“On my second night at Fruition, I lit my menu on fire. It wasn’t a big fire—just the sort one gets from an unfortunate proximity of a heavy-bond paper menu to a small candle on the dinner table. I put the fire out with the palm of my hand—thankful, in the instant that my hand came down on the little tongues of flame, for the years of kitchen work that’d given me calluses like cracked leather, but remembering about two seconds later that it’d been five years since I’d been in a kitchen in any professional capacity and that calluses (like scars, friendships and memories) fade. Burning paper smells thick, heavy, a little bit woody like paper’s memory of when it used to be a tree. Burning restaurant critic smells, perhaps unsurprisingly, a little like barbecue.”
I managed to embarrass myself quite thoroughly every time I sat down to dinner at Fruition. Three meals, three bad scenes—and yet through it all, the restaurant itself got better and better. Fruition is an amazing restaurant, and this week you can read all about it right here.
In this week’s column, we’ve got even more about Fruition—a conversation with chef Alex Seidel, some chat about how his kitchen is arranged and his plans for the future. (Here’s a hint: he’s going to be cooking. A Lot.) And for those of you who’ve maybe heard enough about Fruition already (seeing as I am willfully a bit late to the game here and everybody and their mothers have already been talking this place up like it was the Second Coming), there’s also some news on Eric Roeder’s new venture, some word on closures, and another visit to Z Cuisine for an update on chef Patrick DuPays’s menus as we roll into the spring season.– Jason Sheehan
