When you really stop and think about it, you don’t actually experience a truly new flavor all that often.

Consider a bottle of outstanding wine. Even the myriad of flavors within can be shuffled off into descriptions that include familiar tastes — plum, apple, courant, chocolate, pear,
etc. Sometimes, discussion of a new flavor — “wow, I’ve tasted anything like that before” — is simple a proxy for a superlative that one can’t fully grasp. But rarely do we mean literally what we say.

Tonight, for the first time in many, many years, I experienced truly new flavors. A moment when the food that I was eating manifested itself in way that I had never experienced before.

My wife and I were dining at WD-50, the nearly eponymous creation of Chef Wylie Dufresne.

To my mind, Dufresne is a disciple of the school of Keller. He develops his menu with an eye toward new discovery, pushing the envelope ever forward to discover new flavors and textures.

Tonight, we enjoyed his creations, and they were extraordinary.

My first course was described in the menu as, “Slow poached egg, chorizo, pickled beets, dried black olives.” By design, the description does it no justice. But neither will mine. Indeed, no description can. It was, in short, an utterly new flavor. Unlike anything I had experienced before. To be sure, there was a soft boiled egg. There were beats. There was a hint of spicy chorizo. There were finely chopped chives. But who would assemble such things? And assemble them in just such a way — in the perfect proportions — to create something entirely new. And, lest you skeptics doubt, the entirely flavor was also entirely wonderful.

My second course was pork belly. It was accompanied by corn. And it too was extraordinary. Each bite was a different flavor. Some were familiar. Some were totally new. The pork belly was cooked to perfection. So was the corn. But what was one to make of “miso-walnut panacotta”? It doesn’t matter. It worked. Perfectly.

The last time that I experienced something entirely new was eight or nine years ago, eating octopus salami in Chef Roberto Donna’s Laboratorio del Galileo. It’s gone now. Temporarily, anyway, while the building is gutting and rebuilt. But the memory of that creation remains.

So, too, I suspect, will the memory of perfectly cooked pork belly and a masterful creation that began with a simple, humble egg.

If the dinner at WD-50 had ended just so, it would have been among the best I’ve ever experienced. But it was the final bite that vaulted it to one of the truly best.

As we finished desert, our waiter brought us what could be described, I suppose, as petit fours. The first was a marshmallow, coated in a delicious powder. It was excellent, but in the context of what had come before, ordinary.

But the second. The second was an invocation of familiar, like a cozy old chair. The waiter described it, as “Our take on sweet potato pie.” Now, sweet potato pie holds a special place in my heart. In short, it’s my favorite dessert, in a long list of favorite pies. (My first word, apparently, involved my reciting the letters p-i-e back to my mystified parents.) Dufrane’s single bite was perfection itself. The prefect flavor. An journey into long lost memories. A trip to a place of comfort.

Chef and author Tony Bourdain likes to say that great food comes at the junction of great flavor, memory and emotion. After the single bite of sweet potato pie, that’s where I found myself.

Dufresne’s ability to merge to entirely new and the mysteriously familiar are pure magic. I hope I get to experience it again someday soon.