Corton.(Restaurant review)

In 2000, Paul Liebrandt, a consumptive-looking Brit who apprenticed under Marco Pierre White, Raymond Blanc, and Pierre Gagnaire, became the youngest chef, at the age of twenty-three, to earn three stars from the New York Times--and, along with them, a reputation for possessing a romantic cast of mind. Within months, he had left the restaurant, Atlas. His next job, at Papillon, lasted only a year. Then there was his stint at Gilt, which people thought was brilliant, and which didn't last long, either. After a couple of years cooking privately, Liebrandt is probably sick of having to relive his temperamental youth. Suffice it to say that he once helped stage a dinner where blindfolded guests ate jelly off a naked woman. At Corton, which Liebrandt has conceived with the veteran restaurateur Drew Nieporent as "three-star dining stripped down," the mood is clean and bright. With starry light fixtures in irregular shapes (one resembles a wand dipped in sparkling honey) and pristine white walls embossed with designs in the shape of tree branches, it could be a planetarium designed by Apple. One recent Friday night, a banquette toward the front of the room was occupied by no less a futurist than the Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein.

What's surprising about Corton is the levity that ...