Since taking charge of the kitchen in late 2017, Christina Lecki has been blasting whole heads of cauliflower in the embers, whipping wood-fired squash into zabaglione-like clouds, and tweaking the stately Wythe Hotel dining room with a root-cellar Gothic sort of vibe. No one can argue, however, with a pool of strawberry juice collected last summer and fermented, set down with a perfect quenelle of milk sorbet in the dead of February. Depending on how you feel about the idea of ecological marginalia so crucial to this style of edgy fine dining, your impression of the special effects may vary.

Flavors can seem remote, and that’s often the point, because it renders the contrast of each emulsified, smoked, fermented, pressed, steeped, crisped, or pickled ingredient into all the more standout and elegant bites. Dinner unfurls at a processional pace: A tuft of dehydrated and fried lichen atop reduced, almost-candied cream, in chanterelle broth and a float of spruce vinegar a hefty spoonful of Finnish caviar dissolving in lemon-verbena broth, pearl-onion petals on the side gently cooked Glidden Point oysters, arranged like pearly doubloons and dotted with oil made from pressed juniper shoots. There are conspicuously few tables, to the point that it wouldn’t be weird at all if the lawyer at the next table who just flew in from Hong Kong stood up suddenly and launched into an Ionesco monologue.

In accordance with the unwritten rules of Nordic futurist fine dining, the room is dark and semi-spotlit.

Casino clam bar williamsburg