Only very rarely does a restaurant emerge like Athena from Zeus’s head, fully-realized and deserving of a Michelin star (or two or three). Much more often, it takes time for an establishment to mature and develop its own culinary identity. Sometimes all the elements never quite come together in the perfect storm necessary, but once in a while, they do. This is precisely what has happened with Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50 over the past three years.

We have been listening to the buzz around this restaurant for longer than we’ve lived in New York– the chatter has been all about the quirkiness, the creativity, and the superb quality of the food. But one aspect has, until recently, overshadowed the cooking: the mad science of the place. Much like an American Heston Blumenthal, Dufresne has worked to create dishes that challenge the senses in their unusual shape, color, texture, and presentation– all the while offering nothing but pleasure for the nose and palate. Reviews have been positive, but the word on the street was that quirkiness overwhelmed much of the experience, very much like eating an episode of Ally McBeal. Apparently, in the restaurant’s early days, most dishes on the menu featured a variety of ’soils,’ which were just crumbled and crushed ingredients that formed the carpet upon which the rest of the food was served. While most diners seemed to concur that the concept worked, it also drew considerable criticism for being a little contrived and gimmicky. Today the soils are still present in a few dishes, but in the past several months, things have settled down conceptually in the WD-50 kitchen, allowing the bubbling cauldrons and Erlenmeyer flasks to take their proper places as accent pieces alongside saucepans and butcher blocks. As a result, the restaurant was awarded its first Michelin Guide star this week on the very day we had coincidentally booked our first visit.

We were joined (and treated) by our Corresponding Cousin, who had also been eager to eat at WD-50 for quite some time, and were welcomed into the restaurant’s celebration by the waitstaff, who immediately poured all three of us (and everyone else in the place that night) a glass of their Avinyo Brut cava. We toasted and downed our drinks while mulling over the menu, which though relatively simple, demands a bit of imagination. Descriptions of dishes tend to emphasize ingredients and not method of preparation, so the foie gras appetizer is listed simply as ‘Foie gras, candied olives, green peas, beet juice‘, which does not give any hint at all that what you will receive is a bullet of foie gras filled with sweet beet juice, resting on a fluffy bed of green pea mash that is made from cryo-vacced peas. It’s almost magical to see a simple list of mundane ingredients incarnated on a plate in such fantastical form.

I opted for the octopus appetizer served with celery pesto, pineapple, marcona almonds, and something called ‘mojama’ that turned out to be dried, roasted tuna belly. It was mixed in with the almonds in a streusel-like concoction that lay on the opposite side of the plate from the octopus. In prior days, would that have counted as a soil? Perhaps, but isolating it at a distance from the rest of the ingredients was important to the dish’s success– combining all of the tastes on the plate offered one very complex result that set off the taste of the celery pesto like a firecracker, while sampling from either side of the plate provided another, more subtle result that allowed the sweet pineapple rolls a star turn of their own.

HungryMan’s hangar tartare, accompanied by a bearnaise ice cream, pickled asian pears, and a healthy streak of sauce made from amaro–an Italian bitter orange and herb liqueur–had the broadest taste spectrum of anything we’ve eaten in ages: not only was there sweet, salty, bitter, and sour here, but there was the mouth-coating unctuous appeal of the ice cream, the sharp tang of the pickled apple-pears, and the toothsome flesh of the slow-cooked hangar steak. This is the sort of dish you’d want to put in a time capsule and send into outer space to give the extra-terrestrials a glimpse of what tasting is.

Our mains were just as good. HungryMan sat with me on the sofa tonight, a full 24 hours later, talking wistfully about the pork belly he ordered, explaining to me how it was ‘luscious and soft,’ even softer than the spaetzle that accompanied it. The very dark dried sauerkraut is what I found most enticing, though– it looked just like hijiki seaweed, but instead of the ocean, tasted cruciferous and earthy.

Corresponding Cousin’s flat iron beef entree provided another pleasant surprise in the form of a lily bulb. Yes, a lily bulb. Even knowing that onions and garlic are close relatives of the lily, seeing a gently sautéed flower bulb on a plate evokes a little excitement. What was even more of a revelation is how perfectly it paired with the radishes and rare meat– because the lily tastes like a cross between a shallot and an endive, it adds piquant high notes to the deep flavor of the beef. Absolutely inspired.

The scallop entrée I selected was the least adventurous of the three mains, but rightly so. Good scallops don’t need much (and often can’t handle much) tarting up, so the scallops themselves were seared very simply and leaned against a bed of very long, thin slices of celery ‘pasta’ and hazelnut coated potato chunks. All of this was wading in a shallow slick of dashi, which was best when spooned up with the celery strips. I could not taste much of the pine needle oil here, which is a shame, as I imagine that a resinous, aromatic accent would have been perfect in this dish. Despite that, it was excellent, if a little small for a main.

The upside to a small portion for dinner is that it leaves you with plenty of appetite for dessert. I chose the caramelized banana with chocolate ice cream and liquorice, not knowing what might arrive on my plate. As it turns out, I never could have predicted the crispy strips of dried banana purée that were sliced and bunched to look like fettucini that rested atop a scoop of milk chocolate ice cream and a golden brown banana half. An unadvertised wedge of banana panna cotta (try saying that ten times quickly) put me in mind of the halo halo I wrote about late this summer. Although there is nothing Flilpino about the WD-50 caramelised banana dessert, it does pay indirect homage to the multiple tastes and crunches of a good halo halo, with the ice cream, fruit, and flan all working in concert. I don’t know what Wylie Dufresne and/or Sam Mason, the pastry chef, was thinking when he concocted this, but if he had halo halo on the brain, I wouldn’t be a bit shocked.

HungryMan’s beet cake, pistachio purée, and chocolate sorbet sounded a little bit wild, but was in fact a very traditional combination of flavors, matching a tender pistachio cake with an intensely dark chocolate ice. The beet cake mohawk was a nice visual accent, but it was never the highlight of the dish. All three of us agreed that we thought the beet aromas and flavors were swamped out by the chocolate and rich nuttiness. Even with that in mind, it was delicious and every morsel of this dessert was gone after 3 or 4 minutes.

Corresponding Cousin’s butternut squash sorbet, on the other hand, had us all marveling. This dessert may have begun life as one of the ’soil’ dishes, but it deserves its spot on the menu– the sorbet tasted like a distilled essence of butternut squash. On its own, it would have been too powerfully gourdlike, but the crushed chocolate pastry and pumpkin seed cake harmonized in beautiful counterpoint. This is autumn on a plate.

One final element of the meal deserves comment here: the extraordinary service. Our waiter was a French woman who had ready answers to all of our dozens of questions. It became clear in the middle of her description of the beef flat iron entrée that she had gone beyond memorizing crucial details of the dishes– something that most good servers do. Instead, she had actually watched them all being prepared and had paid very careful, scrupulous attention. Such ultracompetent service is a rarity, and it must have helped tremendously when the Michelin inspectors came to call earlier this year. My guess is that they witnessed what we did a few nights ago: a chef with a flair for the unusual who has put his creativity in context, artfully breathing life into a new and enchanting kind of cuisine.

[More images of our trip to WD-50 are available on our Flickr photostream as well. Come visit.]

WD-50, 50 Clinton Street (north of Rivington Street), 212-477-2900