Thanks for the warm welcome, and thank you for the criticism. I understand your concern about the sacrifice of flavor for cleverness, it is something that I have certainly been concerned with. My approach to food is inspired by chefs like Grant Achatz, Andoni Aduriz, Rene Redzepi, and Quique Dacosta. I'm interested in utilizing food as a medium to convey ideas, emotions, and concepts; these are often the things I initially address when conceptualizing a dish. I think you are right about the curry banana in the pork dish, originally I was going to do a balsamic poached cherry instead but since cherries are now out of season I've been trying to come up with something else. Any ideas? The bubble gum shot is sort of a reflection of this past summer and is a miniature version of a cocktail my ex-girlfriend and I created. I sort of pictured it as a pre-dessert sort of thing. Many of the ideas in these dishes were actually a collaboration between my ex-girlfriend and myself, so the story I'm going after is that of our relationship through food, or something like that. This menu was something we were originally going to create and serve together but now things have changed and the story is less about romance and more about nostalgia. One of the other dishes I didn't post here was something we came up with called "First Date" which is a miniature version of the first meal we cooked together. It would be gnocchi, sage brown butter, and porcini mushrooms served as one bite in a spoon. That is what was going to start off the meal. I was apprehensive about posting this sort of stuff because of the personal nature of it. hah, I hope I didn't get to mushy there or anything. Any other suggestions/comments/criticisms would be much appreciated! You seem to understand the approach I'm going for, even though I didn't make it entirely clear. I hope this helps. As I said above I totally agree about the amount of richness and sweetness in the menu, and it is a concern. I'm not exactly sure why I'm attracted to the interplay of sweet and savory ingredients, but it seems sort of natural to me and it's something I need to be more aware of. If you have any other suggestions for ingredients/flavor profiles I would love to hear them. The duck course isn't going to be the first course, right now the menu is still a rough draft and I just happened to write it in this order. It isn't going to be a whole leg, only a small portion of the meat, probably shredded as you said.