Sensorium - special blog edition

We are here for one reason only, to awaken the senses as they've never been awakened before.

I'm at the Sensorium DC dinner, in a newly erected geodesic dome in Southeast DC.  It's a pop-up dining experience, a twelve-course meal accompanied by a wacky stage routine - not dinner theater, not mimes, but something in between.  Kind of strange and inexplicable and European - a not-quite-as-contortiony Cirque du Soleil.

Sensorium comes from Bryon Brown, who I'd surely never have heard of had he not been married to a friend and colleague of mine.  His previous dinners were titled Artisa, one of the muses.  Tonight, in this weird dome with strange actors in odd hats, they tell me that Artisa is in my fork.

We start with the Amuse bouche course: kir royal grape with magic crystals from outer space. We are being instructed how to eat it. There are seven steps. Yummy flavor... explosion.  Yeah, it's pop rocks.  People have been talking about this in all the press accounts, so I don't feel too bad doing the spoiler here.

Kir Royal Grape with "Magic Dust from Outer Space."

Salmon tartare is course two. Small dice, with dill sprigs on top.  The wine is something very light and lemony, and it's going with this course and a couple more, I think.

Then: Corzetti pasta with pistachio brittle is on the way.

Corzetti pasta turns out to be a disk of pasta, and it's served underneath crumbles of sweet pistachio brittle. It's very al dente, and has a pattern stamped in it. It looks like a wet cookie.

Then: Cold beet gazpacho with iced goat cheese. Nice.  Beet anything is so pretty.

Red wine makes an appearance now - an Argentine Malbec called Cava Negra.  Absolutely delicious - the best of the wines.  There's a potato gratin with asparagus, cherry tomato, and balsamic. And a song about food chemistry!  This place never ceases to amaze.

Next up was an oyster thing on a salt bed - which I couldn't eat:

But Sensorium had checked with each of us about food allergies, so I was served this little tomato:

Fried eggplant with honey and thyme, served with a Syrah.  Light and delicious, and the little sprigs of thyme looked like they had been hand-selected for their perfection.

Next course: Chicken roulades with chestnuts and spaghetti squash.  Actually, I don't remember when this one came out - I just have a photo of it so I know I ate it.  The courses start to get muddled up in my head now, because of the great wines.

This was really nice - but all around the table I heard people saying "I could eat an entire chicken breast like this."  The small courses are adorable, but I was dining with three hungry men.

Next there was an oxtail something on a crispy ricotta something else - this and the eggplant got top nods from our table. 

We got magic tricks while we waited on one course:

Tony reaching for the three of clubs.  Maybe the whole deck was threes of clubs?

This pork belly one was great, and beautifully presented.  Mine came with a solid 5cm by 5cm cube of pork fat, which was more pork fat than I've eaten in the last ten years.  I just had a nibble and then abandoned the rest.

The best part was the green onion.  Or maybe the wee potato. 

Some wacky contraption was wheeled around to each table, looking like something from a mad scientist's lab.  It deep froze the palate cleanser, which was served to us on toothpicks.  Very entertaining.

The dessert course was fantastic - a blonde cake with fruit, sounds simple, but it was so dense and vanilla-rich, it made the night for me.  I haven't enjoyed a dessert so much in I don't know how long.

Then we were given this weird plate with just a pill in it:

When you reach for the pill, it's not there - some sort of weird imagey mirror thing projects the picture of this pill up on the top of this plate, when in reality it's down inside.  Some sort of tongue prepper, it makes tangy things sweet.  We got a taste of key limes after that perfectly illustrated how it worked.

It was truly a bizarre night, very tasty.  Combining the experience and the food and the very good wines, it keeps you interested and charmed.  I have to throw in two recommendations: The nicer-than-average portable restrooms ran out of water, which was a drag for all concerned.  And they REALLY need to have something there for non-drinkers.  There was a non-drinker in our party and he got water all night (while the rest of us got "spring sangria" at the entry and wine all evening.)  Even just a nice juice or sparkling water or something would have done the job.

Filmfest DC!

Waiting for the bus is disconcertingly normal after being transported to Buenos Aires this evening. I'm outside the Avalon theater in Washington, DC, but just exiting the theater means I was just "somewhere else."  A good movie can steal you from time and place and fully implant you in another. This one was called "Hostage of Illusions" and I've just lived through the main characters' torrid affair, in which an aging writer finds paradisiacal youth outside his marriage.

Hostage of Illusions

Then he finds out his young lover has her own secrets.  The filmmaker insinuates that perhaps the lover is one of the children taken from the desparecidos (disappeared) - those lost to the dictatorship - and placed in loyal families' households.  Eerie, troubling, beautiful, and human. 

Loose Cannons

The film is part of Filmfest DC, one of six I've seen so far.  The first night, I went to Italy to hang out with a traditional family that owns a pasta factory, in a movie called "Loose Cannons." Well, they're sort of traditional - I can't spoil the twist but the family really entertains.  There's a grandma who has lived her share of life - she's made some compromises but lived to the fullest anyway - and a nutty auntie who's rebelling against the old maid label.  The family has to come to terms with the contemporary world in one swell foop, and it's not easy - when it starts, the patriarch has an almost immediate heart attack.  But they find a way to move forward.  I guess that's what we all do.

Lope

Next we leap into the end of the 16th century in Madrid - for "Lope" which tells a fictionalized version of the writing heyday of Lope de Vega.  The city has that pre-plumbing squalor down just right, but there's a city view in one shot that makes me wonder - how did they excise out all the modern skyscrapers from the skyline?  It's beautiful.  The lead male actor has a certain spunkiness that is endearing as he tries to get his plays read by the mercantile controllers of the theater "industry" of the time.  The female lead is lovely and devoted to him, though from a modern perspective I'd have to ask why - as she has plenty of knowledge of his amorous misdeeds.  Anyway, it's a fun romp, sort of "good old filmmaking" with a logical plot line and tried and true denouement. 

The Man from Nowhere

Sunday I saw one of DC Filmfest's featured South Korean films, The Man from Nowhere.  It is captivating, with very strong performances.  It starts with a double-cross and takes off from a point where no one trusts anyone, including a little girl.  Very intense.  As the tricks and deceptions unravel, the filmmakers premiere some really clever writing and surprises; I did feel, though, that some of the clichés of action flicks kicked into gear later in the script.  Nevertheless, it kept me riveted, and the finale is spectacular - bloody, tense, beautifully choreographed.  I gave it a lot of stars, and not only because the lead character has the most attractive torso I've ever seen.  Which he does.

Then there was "Octubre" (October) from Peru.  A taciturn loan shark - I think he has Aspergers, actually - has his life disrupted when a baby is left on his doorstep.  It's probably his, from one of the prostitutes he frequents.  The way he acts is like uber-man - all the worst stereotypes about men not being able to communicate, and not having or sharing feelings - it's 10X worse.

Octubre

There's a side story about an elderly guy who is saving his pension to escape from Lima, and he "rescues" his comatose elderly girlfriend from a state hospital.  He just sort of rolls her around town.  "I'm going to all this trouble because she's my girlfriend," he answers when someone finally asks.

Today I volunteered for the Cinema for Seniors event, back at the Avalon.  A couple hundred or more elderly people came from centers all over the city.  I did almost nothing, except hold my umbrella over some of them when it started sprinkling out (and some of them move kind of slow.)  But I watched the movie with them - a documentary on the history of gospel music called "Rejoice and Shout." You won't find a movie that's better pitched for that crowd if you try for the rest of your life.  Everyone was enraptured, even when they were making their way to the bathroom.  The film was lively, historically bound, beautifully filmed, moving. 

More soon!  Five movies left on my roster, plus maybe closing night?  Haven't decided yet... we'll see!