Grape Fruit Dishes Around The Country

It's awards season, and we've got a nominee for best supporting actor: grapefruit.

With sweetness enveloped in a bitter tang, it's the perfect foil for anything from seafood to gin.

We looked to top chefs around the country for the fruit's best appearances of the season, and found it both raw and juiced, plated with tender calamari, and taming the cloying sugar in sundaes (see a slide show of the dishes). A clever application at AQ in San Francisco combines sesame, avocado, grapefruit and parsnip milk: creamy, multitextured, sweet and bitter in one, it inspired our own Test Kitchen recipe for halibut with grapefruit-sesame salt and grapefruit-radish salad (see the recipe).

Bartenders are also putting the citrus to good use, pitting it against unusual ingredients such as pickle brine, in a pickled Paloma cocktail at the The Corner Store in San Francisco, or Zirbenz pine liquor, at Atlanta's The Optimist. Tiffany MacIsaac at Washington, D.C.'s soon-to-open GBD drizzles a grapefruit-Campari glaze over golden fried doughnuts, a technique with such great results that we cribbed the recipe for you (see the recipe).

And the award goes to...