guess this lamb was like, the happiest lamb in the field.

Our next course was salmon:

So if you go to the grocery store and buy salmon, sometimes it has food coloring in it (isn’t that disgusting?) I actually grew up eating a lot of salmon because my mom prepares it really well and it was one of the only things I would eat, but we would usually get Atlantic salmon (it was the only thing available in the landlocked town of Champaign, Illinois!) Anyway, the salmon was wild and tasted like…SMOKED salmon. It actually tasted like something I’ve never had before – more flavorful than any other fish I’ve ever had and it was just seasoned with a little salt. It’s pretty incredible how much flavor you lose when you buy farmed salmon (the food farmed salmon eat = parts of other fish and pellets to get their coloring vs. the food wild salmon eat = shrimp).

My main entree was a large piece of pork. A REALLY large piece of pork:

So berkshire pork is really a big deal (well, pork in general), but the pork was overly salted and almost to the point that the pork lost all of its flavor and it tasted like I was chewing on salt. Chris thought the pork tasted okay, but I was a little disappointed because the pork was supposed to be the best part of the meal and I thought it was possibly the worst.

As a palate cleanser, we were served some mint sorbet with berries:

The mint sorbet was refreshing and something I could see myself making (although I might mix it up and add some lemon balm into the sorbet mix)

For dessert, we were brought some vanilla type pudding with strawberries:

People say that strawberries are supposed to taste a lot better with they’re organic – and they’re right! They’re much sweeter (and smaller) and the dessert wasn’t overly sweet.

And finally, we ended our night with some cherries:

Well, I didn’t really taste the difference between the cherries I buy on the street and the cherries from Blue Hill, but it didn’t really matter because I was stuffed beyond belief by the time we finished dinner. The meal was very delicious and unpretentious and I can definitely see why Michelle Obama would want to go on a date at Blue Hill.