My Birthday Dinner at Wolfgang Puck's Five Sixty at the top of Reunion Tower in Dallas

I confided in Julie, TR's daughter, that one of the things on my bucket list was to eat at least once at a celebrity chef's restaurant.  She immediately made reservations for Wolfgang Puck's Five Sixty (that  is the height of Reunion Tower) for the Sunday before my 69th birthday (July 6, 2014) while we were sitting at the coffee table at the Y.  Reservations were for 5:00, which rather disappointed me since in the height of summer it doesn't get fully dark here until 9:30 and the city is a whole new kind of beautiful when the lights come up.  Little did I know we would not be leaving until 9:45....  Yes, we were there for 4 3/4 hours--nearly five turns around the dining room.

 

After a first perusal of the menu, which I'd seen earlier on the restaurant's website, I was at a loss.  I wanted to try everything.  The closest to that was the seven course (there is a twelve course also, but I knew that was totally beyond my stomach capacity, large as I am) tasting menu with wine pairings ($200 a person!), but I figured that was totally out of line. 

I should mention, at this point, that this is an Asian restaurant, and in many of the menu items, I did not recognize a single word.  Julie went ahead and ordered a bottle of champagne while we decided and then proceeded to tell us what she and Chris had had in the past and enjoyed.  I said, "I just can't decide," although I did know I eventually would when she suggested exactly what I really wanted--the tasting menu with wine pairings.  All of us decided to have the same except TR who decided not to have the wine pairings because his meds might clash with unknown wines.  He decided to stick with champagne, finishing our bottle and then ordering by the glass as we went on. 

While we were still drinking our champagne, our palate cleanser (a sweet and savory spoonful to get the palate ready for good food) arrived: a cherry-size heirloom tomato, blanched and peeled, on a bed of avocado mousse with a kind of honey jam on the bottom (or maybe just honey) piled on a tasting spoon like the ones used on the TV show, The Taste.  Luscious, especially with the champagne.

 

I should note at this point that this was my first experience with fine dining--everything I know is from the TV chef competition shows which I am addicted to, so I may cite them often.

As we drank the champagne and waited for our first course, chatting with our very personable and knowlegible waiter, Mathew, who knew, not only all about our food and wine, but also everything, it seems, about what we were seeing out the window, Julie took and posted pictures:



This is Dallas looking east over the city--the highway is 75.

And here is the dining room as seen on the restaurant's website:

 

Mathew asked us if we had any time constraints, and when we said, "No, none at all, you are stuck with us for the evening," he seemed relieved and told us how he hated it when people thought they could get through a seven course tasting menu in an hour and a half.  This was no hour and a half meal for us!

 

The "Amuse" course was brought out, a bonus course now giving us eight courses, not counting the palate cleanser.  This was a glazed pork belly Bao Bun (a sandwich on a bon mi bun) with Hoison Gojuchian aoli (I know from my shows that an aoli is a mayonnaise,  usually flavored.)  With it was served a Rose, a Lucien Albrecht wine from France.  The pairing was perfect--the wine having enough body, while being light, to stand up to the pork belly, which I now learned was a glorified bacon, thickly cut.  Although Julie suggested that what really separates pork belly from bacon was that the hogs were raised as pets, fed milk and honey, curried and groomed, and had music played to them as they matured.

 

Part II of this discourse will come up tomorrow....We haven't even gotten to the first course yet!