A Splurge Dinner If You Love Dessert: Wit & Wisdom Starts A Monthly Tasting Special

The "Lemon" course with avocado sherbet and a perfect meringue

Dyan Ng's food doesn't taste like Baltimore, but I think that she'll fit in quite beautifully.

Ng is the new pastry chef at the Four Seasons in Baltimore, and she is the star of a new monthly special at the hotel's Wit & Wisdom restaurant.  It's a splurge night.  A five- or six-course dinner that calls itself "progressive dessert" and comes across as imaginative, delicious fun.

Dyan Ng

Envision four courses -- plus a special cocktail to start -- where Ng and her team take ingredients that you'd see in dessert and create a real meal.  No hard line between sweet and savory.  Dishes instead that play with that line, sometimes skipping across bite to bite.

Start off with the cocktail.  Strawberries with rhubarb, swimming in gin with diced cucumber.  Icy, refreshing and bursting with flavor.  We sipped a bit and then scooped out the dessert-y remains.  We learned the strawberries were injected with basil-filled syringes.  Pretty cool.

Two courses in, Mrs. HowChow said she was leaving me to live in Harbor East -- Handbags in the City, great food, and an easier commute to work.  That was the avocado sherbet talking.  Creamy.  Like a lighter fruit.  Taste of cilantro, grapefruit, crunch of almonds, and the crispiest, lightest meringue that I have ever tasted.