Restaurant Review - The Elm in Williamsburg, Brooklyn - NYTimes.com There were more luxurious fine-dining restaurants in New York than Corton, which closed this summer after nearly five years in TriBeCa, but very few that could deliver as many high-wire thrills. Paul Liebrandt's cooking challenged you to pay attention. The precisely calibrated flavors might be contained in a single mouthful, or might unscroll themselves as you ate your way across several plates. The harmonies were multilayered, and so were the rewards. Corton earned three stars from The New York Times and two from Michelin, yet the acclaim didn't translate into the kind of love that fills dining rooms. While other restaurants serving far less compelling food at similar prices were booked weeks ahead, tables at Corton could often be found with just a few hours" notice. This seemed wrong to me, and it must have seemed wrong to Mr. Liebrandt, too. This summer, he opened the Elm in a new hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, extricating himself from Corton weeks later. "Honestly, I wanted to do a restaurant that would reach a clientele that would never, ever have come to Corton," he told the blog Grub Street. Corton was hushed; the Elm plays music. Corton's tiny bar seemed like a waiting room; the Elm's is a hangout. Corton's menu offered two tasting menus, one long and the other longer; the Elm's lets you drop in for a bite, a meal or something in between. You can study the food or just eat it while in the background Jarvis Cocker sings, "I want to live like common people, I want to do whatever common people do." The Elm, in other words, would be just like a hundred other restaurants if not for Mr. Liebrandt. He has ratcheted down the complexity and the number of surprises in his cooking. This could have dumbed down the cuisine, but it has focused its pleasures instead. He has tied one hand behind his back and made that seem like an advantage. A dish called Flavors of Bouillabaisse, in quotation marks, sounds ominous, as if the Provençal classic has been turned into edible powders. It is lovely. Mr. Liebrandt has kept it in seafood-stew form but rearranged the emphasis. He leans strongly on the sweet perfume of fennel and orange peel in the luxurious, halfway-sweet emulsion that swirls around razor clams, oysters, bits of lobster and a brick of meaty tilefish. How do you eat something called Summer Garden? When a black Dutch oven arrived at the table, filled with what our server called "literally around 50 different vegetables and fruits" bobbing in a green herb sauce, we plunged into the chaos. Some of those vegetables were raw, some were pickled, some were roasted, some were braised; all tasted extremely fresh and delicious. Instead of appetizers and main courses, Mr. Liebrandt's menu puts forth mix-and-match categories called Raw, Sea, Land and Share, with so much overlap that the point is hard to follow. Foie gras torchon, listed under Raw, was of course cooked before it was topped, thrillingly, with pickled strawberry jelly and pungent cracked long pepper. More confounding is the Share category, where Mr. Liebrandt seems to be trying to catch the large-format wave without changing the way he composes his plates. Except for the Summer Garden, these consist of two main-course servings of one dish arranged inside a casserole or pan that played no apparent role in its preparation. It's your job to transfer each element to a plate. So, for example, turbot stuffed with a pale green vein of leek mousse has to be fished out with two spoons and dropped unsteadily upon a bowl of summer beans. There is no reason not to do all this work in the kitchen. My turbot certainly lost something in the journey, including whatever warmth it once had. The chicken Kiev had less to lose. Mr. Liebrandt prepares the log of white meat without the traditional bark of fried bread crumbs that makes it crunchy fun to eat. Once you've stabbed the skin and watched the melted butter gush out, the show is over. From his days at Atlas and Papillon in the early 2000s, Mr. Liebrandt has had a fearless palate that didn't try to please everybody. So it's a little surprising that the few disappointments at the Elm err on the side of dullness. Blobs of Mr. Liebrandt's swell homage to HP sauce couldn't salvage one of the Land courses, a long-cooked short rib that was dry and dull and, on one of the two nights I tried it, almost as gray as pot roast. But while you can find a couple of sleepwalkers on nearly any menu, you'd be lucky to find just one dish as good as Flavors of Bouillabaisse. The Elm has at least a half-dozen that equal or surpass it, and none of them is more than $30. I stopped noticing bacon in restaurant cooking a long time ago, but I was almost knocked on my back by the intensity of the spicy, smoky bacon XO sauce that lifts a beet salad to a higher plane of awesomeness. The gnudi splayed around a browned sea scallop were a little sticky, but I forgot that, once I tasted their wildly rich coconut-milk sauce, lush with Kaffir lime and galangal. And there is nothing safe or dull about the charred eggplant purée beside the lamb neck. Terrifyingly black and shiny, like nothing that humans are meant to eat, it has a deep and enduring flavor that goes on even longer than the taste of the gorgeously sticky lamb, and that is saying something. My reservations about the shared plates definitely do not extend to the fruit tart for two, a conglomeration of meringue chips, berries, lemon grass marshmallows and flowers that shows up under a glass cloche looking like a prom corsage. In fact, I had no reservations about any of Jeffrey Sytsma's desserts, or about the wedge of aged goat cheese from Vermont Creamery that the Elm serves with pistachio croutons and a twisted band of apricot. I could complain that the dining room, in the open basement of the King & Grove Williamsburg hotel, isn't as fixated on the details as the kitchen is. The servers were amiable, but apt to say things like "How's that lamb working out for you?" when not mangling the pronunciation of "Eton mess" in a way that Eton's headmasters would have once rewarded with a caning. When a fork clattered to the concrete floor, nobody noticed. And the phrase that runs through my mind each time I look at the bulbous glass lamps on the ends of long, thin, bent rods is "alien probes." Building a restaurant that can keep company with Mr. Liebrandt is no easy job, however. "You'll never live like common people," Jarvis Cocker is singing now. You'll never do what common people do. The Elm King & Grove Williamsburg hotel, 160 North 12th Street (Berry Street), Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (718) 218-1088; theelmnyc.com. Atmosphere The dining room, sunken below street level, mixes wood, metal, concrete, glass and walls of ivy floating in the air. Service Good-natured and far more casual than the cooking. Sound level Moderate to high. Recommended Foie gras; Flavors of Bouillabaisse; gnudi; Atlantic skate; Elysian Fields lamb; duck; Summer Garden; fruit tart for two; milk chocolate palet. Drinks and wine The wine list has many well-priced bottles and is particularly strong in France. Prices Most dishes, $15 to $27; dishes for two, $48 to $56. Open Daily for breakfast and dinner. Wheelchair access The dining room and accessible restrooms can be reached by an elevator inside the hotel.