Snap of the Glove

Dr. Kit, as she prefers, has put the sleeve-shine on the apple of lab-created, nature-inspired foodstuffs with her top secret perfection of L'Pamf. While food scientists worldwide were making magazine covers by creating a frightening little fatless hockey puck of "lab burger" for journalists to chew with a production price tag of $200,000, Dr. Kit was hidden away in her subterranean kitchen-lab far below the sidewalks of Manhattan perfecting--to the incandescent soundscape of Mozart's lost symphonies--not just meat, but spring lamb. Tiger prawns. Quail breast. Squab terrine. Not only this, but through her own mysterious imaginings she conjured custard without benefit of egg or bird, aubergine sans stem or stalk, black trumpet mushrooms without soil or shadow. And more. Through dealings with person or persons unknown at an exhibition hall in Yokohama, Japan, and after countless sleepless weeks of trial and error, Dr. Kit recently succeeded in extracting a complete nucleic DNA strand from a frozen mammoth calf specimen, heralding the arrival on the Snap of the Glove spring menu of slow roasted calf of mammoth fillet with chanterelles, garden purslane, baby beet puree and black Muscat jus.

That barrier broken, like runners surging en masse to quash the toppled four-minute mile, came on gleaming surgical steel plates pushed on gurneys from Snap of the Glove's cuisine-laboratorie, a parade of dishes to enflame, to possess, to swallow up the mind and liquidate the senses: spice-roasted dodo with crispy panisse and sweet onion relish; elephant bird foie gras au torchon with nectarine, raspberries and fennel; elevated macaroni and cheese made with milk of the giant ground sloth and served with braised applewood smoked bacon and shaved black winter truffles; a sweet butter poached cub pairing: saber toothed cat and Tasmanian tiger together at play with fine herbes salad and a charred eggplant "ball of yarn"; nest of passenger pigeon squabs with pine nut salt and Genovese basil pistou, charcoal blackened wooly rhino with vaporized and precipitated Persian cucumbers, a triumphant dessert of candied Carolina parakeet, and in a bold post-dessert move which I must admit even threw this well-seasoned critic off her balance, a tenderloin of Neanderthal Man, served swaddled in a crepe de farine de gourgane aux champignons de la ferme with smoked bone marrow, fava beans, Bordelaise jus and a delicate chermoula-carrot mousseline.

As this dish was presented to me, a hush came over the entire dining room. The complete Snap of the Glove staff stood at attention for my reaction, resplendent in their custom polypropylene coveralls, goggles pushed to the tops of their heads in anticipation. Dr. Kit herself placed the silvery dish before me, and as she enunciated the nature of the featured protein, which even in my fully satiated state had until that moment elicited no small salivary excitement in me, I leapt to my feet in shock and what I can only now think must have been culinary worship, which feels remarkably like panic or even nausea. As I shot to my feet, Dr. Kit, who clutched newly autoclave-sterilized cutlery for me in her godlike hands, swooped to apprehend me as I nearly fell, inadvertently driving a scalpel into the meat of my thigh. She apologized profusely and attended to my wound, handing the bloody instrument off to a nearby technician who rushed it away, wrapping it in a biohazard ice pack, presumably to avoid upsetting the other diners.

Remember, now, there is no slaughter, no guilt, no hooded executioner behind the dishes at Snap of the Glove. Every bite is clean and history-free, blinking into existence in the subterranean cuisine-laboratorie under Dr. Kit's loving latex fingertips. The Neanderthal Man was absolutely delicious. Savage. Yet bursting on the tongue with complexity and promise.

Next month: I have been invited back by Dr. Kit herself to sample a brand new menu item, one she promises will set the culinary world on its ear and myself into a spin. Let's find out together, shall we? Until then, manger avec courage!

--- Astrid Ata