UL – I’m not as familiar with the inner Michelin chefs circle, but if you find out anything more, please let me know. I think it’s a really cool story.

As for Geewit’s comment. She had me laughing out loud with that one. I love how her mind works!

BANDOBRAS – Monty Python, you think? It’s something for the fiction pages that’s for sure. I was thinking more Agatha Christie with all the last century opulence, over-the-top characters, mysteries without clues.

BOB – You really are so bourgeois with your heaping plates of potatoes and animal hindquarters.

KIMBERLEY – Here’s a list of a typical tasting menu meal (each item is a “course”) that can take up to 6 hours to eat and comes with 5 different wines:

Cucumber gin tonic* with candied citrus peel, prepared tableside with a jug of liquid nitrogen
Esferificación olives* (olive oil trapped in a soft casing to look like an olive)
Olive oil spiral*, which you loop around your index finger and drop in your mouth, where it dissolves into thin filaments
Mango leaf with tagete flower (a type of marigold)
“Animals”: seaweed-flavored rice crackers with a fragile, moussy texture that reminded me of Monster Munches
Hibiscus, blackcurrant, and eucalyptus candy with a paper-thin sugar “cape”*
Sea lettuce and white sesame waffles
Freeze-dried banana crunches flavored with sesame and nutmeg*
Walnut polvorones (“polvorones” are traditional Spanish cookies — these were savory, and had a buttery texture that turned to dust in your mouth)
Mandarine essence: a silky soup of mandarin with a hint of mango
Caramel filled with squash seed oil*
Popcorn cloud*
Melon and passionfruit caviar
Pine nut tart in a meringue shell
Thai brioche filled with a lemongrass and basil ice-cream
Crab fritter topped with an anemone*
Liquid ham croquette topped with breadcrumbs*
Parmesan wontons in a chicken broth, plopped into a bowl of basil foam
Parmesan “air” (more like snow, really) in a styrofoam box, on which you sprinkled a freeze-dried berry muesli (this was our least favorite dish: there was too much of the Parmesan air, the texture wasn’t particularly enjoyable, and the muesli seemed completely out of place)
A fillet of anchovy, surrounded with dots of variously and intensely flavored sauces and grape-like bubbles, and a crisp cardamom brioche on the side
Tomato soup with virtual ham* — thin slivers of tomato-flavored jelly, and croutons topped with ham-flavored jelly and basil seeds
Mussel spheres in a potato and bacon soup, with dots of double cream, and cubes of apple jelly
Bread soup with egg yolk spheres and laurencia seaweed
“The seeds”: tiny lumps and piles of various vegetable and herb seeds
Curry-flavored zucchini seed risotto with capsules of peanut oil*
Ackees (a Jamaican fruit) and cucumber hearts in a veal and basil broth
“The sea”: a discovery trail of twelve different types of seaweed, some mild, some extremely bold in flavor
Crab Marrakech: lumps of crab meat in a mandarin flower broth, with bulgur on the side
Boneless chicken feet wrapped in sea lettuce with sesame sauce and froth*
Creamy sheep’s milk cheese topped with a sheep’s milk cheese “wool”, with a wedge of raspberry jelly on the side
Liquid peach: a frozen casing of peach liqueur, and a spoonful of thin peach purée
Raspberry sorbet, verbena mousse, and chocolate* (notice how the plating makes it look like a snail)
Peach soup
Mango sorbet sandwiches
Chocolate bites filled with mandarin sorbet*

GEEWITS – Your mind works in interesting ways.

Bizarre.