With chefs paying such close attention to artisanal ingredients and farm-to-table cooking, it’s a no-brainer that several prominent restaurants like Blue Ribbon and Market Table have opened retail offshoots, where they offer unique products and specially prepared foods. Some, like Fort Greene's Little Piggy (Market), sell basic grocery items; others, like Laurent Tourondel's fancy new BLT Market in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, line the shelves with hard-to-find, pricey gourmet treats.

All told, these retail spinoffs peddle the same fantasy: that you, too, can bring the restaurant experience home. Which begs the question: Can you actually successfully re-create these restaurants’ dishes in your kitchen, using ingredients purchased at their retail markets?

I attempted to find out: I decided to invite some friends over for dinner, shop at a few of these markets, and cook away. Would my dishes come even close to restaurant quality? Would we eat better if I did my shopping at Whole Foods?

A full, three-course dinner was planned: starter salads from Little Piggy (Market), an entree of pork chops from Market Table's extensive meat counter, and a dessert of Blue Ribbon Bakery's famous chocolate-chip bread pudding. With each course, the meal would progress from easy to difficult—the appetizers would be wholly pre-prepared, the already-marinated pork chop would need cooking on the grill, and the bread pudding would be a total experiment from raw ingredients and my own on-the-fly recipe.

Since my dinner guests were all self-avowed food lovers—a motley crew of two published authors, a poet-woodworker, a brain researcher and the evening’s photographer—I knew I could rely on well-informed opinions. Most everyone had been to dinner at my house before, so they knew what I was capable of in the kitchen. It was time to find out if shopping at these specialty restaurant-markets would help me create an especially sublime meal.

On to the appetizer—>