Image by Martha Williams
In the competitive world of fine dining, chefs see themselves first and foremost as innovators. How many ways can they amaze us with their technical brilliance, their search for the rarest ingredients, and the most unusual presentations? Only cities where the high earners live or travel can support restaurants where virtuosity is its own goal. New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and, more recently, Atlanta can afford to compete with flashy tasting menus at shocking prices. The rest of the world doesn’t care or watches it on TV.
I often wonder what I would think of the so-called tweezer kitchen if I were a big guy with a fat wallet and a decent appetite. Would I want to sit for three hours and nibble on tiny leaves and flowers that I have placed on protein shards using precision instruments?
Tweezers of all shapes and sizes are in heavy use in the kitchen at Lazy Betty. Ron Hsu and his team, including longtime friend and collaborator Aaron Phillips, hunch over plates that you and I should adore for their daring and often abstract assemblages of miniaturized ingredients.
My first thought about the recently relocated Lazy Betty, now in the former location of Empire State South at the intersection of 10th and Peachtree Streets, was Well, that’s the end of the yard! Who’s going to spend $300 or more per person to look at a bocce ball court? The entrance to the restaurant has been moved around the corner, into the cruelly lit lobby of the office building above. As I entered the completely remodeled dining room, a vision of smooth, light caramel-colored wood partitions, a repositioned bar and raw wood tabletops, I realized how casual Hugh Acheson’s previous concept had been. There is no clatter or clanking coming from the two smaller dining rooms next to the now magnificent main room. There is a kind of voluptuous calm.
Image by Martha Williams
The move from DeKalb Avenue to Midtown is an excellent business decision for an ambitious chef with a new Michelin star and all that entails for the target audience. The number of dishes on the tasting menu has increased (now seven courses plus all sorts of sides, amuses and mignardises), and so have the prices ($225, drinks not included). I love the new menu (expect slight seasonal changes) and its deliberate evolution from the familiar to the unknown. It begins with a bread service consisting of lemony rolls and delicious laminated cookies with an almost unsettling bright red hibiscus butter, followed by a shadow box where small savory bites are nestled in a diorama that includes moss and pine needles. The first course, a thick cigar of raw bluefin tuna with a fleeting, crispy layer of brik dough at the bottom, lemon crème fraîche in the middle and caviar on top, is one of Hsu’s finest creations. Then you enter a more sophisticated world, where a delicate, layered terrine alternating between foie gras and cherries is plated with a few leaves of radicchio and poached endive, a handful of roasted beetroot, a striking oat tuile, tiny dots of yogurt meringue and more.
I tend to go for the slightly larger and less complicated mini mains, like a plate of duck with a thin slice of crispy-tender breast, some leg confit in a vol-au-vent, foie gras, caramelized miso, and carefully poured rivulets of blackberry gastrique. My favorite, a butter-poached Icelandic cod the size of a hefty scallop, surrounded by peeled and split broad beans, green tomato caviar, and country ham broth from a small jug, makes sense to me.
Hsu explained that he works with the best part of his ingredient (the tip of a white asparagus shoot, for example), but I often felt lost in a world where, without my waiter’s explanations, I would have missed the morels stuffed with wild garlic, the barely visible onion and fava flowers, or the curls of this and the tendrils of that.
The pastry shop, run by Gus Castro, is exceptional. A lemony granita with coconut foam is a brilliant palate cleanser; an intense domed raspberry mousse, then sophisticated petits fours with traceable, progressive flavors, followed by some mignardises, revive the taste buds fatigued by the previous abundance of toppings.
Those less demanding can sit at the bar or in the lounge and order à la carte. Aside from the caviar service, none of these far-from-mundane dishes (such as smoked kampachi with pineapple consommé, chili peppers, finger limes, pomegranate and mint, or a brioche doughnut with whipped foie gras and raspberry coulis) are on the menu served in the dining rooms. One can make do with a glass of champagne and a couple of oysters, or with an intriguing bourbon cocktail, an Attitude Adjustment, which features real smoke in a glass sealed with a snappy cork.
I’m a huge fan of Ron Hsu. In person, he’s relaxed and welcoming. Like his most famous former boss, the sensational Eric Ripert of Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, he’s French-educated and obsessive. I think he’s an insanely talented chef whose approach to food should perhaps prioritize intensity of flavor over artistry.
This issue will appear in our August 2024 issue.
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