A Ten-Course Tasting Where Dessert Is the Whole Point

The Journey, which Lee débuted earlier this year, on Thursday evenings only, is something of a return to form for the chef. Before opening her bakery, she worked in high-end restaurants, including Alain Ducasse’s gilded Le Meurice, in Paris, where she trained under the superstar pastry chef Cédric Grolet; in New York, she reinvented the pastry program at Jungsik, the three-Michelin-star Korean restaurant in Tribeca, where her creations—including a trompe l’oeil banana, perhaps a foreshadow of the corn mousse cake—became objects of cultish obsession. Her 2022 book, “Plating Dessert,” published the same year that she opened Lysée, covers just ten dishes, each documented with the component-by-component obsessiveness of a person who thinks about sweetness as a composer thinks about sound. The Journey, which is available to at most sixteen guests each week, showcases this way of cooking, and of thinking: not the self-contained packages of the pastry case but elaborate, expansive dessert.

The Journey begins with a pea tart: a tiny, tender, full-throated savory bite. The peas themselves are piled like cabochons over a thin pastry shell, dressed in a tart citrus vinaigrette and studded with slivers of pickled shallots that deliver bracing little sparks of brine against the crisp sweetness of the legumes. It’s not a dessert, per se, but it’s certainly dessert-shaped. It was followed by a steamed egg served in its shell, wearing a swirly toque of dried gamtae seaweed that tasted, startlingly, like oceanic threads of black truffle, alongside a single brioche toast soldier piped with crème fraîche and punctuated with a tittle of osetra caviar. Then there was a course simply called Spring Herb, an intricate mosaic of green the color and green the flavor: a creamy herb sorbet, an icy-flaky lemongrass granita, slippery slices of kiwifruit, and bits of raw apple as crisp as snow. The dish had a precision that I recognized from years of enjoying Lee’s pâtisserie, but it tasted almost shockingly wild, the flavors sparkling and faceted, with unpredictable brightness.