Critics’ choice: The spread of molecular gastronomy

Atera New York City

“Seasonal cooking has often meant a narrow devotion to simplicity,” said Pete Wells in The New York Times. At this “remarkable” new Tribeca restaurant, chef Matthew Lightner greets nature’s shifts with a poet’s spirit, assembling “this-week-only ingredients” into dishes of “genuine beauty.” Each night, Lightner and his team of chefs operate quietly behind a 13-seat bar, creating a multicourse meal that at first seems “willfully strange”—a chip-like snack made of pulverized lichen, a mock peanut made of foie gras. But irritation soon enough yields to “a steady sense of wonder.” Lightner is a mix of “woodsy forager” and “geeky science-club member”: Many of his dishes set a “modernist bauble next to a specimen from the forest floor,” and every course opens our eyes again to nature’s creative fecundity. Given each meal’s $150 fixed price, you might expect every dish to be as transporting as the scallops cured in gin botanicals and interwoven with shards of green-tomato ice. Maybe someday. But already, a night at Atera is “one of the most fascinating experiences you can have in a New York City restaurant.” 77 Worth St., (212) 226-1444

Premise Chicago

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Chicago’s Brian Runge is mining the cuisines of the American South and Latin America like no other modernist chef before him, said Michael Nagrant in the Chicago Sun-Times. The upscale but casual new restaurant where he practices his art suffers lapses into preciousness, beginning with its name, but the food ranks with that of the city’s established four-star restaurants. Runge sets compressed melon and sliced baby cucumbers in a pool of peppered buttermilk that “laps at the shores of a rocky, arugula-strewn soil of candied peanuts.” His lake whitefish—“a flaky, perfect plank of the stuff”—is accompanied by pickled okra, green tomato, and tiny mustard greens, plus a cleverly deployed slather of “red-eye” gravy studded with country ham. The Latin theme, meanwhile, plays out in such dishes as the oregano-flecked charred lobster, served alongside marinated chanterelle mushroom florets and crispy fried plantains. Some Andersonville locals are unhappy that Premise pushed out a popular bar/lounge attached to the wine store In Fine Spirits. To them, I say, visit the upstairs “salon.” The inventive, nuanced cocktails are still flowing. 5420 N. Clark St., (773) 334-9463

Root New Orleans

Root is “unlike any restaurant New Orleans has ever seen,” said Brett Anderson in The Times-Picayune. Chef Phillip Lopez’s “hyper-creative cooking demands a lot from a diner, including a suspension of disbelief.” Frequently, the leap is worth it, so grab a seat in Root’s warm but stark dining room and let go. Thin-sliced bresaola sounds like an elemental appetizer, but here it begins with lamb tenderloin instead of beef, is cured with chocolate and espresso, and somehow tastes “more like bresaola than traditional bresaola.” Lopez’s uses of evaporated cheeses awe, and by coloring scallops with chorizo dust and serving them in a cigar box filled with Cohiba smoke, he creates a dish that “tastes precisely like a clambake smells.” Lopez doesn’t “hit a bull’s-eye every time,” but right now, no other kitchen in New Orleans is “creating more startling food.” 200 Julia St., (504) 252-9480