Wednesday, January 18, 2012.
Eat Club @ Flaming Torch.
At the very end of a bad cold--when the only remaining symptoms are an occasional sniffle and a few light coughs--a strange thing sometimes happens to my olfactory sense. It gets better. Sort of. I begin detecting aromas that nobody around me does. This would be a good thing for someone in my line of work, but for the strange part: everything smells the same to me during these days. The same, but unfamiliar. It doesn't smell like anything I know. It's different every time. It's neither a bad smell nor a good smell. And sometimes the smells come from things that don't (or shouldn't) have smells at all. Sometimes the effect lasts a few days, but it has gone on for months.
This weird effect peaked today. I noticed it yesterday, but it really was apparent when Chef Nick Gile of the Flaming Torch sat down for an interview during the radio show this afternoon. I'm not accusing Nick of exuding a bad odor. All chefs are surrounded by an aura of aromas while they're working. It's the smell of the kitchen, and it comes with the territory.
But when the Eat Club sat down to dinner a couple of hours later, and I forked a piece of the excellent crabmeat beignet into my mouth--there was that aroma. It translated into a flavor. Many things that we register as tastes are really aromas, our sense of smell having far greater range than our sense of taste.
The same aroma/flavor appeared in the warm spinach salad with the coddled egg. And in the almond-crusted redfish with Veronique sauce. I asked a few of the forty Eat Clubbers whether they noticed similarities among the dishes in aroma and flavor. Nobody did. In fact, nobody had anything but good things to say about the dinner.
They would continue to do so as we went into the entree of duck confit with a reduction of port wine, pomegranate juice, and duck stock, with the side of potatoes whipped with goat cheese. And as we finished with a very rich, heavy chocolate torte mellowed with hazelnuts.
I liked it all, too, even with the background of what I came to think of as The Smell Of January 18. What else could it be?
Hassan Khaleghi, the owner of the Flaming Torch, enhanced the Eat Club evening well beyond the typical. We had a half-hour cocktail session with cheeses and other appetizers in the main dining room before we went up to dinner in the antique rooms on the second floor. He brought in an excellent cellist from the Louisiana Philharmonic to play for us all night. (I wrote her name down somewhere, and promptly lost it.)
Among Hassan's invited guests were a few learned friends from Iran. One was a writer who gave me a book of his poetry, with the poems written in several languages. (I asked him how "who dat?" translates into Parsi. He wasn't sure.) Questions about Iran brought the same answers I always hear from Iranians: what's going on over there now is a terrible aberration.
Flaming Torch. Uptown: 737 Octavia. 504-895-0900.
