—Synonyms
1. gourmand; gastronome; chowhound.

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This is what I did the other night.  I have a friend in from Seattle.  He’s a real chef.  Much better than the likes of me.  I would argue that he has almost as good taste as my father. (I still think he’s the best cook there is.)

Anyhow, whenever he comes to town, we go to what-ever’s the newest thing.  He’s just at that point where every time he comes back to visit, he thinks about opening a place here.  So we consider our outings to be “research” and the like.

Last time he came back I took him to Justine’s.  If you didn’t already check, Jen blogged about it but didn’t say the name, she was afraid it would blow up.  Thing is, no amount of us keeping our mouths shut would keep people away from our little hideaway on the east side.  It’s just too fantastic, one person found out about it, and now there’s always at least a 3 hour wait.  I’ll be going again in the future, I don’t mind the wait for food that awesome.

So, back to the story.  My dude was in from Seattle, and he wanted to go to Uchiko.  It’s not even open yet.  They’ve been having a “soft-opening” for the last week or so.  I guess I don’t know any cooks or restaurant people anymore, I called around to everyone I could think of and no dice.

We were in luck though, b/c a friend of his had been recently and told us that we could sit at the bar and nosh there.  So his friend met us there, who is consequently the sous at Mulberry.  (Still haven’t been there yet, planning on that soon.) And we ate.  We ate, and ate, and ate.  Then we decided to go to Uchi, just for comparison.

We got to Uchi and they boys were almost wanting to bail.  I’m a trooper, the wait wasn’t that long, 45 mins or so.  So I made them stay.  I’m glad I did too, was a super fun evening with tons of food, correction, tons of really great food.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a food snob, you guys know that about me, and for the past few years I’d been staying away from Uchi.  I like what Tyson started with and all that, but I think it needed some new energy in the menu.  The thing that tipped me over the edge was when my dude said that Uchi got a new chef b/c Tyson was busy at Uchiko.

I gotta say, I’m a fan of the new guy.  I heard, read: have not done research on this to check my sources, that Ben McBride (the new chef) used to work at Parkside with Shawn Cirkiel.  I’ll get back to you on that.

In the mean time, here’s some of the pics I took of the food at Uchiko and Uchi.  It was beautiful.