“Hambuhbuh… shoop shies… toke…” a tiny, curly-headed version of me would babble. I fancied myself a pioneer, a spokesman and tastemaker for gourmet toddlers worldwide. Once I learned of their collective existence, all I wanted was a hamburger, french fries and Coke — and I felt inclined to tell everyone willing to listen.

Now I’m a few more than two years old. Whether or not I still babble is debatable. But again, I feel like I’m on to something.

Or maybe I’m just on something. Coke is not involved but mushrooms keep popping up during dinner. Acid, too. At meal’s end, the effect of staring at a subtotal so unreasonably reasonable is mildly hallucinogenic.

And now I’ve picked up a bit of a habit. I go to Frej every week. Fredrik Berselius and Richard Kuo always seem to have the good stuff.

They start with small doses — snacks, let’s call them. Ah-muuuse if you’re feeling fancy. (I’m not.) These might be razor clams with pickled cabbage heart one night, or heart again on another. From a goat this time — thinly sliced, draped over nubs of celery root and hiding tiny pickled elderberries in its folds. The introductory nibbles change with each trip but always provoke and tease, using balanced little bursts of richness and acidity to make you anticipate the meal ahead without forcing you to plunge right into it.

As you might expect out of one guy born in Taipei but raised in Sydney and another hailing from Stockholm who have collectively spent nearly twenty years in New York, the chefs here cook “simple, modern Scandinavian” food using local ingredients, says the website. But don’t bother searching online for what exactly that means. Merely a month old, Frej is still nearly un-Google-able.

It’s also only open on Monday through Wednesday nights in a multi-use space in Williamsburg called Kinfolk Studios. With approximately the same square footage in my own kitchen I can barely throw together a decent grilled cheese sandwich. But these guys? They’re crafty, using the constraints of space and equipment as an impetus for creativity.

They start with smoked fish. Brook trout usually, mackerel once. They serve it with a warm egg yolk emulsion, little discs of cucumber, fried rye bread, and approximately 47 different preparations of dill (fresh, oil, powder, etc). It’s excellent.

Often that’s been followed by sunchoke, pear, elderflower and beef liver, a dish that immediately catapulted to one of my favorites at Frej. Alternating orbs of sunchoke puree and an irony beef liver sauce don crispy strips of sunchoke skin, pears pickled in elderflower vinegar, burnt hazelnuts and thyme. The combination is arresting, decidedly sweet but with rich, woodsy and bitter tinges.

Even now in the restaurant’s infancy, Fredrik and Richard’s cooking is thoughtful, confident, nuanced. Ingredients are not neglected. A plate ostensibly showcasing Maine shrimp and pickled cauliflower provides equal spotlight for fingerling potatoes, crispy on the outside and bursting with creaminess inside. Those same potatoes star in a sequel, with the sweet shrimp singing backup, while bitter flowering broccoli and a funky sprat-infused milk sauce round things out. Fine dishes, both of them.

Heartier dishes maintain that sense of balance. A soft-poached egg, oozy and satisfying, is surrounded by roasted mushrooms, pickled ramps, scallops and crispy bits of seaweed. Earl Grey tea-braised pork belly arrives with a smoked onion puree and peppery winter cress. Roasted rutabaga and apple cider lend sweetness to slices of flat-iron steak cooked in hay. Even lamb heart with smoked cheese and burnt celery root is a simultaneous display of power and finesse.

I’ve loved the desserts so far, but most of all I’ve loved their effect: to end a multi-hour, multi-course meal on a high note. It’s easy to woo the diner with sugar, to beat them into final submission with butter or chocolate. It’s considerably more exciting to be pricked with the tart sting of freeze-dried raspberries as you tuck into a cardamom parfait with hibiscus cake and walnuts. Better still to be surprised by savory seaweed shortbread crumbled around a tangy goat custard, sweet roasted pears and crispy pear skin.

The visual aesthetic of the food, for me, recalls Relæ and nods toward Noma. Maybe the ingredients have been deliberately placed there, or perhaps they’ve just fallen on the plate, amongst the same foraged garnishes that nature herself might provided. One can’t really be sure.

One thing I am sure of is that I’ve fallen for Frej. I don’t know how long the restaurant will last in this incarnation, a pop-up serving 5 or so courses to 20 or so people a night. I’d love for Fredrik and Richard to have the opportunity to share their food with people on whatever scale they see fit. They more than deserve that chance. But for right now, I’ll keep going every week until I wake up from this dream. For right now, I feel lucky to be a regular here.

Oh, and did I mention that the set menu costs just $45? Yep, basically the best dining deal in New York at the moment. You’re welcome.

But one day, every New Yorker wakes up feeling jaded and tired of all the restaurants by which he is surrounded. His mother comes to visit from out of state, and he wants to take her someplace nice. He is forced to think outside the boroughs.

In the past, this scenario has pointed my own compass northward to Tarrytown. But tonight my mom and I are in Princeton, and we’ve walked past leagues of ivy-covered buildings to arrive at a restaurant called Elements. Our table is situated in the kitchen — Scott Anderson’s kitchen — and my dad is here, too.

It doesn’t take me long to find the shovel with which I’ll dig our collective grave. I ask the gentleman I assume to be our server if some kind of extended menu might possibly be arranged. I assume — and acknowledge — that this will cost more than the standard tasting menu, so find myself a little frustrated to endure a stubborn sales pitch for truffles and wagyu beef. It takes literally four tries to convince him that we don’t need those supplementary flourishes. I just want to see Chef Anderson’s cooking, not his credit card statement.

Early on we see a lot of vegetables, and this being late November, they provide tastes of autumn. Sweet potato soup comes dotted with sweet little cubes of compressed apple. Hubbard squash custard points us to maple and mustard. Salt-roasted beets take a decidedly funky turn with a cheese called Shropshire Blue, a simple duo that emerges as one of my favorites of the night.

Chef Anderson’s larder also leans heavily toward Japan. Menu verbiage veers toward a vocabulary test. A finely minced tartare of hamachi, for instance, gets crowned with tonburi and yuzu zest. Foie gras fields wakame seaweed and umeboshi sorbet. Sea bass here is not just sea bass; it’s suzuki. And Anderson is as excited as any practitioner of kaiseki cuisine might be to have matsutake mushrooms in season. He’s made a consommé of them, and ladled it into a cast-iron pot brimming with fat nubs of mushroom and gossamer sheets of lardo.

The sad part is that those seasonal ‘shrooms lack sufficient salt — to my taste, at least — and a composed carrot salad does, too. There’s a lot going on in that dish: nori and smoked ricotta cheese, hazelnuts and roughly-torn shreds of Japanese brown sugar bread. It’s a band with too many instruments, the work of a writer in need of an editor.

Razor clams “casino” don’t fare much better. They’ve a chewy bounce that suggests over-cooking, and a distracting grittiness that makes me think they’ve been improperly cleaned, too. Imagine, also, my disappointment when a racquetball-sized potato, beautifully shrouded with black and white truffles, tastes and smells of nothing.

Fortunately the rest of the proteins, on balance, save the day. That suzuki I mentioned holds its own marvelously against an assertive backdrop of yogurt and black truffles, a beguiling combination. Mangalitsa pork neck is impeccably tender, perfect atop a bittersweet pecan-and-black-sesame puree. Colorado lamb tugs us unexpectedly back-and-forth between Mexico (hoja santa and green mole) and southern France (aligot re-fashioned into a fluffy steamed bread), and we’re very happy to make the journey. It’s our favorite dish of the night.

And that’s not to mention the most interesting — Scottish woodcock, in three services. The first is a “tea” brewed with its dried, smoked, and dry-aged meat in a French press. Then the heads of the roasted birds arrive, ready for us to pick their brains. My mom is, of course, giggling with delight at this point. In fact she’s so unable to control her laughter that she distractedly pushes every bit of roasted breast meat off of her plate and onto mine. My father does the same, bequeathing to me even the liver-filled porcini macarons that come with it.

Now I’ve eaten basically an entire bird, and I’m so disgustingly full that I want to kill somebody. My parents, meanwhile, wear smiles, but there’s something murderous in their eyes.  I fear for my safety. Granted, none of us can move at this point, anyway.  We’ve been assaulted by abundance, beaten by bounty.  I’ve given up on everything sacred in this world.

Desserts — I hate to say it — are excellent. Concord grape sorbet with lemon verbena, smoked salt, and rose apple is a pretty prelude. Then we’re hit with some pumpkin cheesecake, and a chocolate/peanut butter/banana dessert that is undeniably delicious, unapologetically rich.

There’s a candle stuck in that last one.  It’s my birthday, actually. And if reaching the ripe old age of 27 has taught me one bit of wisdom, it is this: the next time I go out to dinner, when the server tries to take our order, I’m just going to shut the hell up.

At the moment, it’s somewhere between one and four in the morning, and it’s awfully damn hot in here. Could it be the abundance of candles? Or is it my displeasure that we are seated across from frat row, young finance types taking turns making fools of themselves? Twice in the last five minutes, their champagne corks have hit the ceiling. Why were these people even born?

Disconcerted, I find comfort in a pig’s head. Kobe Desramaults and company have made a dark, gelatinous broth of the cranium; brittle, herb-flecked crackers of the ears. Kobe is the chef, by the way. He’s from Belgium, which I know only because I actually saw him there back in March of this year.

But I’d still not tasted his food, which is why I jumped to book this, the second of thirteen consecutive services in a ’round-the-clock pop-up restaurant by Le Grand Fooding. I’m feeling quite grand, indeed, eating the creamiest of oysters — poached in whey, adorned with cabbage and hazelnuts, and plopped in front of me without explanation.

There’s not much service to speak of, in fact. But talking with Anna Polonsky, half of the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Paris duo that organized this irreverent shindig, I get the sense that they want the experience to be about presence, not pretense; deliciousness, not decorum.

Salted West Flemish beef is the first dish I haven’t been crazy about. I love the texture of the meat — somewhere between roast beef and a young prosciutto — but have no meaningful feelings for its flavor, with or without the fermented carrots keeping it company. I just want to be friends.

And actually I’ve just made friends. It turns out that the two women to my immediate left work for the same restaurant group I do. A conversation sparked by salsify has brought this fact to light — roasted salsify, with a dollop of burnt bay leaf cream and gratings of an over-cured ham. These sweet, bitter, and salty elements show themselves like a spinning top, wildly dynamic but ultimately balanced. Each bite is a game, and I want nothing more than to keep playing.

Kobe, meanwhile, has snuck off into a corner. He’s elbow-deep in smoldering hay, cooking plump little pigeons over an electric flat-top stove in this New York City loft — visual dichotomy at its finest.

He stuffed and smoked those birds with the same hay over which he is now roasting them. It’s the same hay he infused into the butter that glistens on each slice he’s plated for us. Aged for a total of five weeks, the birds taste of minerals and red meat, of bacteria and barnyard. The FDA would frown on this kind of funk.

Meanwhile the crowd is all smiles. Free-flowing champagne all night has not hurt. The lone dessert — variations on goat’s milk — certainly hasn’t either. As the room empties out, a dude in a yellow t-shirt walks up to me: “Are you a blogger? Are you… Aaron?” He smiles, and nods towards a stack of cookbooks somebody has forgotten to distribute; cookbooks for In De Wulf, Kobe’s restaurant in Dranouter, Belgium. I flip to page 44. Yes, I definitely cannot read this. But I leave with a happy feeling — a feeling that at least I understand it just a little bit better now.