But it is more accurate to say that the cuisine, and the restaurant generally, comes from that region called Metaphor. A story related to me recently captures what, for all its personal touches and high ambitions, Moorefield's is not. Robert Reynolds, a chef who spends half the year in Portland, half in Provence, took a colleague to a market, purchased an eggplant and cut it open on the spot. How the vegetable fell open, and what precisely was revealed inside, would determine exactly how he would prepare it. Moorefield's, by contrast, is the projection of a priori ideas that its chef brings to each cluster of her ingredients.
Nothing is left to chance.
Moorefield's eschews simplicity as if it were vulgarity incarnate. Ingredients are occasionally metamorphosed beyond their nature, sometimes with inventive and seldom-imagined combinations, but sometimes with an overwrought imagination that masks the integrity of the raw materials in the name of art. But make no mistake, a meal at Moorefield's is an experience. One metaphor is opera. An enormous painting of Icarus about to launch himself into the sky graces one wall.