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Henry Blodget
A few weeks ago, I learned that one of my co-founders at Business Insider, Dwight Merriman, had gone into the restaurant business.
Dwight's also the founder of DoubleClick, Gilt Grouple, 10gen, and a bunch of other companies. So he's no stranger to startups.
I didn't know anything about Dwight's restaurant.
All I'd heard was that the food was unusual.
Specifically, our third co-founder at Business Insider, Kevin Ryan, had joked that eating at Dwight's restaurant was "like eating moss."
Well, "moss" sounded cool, and I like to support my friends' startup efforts. So I asked Dwight if he could squeeze my wife and me in.
Dwight pinged his wife Jodi, who it turns out is the boss.
Jodi squeezed us in.
I was envisioning eating a quick meal of "moss" (perhaps followed by a supplementary bowl of cereal) and making a minor contribution to Dwight and Jodi's local startup.
Much to my surprise, it turns out that Dwight and Jodi's little restaurant, Atera, is one of the most amazing restaurants in the world.
Atera is on Worth Street, in Manhattan, a few blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge. It only seats about 20 people.
The seating is built around the kitchen, so you watch everything the chefs and waiters do. Part of what they do is explain what you're about to eat, which is extremely helpful.
Atera's owner Jodi Richard and GM Eamon Rockey found Atera's chef, Matthew Lightner, in Portland, Oregon, after flying all around the country eating people's food. Matt had been named one of the best new chefs in America in 2010. Some of the conservative folks in Portland, however, were apparently a bit freaked out by his food.
Some Portland folks were freaked out because Lightner makes what is described as "modern" food. The food is influenced by at least two recent culinary trends: "Foraging," which involves the use of strange, wild ingredients, and "molecular gastronomy," which applies scientific engineering to food. Lightner grows all his own herbs hydroponically, in a basement room at Atera. Here's a fresh batch in the "test kitchen."
Upstairs, in the dining room, one of the walls is made of plants. It smells nice--like an herb garden. By the way, when Jodi Richard was buying the hydroponic equipment to grow the herbs, the hydroponics dealer was convinced she was building an industrial-scale pot farm. "Cash only," they said.
Before the first course, though, Atera's sommelier popped over. His name is Alex LaPratt. He was recently named one of the best sommeliers in the country. In 97 days, he's going to take a test to become a "master" sommelier. There are only about 200 of them in the world.
Alex brought us a bottle of Riesling. For several reasons, I don't normally drink. Last night, I decided to drink. Then "snacks" started to arrive. Like granola dipped in a sesame sauce and frozen.
The food isn't the only stuff at Atera that is home made. All the plates and bowls are, too. And the boxes. And the table. And the light fixtures. And the lights.
The second group of snacks featured "fois gras peanuts," a chip of some sort, and pickled quail eggs. As we ate all these things, I began to consider the possibility that my contribution to Dwight and Jodi's local startup might not end up being as "minor" as I had expected.
"Atera," by the way, does not mean "of the earth," as I had surmised. It's a Basque word. It means "go out." Snack number three last night was razor clams served on stone.
By 930pm, we were done with the snacks. We were also done with the Riesling. So Alex had popped over with a bottle of Montrachet. And dinner started to arrive. Starting with yogurt, nuts, freeze-dried fruit, and a beet. This was not the last beet we would see.
Diver scallops, sliced, layered between citrus slices and "gin botanicals." Atera's chefs, by the way, don't just throw this stuff together. They assemble it. With tweezers.
And then a mystery course that we were asked to eat first and then guess what we were eating. My philistine guess, which I was too embarrassed to share, was "some kind of fish." I was kind of in the ballpark, at least with one of the ingredients. It was "squid flake" served with bacon fat and squid broth.
Between every course, by the way, the waiters swapped out our utensils, arriving with new ones in a box like this. If you're going to eat squid flake, there's no sense in diluting it with fluke after-taste.
It was while eating the squab, I think, which came with pear skins (those curly things) that I concluded that my contribution to Dwight and Jodi's little local startup was not going to be minor at all, especially considering the Montrachet and Riesling.
It is hard to even begin to convey how fan-fracking-tastically cool "rock" was, especially after a bottle of Riesling and Montrachet. "Rock," it turned out was bergamot sorbet in some sort of candy shell on a bed of "wheatberry gravel." It didn't look like that. It looked like a rock.
But oak leaves don't taste this fabulous. The oak leaf was covering bourbon cake, brown butter, and wintergreen "snow," which, appropriately, was frozen.
"Coal" wasn't on the menu we later received (as nor, I later learned, were several of the other things we had eaten). "Coal," we learned, was chocolate meringue that had been vacuum sealed, frozen, and then rolled in liquid nitrogen. When "Coal" arrived, dry-ice smoke was flowing off of it.
It was nearly midnight by now, three and a half hours after we sat down to eat a "quick bowl of moss" at Dwight and Jodi's little restaurant. With the exception of the "squid flake in bacon fat," about which I confess I shared the "slightly freaked out" feelings of the people of Portland, I had never eaten so many remarkable things in such rapid succession. The meal ended with "hazelnut truffles..."
And now it was time to find out how much of a contribution I was going to make to Dwight and Jodi's local startup. The information arrived in an envelope.
There's a saying about certain things in life that, if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it. That's probably the attitude you should bring to Atera.
