Restaurant Review: Lysée

The Journey, which Lee débuted earlier this year, connected Thursday evenings only, is thing of a instrumentality to signifier for the chef. Before opening her bakery, she worked successful high-end restaurants, including Alain Ducasse’s gilded Le Meurice, successful Paris, wherever she trained nether the superstar pastry cook Cédric Grolet; successful New York, she reinvented the pastry programme astatine Jungsik, the three-Michelin-star Korean edifice successful Tribeca, wherever her creations—including a trompe l’oeil banana, possibly a foreshadow of the maize mousse cake—became objects of cultish obsession. Her 2022 book, “Plating Dessert,” published the aforesaid twelvemonth that she opened Lysée, covers conscionable 10 dishes, each documented with the component-by-component obsessiveness of a idiosyncratic who thinks astir sweetness arsenic a composer thinks astir sound. The Journey, which is disposable to astatine astir sixteen guests each week, showcases this mode of cooking, and of thinking: not the self-contained packages of the pastry lawsuit but elaborate, expansive dessert.

The Journey begins with a pea tart: a tiny, tender, full-throated savory bite. The peas themselves are piled similar cabochons implicit a bladed pastry shell, dressed successful a tart citrus vinaigrette and studded with slivers of pickled shallots that present bracing small sparks of brine against the crisp sweetness of the legumes. It’s not a dessert, per se, but it’s surely dessert-shaped. It was followed by a steamed ovum served successful its shell, wearing a swirly toque of dried gamtae seaweed that tasted, startlingly, similar oceanic threads of achromatic truffle, alongside a azygous brioche toast worker piped with crème fraîche and punctuated with a tittle of osetra caviar. Then determination was a people simply called Spring Herb, an intricate mosaic of greenish the colour and greenish the flavor: a creamy herb sorbet, an icy-flaky lemongrass granita, slippery slices of kiwifruit, and bits of earthy pome arsenic crisp arsenic snow. The crockery had a precision that I recognized from years of enjoying Lee’s pâtisserie, but it tasted astir shockingly wild, the flavors sparkling and faceted, with unpredictable brightness.