Will Goldfarb is the greatest practitioner of dis-comfort food working today. I’ve never felt less comfortable before, during or after a meal, but I can’t get the experience out of my head. Provocation, titillation, willful withholding of satisfaction. His restaurant Room 4 Dessert is more Zappa by way of Picasso than Gramercy Tavern’s James Taylor by way of Monet. The result, more than a few “umami, oh mommy!” moments.
Back to the scene: This past July a friend and I opened Room 4 Dessert (the place is empty in the early evening) and ordered the whole menu. Due to some monumentally bad communication about our Pantagruel-plan, the swarm of small plates was served all at once.
What resulted was a puckering, perplexing, pleasurable, disconcerting, de-centering memorable few hours sealed by a modest check and a major case of mind/body overload. Perhaps the fly-flecked (replaced on request) acid-punch colored rum was the culprit. Perhaps I should have voted a few selections off the island. Perhaps I should have eaten the elements of each dish in sequence rather than jumping around. Perhaps I should do the whole thing again.
The umami may have been more of the mind than the tongue, but I’m still tasting it, albeit ambivalently, months later.
Gray and Grizzled Food Fan 