Paul Liebrandt, Exacting Chef, Set to Open the Elm in Williamsburg Evan Sung for The New York Times This summer, Paul Liebrandt, the British chef at Corton in TriBeCa, is opening the Elm in Williamsburg. Hunched at a table at Bar Masa, four stories above Columbus Circle, Paul Liebrandt was nibbling and sipping his way toward an $800 bill and talking about art. "An artist like Cy Twombly - it's just a bunch of scribbles to some people," the chef said. I look at it, I see rhythm in what he's doing. How does he know to do it like that? I don't know. He just does it. There's no plan. Mr. Liebrandt is only 36, but the British chef has occupied an influential, and at times perplexing, seat in New York's fine-dining pantheon for more than a decade. On this rare night off, he was citing Twombly's curves and colors as a stab at self-explanation: When Mr. Liebrandt creates a new dish at Corton, his culinary atelier in TriBeCa, he's responding to the same kind of instinctual tug. "I see a connection in something, without necessarily seeing it," he said. It's a feeling. And we have to explore that feeling, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Plenty of award-winning cooks around the world are treated these days with the sort of gasping awe that used to greet pioneering painters and composers. New York certainly has its share of creative powerhouses (think Daniel Boulud, Eric Ripert, David Chang). But many of them strive to convey a certain down-to-earth, New Yorky nonchalance; a few might even brush off the word "artist." Not Mr. Liebrandt. He embraces it. Prone to perfectionism in the kitchen but allergic to schmoozing in the world outside, easy to respect but difficult to warm up to, Mr. Liebrandt seems to exist, like many artists, in a bubble of his own devising. In spite of his relative youth, he doesn't have that much stylistically in common with his comrades in, say, the booming restaurant scene across the East River. "When you look at me," he said, "I couldn't be more far from being Brooklyn." So it will be interesting to see what happens this July when he breaks out of that bubble to open the Elm, a more casual enterprise in the King & Grove Williamsburg hotel. Will hipsterville take to this exacting auteur? "Basically that's the way he sees himself," said Drew Nieporent, the veteran restaurateur who is the chef's primary business partner at Corton. And the reality of Paul Liebrandt versus anybody else in New York is that his food and his approach to it - you can't compare it to anybody else. I don't think you can. And that's both good and bad. At Corton, you don't just drop in to have dinner; you go to marvel at the virtuosity. Intricately composed and blossoming with color, his dishes can look, on the plate, like edible bonsai corsages. His handiwork is so painterly that it can feel like desecration to dig a fork into it. Lately his two tasting menus, priced at $125 and $155, have at times included a tribute to Cy Twombly, fashioned from skate, spring nettles and razor clams. Mr. Nieporent concedes that their partnership is complicated. Mr. Liebrandt declined even to discuss it. It's the sort of uneasy symbiosis you might find between a visionary painter and a perpetually hustling gallery owner. Mr. Liebrandt needs a downtown showcase for his oeuvre; Mr. Nieporent provides that, even when the oeuvre itself mystifies him. "Well, I work very hard at the relationship," Mr. Nieporent said. At 58, he has backed 36 restaurants over the years and has a customer-centric philosophy that can be at odds, he suggested, with the aims of an auteur. "My whole thing has always been about accessibility and making it easier on the guest," Mr. Nieporent said. This has been a challenge. Because his food is anything but accessible. It takes submission. To some extent Mr. Nieporent, too, must submit. He's the restaurateur "famous for killing the goose that laid the golden egg," as he put it, by firing David Bouley at Montrachet 27 years ago, but at Corton his core job is to stage the exhibition. He used a cinematic metaphor to explain it. "If the restaurateur is the director and the chef is the actor, you're in an era now where the actor doesn't want to listen to the director," Mr. Nieporent said. Not even to praise, at times. "I think Paul's food changes, and it changes rather rapidly, and sometimes you run the risk, if you compliment him about something, that then he'll change that, too," he said.