7 Quotes by Michelle Wildgen

They started on the ice creams: cinnamon, crème fraîche, and Damson plum."Ever had Damson plum ice cream?""Nope. Nice color." The plum ice cream was vanilla marbled with a rich winery purple."By 'cinnamon,' do they mean cinnamon the spice?""As opposed to what?""The candy. Try it. Plus, it's pink.""Oh.

According to Britt, Hector was spending the last few weeks before Stray opened perfecting some mad scientist's ice cream cone, cacao custard in a cup constructed out of malt or something equally odd, plus a salted, buttered popcorn ice cream. He'd created some kind of hot fried pastry with a cool Meyer lemon center, served with Thai basil cream and a sparkling drift of sugared zest. Britt had described them as otherworldly beignets.

Yesterday it had been a single chocolate orb that shattered with the tap of a knife, revealing shards of crystallized whiteness. "Chocolate-menthol geode," Hector had said, and watched them piercingly as they ate, the chocolate melting on their tongues while the menthol rose in vapors straight towards the tops of their skulls.

He liked walls the color of some creature's muted underside or the soft inner petal of a plant, slippery leather banquettes and a silky curl of gravlax served on a slick white plate.

Mostly Britt had done it; he'd exchanged a terracotta vase for the sleek ones the color of chalcedony, the stemware for Moroccan painted bistro glasses, the white napkins for oatmeal ones, and the ferns for more birch branches, until the clusters looked as if they'd come from Norway or a fairy tale.

The cloudy-eyed heads of the fish were stoically averted from the bare fronds of their ribs. The baby octopus wasn't moving, but the few he'd seen looked perfect, purple and white beneath a yellow haystack of frizzled ginger.

Hector would spend a week perfecting a sesame grapefruit mousse that Britt had described as the union of grainy and puckering, but then ditch the mousse and debut a flawless napoleon of crackling pastry layered with coconut and kaffir lime custard. He'd sprinkled it with a vivid emerald powder that sent Leo's mouth alight when he tasted it, a fragrant tartness that intensified the creamy custard and the buttered shards of crust. It turned out to be sugared lime leaf powder.