June 18, 2018 Issue

Rebecca Mead’s “Meal Ticket,” in this week’s issue, combines the disgusting and the sublime. It’s a fascinating account of Mead’s dining experience at Koks, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the Faroe Islands, specializing in extreme cuisine such as gannet-and-whale-blubber sandwiches, razorbill Wellington (“The pancake-wrapped seabird was topped by a lumpy, bloody-looking sauce made from beet, elderberry, and rosehip”), and crème brûlée infused with red seaweed. 

Mead is a superb, sensuous describer. She says of Koks’s fermented lamb, “Wind and time bestow on the meat a layer of greenish mold, and a pungency somewhere between Parmesan cheese and death.” Lamb drying in a shed looks “less like the wares in a butcher shop than like shards of granite patterned delicately with lichen.” Of a plate of aged lamb with rutabaga, she writes, “The aged lamb on my plate looked like shreds of an automobile tire, and it tasted like something I wouldn’t be able to wash out of my hair for a week.” Her details delight (“A carafe of coffee was delivered to the table with a dried salmon skin wrapped around its neck, as a holder”).

Notwithstanding the gross nature of most of the food, I enjoyed “Meal Ticket” immensely. I especially liked the last section in which the guests assess the experience they’ve had dining at Koks. Mead concludes:

With repletion came dissatisfaction: a hunger for something more, or for something different. Everyone felt a bit drained. Ducking under the rafters by the door, then taking care not to slide on the mud that the workers had not entirely remediated, we straggled out into the all-consuming darkness, and began the long passage home across the sea.

Postscript: A special shout-out to the magazine’s designers for “Goings On About Town” ’s new look. I like the sky-blue, serif-font titles. I like the cohesive way the “Art,” “Theatre,” “Classical Music,” “Night Life,” “Dance,” “Movies,” and “Readings and Talks” sections flow into each other. I applaud the elimination of GOAT-writer anonymity. In the new model, the writer’s name appears at the end of each note. This is as it should be. Some of the magazine’s best writing is in GOAT. Now we can tell who writes it.