Flavor Tripping at Caviar & Bananas

Caviar and Bananas is not on the list of restaurants this blog intended to cover, but sometimes opportunity calls and in response you have eat obscure West-African berries. And so we did.

For the uninitiated, "flavor tripping" has been quite the rage in gastronomy circles for the last year or two. A small, red berry, known colloquially as Miracle Fruit (and pedantically as Synsepalum dulcificum), is what the excitement is all about. A chemical in the berry's flesh does something very scientific and undoubtedly complex to the tongue that makes everything taste as though it were mixed with one-too-many packets of Splenda. Flavor tripping popped up on the radar in Charleston some months back with a Guerilla Cuisine event catering to the bizarre effects of the Miracle Fruit. Caviar and Bananas has gamely brought it back to the city for a second go-round.

Settling into our table at C&B, Maggie and I gnoshed away on the flesh of a small, red berry for a minute or so, allowing the juice to coat the inside of the mouth. Most of us trippers at this C&B event were first timers. Anxious glances and hushed questions raced across the tables, each group worrying that they did not apply the berry correctly.

"Should I eat the seeds?"

"Don't eat the seeds!"

"What seeds? There's a pit - should I eat the pit?"

"I think I missed a spot near my molars."

Some more instruction from the staff couldn't have hurt, but a lot of worries proved unfounded as we slugged back shots of balsamic vinegar, mistaking it for Port, and sucked suddenly-sweet lemons to the last drop.

Ignoring the tastes for a moment, the effect itself was difficult to measure. On one hand, sights and smells did not change, so the oeuvre of the lemon was complete as I brought it to my mouth. And though the taste was utterly unlemonlike, it did not seem particularly strange. My mind was clear, my senses functioning, and all was right with the world. I found myself wondering "Might a lemon have always tasted this way? How often do I eat a raw lemon anyway? This berry is hardly doing a thing!".

In this sense, it was a trip of the highest order. My mouth didn't feel funny and there was nothing beside my second-guessable memories to indicate that a fresh lemon ought to taste of anything other than faintly flavored sugar. The unremarkableness of the whole experience tied my brain in a knot.

The highlight of the experience, unquestionably, was a simple goat cheese tart. Consisting of nothing more than pie crust and warm goat cheese, the unaromatic tart blossomed in the mouth into a perfectly balanced bite of cheesecake. Our waiter explained that diet restaurants have sprung up in Japan, serving unsweetened, low calorie food like this to patrons under the influence of the small red berries.

I wish there were more foods to sample at C&B, lord knows they have enough on hand. I've also heard great things about the berry's effects on the flavor of liquor. I'd like try it again, maybe in the comfort of home with a few friends and foods of my choosing. In the end, flavor tripping is and will always remain a gimmick, but that doesn't mean it's not fun.