Manhattan’s Most Coveted Reservation: Momofuku Ko

It’s not the food—OK, maybe it is the food—but Momofuku Ko’s online reservation system has gotten as much hype among Manhattanites over the last year as the latest Apple iToy. The online-only system (the restaurant doesn’t even have a phone) has frustrated food critics and senior foodies alike—with an entire night’s open spots disappearing in a matter of seconds, it was definitely designed with the Web-obsessed in mind. I decided to try my hand at making a Ko reservation a few months ago, and with fast fingers, it’s really not that hard to score. Admittedly, 9:10 on a Thursday night wasn’t really what I had in mind, especially given that the dinner lasts over two hours, but I decided to follow through.

Flickr Creative Commons Photo by EssG

The food is incredible, but not the kind of incredible I could handle every night, or even every month for that matter. All of the dishes were incredibly thoughtful, and prepared right before each of the twelve guests. With twelve stools (set up around a bar—they’re not very comfortable) and only two seatings each night, it’s no wonder that the entire restaurant is reserved before some have time to refresh the page at 10 a.m., when the next set of reservations are released. The crowd was very young, which I typically wouldn’t expect given that dinner runs $100 per person, before wine pairing.

Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Roboppy

Overall, dinner at Momofuku Ko is a once in a lifetime experience—even living in Manhattan with fingers fast enough to get a table any day of the week, I don’t know that I’d go back, at least not for a while. It’s just one of those perfect dining experiences that you want to remember that way. The menu doesn’t change all that much on a daily basis, and there are definitely plenty of critiques floating around the Web, so I’ll just focus on my favorite dish of the night: The smoked hen egg with black caviar and fingerling potato chips. The dish was like a well-planned work of art—it was layered and colorful, with a mixture of crisp lines and softer shapes. The overflowing caviar was an obvious pairing with the comparatively oversized hen egg. The combination of sweet, bitter and salty flavors combined with the soft texture of the egg and crispy chips made this dish one of my favorites.