P*ong.(Pichet Ong )(Restaurant review)

In haute-cuisine circles, it often seems that food is considered art first, sustenance second; aspiring chef-auteurs create increasingly high-tech dishes, stacking and sculpting ingredients--liquefied, freeze-dried, or otherwise rendered unrecognizable--into improbably cantilevered facades. Even so, Pichet Ong may be the only chef in New York with an actual master's degree in architectural design (and whose Web site launches with a quotation from Brancusi--"Simplicity is complexity resolved"). His eponymous restaurant, P*ong, has an imposing, conceptual decor (recently spotlighted in Interior Design): slinky white Eero Saarinen-style chairs on single stems; illuminated geometric cutouts in a curved wall of pale ash veneer; mirrors etched with Takashi Murakami-esque flowers. With mirrored disks on the ceiling and electronica on the soundtrack, the space-pod-cum-disco feels dismayingly at odds with its sleepy West Village brownstone block. One begins to fear the elaborate confections to come.

Yet Ong--who made his name as a pastry chef for Jean-Georges Vongerichten--manages to make an appealing marriage of innovation and tradition. The menu is constructed as a set of small plates, divided into savory, sweet, and somewhere in between. So blurry are the boundaries that a dish classified one night as ...