Before we even started our meal, we were served an unusual spread inside a caviar tin: It wasn't olive oil and it wasn't butter; it was taramosalata. "Rick [Moonen] has been doing this instead of butter in his restaurant probably for 15 years," Chef Sobel said. "This is a much healthier option. It’s a Greek spread. It’s a combination of almonds, potato, onion, carp roe and olive oil. It's delicious. The reason we put it in the caviar tin is it’s a roe and it’s a form of caviar, and we wanted to do something a little different. We just started doing this up here, but Rick's been doing the taramosalata for a long time."
Our first course was, of course, an amuse bouche -- and quite an amuse bouche it was. "The amuse bouche tonight is a wild smoked sockeye salmon," Chef Sobel explained. "We bought about 300 pounds of sockeye because the season is so short. We got it in a week and a half ago, cured it and then smoked it all, so we're going to have our own smoked sockeye salmon for the whole season, throughout the summer. Every year we do it. The same thing with truffles. Toward the end of the truffle season we buy a ton of truffles, and then we preserve them. Going back to the amuse, though: It was a wild smoked sockeye salmon with beet tartare, horseradish crème fraiche snow and sockeye roe. Actually, some of the fish that we got in had the roe inside them, so we made our own caviar with that. The amuse also has crispy shallots and a little juniper oil."