Coaching Cooking

**Note**: I wrote this review some time ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to publish it until now.

Sometimes I dream of restaurants. The review that I read sparked my interest and made Ame seem like the magical place where Italian and Japanese cuisine meet and entangle into fiery bursts of luscious flavor.

Or you could eat this:

Hey, this looks pretty good. And the only catch is that there’s nothing Italian about it and the Japanese elements might as well be a separate appetizer. The unagi tasted perfect with the tender fish complimented by a traditional Japanese barbecue sauce. The foie gras pate was served on the same plate with brioche. This is a classic French preparation and eating it is almost indescribable except that it tastes like the most delicious meat-flavored butter (go with this…it’s true) ever. So far, the cuisines of Japan and Italy sat together on the same plate, but they didn’t really meld to create some new and exotic dishes. Plus the pickled stuff in the left corner tasted like sweet and sour cucumber-lime-orange-something. Blech.

On to organ meats #2:

This sweetbread dish was flavorful and truly tasty. The crispy sweetbreads had a great crust on the outside with the soft taste of the flesh on the inside. I’m not trying to sell organ meats to everyone. Clearly, this is a dish you pick if you’ve had sweetbreads before or if you have just lost a bet to a foodie. All in all, it was a wonderful dish.

There have been many times when I’ve questioned the name of this food. Yet I still love it. Hey, what’s not to love about something whose name is also its content yet with a very cute “etta” at the end? Porchetta is pork fat and it tastes damn good. There’s no other way to put it. This dish was very good. It was one of the highlights of the entire meal. In fact, looking back it was the sapphire among cut glass.

Other dishes followed including this dessert.

Everything was pleasant, but not earth-shattering. I expected to be tantalized and, instead, I felt somewhat satiated, but not elated by the dishes.

All in all, Ame was not the stuff that dreams are made of and I didn’t leave feeling completly inspired as a cook. It was disappointing because the dishes themselves looked perfect and the taste did not match the style of the food. I admire the striving for a marriage between Japanese and Italian cuisine. Instead it seemed more like a slight collaboration between roommates who shared the same saute pan.