Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
And talk about fast learners—Amador only
opened his eponymous restaurant in
2004, but 3
1
/
2
years later he had three
Michelin stars to show for his efforts.
Once you get inside that historic build-
ing, you find a lovely small dining room (it
only seats 36) with mellow golden stone
walls and matching butter-yellow table
linens and armchairs. Diners can choose
between two tasting menus, one of three
courses and one of seven courses, but if
you order the shorter one, you may end
up looking wistfully at the strange and
wonderful things being brought to your
neighbors' tables. Amador's cooking falls
at the gimmicky end of molecular gastron-
omy—there's the apple-wasabi cream you
squeeze out of a toothpaste tube onto
beet macaroons, the poached quail egg
impaled on a metal rod, the glass jar con-
taining a prawn marinated in barbecue
sauce that releases a whoosh of smoke
when you lift the lid, the test tube of lob-
ster bisque set alongside the lobster
entree, the iced duck liver sprinkled with
“space dust.” Amador even re-imagines
the classic German ham-and-egg sand-
wich known as
strammer Max,
with tiny
toasty roll-ups of egg-filled bread accom-
panied by glass straws through which you
sip an intense shot of bacon-flavored oil.
But Amador got his three stars not for
magic tricks, but for the vivid flavors that
his preparations call forth—as in more
straightforward entrees like a robust
Aragon lamb cooked with coffee, celeriac,
and walnuts, or the tender pigeon breast
served with coconut milk, mango, and
purple curry spices.
Restaurant Amador's extensive wine
list concentrates on Spanish and German
wines—not surprising, given the chef's
polyglot heritage. In the end, though,
Amador isn't Spanish or German, or Asian
or Italian or haute French—it is a planet
unto itself.
Vierhäusergasse 1, Langen (
&
49/6103/50
27 14;
www.restaurant-amador.de).
(
Frankfurt (10km/6
1
/
4
miles).
L
$$$
Villa Kennedy,
Kennedy Allee
70, Frankfurt (
&
49/69/717120;
www.villa
kennedy.com). $$
Hotel Robert Mayer,
Robert-Mayer-Strasse 44, Frankfurt (
&
49/
69/9709101;
www.arthotel-frankfurt.de).
Cutting-Edge Kitchens
130
WD-50
Lift-Off on the Lower East Side
New York, New York
In 1999, a young chef named Wylie
Dufresne started cooking at an edgy little
joint called 71 Clinton Fresh Foods on
Manhattan's Lower East Side. Seemingly
overnight, the gritty, down-at-heel neigh-
borhood became a magnet for Upper East
Side diners as well as young hipsters. In
2003, Dufresne moved down the street
into his own restaurant, WD-50 (a name
concocted from Dufresne's initials plus the
restaurant's street address), and awards
have been flowing in ever since.
Wylie Dufresne—who first rose through
the ranks in Jean-George Vongerichten's
restaurant empire (see )—may not have
been solely responsible for the sudden
gentrification of the neighborhood, but his
innovative cooking sure helped to define it
as a place of fresh ideas and casual sophis-
tication. Occupying what was once a
grubby bodega, WD-50 is a stylish space
filled with blond wood, whiskey-colored
leather, black iron, abstract white-glass-
and-copper light fixtures, and a dramatic
