Went to Momofuku Ko last night, as part of Project Blow the Second Installment of My Book Advance.

It was smoky-rich-briny-delicate-gooey-buttery-fried-fresh-crunchy-soft and delicious, with shards of roast chicken skin on top.

But it was a little weird.

The whole setup was not unlike DiFara’s, in its hushed voyeurism.

There’s a counter with 12 seats, and we all sat around watching three cooks make our meal. There’s an awkward fourth-wall problem. The cooks don’t really talk–they don’t need to, because it’s a set menu, and they know the drill. The customers don’t need to order, so that banter is gone. We could talk amongst ourselves, of course, but you feel like you have to be kind of quiet otherwise you’ll disturb the whole gestalt. And you don’t want to talk about totally inane stuff, because the poor cooks have to listen to the customers chatter all night. Not that that stopped us–we debated the merits of dishwashers for 45 minutes.

Fortunately, unlike DiFara’s, there’s music to fill the void. And in the second (and final) dessert course, the guy sitting next to me was so moved that he had to break the invisible barrier between all of us. “You were talking about which course was your favorite?!” he said to me. (I had not, but whatever.) “I assume you weren’t even counting this thing!” he went on with a swoon.

“This thing” was funnel cake with black-sesame ice cream and lemon curd. And I guess he felt like he had to talk to me about it, because his date was not eating hers. I guess I had signaled my overall enthusiasm earlier by dragging my finger through my buttermilk dressing repeatedly and licking it.

Anyway, I totally appreciate David Chang’s effort to give restaurant cooks some dignity and a good work environment. It was great to watch people cook without the hopped-up vibe in most pro kitchens. It was like the anti-Top Chef, thank god. But I wound up feeling a little stoned because all the cooks were moving so slowly.

Also missing, luckily, was the general nastiness of the open-kitchen-that-should-not-be-open, where you get to see how gross and factorylike the cooking really is.

The softshell crabs were cleaned in front of us, in a mesmerizing surgical way, then, in the only real cooking noise of the night, pan-fried with Old Bay and fuckloads of butter. (Who can argue with Old Bay?) The frozen foie gras was grated onto my bowl in heaps, atop peanut brittle and lychee gelee, creating a kind of ice-cream sundae that should’ve been delivered by a team of singing angel-waiters. The poached egg was cut open to look like Pac-Man, eating a whole mess of dots in the form of caviar. The short ribs were deep-fried and served not with ramps, because I suppose ramps are played out, but with “spring alliums,” which is the new hipster code for ramps, so that foodies can continue to eat them without feeling like they’re wasting their time with last year’s food fetish.

Oh, and speaking of fetishes, the sweetest sea urchin ever was doled out in a mammoth block, served with sugar-snap peas that were actually twee little balls of cucumber laid in the pea pods–which, I’ve got to say, is a rare brilliant leap in trompe l’oeil cuisine, because sugar-snap peas never taste like anything unless you eat them right off the plant, but the pods taste fine.

It was a great dinner. But not a jubilant night out.