“Surgeons usually fantasize about wild and improbable surgeries. Someone collapses in a restaurant, we splice them open with a butter knife, replace a valve with a hollowed out stick of carrot. But every now and then some other kind of fantasy slips in. Most of our fantasies dissolve when we wake, banished to the back of our mind, but sometimes we’re sure if we try hard enough, we can live the dream. The fantasy is simple. Pleasure is good, and twice as much pleasure is better. That pain is bad, and no pain is better. But the reality is different. The reality is that pain is there to tell us something, and there’s only so much pleasure we can take without getting a stomach ache. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe some fantasies are only supposed to live in our dreams.” –Meredith Grey

Mid February when everything was still, I flipped on my Roku and saw Alex Guarnaschelli enjoying this out-of-this world dessert. After watching Chef Alex’s best thing I ever ate, I can’t stop thinking of that lobster tail…

I scouted for ways I can buy the lobster tail and sfogliatella of Ferrara NYC.

Yesterday my Ferrara NYC order arrived…

Tried it…

Suddenly I realized…

It could have been better if I had just kept it as a fantasy…

Failed.

G.