What Happens When You Challenge A Chef

Everyone’s a critic.  Everyone has an opinion.  The problem is most people are sheep.  Their opinion is not their own.  Rather, it is recycled and regurgitated, assured to offend no one.  Unless an opinion offends more than 50% of the population, it probably isn’t worth having. Or at least it isn’t very interesting.  It’s like a Buick.  Offensive to no one, but heinously boring.  Who aspires to own a Buick?  I’d take an uproariously amusing, albeit ill-found, illogical and irrational opinion any day over a banal, beige and boring opinion, no matter how rational and well-conceived it might be.  At least for its entertainment value that is.  But this is not the point.  The point is the sheep out there want to hear what I ate for dinner.  And so I will tell them. 

I ate a ten-course meal at a trendy, local/organic restaurant in Sun Valley, Idaho (Check Out Sego's Blog).  I sat at the chef’s table in the kitchen.  The meal would have cost me close to $300 (just for me) if I had paid.  The problem emerged because Sarah challenged Chef.  She said, “This girl can eat.  You’ve got your work cut out for you.”  And everyone knows that you should never challenge a chef unless you are prepared for a show so fueled by over-the-top egoism and competitive instinct that it would intimidate even the gluttons of Rome.  And I, the ever-present hard ass who runs with the big dogs, plays with the boys and never, under any circumstances, backs down from a challenge, accepted.  It was sure to be a stalemate – two stubborn, competitive egoists facing off. 

I consumed delicata squash salad with frisee, Idaho goatster and walnut-sage pesto; sorrel soup topped with crab and caviar; a red win poached duck egg on brioche with creamed spinach and spring greens; roasted squash flatbread with Oregon black truffles; handmade garganelli pasta with pine nut pesto and shrimp; pork shoulder with beans and biscuit; grilled local sturgeon with sun-choked capelletti, clams, chili, lemon and parsley; homemade ice cream (Sarah’s first love and absolute specialty) of the mint, toast, apple, grapefruit, vanilla and coffee varieties; carrot cake topped with a candied carrot and no heinously thick butter cream frosting and last but not least a palate cleanser of every sorbet flavor (Sarah’s second love). 

Does that impress you?  It should.  I guess.

After stuffing myself fuller than a fat man at a Vegas buffet, I eventually managed to roll my overstuffed, Michelin man of a body out of the restaurant and into the car.  I have never, in my twenty-four years on this Earth, been so physically ill just from eating.  I was entirely certain that I would need to stop the car to vomit on the 35-second drive from the restaurant to Sarah’s house.  I think the chemicals in my brain released some sort of strange reaction.  I actually felt drunk.  I collapsed on the floor in a stupor of carbohydrate-induced oblivion and felt the twinges of a sugar coma coming on.  I writhed on the floor in visible pain, occasionally releasing small groaning sounds and gurgles from my packed tummy.  I had an overwhelming desire to poke a hole it he side of my stomach and watch its contents drain out.  Sweet relief I imagined.

Good thing they invented hot yoga and spinning class.  Detox must commence immediately.

One more plug for Sego (Don't be lazy.  Check It Out)