Photograph by Martha Williams
In the competitive world of extreme fine dining, chefs think of themselves first and foremost as innovators. How many ways can they astonish us with their technical brilliance, their hunt for the rarest ingredients, the most unusual presentations? Only cities where big spenders 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 go head to head with flashy tasting menus at shocking prices. The rest of the world doesn’t care, or watches it on TV.
I often wonder how I would feel about what is often called tweezer cuisine if I were a big guy with a fat wallet and a reasonable appetite. Would I want to stay seated for three hours, munching on minuscule leaves and tiny flowers deposited on slivers of protein with the help of precision instruments?
Tweezers of all shapes and dimensions are hard at work in the kitchen of Lazy Betty, where Ron Hsu and his team, including longtime friend and collaborator Aaron Phillips, bend over plates you and I are meant to revere for their daring and often abstract congregations of miniaturized ingredients.
My first thought about the recently relocated Lazy Betty, now at the former location of Empire State South at the intersection of 10th Street and Peachtree Street, was Well, this is the end of the courtyard! Who is going to spend $300 or more per person looking at a bocce court? The entrance to the restaurant has been moved around the corner, to the cruelly lit lobby of the office building above. Entering the completely transformed dining room, a vision in smooth, light-caramel wood dividers, repositioned bar, and raw-wood tabletops, I realized how casual Hugh Acheson’s previous concept had been. No clatter and clang emerge from the two smaller dining rooms off the main, now splendid, one. A kind of voluptuous calm reigns supreme.
Photograph by Martha Williams
Moving from DeKalb Avenue to Midtown is an excellent business decision for an ambitious chef with a new Michelin star and all that it entails in terms of target audience. The number of dishes on the tasting menu has increased (seven courses now, plus all kinds of supplements, amuses, and mignardises), and so have the prices ($225, beverages excluded). I love the new menu (be prepared for slight seasonal changes) and its intentional progression from recognizable to unfamiliar. It begins with a bread service consisting of citrusy buns and deliciously laminated biscuits with a borderline distressing bright-red hibiscus butter, followed by a shadow box where tiny savories are nestled in a diorama including foraged moss and pine needles. The first course, a fat cigar of raw bluefin tuna with an evanescent, crisp sheet of brik pastry on the bottom, lemon crème fraiche in the middle, and caviar on top, is one of Hsu’s best creations. Thereafter, one enters into a fussier world, where a delicate, multilayered terrine alternating foie gras and cherry is plated with a few leaves of radicchio and poached endive, a fingertip of roasted ruby beet, a showy oat tuile, minute dots of yogurt meringue, and more.
I gravitate toward the slightly larger and less complicated mini-entrees, such as a duck plate with a slim cut of crisp-tender breast, a bit of leg confit stuffed into 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 divided fava beans, green tomato caviar, and country ham broth poured from a small pitcher, makes sense to me.
Hsu explained that he works with the best part of his ingredient (say, the tip of the tip of a white asparagus shoot), but I was often lost in a world where, without my waiter’s explanations, I would have missed the ramp-stuffed morels, barely visible onion and fava flowers, or ringlets of this and tendrils of that.
The pastry kitchen, headed by Gus Castro, is exceptional. A citrusy granita with coconut foam is genius as a palate cleanser; an intense domed raspberry mousse, then refined petits fours with relatable, progressive flavors, followed by a few mignardises, revive taste buds fatigued by the previous plethora of garnishes.
For a less committed experience, one could sit at the bar or in the lounge and order a la carte. Other than the caviar service, none of these far-from-casual dishes (for example, cured kampachi with pineapple consomme, 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 get away with a glass of champagne and a few oysters, or an intriguing bourbon cocktail, an Attitude Adjustment, with real smoke trapped in a glass topped with a jaunty cork cap.
I am a big fan of Ron Hsu. Personally, he is relaxed and hospitable. Like his most famous previous boss, the sensational Eric Ripert of Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, he is French-trained and obsessive. I believe in him as a madly talented chef whose attitude toward food should perhaps prioritize intensity of taste over artistic prowess.
This issue appears in our August 2024 issue.
