A Ten-Course Tasting Where Dessert Is the Whole Point
The question of what to eat before dessert is not, usually, top of my mind. You eat a meal before dessert; you eat dessert after a meal—it’s not one of life’s persistent mysteries. But what do you eat before arriving at a dessert-focussed restaurant to experience a three-hour, ten-course tasting of almost entirely sweets? I considered a sad little salad at home, or a street-cart hot dog; in the end, I chugged half a protein shake and set out for Flatiron, where I had a reservation to experience the Journey with Lysée.
If you have a sweet tooth and you live within view of the Empire State Building, you’ve probably heard of Lysée, the chef Eunji Lee’s brilliant pâtisserie on Twenty-first Street, and you’ve more than likely had one of her inspired creations, such as her extravagantly—and justly—famous corn mousse cake, which is shaped and tinted to look like a plump ear of corn. For four years, since its opening in 2022, Lysée has been mostly a daytime shop. You can enter the serene gallerylike space to pick up a box of pastries to go, or book a table in the lower-level seating area, where you can linger over a seasonal fruit tart and a coffee. (The menu is mostly à la carte, but real sugar-heads know that booking the prix-fixe “signature reservation,” which comes with four bakery items, is the only way to guarantee receipt of a corn cake and one of Lee’s sticky-flaky kouign amanns, both of which tend to sell out early in the day upstairs.)
The Journey, which Lee débuted earlier this year, on Thursday evenings only, is something of a return to form for the chef. Before opening her bakery, she worked in high-end restaurants, including Alain Ducasse’s gilded Le Meurice, in Paris, where she trained under the superstar pastry chef Cédric Grolet; in New York, she reinvented the pastry program at Jungsik, the three-Michelin-star Korean restaurant in Tribeca, where her creations—including a trompe l’oeil banana, perhaps a foreshadow of the corn mousse cake—became objects of cultish obsession. Her 2022 book, “Plating Dessert,” published the same year that she opened Lysée, covers just ten dishes, each documented with the component-by-component obsessiveness of a person who thinks about sweetness as a composer thinks about sound. The Journey, which is available to at most sixteen guests each week, showcases this way of cooking, and of thinking: not the self-contained packages of the pastry case but elaborate, expansive dessert.
The Journey begins with a pea tart: a tiny, tender, full-throated savory bite. The peas themselves are piled like cabochons over a thin pastry shell, dressed in a tart citrus vinaigrette and studded with slivers of pickled shallots that deliver bracing little sparks of brine against the crisp sweetness of the legumes. It’s not a dessert, per se, but it’s certainly dessert-shaped. It was followed by a steamed egg served in its shell, wearing a swirly toque of dried gamtae seaweed that tasted, startlingly, like oceanic threads of black truffle, alongside a single brioche toast soldier piped with crème fraîche and punctuated with a tittle of osetra caviar. Then there was a course simply called Spring Herb, an intricate mosaic of green the color and green the flavor: a creamy herb sorbet, an icy-flaky lemongrass granita, slippery slices of kiwifruit, and bits of raw apple as crisp as snow. The dish had a precision that I recognized from years of enjoying Lee’s pâtisserie, but it tasted almost shockingly wild, the flavors sparkling and faceted, with unpredictable brightness.
Somewhere in the middle of the next course (a layered bowl of yuja sorbet with rainbow-colored citrus segments and swirled compote, with a crowning leaf of meringue–not quite a pavlova, though certainly pavlovian), I realized that I had developed a theory of the meal. Lee was walking us along a sweetness gradient, beginning with a savory on-ramp of legumes and caviar and arriving at a place of unambiguous dessert. But with the arrival of the next course, bread and butter, I was forced to revise my theory. The “bread” was a laminated spiral made with locally milled ancient grains, the butter a duckling-yellow puck pressed into the shape of a flower. The dish had hardly a hint of sweetness at all beyond the butter’s lactic tang.
Like all tasting menus, the Journey has its ritual flourishes, some of them twee (such as the servers presenting a basket of farm eggs and an arrangement of grains just before the courses featuring those ingredients) and others quite charming. There was a mid-meal field trip to the off-hours retail space upstairs, where a server poured palate-resetting glasses of a sippable seasonal-fruit vinegar (strawberry-rhubarb, on my visit) paired with a dainty olive-oil-and-calamansi bonbon cunningly shaped like an olive, a small visual joke in an otherwise reverential affair. What came afterward, in the Journey’s second act, was slightly hazier in its outline: the platings larger, the flavors creamier and milder. Lee’s signature brown-rice mousse cake, the Lysée, which at the bakery takes the form of a crisp-edged white flower, appeared here deconstructed, its components arranged abstractly, expressionistically, a choose-your-own-adventure through the crunch of praline and the milkiness of ice cream. Second only to the riotous Spring Herb, it was the highlight of the meal, and maybe the neatest distillation of Lee’s approach: the tidy retail entremets exploded into a new form, the plated presentation making it dynamic, kinetic, a sequence of ever-changing bites.
The meal could have (and maybe should have?) ended there, but it continues with more main-course-size desserts of a similar richness—a buttermilk panna cotta with vanilla ice cream and a drench of green perilla oil, for example—and slightly repetitive flavors. By the time Lee summoned us to the kitchen pass, in the back of the room, for a penultimate bite of creamy, gentle lemongrass ice cream on a stick, I was longing for a bit of spiky acid—a tart berry, a leaf of mint, a test-tube shot of that upstairs vinegar. Instead, it was followed by a final bite in the form of a single petit four featuring the menu’s only evident inclusion of chocolate. Shaped like a cacao bean, and tipped with gold leaf, it was a graceful and slightly puckish, if still awfully rich, conclusion.
Helen, Help Me!
E-mail your questions about dining, eating, and anything food-related, and Helen may respond in a future newsletter.
The ten-course meal costs a hundred and forty dollars per person, which is not exactly sofa-cushion change but does feel reasonable given that such high-flying pastry is normally available only at the end of ultra-ritzy meals of considerably higher expense. This sort of attention to dessert is otherwise increasingly rare; too many ambitious kitchens pour all their resources into their savory menus and then punt on the sweet courses, serving a scoop of gelato in a fancy coupe, or a slice of cake assembled off-site. Lysée, as a venue, lacks some of the grandeur that I feel Lee’s dishes deserve—the lighting is a little sharp, the ambience slightly clinical—but the talent and the verve on display overcome their imperfect setting. In another classic tasting-menu move, the menu arrives after the meal, a map to study only once the journey is complete. Presented as an accordion-folded booklet, it opens to reveal a sun-drenched watercolor by Janet Lee, an illustrator and a former Lysée employee, of flowers and fruits and chickens and greenery and aproned bakers and bakery items—plus Lysée itself, the black frame of the building, the very tables and chairs at which you’re sitting. Like the meal it memorializes, it was very beautiful, very special, very sweet. ♦
