Chop Suey.

Chop Suey is not a Chinese restaurant. That's fitting, since the dish it is named after was invented in America. The food served here is, instead, vaguely Korean, as filtered through the mind and the taste buds of Chop Suey's consulting chef, Zak Pelaccio. The term "consulting chef" is a kind of warning: don't expect to see Pelaccio in the kitchen on a nightly basis. He's likely busy with one of his other consultant gigs (230 Fifth, Borough Food and Drink) or collaborating with a fellow star chef on a side project (rumored to be in the works: a Southeast Asian barbecue spot and a European gastropub).

A sense of absence permeates Chop Suey, which is semi-hidden on the second floor of the Renaissance hotel in Times Square. On recent visits, the dining room was barely a quarter full, which made it feel like a private aerie, perched above the neon ripple of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. The interior is refreshingly free of Asian kitsch, although the decor comes across as more designy than designed: biomorphic lipstick-orange leather chairs, ceiling fixtures that resemble giant toothbrush heads, china and cups with angles that are aggressively askew.

The menu is, alas, similarly wayward. The scallion pancake, a dependable Chinatown staple, was either ...