Shang.(Restaurant review)

Susur Lee has been called one of the best chefs in Canada--a bit of a backhanded compliment, and a characterization that accounts, perhaps, for his decision last year to shutter his eponymous restaurant in Toronto and head for New York. The result, in the Thompson Hotel LES, is named Shang, and its menu takes in Lee's early years in Hong Kong, where he lived until he was twenty, the multicultural influences of Ontario, and his three-year sojourn in Singapore. Even if there's a sense that many of the diners are hotel guests, it's still a pretty chic crowd--girls with eyelid-skimming bangs, men with kaffiyehs wrapped around their necks. Only the odd towheaded toddler gives the game away.

Back in Toronto, Lee was famous for his tasting menu, which turned the concept of course progression upside down. If you start with small things, Lee reasoned, people will be too full to appreciate the heartier courses at the end. So meals at Susur went from main dish to appetizer to fish to soup to dessert. At Shang, the menu is a la carte, and the sense of progression, in either direction, appears absent. The philosophy, instead, seems to be to stuff them early and late. Sizable dishes included the Singapore Slaw, billed as the ...