Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboretis, et ego restaurabo vos. That, says the Larousse Gastronomique, was the dog-Latin sign of one Boulanger, Parisian bouillon seller: "Come unto me, all you whose stomachs are aching, and I will restore you." With that sign, Boulanger set up the first restaurant around 1765, the word derived from restaurer, to restore. Again according to Larousse, "gastronome Brillat-Savarin referred to chocolate, red meat, and consomme as restaurants." Soup, meat, and chocolate? Sound restorative to me, though I would've added wine and cheese to that list, especially the decadent triple-cream named in honor of that gastronome.
If restaurants are the place for restoration, there are few cities equal to the R&R (riot & restoration) offered by New York. So, after my ex-employer requested my absence, I was quite happy to fly to Manhattan for a week of food, plays, and art. And yes, I am 13 months behind in my blogging--so much for taking advantage of the medium's immediacy.
For a theater-chow double-header, it's hard to beat Greenwich Village--midtown may have Broadway shows, but have you tried to get a good, non-extortionately-priced meal there? And don't get me started on the crowds; I'd rather get lost in the Village diagonallies than salmon up Seventh Avenue any day. Thus my first stop was Neil LaBute's In a Dark Dark House at the Lucille Lortel, followed by a late late dinner at Perilla on Jones Street.
Perilla had just opened the month before, the first restaurant from the first winner of Top Chef, Harold Dieterle, and accordingly it had a certain amount of buzz. That buzz, though, seems to be what Perilla is not about: it's not a velvet-rope, see-and-be-seen scene, nor is it an exotic-ingredient, specialized-servingware, extravagant-tasting-menu temple of cutting-edge cookery. Nope, Dieterle has dared to be humble, opening a cozy neighborhood restaurant with an unpretentious menu. And that's quite all right: fireworks aren't for every day.
I arrived early, but the staff behaved as if they were the
ones causing inconvenience. They asked that I wait 10-15 minutes at the bar,
where they graciously and unnecessarily comped my wine and the host kept
checking on me. I was glad to have a few minutes to scan the place: a long bar
with about 10 stools on the right, 18 tables and banquettes along the left and
back, and an old-fashioned pressed-tin ceiling.
Once at my table, I started with peekytoe crab salad with mango, avocado, and ginger vinaigrette. That's not a groundbreaking combination (and sounds like something you'd find at a nontraditional sushi joint), but it was delicious, creamy rich in texture, appropriately light for a hot night. Perilla is a serrated-leaf plant from the mint family, more commonly known in the U.S. as shiso, but I didn't see any shiso that day, and this crab is the only Asian-esque dish that I can recall there. Besides his CIA training, Dieterle took a cooking sabbatical in Thailand, so those eastern influences do pop up on the menu.
Wagyu skirt steak was my entree, not a slab of meat but rillettes on a bed of spinach creamed with sunchokes, with shallots and chanterelles and a fruity steak sauce the consistency of apple butter. I thought the sauce was made from cherries or plums, but the waiter said it's just reduced beef jus and red wine. It beat the hell out of A1--I was looking around to see if I could sneak a plate-clearing swipe with my finger. I love creamed spinach, too, though had my doubts about substituing sunchoke for dairy, but it was smooth and tasty. (And sounded familiar: sure enough, that combination was one of Dieterle's Top Chef recipes.) The wagyu was tender, pink, and flavorful, as you'd expect from well-marbled beef. Wagyu refers to several types of Japanese cattle bred for a judicious amount of fat in their flesh; Kobe is a subset of Wagyu. My understanding is that much of what appears on American menus as "Wagyu" or "Kobe-style" beef actually comes from cattle that are domestic Wagyu-Angus hybrids. In short, I wonder if Wagyu and Kobe are becoming menu marketing words more than a guarantee of superior quality.
Though I love sweets, I couldn't resist getting the cheese course instead, with selections from down the street at Murray's. Accompanied by grilled bread and quince paste, the trio included moussey, three-milk La Tur, mild here but it can get mushroomy and slightly pungent as it ages; gouda-esque Prima Donna (there are three types; I'm guessing this was the fino); and Bayley-Hazen blue (from Jasper Hill Farm, producers of Constant Bliss, which is), tasting a bit murky compared to the bitchen Colston-Bassett stilton I'd had the night before (still my favorite blue). Then it turned out that I didn't have to sacrifice dessert, because Perilla brought two quarter-sized oatmeal-raisin cookies for petit fours.
Six months later I was back with my father and step-mother, who couldn't come up with a Christmas wish list and so got dinner instead. I didn't notice a ton of menu changes or many changes period, which was fine--the food and service were as good as the first time. (Sorry, by the way, that I didn't take photos.) I started with a special, celery root soup with wild mushroom garnish, which was exactly what a winter soup should be, hearty but refined. Next I had pancetta-wrapped pork tenderloin slices (pig squared, hurrah!) on rutabaga puree (a mite sweet), with brussels sprout leaves, walnuts, and a black mushroom custard. That sounds like a lot on the plate, but it was a reasonable amount. This was one of the first times I noticed brussels sprouts peeled like a head of lettuce, which I've seen several times since, even a salad made of sprout leaves (which poor prep cook drew short straw on that task?). Finally, I had a rockin' dessert: four square, compact, "vanilla-scented" donuts with sides of lemon curd and dark chocolate to dunk them into. Ooee, those were good, hot and fluffy and not too sugary, with the curd and the chocolate offering two completely different shades of astringence to give a flavor punch to the dough. I believe Perilla has had donut variations on the menu since opening, and I'd definitely go for them again.
You have a mind-boggling number of restaurant options in the Village (and I'll be writing up some of those soon...or someday), and Perilla wouldn't necessarily be my first recommendation. It would be on the shortlist, though--I enjoyed everything I had there. It's on the money if you're not out for a "destination" restaurant but for a comfortable, reliable, fairly priced neighborhood spot with quality ingredients and well-prepared dishes. And don't forget the donuts.
Many years ago, during a stressful stretch of my life, I had a happy interval of five or six months in which funny dreams made me wake up laughing. In one, I was walking down a nondescript street, being badgered by a man who wanted a date. After several failed attempts to brush him off, I exclaimed, exasperated, "Look, man, I'm fat, insane, and tattooed. In some states that would make me a carny." Carny? Now there's a word one rarely encounters, popping into the sort of snappy retort I never produce in waking life. How marvelous! Of course, most dreams are not wish fulfillment but non sequiturs and humdrum reprocessing of our conscious world, the brain idling like a car engine on fumes of the day's fuel.
Also, not all dreams are sweet. Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia offers exactly what it says on the label: an absurd world of wonder and dissociation, funniness and brutality and nonsense, which may be dream, fantasy, delusion, or metaphor. It begins, literally, with discord, as our heroine Lisa (Christine Entwisle) sits alone at the front of the stage, tuning the E string on an acoustic guitar, turning the peg until the string's in tune...and then she keeps going until the string exceeds its limit and snaps.
The curtain then rises on Lisa's apartment, where a stranger calls to her through the mail slot. He's Victor Hesse (Barnaby Power), a Swiss watchmaker more than a little reminiscent of Freud, come to tell her that her watch isn't broken; her temporal continuity is. While flying through time zones, she has lost an hour, and she must reclaim it in the kingdom of Dissocia to set her life aright. First, she calls for information, which only wastes more of her time: "Thank you for calling the Dissocian Embassy. If you wish to report a conspiracy, please press one. If you think everyone would be better off without you, please press two. If you wish to correct a temporal disturbance, please press three. If you wish to press four, press five." Luckily, it turns out to be very easy to find Dissocia: her flat turns into an elevator.
And off we go on a fanciful journey that's reminiscent of Willy Wonka, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz. For me, the persistent analogue is my favorite childhood book, The Phantom Tollbooth, in which Milo, a young boy killing time, ventures to the Lands Beyond, passing through Expectations, where the Whether Man sends him on his way, and Doldrums, where he meets the vigilant Watchdog--his torso is a clock--named Tock. Lisa is likewise on a voyage through expectations and doldrums in search of lost time, though this being so-called "in yer face" (a moniker that none of the playwrights so described seems to like) British theater, the trip is decidedly more R rated. As Neilson puts it, "If you like Alice in Wonderland but there's not enough sex and violence in it, then Dissocia is the show for you." Like Norman Juster, the Tollbooth author, Neilson likes wordplay: on her journey, Lisa meets insecurity guards and a live scapegoat, and finds the lost property office, where people have lost their humor, their arguments, their inhibitions (a man naked below the waist--for those of you counting at home, incident #4 of male nudity in the theater on this vacation--trend or weird coincidence?).
Neilson enhances his whimsical world with musical numbers that make it even more Oz-like. As he says in his introduction to the published script, "People are looking for something in the theatre that they can't get anywhere else, a sense of live-ness, a certain spectacle. There's no part of me that needs to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on stage, but all of me wants to see that car fly. And that's what we've got to do in the 'serious' theatre--we've got to have our flying car....We must be magical, or suffer the consequences."
Of course, like Oz, Dissocia is fanciful but not fancy-free: good Queen Sarah has been lost, and the people are plagued by the Black Dog King ("black dog" was what Churchill called his depression; the expression has entered British idiom). And that scapegoat, who first wants Lisa to blame him for something, anything, then attacks. As he's about to rape her, a woman steps in--Jane from the council (Amanda Hadingue), a bruised and bandaged social worker whose job is to take all the assaults in the area. The council's theory is, it may not be able to reduce crime, but it can reduce the victims of crime to one. It's a fine piece of satire, monstrous but not wholly improbable, like Swift's modest proposal. But it is genuinely awful, as we hear Jane being raped offstage, and Lisa, horrified that someone is suffering abuse on her behalf, screams and weeps. Then a polar bear (a puppet) pops up through the grassy lawn of the set to console her, singing "Who'll hold your paw when you die?". And then ravaged Jane comes back onstage with her clipboard and takes Lisa off on her pedal car, which flies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
So the first act goes, delightful and imaginative, dangerous and confusing. During the intermission, the set changes completely: grassy, technicolor Dissocia gives way to a stark white set, a hospital room, just as Lisa's state of mind has flipped from mania to depression. Dissocia, we see, is the result of Lisa forgoing her medication; she hasn't lost an hour, she's psychologically out of sync. This act of the play is the first act's opposite, minimal in dialogue, color, action, sound. To increase the sense of dissociation, the hospital room is not open to the audience but enclosed, so the audience is looking in like a visitor and the actors have to speak through wireless mikes, sounding that little bit less organic and near. Back on her meds, Lisa sleeps a lot, and we flash through several short scenes in which not much happens, reflecting Lisa's slow recovery.
She does rebel in one scene, jumping around as she listens to her Walkman (a solitary experience of music, unlike the Dissocian group musical numbers--though both are all in her head), and staff stop her and put her back in bed. This scene seems to argue for somewhat for mental health treatment slapping down self-expression and medicating away individuality, and one can't quite blame Lisa for preferring Dissocia to drugs. Those of us who've felt our brains compensating for stress, as I did with my funny dreams, are grateful for the psychic resilience. Neilson doesn't quite take sides--Dissocia is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. In the second act, we also see a brief visit from sister Dot, who snaps at Lisa, "It's just selfishness"--an unsympathetic but understandable view; Dot's no Jane, but Lisa's Black Dog King has caused distress and disruption to those who care for her. (And I can't help noting that Dot is an abbreviation of Dorothy, another Oz reference.)
In the final scene, the polar bear is back, a stuffed animal that Lisa cuddles as she sleeps peacefully, and colored lights circle like a kaleidoscope over her face. Is this a benediction, sign of her color coming back? Or the first hints of Dissocia returning? We can't tell, and it's a beautifully ambiguous ending.
The Wonderful World of Dissocia was commissioned for the 2004 Edinburgh International Festival, and this 2007 revival by the new National Theatre of Scotland played at the Royal Court, which also staged Neilson's latest, Relocated, last month. I have seen very few American productions of Neilson's works, which is a shame, because his belief that populism and experiment are not mutually exclusive is quite refreshing. As he says, "We must be accessible, yet still bold in form and content." Who says you can't have flying cars and intellect too? Though Neilson hasn't made a splash in the States yet, the National Theatre of Scotland has made a good start here with The Black Watch at UCLA and St. Ann's Warehouse (it's there again October 9 through November 30) and The Bacchae at BAM. Judging by the NTS's performance so far, I'd say catch any show you can.
