Perhaps the most curious thing about Twist by Pierre Gagnaire in Las Vegas -- the American beachhead soon to be established by a legendary seigneur of Parisian cooking -- is its intended humility. 'The idea is not to make a big show,' the 59-year-old chef said on a recent afternoon. 'I hope it will be an experimental experience, in a humble way.' He paused and shook his grayish mane. 'I don't want to be the French chef saying, 'I'll show you how to cook.'' He smiled. 'I will be quiet.' His cooking, however, will soon speak for itself. And when it opens Dec. 4, his restaurant will have grandeur enough: a cost of $7 million, a 72-seat design by Adam Tihany, and prominence in the 23rd-floor lobby of the luxe, nongambling 47-story Mandarin Oriental Hotel in the $8.5 billion CityCenter. Gagnaire has seven restaurants, in Paris, London, Tokyo, Seoul, Dubai and Hong Kong, but his entrance is belated among the three-Michelin-star Parisian sachems in Las Vegas -- Alain Ducasse, Joe Robuchon and Guy Savoy. Still, in a city that remains scoured by recession, the arrival of a chef who has attracted a cult of devotees, and influenced a generation of high-profile French kitchens, has drawn more than a little anticipation. The chef, who first won three Michelin stars in 1993, has been variously perceived by critics as an enfant terrible, a conjurer and a master of suspense and, well, humor. Those who have been observing his high-wire act for years wonder how he will wed his audience and his art. 'When you're going to Gagnaire,' Patricia Wells, the author who runs a Paris cooking school, said of his previous restaurants, 'you fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night.' His cooking has been noted for occasionally iconoclastic -- and usually playful and unpredictable -- experiments in taste, color, texture and ingredient selection. There have been thyme tartlets. Edible toothpicks. Tamarillo souffle. Fish liver with crunchy spaghetti. Gagnaire's menus have featured rare epine-vinette cranberries as well as overlooked sea cucumbers called espardeigne. He has even paid homage to the gastronomically shunned (including black radishes and the humble peanut). And he has not been above perpetrating a cuttlefish-ink croque-monsieur -- a restructuring of the classic cafe ham-and-cheese sandwich. 'God put all those ingredients on Earth,' the chef once said, 'and it is our job to deal with them.' Ruth Reichl termed him a 'wizard' in The New York Times in 1997, and he has been described as an alchemist of ingredients and spices. The Las Vegas restaurant 'is about surprise -- magic,' said Tihany, who also designed the Mandarin rooms and public spaces. The dominant Twist colors? Silver, gray, purple and touches of white, in a configuration that 'seduces you but doesn't take you over,' he said. When the chef arrived to sniff his new terroir, he was 'astonished -- no, terrified,' he recalled. 'The faux city in the desert. Didn't know what to make of it. Then, on the second day? I realized I loved it.' He said he relished the challenge. 'People throw so much money at them, they have to come,' Wells said. The three-star chefs 'have worked so hard since childhood,' she added, 'why shouldn't they be able to get rich?' Gagnaire would not discuss his deal, but the pricey restaurant build-out is being paid for by CityCenter. Gagnaire's global domain already employs 300, but unlike some of his bestarred Parisian peers he professes a lack of calculation about the mushrooming of his brand. 'I had no business plan, it was all about chance meetings with people who want to be your partner -- and we happened to hit it off,' said Gagnaire, pronounced gon-YAIR. ('It is impossible, I should have changed it long ago,' he said. 'My name? It means goat keeper.') Though he has worked on the new restaurant for three years, he has difficulty articulating its essence. 'It will not be a brasserie, and not be a gastronomic restaurant,' he said. 'My way of cooking is very poetic and emotional. I would like this to be a place of tenderness -- a word not often used in Las Vegas. After all, my only way of expressing myself is through my cooking.' He thinks his new menu 'will evolve quickly, according to the measure of the rhythm of the city. And the clientele.' He will be doing due diligence as he inhabits the kitchen for a month. 'I am going to listen,' he said, 'to try to understand the psychological profile, and the gourmet profile, of people coming to dinner.' Though Twist offers competition for all the city's restaurants in its price range ($135 with wine per person, on average), Gagnaire 'is a serious and artistic chef with great panache and an edgy food style, so how can any of that be bad news for Las Vegas?' said Paul Bartolotta, 48, proprietor of the high-end 230-seat Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare in the Wynn Hotel. 'I hope that he will elevate everyone's game.' Of his calling, Gagnaire said, 'I never had any choice, I just had to be a chef,' since his father, Jean-Claude, was a restaurateur. Born near St.-Etienne, not far from Lyon, Gagnaire fils was the oldest of four. 'I put my foot inside the system -- and couldn't get out of it.' By age 14 he was working in a patisserie, and a year later did a summer internship with the chef Paul Bocuse. 'I was frightened by him,' he recalled. 'I was too impressed by him to ever work for him.' After Gagnaire honed his skills elsewhere, 'my father turned his restaurant over to me, and I ran it for six years. It was a bad experience.' He started his own, more ambitious, St.-Etienne restaurant in 1981; 12 years later he landed his three Michelin stars, but the establishment was a financial failure. 'I lost absolutely everything in one day, all I'd worked for, and built,' he said of his bankruptcy. 'But I would have lost my soul if I'd stayed there and adapted to the taste of the bourgeoisie.' Six months later, in 1996, he opened the restaurant that bears his name in the Hotel Balzac in Paris. 'It was a rebirth,' Gagnaire recalled. 'Perhaps for some, part of the attraction of my cuisine was that they knew I'd fallen, and had come back.' Initially he was viewed as an enfant terrible, said Helene Samuel, the proprietor of the Cafe Salle Pleyel in the venerable Parisian concert hall. 'He was very inspired,' she said, 'he was tortured, a seeker -- and he never changed. Dining chez Gagnaire is to see inside an artist's brain.' He was respected for his work in St.-Etienne and there was also a bit of: 'you know, 'we Parisians offer sympathy' -- as opposed to the country clods,' said Michael Batterberry, editor and publisher of Food Arts magazine. And so, three Michelin stars arrived the following year. Samuel said that by his example, Gagnaire 'opened things up for a new generation, saying that you can be successful -- and be yourself.' Some critics in Paris and London have taken Gagnaire to task for his heart-stopping check costs, and an artist's disdain-for-the-proles mentality that can impart a froideur -- a coldness -- to his establishments. He has also been mocked for a chemistry-class approach to cooking, given his long collaboration with his friend, the molecular gastronomist Herve This. But Gagnaire said that 'for me it is more like an intellectual game.' Even critics who have praised Gagnaire are sometimes overwhelmed by the chef's penchant for overwhelmingness. Francois Simon of Le Figaro, torpid from a Gagnaire meal, described feeling 'like a displaced whale stranded on some tepid seashore.' The very name of the Las Vegas restaurant would seem to describe what Gagnaire has always done in the kitchen. But the Twist rubric actually derives 'from the dance about which I have such happy memories,' he said, referring to the Chubby Checker warhorse. 'It was my favorite rock 'n' roll song. It is the meaning of America for me. Big cars. Violent colors.' Ultimately, of course, he will turn over Twist and its staff of 13 to his 40-year-old chef de cuisine, Pascal Sanchez, who headed his London restaurant, Sketch. Managing from afar is ever a concern of the multiply starred absentees, but Gagnaire's team 'is devoted to him,' Samuel said. 'In the kitchen, they know him so well that they don't need to speak to one another.' Gagnaire presentations can almost veer beyond the edge, 'but the good ones always work,' Wells said. At Twist, a signature dish of the $145, seven-main-dish-plus-dessert tasting menu is to be a five-way preparation of langoustine -- seared, grilled, tartared, mousselined and gel?ed. ? la carte menu items include a $22 foie gras appetizer degustation served shaved, grilled and as a custard; a $60 entree will offer lobster three ways -- the body slowly roasted in consomme, the claw tempura-style, and the remainder in a ravioli cooked in Sauternes. But, Gagnaire said derisively: 'There will be no hamburger.' Gagnaire, who speaks some English, relies on his wife, Sylvie Le Bihan, 44, as a translator. They met at Sketch, where she was a customer, and married in 2007. They have five children -- two from his first marriage, three from her first marriage. His first wife, Chantal, manages his company's finances. Twinkly eyed and often seeming to be enjoying a joke he prefers not to share, the reedlike chef, a touch over 6 feet tall, frequently gesticulates during passionate monologues with definitive chopping motions. Given his height, his Rhone-blue eyes and his proud Mont Blanc of a proboscis, he is often mistaken for a celebrity other than himself. Earlier this year he was in a Parisian bakery and the proprietor said with surprise: 'You're not at the Cannes festival!' the chef recalled. 'So he was thinking I was a star -- or director. And I went with it.' He sighed. 'You must not take yourself seriously.' 