![]() 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. ![]()
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