To Lee’s credit, he’s left the enchanting postmeal ceremonies intact, including meltingly ripe cheeses, with unusual sauces like Guinness and cider, and the city’s top after-dinner tea list, with obscure artisanal offerings such as South African rooibos with a shocking vanilla taste, pungent enough to shame the Earl of Grey. (A parallel Liebrant signature, typically exotic, was dover sole, prepared sous-vide, encrusted with cheese and topped by apple jelly and smoke haddock).ĭessert from brand-new pastry chef David Carmichael (also from Oceana) has some of the old Liebrandt kookiness-witness the “Chocolate Solar System,” three chocolate balls stuffed with treats like sorbet and soft fudge, sitting in chocolate foam. The new Gilt’s signature dish is a tuna Wellington-rare yellowfin wrapped with chopped porcini mushrooms in a thin pastry crust, flanked by two clashing dipping sauces, a rich foie gras emulsion and a tart red-wine reduction. Another hats-off to the French chef comes in the form of Lee’s nicely marbled rack of lamb with a winning lemon jus, poured tableside. Diver sea scallops, impeccably firm and sweet, get dressed up with a silken black-truffle gravy that would make Boulud proud. From a dish that can come off as bad pickled herring, he creates a wonderful Greek salad, as colorful as confetti, with black olives, feta cheese, phyllo crackers and sweet pickled cucumber that tastes like watermelon. Those last two experiences manifest themselves at Gilt, where more than half of the choices on the small menu-four hot and cold appetizers, four land and sea entrées-come from the ocean. Just 31 years old, Lee boasts serious bona fides, having apprenticed for Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud, wowed in a deputy role at Oceana and headed the kitchen at Philadelphia’s Striped Bass, one of that city’s perpetual treasures. The chef also eschewed Liebrandt’s delicious theatrics-I still remember eating his sandwich of crab-and-gingerbread gelée, bracketed by dried seaweed-in favor of an American menu with heavy global touches. The wine list, one of the city’s greatest but also most absurdly upscale, now has more sub-$100 selections (the $12,000 1900 Margaux remains, but I had an outstanding $48 Santa Barbara tempranillo). He’s slashed the three-course prix fixe by 15 percent, to $78. He makes Gilt, whose very name connotes beyond-the-pale decadence, practical. New chef Christopher Lee steps into this absurd theater and does something surprising. Gone instead is risk-taking chef Paul Liebrandt, an experimentalist of the Wylie Dufresne/Homaro Cantu ilk. The dining room floor’s orange rubber overlay and the bar’s honeycomb lunar lander architectural flourish-which together defile the 125-year-old Villard Mansion, home to Le Cirque during its grandest days-sadly remain. The folks behind Gilt have only partially accepted this dictum. There’s a business cliché that executives learn at $1,000 seminars: Change or die.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |