Le Bernardin

Bidding farewell to New York at the end of my seven week stint, I visited Le Bernardin, New York's premier fish restaurant. Unlike many of my previous visits to much lauded restaurants, I was impressed, though counterintuitively, my favorite dish hadn't a bit of seafood in it.

The meal was preceded by a sort of salmon dip - a distant cousin to the kind of smoked salmon pate one gets in the supermarket in a plastic tub. This version was made of fresh salmon, and creme fraiche, and some wonderful chives - while my table mates went for the admittedly good butter and relatively interesting sourdough boules, I went ahead and piled the bright dip onto the pieces of lightly oiled toast that accompanied it. I don't think it's my fault if no one else at the table notices what they should be eating, right? In any case, the early bird gets the worm, I think.

As I perused the menu, though, I was really surprised to see quite this much fusion in such an old standby - tandoori hamachi, for example? It's certainly clever, but I'm not sure whether that's quite what I have in mind when I go out to eat. My own choice was hardly more orthodox - a sort of tower made of potato, and vegetables, and crab, all topped with a spicy Peruvian mayonnaise. However un-French it sounds, I'll admit that the concoction was delicious - particularly impressive, if you haven't ever tried delicately stacking foods, was the fact that the dish never collapsed into a sort of all inclusive casserole. Each tiny layer remained distinct, different, and entirely identifiable - a real masterpiece of presentation, if not of cooking.

For the main course, I ordered a wild striped bass, surrounded like a sort of edible stonehenge by some brightly green, lightly steamed okras. That alone was delicious, especially since the fish was cooked so precisely - not quite at the quiver I tend to like, but at perhaps the even more difficult to achieve line between flakiness and dried disinterest. I've certainly never been able to achieve that in the oven, as Le Bernardin says they did. But additionally, as part of the elaborate table service favored by Le Bernardin (they go in for the synchronized waiter thing there, and I think it works), the bass was accompanied by the lightest fusion broth of lime and mango, adding a tiny sweet tinge to an already near perfect dish. The flavors weren't the strongest, and in a world used to powerful sensations that might be a problem for some people, but in my view there's a yawning gap between bland and subtle - this fell, (as I hope to. heh), on the latter side of that divide.

Good though the previous dishes were, however, dessert was outstanding, especially if you order wisely. My warm almond cake combined all the deep flavor of those runny chocolate cakes everyone (including me) likes so much, with the distinctive tinge of a dense almond base. This kind of cake should be like eating a miraculously light marzipan, I think, and Le Bernardin achieved that ideal precisely. But even here there was a little surprise, accomplished I think by lining the baking instrument (presumably some kind of ramekin, though I won't guess) with a thin layer of some delicious sugar, which provided a startling texture to the outside of a usually quickly softening sort of cake. In any case, with our without the shavings of surprisingly tasteless pear alongside (I think chosen more for its firmness than taste), I wish the restaurant was open for just dessert. It's not that I wouldn't like the rest of the menu again, but sometimes, a full meal isn't in the cards- but a striking dessert like this one might be.