![]() The food ($92 for a three-course prix fixe dinner) is a comparative bargain, and once the platoons of carefully articulated amuses begin issuing from the kitchen, it’s difficult to make them stop. The restaurant employs a friendly and informative tea expert (“We have 52 teas on the list for now, sir”), and the wine list is loaded with big-ticket trophy items, including a 1999 Screaming Eagle Cabernet for the ludicrous price of $1,000 per glass. The partners at Gilt are wealthy Londoners, which may be why there’s a forced European extravagance about the place, a sense that luxury isn’t really luxury unless you have to pay through the nose. The kitchen is the old Le Cirque kitchen, and so the food descends, as it did at that famously theatrical establishment, down a grand flight of stairs. Two similarly colored banquettes rise along either wall, like seats on a barge, and between them sit two rows of tables. Sirio Maccioni’s wacky decorations have been carted away, and the new proprietors have installed a synthetic caramel-colored covering over the old floorboards. The restaurant is located where Le Cirque 2000 used to be, in the old Villard Mansion dining room, with its carved-wood walls and marble fireplace as big as a garage. Now, with the opening of Gilt, the unabashedly expensive, almost painfully sleek new restaurant in the New York Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue, that time has arrived. He has been biding his time, or so the rumor goes, waiting for the right opportunity to return to New York in a blaze of glory. ![]() Since his last restaurant engagement, he has been in demand as a private chef for fabulous clients like the Rothschilds of London. There is not much doubt, however, that Mr. Presumably he threw a tantrum or two along the way. He has worked for several New York restaurants (including Atlas and Papillon, the former of which received three stars from the Times) over the past five years, and lasted only briefly at each. He has been praised by critics as a genius, and attacked by them as a poseur. He has served his clientele licorice-and-parsley soup, among other things, and once devised a tasting menu designed to be eaten blindfolded, with one hand cuffed to the chair. ![]() During the course of his short, tumultuous New York restaurant career, the young British chef Paul Liebrandt has exhibited all sorts of virtuoso tendencies. Because they bore easily, they are fond of experimentation, a habit that sometimes alienates patrons who would prefer a simple steak dinner to, say, a bowl of licorice-and-parsley soup. They’re notoriously finicky and have hopelessly expensive tastes. Like high-strung opera divas, virtuoso chefs can be rash, prickly, and prone to towering displays of temper. Virtuoso talent is a gift, of course, but in a relentless service-oriented profession like cooking, it can also be a curse. ![]()
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