Five Dishes at Acme - NYTimes.com This week I review the reborn Acme on Great Jones Street, a shabby-chic bistro with food from Mads Refslund, a Danish chef who helped found one of the world's most celebrated restaurants. Foodies who come for Mr. Refslund's cooking rub elbows with an art- and fashion-world crowd cultivated by Jean-Marc Houmard and some of Acme's other owners at their previous restaurants, notably Indochine. "The whole idea with Acme was that people should have fun and come more than once, and it should be also about the food," Mr. Refslund said. Jean-Marc wanted to mix the whole thing together, he wanted to please everybody. There is a tension in that marriage, to say the least, and Mr. Refslund had to greatly simplify the style of cooking he developed at MR, his fine-dining restaurant in Copenhagen, which closed in 2010. I spoke with him on the phone last week to ask how he had adapted his highly refined New Nordic cuisine to the ingredients and customs of New York, where he now lives. Chicken and eggs ($20) When Mr. Refslund first met Acme's owners, he cooked dinner for them "like I used to," making the kinds of things he served at MR. One of the dishes was an elaborate beak-to-tail meditation on the chicken that included barely roasted kidneys, coxcombs braised in red wine, and the liver. "They asked me if I could bring it a little down because it was too arty farty," Mr. Refslund recalled. Ten dinners later, his new employers told him he he'd finally modulated his cooking to the level they were looking for. The chicken dish had evolved into something far simpler, pieces of white meat in a sauce that tastes like giblet gravy and roast chicken at the same time. To make it, Mr. Refslund cooks skinless chicken breasts seasoned with garlic, thyme and shallots at a low temperature. The skin is roasted at a higher temperature until it's crisp. He makes a stock with the carcass, then blends in the roasted liver and hearts along with the crisp skin. The chicken is served in a clay pot with eggs that have been poached, then deep fried. There are also some potatoes that are roasted, then smashed and soaked with chicken stock before being roasted for a few more minutes. Finally, just before serving, the potatoes are fried. Pearl barley and clams ($15) When I told Mr. Refslund that I thought this dish had changed slightly each of the three times I had it, he agreed. "My food is always growing," he said. I can never stand still. I'm never satisfied with a dish - sometimes I'm satisfied, but it's very rare, actually. So that's why I'm very difficult to work with. Sometimes the dish had lots of scallops and sometimes just a few. One night it was a bowl of barley garnished with shellfish, and another it was a bowl of shellfish on a bed of barley. In any incarnation, there were pea leaves and braised, roasted artichokes. I liked it in all its forms. Barley, a common Danish ingredient, is lightly toasted with shallots and garlic, and then cooked in three liquids: first, white wine, which is reduced down completely; next, wheat beer, which is also reduced completely, and finally clam broth, in which the barley cooks until it is tender. Hay-roasted sunchokes ($12) "I have very high expectations of vegetables," Mr. Refslund said, and no wonder. Back in Denmark he had his own field, and a farmer who grew things to his specifications. Now he's just another downtown chef standing in line for late-winter root vegetables at Union Square. And to get the large sunchokes he wanted for this dish, he had to plead with his purveyor. In the end he had to settle for some smaller ones, too, but he made do. The dish is inspired by Mr. Refslund's memories of eating baked potatoes with a spoon; he would carve a hole into the potato, insert butter and wait for it to melt. The sunchokes are scrubbed and oiled and then covered with hay before being put into a 350-degree oven for 2 hours. The pan rests for 30 minutes and then ... kitchen fire! "We burn all the hay," Mr. Refslund said. It's a little bit smoky. A hole is cut in the roasted, charred sunchoke, and filled with butter that's been whisked with bits of winter truffle and truffle oil. Finally the sunchokes are covered with a Gruyère-style cheese from New England. Maybe next winter, finding the right sunchokes won't require an argument, but he doubts it. "It took me three years to get a good vegetable guy" in Copenhagen, he said. I'm pretty sure it will be the same here in New York. Nothing is easy when it comes to finding good providers. You always have to fight with them. Beer and bread porridge ($10) This, as all the Danes in the house will instantly recognize, is an homage to a very traditional dish called øllebrød. Back in the old days when people didn't have so much money, they took their old rye bread and soaked it in beer overnight. The day after, they'd warm it up and serve it with milk or whipped cream. It was a poor man's dish. I've just turned it into something different. The Acme version of the porridge involves sourdough rye, Guinness, dark chocolate, brown sugar, lemon juice and reduced apple-cider vinegar. It's served with a salted caramel ice cream and caramelized-chocolate crumble. Fallen fruits ($10) This dish is an edible landscape. "I wanted to try to paint a picture of fruit lying in the grass," he said, after they fall from their trees in the autumn. The fruits are apples, pears and figs cooked in fruit juice, then slowly dehydrated in a low oven. The fruits are lying in a wheatgrass granita, made of wheatgrass juice blended with sorrel and sugar. "It's wintertime now so the grass is frozen," Mr. Refslund explained. This dessert arrives at your table with a thud: the bottom half inch or so of the bowl is filled with solid ice. This is to keep the granita from melting. "The whole idea of Acme is sharing plates, it's family style," he explained. A plate might sit on the table for five minutes or so before the diners turn their attention to it. The family-style manner of plating and eating has taken over New York, but it was new to Mr. Refslund, and he has come to appreciate it. "It reminds you that you're with somebody you like, and you talk about the food in another way," he said. It's about who you're with and the whole atmosphere. It can't always be about food. For the normal person it's also about company and talking about everything else.