Dinner at Mäs

    For what kind of experience would you pay $220? A raft trip down the Wild and Scenic Rogue River, maybe? A really good seat at the Metropolitan Opera? 

    Dinner? Not really. I don't need to pay that much for a good meal, especially if I had to pay extra for wine. So when my friend Cheryl suggested we have dinner at Mäs, a restaurant in Ashland that the New York Times called one of the fifty best restaurants in the country, I said no. The price was beyond my dinner-out budget. 

    Then I remembered that a friend had given me $200 for my birthday. If I used that, I thought, it would be like spending $20 for the dinner, and then maybe I could have wine, too. So I told Cheryl I had figured out how I could do it, so she made our reservation.

    In the meantime, I made a trip Georgia (see post on October 25). While I was in Atlanta, my sister Laura took me to Lenox Square, Atlanta's first shopping mall, with its high-end shops. I was way out of my element, but when Laura pulled a skirt off a rack and handed it to me, saying, "It looks just like you," I tried it on, liked it, checked it for affordability, and bought it. 

    That's what I wore to dinner at Mäs.

    When Cheryl and I arrived at the restaurant, we were shown to a private dining room. I was taken aback. I like the ambience of being among people enjoying themselves at a restaurant. We were alone here. Would this be fun?

    Oh, yes. Right from the beginning, when the chef, Josh—repeatedly a semifinalist for the James Beard award, a finalist for Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific, and the owner of Mäs—came in to greet us. He explained that here the chefs were the waiters and that there would be eight courses and did we want wine with our dinner? I did, so Josh returned with a bottle of sake made, he said, in a long fermentation and refermentation process to brew the essence of rice into silk-smooth alcohol. 

    I don't usually much care for sake. This one was superb.

    

Our waiter, a young apprentice chef named Derek, brought in the first course, which was called a tea but which I would have called the most delicious broth I have ever had. The second course was a croustade—a delicate fried cup with a creme-fraiche layer and some other layers I can't remember, topped with trout roe. "Eat it in one bite," Derek advised. "Otherwise, the roe will explode everywhere."

I forgot to take a picture, so this is an online picture
that is almost like it.

    It was a heavenly mouthful.

    After the sake, Josh brought us a white wine that was oh-my-god good. Later he asked if I wanted a glass of the red wine, too, and I'm glad I said yes because I have never had such good wines as I had that night. Like the food, the wines came from special places—the red from the Canary Islands, the white from somewhere in Germany. When I asked Josh where I could buy these wines, he said Mäs had their own sommelier in Bend. These wines were not to be found in the local supermarket.

    The theme of the night seemed to be foods from bodies of water—trout, lobster, tuna, crab, abalone, prawns, duck, scallops, seaweed. 

Third course: lobster, pineapple guava, yuzu, lemongrass, chili

Everything had an origin story—the trout from Lake Helen in Lassen Volcanic National Park (I've swum in it!), the scallops from the Oregon coast, the duck from one place, the tuna from another. In season, Josh uses local produce—tonight's matsutake mushrooms were from southern Oregon.

Fifth course: Chawanmushi (crab, matsutake, abalone jus)

 Everything was cooked with special techniques and equipment. Every course was beautifully presented in its own appropriate and beautiful dish. The cutlery was delicate and smooth to the touch. The wine glass had a stem as slender as a reed and was signed by the glass-maker.

And, of course, it was all indescribably delicious because, as we all know, there's no way to describe tastes except to say that they mingled and melded and separated then mingled again like water winding downstream, like the colors of the ocean, like the opening measures of Beethoven's Fifth. 

Sixth course: trout, blue prawn, chive, lobster blanc

    We were there three hours. Derek's timing was perfect; we never felt rushed to eat faster; we were never impatient for the next course.

Seventh course: duck, dragon's breath, sweet potato, kampot pepper jus

  Everything was as smooth as the custard base of the final course, the dessert: pawpaw, rum jelly, milk crumb, walnut oil.

Cheryl is relishing the tastes of the dessert tucked into the bottom of the vessel.
The "drips," by the way, are a part of the pottery, not spills.

    As we finished scraping the bottoms of the dessert bowls, Josh came in with a port, made, he said, in the oldest port-making facility in Portugal. 

    When I was a student at Cambridge University in England in the sixties, I had some fine port but never have I had any port as good as what I had at Mäs.

     What a very wonderful time Cheryl and I had that night. It was more than dinner out. It was a complete experience—sharing the private dining room, talking with the chefs, knowing where each ingredient came from and the complex and imaginative methods that turned those ingredients into gourmet rapture. And then, of course, eating those incredible edibles. 

    A raft trip down the Rogue is an experience of thrills. A night at the Met centers on music. Both experiences are sensually all-encompassing. So it was with dinner at Mäs—the totality of an experience centered on taste. I didn't spend $270 on dinner that night. I spent it on an adventure unlike any I've had before.