According to Special K, one should play to one's strengths when traveling. Our strengths, according to him, are eating amazing food and critiquing museum curation. We played to them hard. [Our other strengths, I would say, are finding übergeek attractions and spending half an hour discussing the split ends of history, but we've got six more days for those.]
After wheedling two seats at the bar at Yours Truly for their carte blanche (you have to mouse over the link), we were almost 30 minutes late, thanks to a brief shutdown on the subway. Apparently, whenever something goes wrong at any point in the system (in this case, an unauthorized person on the track), the whole system shuts down. On principle (although they probably prefer to say "as policy").
But we called ahead and said we were going to be late, and they didn't seem to mind in the least. And it worked to our advantage in the end, because by the time we got there, a reserved two-top had been declared a no-show, so we got to sit with the grown-ups.
The carte blanche menu is all surprises; we had no idea what was coming next or how many nexts were remaining. Here's my best recollection of what we ate (assisted by the one-word descriptors our server kindly wrote down for me as an aide de memoire). Each bullet point represents a physical plate/dish/bowl/platter/fancy French canning jar.
• raw oyster with kimchi reduction and parsley coulis; pickled mackerel with yuzu powder and some leaf I can't remember; smoked salmon dolled up in some way I can't remember; soft-cooked octopus with compressed beans.
• "Forest": a combination of seaweed (sea forest) and fungus (land forest) and a gelatinous globule, dressed with some kind of foam I can't remember. Special K ruptured his globule on the plate; I ate it whole and let it explode in my mouth. It tasted like amniotic fluid (Proustian moment there).
• lamb and pickle gougère, accompanied by a leaf of compressed spinach with carmina powder.
• garlic knot with chive and sea salt.
• felafel disguised as a truffle, served in a jar of rice, with tamarind yogurt alongside.
• wee shaved radishes (seriously, the size of my little-finger nail, and you know I've got tiny hands) with paper-thin mushrooms, radish bottarga, and salmon roe.
• onion bhaji with cardamom jam.
• confit of purple yam with unidentified leaf; cherry tomato stuffed with something tasty we can't remember; smoked smelt on a "glass potato" (ie, an artisanal potato chip) with pickled day-lily shoot; squid-ink rice chip with a slice of octopus and a green sauce.
• a sous-vide egg on sweet-pea mousse with al dente sweet peas and something molecular I can't remember.
• a cube of pork belly wrapped in pickled daikon and tied with a shoot of some kind; a ceviche'ed whole shrimp; lardo toast. [At this point, my memory for garnishes, powders, and concoctions is completely overloaded.]
• sous-vide turbot with compressed cattail and some other cattail preparation.
• yuzu-orange mead "freezie" (ie, a freeze pop), served on a bag of flower blossoms in dry ice, which outgassed/misted as we ate.
• poached duck breast with paper-thin slices of miniature unripe stone fruit, both raw and pickled. Also, other accoutrements I can't remember.
• "strawberry chocolate milk" -- a gelée made of chocolate milk, wrapped around a spherical strawberry (analogous to Ferrán Adría's spherical olive).
• a cube of chocolate mousse and something panna cotta with cherries in several preparations.
• tarte trapezienne (lemony trifle with a lovely salty sponge) and coconut praline truffle.
Of those sixteen plates, not everything was successful. I liked the platter of sashimi better than Special K did, and we agreed that the "forest" was a bowlful of meh. Some were spectacular, esp. toward the end of the meal (which also got less experimental).
I had a "Belgian sour" (which was like a whiskey sour, but with gin and coriander seed), and then a glass of rose. Special K had the Creemore IPL, which we both agreed was a fantastic summer beer for hopheads. I will try to get a six or two before we leave Ontario.
I'll try to update the descriptions as I remember things and as K. points out things I forgot.