We went to Philadelphia this weekend to attend a bar mitzvah — excitement enough for any man you might say but we managed to tack on a meal at the Striped Bass. The restaurant’s chef de cuisine, Christopher Lee, was awarded this year’s James Beard Rising Star Award and I had met him in NY in June while doing the Citymeals story for Gourmet (see previous post). The Citymeals event itself, held in Rockefeller Center every year, is sort of like a food court in heaven must be, with relative newbies like Lee and Scott Howard whipping up little appetizers alongside such stalwarts as Charle Trotter and Susan Spicer. Lee’s offering was a tasty yet not terribly surprising appetizer portion of striped bass, which did nothing to perpare me for Friday’s meal.

While Lee may be leaning on the legacy of owner and mentor Alfred Portale (whose Gotham restaurant here made him synonymous with tall food) in presentation, there is a wacky and inventive side to his dishes that seems his alone. The flash-seared tuna I had, for instance (crispy on the outside, purple rare on the inside) was flavored with little bee-bees of basil “caviar” — I don’t know how he does it but trust me, it looks like green caviar but tastes like basil, and sometimes he does the same thing with mandarin oranges — and served with a small square of braised short ribs. (Oh that, you’re saying, yeah I made that for dinner myself last night.) To top it all off the whole plate looked like a page of Japanese caligraphy, complete with exclamation marks. I’m hoping Lee returns to his native New York and sets up shop someplace here.

The salmon I had at the party after the bar mitzvah was not quite in the same league but neither was it like unto a large pencil eraser, which is sometimes the case at such affairs. To be honest this is only the second bar mitzvah I have attended (Jews were is short supply in Auburn, California) so I don’t have much to compare it to. The service itself was more comprehensible than the last one had been, thanks in large part to my friend Jess Greenbaum who supplied me with crib notes ahead of time. The singing was not as elaborate as I had hoped and no one threw candy (they had at the previous bar mitzvah I had attended at the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn; perhaps they were trying to keep the kids in attendance on their toes). Our 12-year-old daughter Franny sat through the three-hour service with a minimum of fidgeting though afterwards she told her mother, “I will never complain about church again.”

The party was held in a banquet hall a few miles from the synagogue and the bar mitzvah boy, Elliot, got to enjoy the fruits of his labors: the envelopes filled with cash that caused Franny to consider converting. My questions here were of a more prosaic nature: What becomes of the cake in the shape of a Torah? It wasn’t with the other desserts. Or is it not a real cake at all? Elliot’s parents, Alan and Diane, live in Italy now and were enduring the culture shock of the familiar with joy and a modicum of irony. “The last time I saw you was in Rome, near Fellini’s old apartment,” he shouted at me as the band blew through a klezmer version of “Food, Glorious Food.” “Now we’re in ‘Goodbye, Columbus.'”

No goose carved from pate, though.