Last week, the 39-year-old executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill in Greenwich Village and Westchester’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns (and nominee for outstanding chef at tonight's James Beard Foundation Awards) found his name printed among those of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Tiger Woods, Arianna Huffington, Tina Fey and the founders of Twitter, to name just a few, when Time magazine released its annual 100 World's Most Influential People list. ("His ethics ... are a model for all chefs and all those who love good food," Time noted.)

“Had it been 10 years ago—and this isn’t false modesty—I just don’t think that I would have been available for this award," said Mr. Barber. "What I’m representing is really a much stronger consciousness and awareness that’s allowing people like me to have more of a voice. So I’m flattered, but I also know it’s a sign of the times.”

It was Saturday afternoon, May 2, and Mr. Barber was at a high school in Park Slope talking about sustainable eating.

A leader in the local food movement here in New York—most of what is served in both Blue Hills is grown or raised on an 80-acre farm adjacent to the Westchester location (it doubles as an agricultural education center)—Mr. Barber's appearance was perhaps the main attraction of the inaugural Brooklyn Food Conference, which organizers said drew several thousand attendees.

“Do you think more people will start growing vegetables because Michelle Obama has planted a garden on the White House lawn?” asked WNYC’s Leonard Lopate, who moderated a panel called “Our sustainable restaurants: A roundtable of NYC chefs,” which included Mr. Barber and fellow Manhattan power chefs/greenmarket regulars Peter Hoffman of Savoy and Telepan’s Bill Telepan.

“I actually do,” Mr. Barber replied amid a bit of laughter from the audience. “I don’t know if it’s going to translate into more people actually growing their own food. But I do think it will translate into more people thinking about cooking with the kind of food that she’s growing. That’s key to reiterating that the chef’s role, aside from providing delicious food and having people think about the connections to where that food is from, is also to inspire people to actually cook.”

After the panel concluded, the Daily Transom managed to get a word in with Mr. Barber before he was swarmed by a few dozen of the crunchy foodies who had filled the John Jay High School auditorium to hear him speak.

We couldn’t help but wonder if Mr. Barber was concerned that, as the recession tightens its grip, more and more New Yorkers might not be able to afford to eat ethically at his restaurants, especially Blue Hill at Stone Barns, where a five-course tasting menu will run you close to $100.

“It’s always a concern because this kind of food is special, but my answer in terms of Blue Hill at Stone Barns is that it’s a free public access facility, so you could come at 9 in the morning on a Saturday, enjoy a little breakfast at the cafe very cheap, have a free tour of the farm, a light lunch, another class in the afternoon, sit down for dinner and enjoy a multi-course menu, and at the end of the day end up spending around $200,” he said. “It’s a lot cheaper than going to Disneyland.”

“I just knew I had to try it,” he said, still sounding a bit awed.

Back in the city that evening, Mr. Bunger, who is decidedly not a vegetarian (he’s from Texas), roasted the squash, which had cost $3.50, with brown sugar and butter. Then he made a purée with the leftovers. It was a veritable feast, he said.

Only 10 years ago, Manhattan was gripped with meat fever: stockbrokers chomping on steaks; chefs competing to see who could offer the most unusual offal; magazine editors slavishly following the diktat of Dr. Atkins (some getting bad breath in the process). These days, the opposite is true. In some of the city’s finest restaurants, vegetables are getting more room on the dish, at times even taking center stage. The corner butcher gently guiding a housewife through her first pot roast now seems quaint; these days we have a legion of househusbands prowling the farmer’s markets, gawking at the cauliflower and palpating the parsnips.

Could it be that vegetables are the new meat?

“I like the sound of that!” said Alex Paffenroth, owner of Paffenroth Gardens, said to have the best produce at the Union Square Greenmarket.

It was a frigid Wednesday morning in mid-November, and Mr. Paffenroth, a burly man of 64, was standing at the back of his box truck in the market’s northeast corner, flipping through pink carbon-copied receipts of vegetable orders from restaurants including Five Points, Telepan, Savoy, Blue Hill and Gramercy Tavern, whose purveyors had already stopped by to claim the day’s bounty. His daughter, 32-year-old Deanne, of Williamsburg, was ringing up customers in front of a portable space heater.

“The real rush will start around lunchtime,” she said.

The place was filled with real men, not bloodless hippies in hemp shirts.

Gary Liliean, 48, a farmer’s market regular wearing a black coat and a baseball cap, placed a plastic bag filled with 3 pounds’ worth of fingerling potatoes (a side dish for Thanksgiving dinner) down on the scale.

“It’s fun!” said Mr. Liliean, who runs a lighting rental department, of his weekly trips to the greenmarket. “You wander around. It’s like impulse shopping.”

Standing nearby with a sizable parsnip in each hand was Joe Beshenkovsky, a 32-year-old TV editor who lives in the West Village. Mr. Beshenkovsky still eats meat, but started making vegetables the cornerstone of his diet about three years ago. He said he wanted to eat more healthfully, and preempt becoming “egregiously fat.” He visits the farmer’s market twice a week to stock up on produce.

“These puppies?” he said, proudly holding up the two tubers as if to show off his catch, “I’ll either bake ’em for dinner or toss them in the microwave for a snack.”  

POWER BROKER ON THE PLATE

A 2004 survey conducted by the city health department found that 90 percent of New Yorkers eat fewer than five servings of vegetables or fruit per day, a spokeswoman for the bureau pointed out.

But 2004 was also the year that Thomas Keller’s Per Se burst  on the scene, with its forest mizuna and field mushrooms. In his four-star review, New York Times critic Frank Bruni praised the restaurant’s nine-course vegetable tasting (now $275)—“of all things,” he marveled, adding, “Lobster is easy; potato salad is hard.”

Meanwhile, “locavorism,” which posits that everyone should eat food produced within 50 to 100 miles of their homes for environmental reasons, has gone mainstream; The Oxford American Dictionary named “locavore” its word of the year for 2007. Initially perceived as a way of life for patchouli-soaked do-gooders, the movement has gotten a considerable PR boost from food-world notables like journalist-author Michael Pollan (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”) and celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse—yes, the same man known for his testosterone-soaked “BAMS!”

Last spring, Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed legislation issuing 1,000 permits for produce-only food carts in low-income areas where fresh vegetables and fruit are not easy to come by. Marcel Van Ooyen, executive director of the Council on the Environment of New York City, said that about 20 of the organization’s 46 greenmarkets just opened in the past three years. And the number of farmer’s markets statewide has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, said Jessica Chittenden, a spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Agriculture.

“People are looking for more rare and exotic produce,” said Ms. Chittenden. “So we’ve seen an increase in the diversity of produce our farmers are growing; more heirloom varieties and things that may not have fit a niche back when people were just looking for the roundest, reddest tomatoes.”

Top New York chefs agree.

“People are more aware of what’s going on with the local veggie scene,” said Bill Telepan, owner of the Upper West Side restaurant Telepan. “It’s become more popular to buy from the greenmarket than it ever has been, and because the greenmarkets seem to be getting bigger and better, now chefs are able to have veggies play a more prominent role.”

Indeed, there’s plenty of room for them on Mr. Telepan’s menu, which includes fried artichokes, autumn vegetable bread soup, roasted cauliflower, chickpea pancakes, beet green and ricotta pierogis, and buttercup squash gnocchi.  

“This consciousness about, ‘Who’s growing what? Where’s it coming from? What variety is it?’ These are questions people weren’t asking 10 years ago,” said Dan Barber, executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill, whose Web site lures diners with images not of sizzling meat, but colorful vegetables sprouting from soil and vine. Blue Hill’s fall menus include entrees and/or tastings of cauliflower steak, brussel sprouts and pistachios, Bloomsdale spinach, celery root, Orion fennel and Forono beets, to name a few.

Mr. Barber, whose “almond carrots,” foodies will recall, were all the rage last year, said that because the farm-to-table movement has made people “more interested about what’s going on their plate,” chefs have become more confident about veggies being the star.

“It’s brought about the rise of the vegetable as a power broker on the plate,” he said.

BEET ME, DARLING

Of course there’s a more obvious reason to opt for veggies when dining out: In an economy where even well off New Yorkers are cutting back on their morning trips to Starbucks, it never hurts to save a few bucks.

“Restaurants are looking for a way to put less expensive items on their menus,” said Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio, founder and co-owner of Craft, which, he noted, offers an array of vegetable-based courses priced below their meaty counterparts. “You can come in and just order vegetables and make a meal out of it. We will see more of that.”

At Gramercy Tavern, the popular contemporary American restaurant Mr. Colicchio co-founded in 1994 but is no longer affiliated with, the vegetable tasting menu, which currently includes heirloom cauliflower, Jerusalem artichoke soup, fennel and lemon risotto and a butternut squash and kale-based ravioli, will run you $92, as opposed to the meat-heavy autumn tasting menu ($112).

“It’s very satisfying to see a rising number of sales of the vegetable tasting,” said Michael Anthony, Gramercy’s executive chef.

There is a happy medium between these high-end places and, say, DoJo, the longtime Village refuge of cheap carrot salads. The menu at the downtown comfort food joint Westville East recently enticed Alexis Saarela, a 29-year-old publicity manager from Queens, when she met a friend there for a post-work dinner. For $13 she got cauliflower, pesto mashed potatoes, broccoli rabe and artichokes (there are about 20 veggies total; diners may choose four).

“It was really tasty and they were vegetables I wouldn’t normally think to buy or cook with,” said Ms. Saarela, who has no problem eating meat. “It’s nice to have an option where you feel like you’re getting fresh seasonal ingredients.”

New York carnivores squeamish about handling a bloody slab in their own kitchens, meanwhile, can now comfortably explore the cooking craze using vegetables alone, with no stigma. No longer is the bachelor cook expected to inflame his lady with a sizzling steak Diane.

Back at the Union Square Greenmarket, the entirely macho Michael Coury, 40, who works as a “concept chef” for OTG Management, was rifling through a crate of black Tuscan kale to accompany the chestnut flour pasta, Jerusalem artichokes and beets he planned to cook that evening for a romantic dinner back home in Jersey City with his fiancée.

“I think we’ve started to come back to more of a European palate in the way that we go out to the market to find what’s best for right now. For tonight,” he said. 

Those without the patience for such foraging can join community-supported agriculture groups, or CSAs: networks of individuals who buy shares in a farm in return for a weekly delivery—usually to a central neighborhood location—of fresh vegetables and fruit (and yes, in some cases meat). You never know what you’re gonna get.

Williamsburg resident Angela Gaimari, 26, joined a CSA last June. Previously she’d been eating a bagel for breakfast, a cheeseburger or sushi for lunch and maybe pizza for dinner.

“It was like, ‘Wow, I haven’t eaten vegetables in a really long time!’” she said. “I just started craving leafy greens.”

Ms. Gaimari, a copywriter for a high-end New York department store, said her most recent shipment (also the last of the season) included dinosaur kale, mustard greens, brazing greens, white radishes, various roots, garlic, sweet potatoes and fingerling potatoes. The cost for 11 such shipments with some fruit and flowers thrown in for good measure: $500.

“Cooking and having people over is a lot more fun to me than going out to some bar in Williamsburg,” said Ms. Gaimari. “I take a lot of pride in picking out vegetables.”

jpompeo@observer.com

These informal kitchen chats have been happening with some regularity since Blue Hill opened, but in recent weeks, the relationship between braininess and Berkshire pork has become more official. Mr. Barber recently signed with high-powered literary agent David Black—the two of them first met when Mr. Black came to eat at Blue Hill—and together, they have been shopping a couple of ideas to publishing houses around town.

According to Mr. Barber, the meetings he and Mr. Black have taken so far have been purely exploratory. “I don’t have a formal proposal,” he said. “I don’t even know what a formal proposal is!”

Instead, he explained, he submitted to editors what is essentially a magazine article not so different in pace or form from his recent piece in The New York Times Magazine about trying to naturally breed almond-flavored carrots. The book he envisions would be comprised of a bunch of these essays—taken together, he said, they would amount to a narrative about the culture of eating and sustainable agriculture as expressed through stories about “all the different farmers and characters” whom he’s met over the course of his career as a chef.

Mr. Barber also wants to write a cookbook that focuses as much on where ingredients come from and how they are harvested as it does on what to do with them in the kitchen. “It’s meant for the home cook,” Mr. Barber said. “It’s not meant to say that in order to have this meal you have to grow your own carrots.”

It’s unclear when these books will have a publisher; Mr. Black would not comment for this story, agreeing only to confirm that he and Mr. Barber are working together. But unless someone goes for an early preempt, a heated auction is likely and, if industry insiders are to be believed, a deal should be done by next month before all of New York publishing leaves for the London Book Fair.

Giant glass doors lead into a long, L-shaped room with an open kitchen in the back. The décor is minimal: a small bar in front, plain, pale yellow stucco walls, brown banquettes and a dun-colored, ripple-patterned carpet. Overhead fluorescent lighting from a recessed ceiling is harsh, pale and flat, making customers look as deathly as the people in Van Gogh’s Night Café. (It could be fixed in an hour with some pink light bulbs, and I imagine it will.) But even though there’s music on the sound system, the dining room isn’t noisy, which counts for a very great deal these days as far as I’m concerned.

At the table next to us, a grizzled man in an open-necked shirt addressed the woman sitting opposite him: “Do you go out on dates?”

Of course she did. She was young and pretty. But he wore a wedding ring. When she left for the bathroom, he took out his cell phone and called home.

A waiter brought the menus to our table. “Any allergies I should know about?”

“Nothing to be concerned about,” replied my companion, adding under his breath, “Unless you’re serving cat.”

Modern Spanish cuisine depends on unexpected juxtapositions: sweet with salty, bitter with spicy, hot with cold. Foams. Confits. Gelées. Purées. Textures.

I began with a superb confit of rabbit leg shredded in strips, topped with sliced shiitake mushrooms and served with cauliflower purée. An equally wonderful Spanish onion–tamarind purée graced two seared, rare scallops on a smoky chorizo sauce, with Avruga (herring) caviar adding a salty note.

I normally like oysters plain in their shells, but I had to try Ureña’s “oysters escabeche with oyster gelée” (I still haven’t gotten over Wylie Dufresne’s at WD-50, flattened into a tile under cling wrap). Six marinated oysters appeared lined up on a long plate—out of their shells, of course—on an oyster-juice gelée sprinkled with a brunoise of crunchy vegetables and dots of an intense green herb sauce. It was wonderful.

One of my friends hadn’t eaten all day, so he opted for a trencherman’s trough of a dinner: the foie gras and the lamb. For his first course, a long white plate arrived with the smallest piece of foie gras ever seen at one end (“Gosling liver!” he complained). The postage-stamp-sized liver came with a sprinkling of candied kumquats. It was accompanied by a small palette-shaped foie gras praline on a fig and balsamic reduction, and a dollop of foie gras yogurt mousse laced with yellow currants. It was interesting, but food more for the mind than the stomach. So until his lamb arrived, my companion returned to the breadbasket, which had some excellent house-made focaccia and rolls served with a spicy purée of red peppers with garlic and olive oil.

I can’t tell you what his lamb tasted like; he ate the entire thing when my head was turned. The dish consisted of one rib lamb chop and a spoonful of roast leg of lamb (or so he claimed) with cashew nut purée, Swiss chard and shiitake mushrooms. He said it was terrific (especially the cashew nut purée), “but not exactly hearty Viking fare.”

I had no quarrel with the halibut I’d ordered, which was crusted with chicharron (duck cracklings and panko) and served with an onion soubise and a colorful, foamy saffron mussel sauce with candied yellow beets—a winning combination.

Mahi-mahi with portobello mushrooms, browned and frothed with a ginger sauce, looked as though it had washed up on the edge of New York harbor: It was a bit of a mush. But tender chunks of steamed lobster on a bed of pickled rhubarb purée with glazed salsify were great, served with a buttery blood-orange sauce that contrasted nicely with the rhubarb. Ureña’s chicken, “en dos texturas,” is a textbook example of modern Spanish cooking: braised, boneless chicken breast and confit thigh with artichoke purée, caramelized leeks, smoked chorizo and foie gras foam.

The witty, deconstructed desserts are by pastry chef Caryn Stabinksy, who has worked at WD-50 and Oceana. “Café y donuts” were delicate beignets with coffee milk foam and espresso gelée. A citrus salad was heaped on a plate spread with a pink lemonade gelée, with grapefruit custard, pearls of blood-orange tapioca and yogurt ice cream. Beet panna cotta (of all things) was strange but compelling, with a squiggle of chocolate sauce, a crunchy chocolate cookie and a sprinkling of powdered, crystallized salted orange.

Afterward, we were served a tiny piece of chocolate that melted in the mouth and had a filling that tasted like seawater. But my companion was still going on about the lamb. He wanted another helping: “After all, the English often have a savory—like Welsh rarebit—at the end of dinner.”

It was that good. So is much of the food at Ureña. But please, before I return, install those pink light bulbs.

Three Stars

75 Washington Place

(Between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square Park)

212-539-1776

Dress: Casual

Lighting: Soft

Noise Level: Low

Wine List: Unusual selections from small vineyards, reasonable prices

Credit Cards: All major

Price Range: Main courses, $28 to $32

Dinner: Monday through Saturday, 5:30 to 11 p.m.; Sunday, 5:30 to 10 p.m.

On a recent Sunday evening, my friends arrived at Blue Hill early and fell into conversation at the bar with a professor and a high-school teacher. The small dining room is warm and intimate, with a low ceiling and bare brick walls, and chocolate-brown banquettes with raised backs act as sound buffers. It’s normally rather sedate, but tonight some young women at a nearby table were becoming increasingly boisterous. The teacher finally lost patience. “Shhhh!” she hissed. The entire restaurant fell stone silent.

Blue Hill is just around the corner from New York University, so many of its customers—and it has a loyal following of regulars—must be well used to hushing or being hushed. The restaurant is in a former speakeasy in the basement of a townhouse near Washington Square. Tables are covered with white paper over linen, and the staff wears long white bistro aprons and blue shirts. The casual style doesn’t prepare you for the high caliber of the cooking here. Perhaps that’s why Blue Hill is underrated. Chef/owner Dan Barber and chef Juan Cuevas (who was formerly at Lespinasse and Alain Ducasse), are producing a sophisticated modern cuisine that’s on a par with some of the city’s best restaurants.

When Mr. Barber first opened Blue Hill five years ago, he created an ambitious seasonal menu with produce from greenmarkets and his family farm in Massachusetts. Last year, he opened a sister restaurant at Stone Barns on the Rockefeller estate up the Hudson, just 24 miles north of the city. The farm there now supplies both restaurants with virtually all of their produce, meat, eggs, poultry and even honey.

My friends and I sat down at a corner banquette near the bar and ordered a glass of this year’s hit wine, the Basque Txakolina, pale gold and slightly fizzy, served in a thin-rimmed tumbler as an aperitif. Blue Hill’s wine list is short but interesting, with many choices from lesser-known vineyards, and the prices are reasonable. The terrific sommelier guided us to a Kuhling-Gillot Scheurebe Kabinett from Rheinhessen, a fruity wine that perfectly complemented our food. The staff is well informed, too—although sometimes you might learn more than you wish. “Our veal tonight is baby veal, brought up by its mother, who has only been fed on grass …. ”

We began with a taste of soup delivered in shot glasses—the “last of the tomatoes,” the waitress said sadly. These late-harvest tomatoes had been roasted and smoked over wood chips before being puréed into a wonderful soup. The waitress set down a small wooden board that had two rows of thin, communion-like wafers slatted into it. “They are baked with ‘fifth-generation’ garlic.” Of course. (The garlic is named, in fact, for an Italian immigrant who brought over a highly prized sweet specimen; the family would only sell it chopped or peeled so that no one else could grow it. When the last farmer retired, he gave his bulbs to Mr. Barber.)

After the soup, I had a plate of exquisite tiny fall vegetables—variously raw, marinated or flash-cooked over high heat—mingled with toasted pistachios, fresh soybeans, apples and fennel in a mushroom gelée. It was permeated with the aroma of purple basil and was unbelievably good. So was a warm wild-mushroom and chicken-liver salad with baby greens and toasted pistachios in a herbaceous pine-nut vinaigrette.

Mr. Cuevas has worked in top restaurants in Spain, and he brings subtle Spanish touches to some of the dishes. Slices of foie gras (not raised on the farm) come on a green glass plate accompanied by puntarelle (wild chicory), fennel, tapioca and apple, with a Prosecco vinaigrette and toasted Marcona almonds. It’s light and refined, with a lemony sweetness—the last thing you’d expect with foie gras. Fluke arrived in a big white bowl with honmichi mushrooms, fennel, chopped herbs and fennel fronds floating in an intense, clear broth made from tomato, zucchini and cucumber water, drained in a cheesecloth. Three smoked shrimp were plopped on a bright green lawn of puréed herbs sprinkled with “panther” soybeans. Cod, an all-white dish, was served in a creamy almond shellfish broth, laced with strips of zucchini and Marcona almonds.

Mr. Barber and Mr. Cuevas like tart, citrusy tastes. The crabmeat salad, with mint and cilantro, micro greens, green-tomato marmalade and diced apple was pure heaven. The Berkshire pork was wonderful, but the bitterness of an arugula and mustard-herb pesto served with it didn’t set off the meat to the best advantage. I loved the tiny, tiny lamb chops, with tiny, tiny potatoes, cannellini beans and lettuce, along with a dollop of braised leg and shoulder. Cobia, a large white fish with meaty, firm-textured flesh, came with colorful twin sauces, a rich purple Concord grape cooked with roast lobster shells and port, and a yellow pepper sauce.

Blue Hill serves a great chocolate brioche bread pudding with roast peanuts and salted caramel in the middle. The apple cobbler is deconstructed: The apples come in a Mason jar, and the crumble is served on the side. Seckel pears poached with caramel were laced with a passion-fruit sauce that kicked the pears into action. A dark chocolate soufflé with ricotta ice cream was a little dry but had great flavors. The fromage blanc soufflé was flawless, with pink peppercorn ice cream. Tiny fresh pears at the peak of ripeness were served as petits fours alongside chocolate truffles.

As we were finishing our marvelous desserts, the women from the once-raucous table got up to leave. The schoolteacher was at the table next to us, and one of the culprits stopped in front of her and glared. “Next time you come here, take a Valium!”

Everyone laughed.

Three Stars

75 Washington Place

(Between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square Park)

212-539-1776

Dress: Casual

Lighting: Soft

Noise Level: Low

Wine List: Unusual selections from small vineyards, reasonable prices

Credit Cards: All major

Price Range: Main courses, $28 to $32

Dinner: Monday through Saturday, 5:30 to 11 p.m.; Sunday, 5:30 to 10 p.m.

On a recent Sunday evening, my friends arrived at Blue Hill early and fell into conversation at the bar with a professor and a high-school teacher. The small dining room is warm and intimate, with a low ceiling and bare brick walls, and chocolate-brown banquettes with raised backs act as sound buffers. It’s normally rather sedate, but tonight some young women at a nearby table were becoming increasingly boisterous. The teacher finally lost patience. “Shhhh!” she hissed. The entire restaurant fell stone silent.

Blue Hill is just around the corner from New York University, so many of its customers—and it has a loyal following of regulars—must be well used to hushing or being hushed. The restaurant is in a former speakeasy in the basement of a townhouse near Washington Square. Tables are covered with white paper over linen, and the staff wears long white bistro aprons and blue shirts. The casual style doesn’t prepare you for the high caliber of the cooking here. Perhaps that’s why Blue Hill is underrated. Chef/owner Dan Barber and chef Juan Cuevas (who was formerly at Lespinasse and Alain Ducasse), are producing a sophisticated modern cuisine that’s on a par with some of the city’s best restaurants.

When Mr. Barber first opened Blue Hill five years ago, he created an ambitious seasonal menu with produce from greenmarkets and his family farm in Massachusetts. Last year, he opened a sister restaurant at Stone Barns on the Rockefeller estate up the Hudson, just 24 miles north of the city. The farm there now supplies both restaurants with virtually all of their produce, meat, eggs, poultry and even honey.

My friends and I sat down at a corner banquette near the bar and ordered a glass of this year’s hit wine, the Basque Txakolina, pale gold and slightly fizzy, served in a thin-rimmed tumbler as an aperitif. Blue Hill’s wine list is short but interesting, with many choices from lesser-known vineyards, and the prices are reasonable. The terrific sommelier guided us to a Kuhling-Gillot Scheurebe Kabinett from Rheinhessen, a fruity wine that perfectly complemented our food. The staff is well informed, too—although sometimes you might learn more than you wish. “Our veal tonight is baby veal, brought up by its mother, who has only been fed on grass …. ”

We began with a taste of soup delivered in shot glasses—the “last of the tomatoes,” the waitress said sadly. These late-harvest tomatoes had been roasted and smoked over wood chips before being puréed into a wonderful soup. The waitress set down a small wooden board that had two rows of thin, communion-like wafers slatted into it. “They are baked with ‘fifth-generation’ garlic.” Of course. (The garlic is named, in fact, for an Italian immigrant who brought over a highly prized sweet specimen; the family would only sell it chopped or peeled so that no one else could grow it. When the last farmer retired, he gave his bulbs to Mr. Barber.)

After the soup, I had a plate of exquisite tiny fall vegetables—variously raw, marinated or flash-cooked over high heat—mingled with toasted pistachios, fresh soybeans, apples and fennel in a mushroom gelée. It was permeated with the aroma of purple basil and was unbelievably good. So was a warm wild-mushroom and chicken-liver salad with baby greens and toasted pistachios in a herbaceous pine-nut vinaigrette.

Mr. Cuevas has worked in top restaurants in Spain, and he brings subtle Spanish touches to some of the dishes. Slices of foie gras (not raised on the farm) come on a green glass plate accompanied by puntarelle (wild chicory), fennel, tapioca and apple, with a Prosecco vinaigrette and toasted Marcona almonds. It’s light and refined, with a lemony sweetness—the last thing you’d expect with foie gras. Fluke arrived in a big white bowl with honmichi mushrooms, fennel, chopped herbs and fennel fronds floating in an intense, clear broth made from tomato, zucchini and cucumber water, drained in a cheesecloth. Three smoked shrimp were plopped on a bright green lawn of puréed herbs sprinkled with “panther” soybeans. Cod, an all-white dish, was served in a creamy almond shellfish broth, laced with strips of zucchini and Marcona almonds.

Mr. Barber and Mr. Cuevas like tart, citrusy tastes. The crabmeat salad, with mint and cilantro, micro greens, green-tomato marmalade and diced apple was pure heaven. The Berkshire pork was wonderful, but the bitterness of an arugula and mustard-herb pesto served with it didn’t set off the meat to the best advantage. I loved the tiny, tiny lamb chops, with tiny, tiny potatoes, cannellini beans and lettuce, along with a dollop of braised leg and shoulder. Cobia, a large white fish with meaty, firm-textured flesh, came with colorful twin sauces, a rich purple Concord grape cooked with roast lobster shells and port, and a yellow pepper sauce.

Blue Hill serves a great chocolate brioche bread pudding with roast peanuts and salted caramel in the middle. The apple cobbler is deconstructed: The apples come in a Mason jar, and the crumble is served on the side. Seckel pears poached with caramel were laced with a passion-fruit sauce that kicked the pears into action. A dark chocolate soufflé with ricotta ice cream was a little dry but had great flavors. The fromage blanc soufflé was flawless, with pink peppercorn ice cream. Tiny fresh pears at the peak of ripeness were served as petits fours alongside chocolate truffles.

As we were finishing our marvelous desserts, the women from the once-raucous table got up to leave. The schoolteacher was at the table next to us, and one of the culprits stopped in front of her and glared. “Next time you come here, take a Valium!”

Everyone laughed.

On a recent Saturday night, a cab deposited me a block from Schiller’s Liquor Bar in front of the hotel’s huge glass front door, which faces the graffiti-covered walls of a tenement across the street. I entered into a bulbous, red-carpeted white tunnel (the designer Marcel Wanders based it on a vase he molded from a condom filled with eggs). The tunnel wends its way into a bar and lounge whose soaring ceilings and walls are covered with a lacy, silver, black and white print that looks like snakeskin.

In the back, the 100-seat dining room is set with black polished tables, black chairs and black banquettes. Through the lofty glass ceiling and windows, the tenement fire escapes are like a West Side Story set. A giant black hulk of steel dominates the center of the dining room. It’s not a Richard Serra or a David Smith; it’s the entrance to a clanging metal staircase leading down to the bathrooms (where it’s too dark to fix your makeup). In the gloom of the cellar corridor, the men waiting in line looked like inmates in a gulag.

Thor has all the trappings of full-blooded downtown trendiness: the deafening bar scene; the wait staff, all great looking, all in black; the hostess telling you to wait “until your party is complete” before you sit at a table for two (which is actually already taken and won’t be free for half an hour); the bar bill to be settled before you’re finally allowed to sit down at your table, which is of the kind beloved by restaurateurs, narrow in width and extra long, like a table soccer game, so you have to shout across it.

But all this belies the seriousness of the food served here. Mr. Gutenbrunner’s cooking at Thor focuses less on the Austrian and more on greenmarket produce (although there is a pumpkin-seed vinaigrette on the Bibb lettuce and side dishes of spaetzle, rôsti potatoes and kohlrabi gratin). The wine list is international, reasonably priced and has many interesting choices from lesser-known vineyards. I also like the fact that the wine is served in elegant, thin-rimmed tumblers.

The menu is divided into categories by temperature: cold plates, warm plates (including a salmon lasagna with fresh tomatoes and a potato gnocchi with wild mushrooms) and hot plates. Begin with the white tomato mousse: It looks like a large scoop of vanilla ice cream and arrives on a bed of sliced heirloom tomatoes and opal basil. When you bite into the mousse, you get a subtle crunch from a thin pastry disk hidden underneath.

An herbaceous spinach and parsley soup is laced with croutons and enlivened with pieces of trout. Hamachi is cut in chunks and served in a spicy marinade with avocado and heirloom tomatoes. And a foie gras terrine comes with the last of the season’s peaches.

But piling American sturgeon caviar and finely diced tuna on top of the Kumamoto oysters amounted to overkill. My friend liked the oysters anyway. “The aftertaste is as though you’d dipped your head in the sea,” he said.

Baby romaine lettuce with one-hour poached egg is essentially a Caesar salad, topped with white anchovies and a Parmesan crisp. “One hour is a traditional Viennese way of poaching an egg,” said our waiter. Those lucky Viennese, with so much time on their hands!

My companion searched his salad with his fork. “I can’t find the yolk,” he said after a while. “I think it hatched.”

Main courses include perfectly nice but undistinguished venison (a special one day) and lamb chops, the latter with “14K golden nugget potatoes,” those waxy little numbers from the greenmarket. Sea scallops come in a subtle curry sauce on a bed of freshly shucked corn with a basil purée. Steamed duck is rolled in three dim sum-like cylinders wrapped in cabbage, with green asparagus and a jolt of mustard seeds.

Pastry chef Pierre Reboul previously worked with Jean-Georges Vongerichten and at Blue Hill in Greenwich Village. A “spur of the moment” raspberry vacherin was marred, for me at least, by licorice that left a nasty after-taste. But the cheesecake, with a tortilla-like wafer and a fromage blanc sorbet, was excellent, as was the homemade yogurt with pistachios, brown sugar and sesame. I also liked the lollipops filled with chocolate and served on sticks. They’re really beignets, and they’re delicious.

But one evening, I looked down at my plate in bewilderment. What had I ordered? Perched on a lump of ice the size of a bowling ball was a small mound that appeared to be covered with green slime. It was crushed avocado, sprinkled with salted caramel, placed on top of a tart lime sorbet. The whole thing taken all together was weird, one of the oddest things I’ve tasted, and not pleasant.

At the end of dinner, instead of petits fours, you’re given a sealed tube and some small, cold doughnuts. The tube contains not toothpaste, but a dark chocolate sauce. It’s a cute idea, and I’m sure some imaginative guests will go beyond cold doughnuts and find other interesting uses for it.

The restaurant's white storefront brightens up a rather dreary block just off Fifth Avenue. At night, you can see the welcoming glow of candles through the windows hung with muslin curtains. Renaud brought his father over from France to help with renovations, and the result is unshowy and simple. It feels a bit like a Portuguese posada or a country restaurant tucked away in the hills of Italy, with a terra cotta tile floor, pale yellow walls, a tiny marble-topped bar and an exposed-brick wall hung with an unadorned Christmas wreath. The well-spaced tables are set with white cloths, candles and small bowls of fleur de sel accompanied by miniature wooden shovels with which to sprinkle the precious stuff over your food.

I had recently broken a tooth on a grain of coarse French sea salt hiding in a tuna fish sandwich, and my dentist had replaced it just that morning to the tune of $950. So it was not, perhaps, the best day to try a restaurant called Fleur de Sel. This gray, briny seasoning is too delicate to chip a tooth, but it could break the bank, with a tiny bag costing around 10 bucks. Boxes and jars of it are displayed near the kitchen, some complete with fancy pewter labels and even the name of the person who harvested it-probably friends of Mr. Renaud, who spent childhood summers on his grandfather's salt marsh. (Owning one these days must be a bit like having a small gold mine, now that fleur de sel is about to become as essential to the yuppie pantry as mineral water.)

When you see Mr. Renaud's food, you can understand why he likes to paint. The plates are gorgeous. A rosette of marinated mussels on finely diced vegetables that were tossed with a mustard and chive vinaigrette looked like a window in Notre Dame, decorated with glistening dots of balsamic and chive oils. A jaunty lobster salad was like a 50's couture hat, a red claw set on a latticed yellow disc of crispy apple, all perched on diced avocado. Foie gras arrived on a purée of apricots mixed with mango, papaya, pineapple and rose water, the plate splashed with a dark cognac sauce.

It's not just the presentation. Mr. Renaud playfully juxtaposes ingredients to lure unexpected flavors from the food. Ravioli filled with roasted chestnuts, white truffles and Parmesan is floated in a soup made with roasted parsnips and puréed vegetables blended into a smooth, milky stock. The broth was thin and subtle, to contrast with the earthy ravioli. In another dish, large ravioli were stuffed with sweetbreads, braised in Madeira and mixed with cèpes and sautéed eggplant, served on an emerald-green spinach coulis. It sounds strange, but it was thrilling. Two trim venison filets were drizzled with a deep-red sauce flavored with beets and licorice powder. The accompanying celery-root-and-potato gratin hid slices of venison sausage.

Our pre-Raphaelite waitress was well-schooled in the menu, which lists some ingredients that may stump the table. Kamut, in case you didn't know, is an ancient Egyptian grain that was apparently discovered in a pharoah's tomb and replanted. (After 3,000 years, it still worked!) The stubby, wheat-like kernels accompanied slices of rare loin of lamb marinated in Dijon mustard and thyme. The chicken breast was served with crones, which look like large cloves of garlic but taste like a cross between an artichoke and a potato. They went down very nicely with the foie gras–truffle sauce-and a dash of fleur de sel, of course.

If giant turnips are not on your list of the season's most desirable root vegetables, Mr. Renaud will make you think again. He cuts them in slivers and fashions them into a galette with figs and dates, topped with sage. A juicy pigeon was perched on the edge of the tart, accompanied by a rich salmis made from its liver and heart.

Roasted sea scallops served with Jerusalem and crispy globe artichokes were complemented by sweet and tart pan juices mixed with sherry wine and vinegar and honey. Filet of escolar was steamed with garlic oil and set afloat on a wonderful panaché of wild mushrooms in champagne vinegar, olive oil and muscadet, with a discreet spoonful of soy sauce to give it an edge.

"In France, if they bring dessert before they take the salt off the table, they lose their third Michelin star," said a friend archly when our waitress brought over the dessert menu. "They" took away the salt and we had one of each of the four desserts. A chocolate soufflé nested in a dark-chocolate tart shell was paired with a delicate, sorbet-like milk-flavored ice cream to cut the richness. Light, airy tiramisù, served in a martini glass, was subtly flavored with banana. The raspberry feuilleté-thin layers of puff pastry topped with a zeppelin of white-chocolate caramel ganache and filled with fresh berries-was simply extraordinary. So was the warm, caramelized-apple crêpe, a favorite dish from Mr. Renaud's Breton childhood, that was served flat, not rolled, with Devonshire cream. The homemade sorbets were works of art, made from pineapple, grapefruit and pear and served on paper-thin candied slivers of their respective fruits.

At Fleur de Sel, where dinner is a $52 three-course prix fixe , Mr. Renaud turns out the sort of haute cuisine you would pay a great deal more for at a grand French restaurant. But at heart it's a casual neighborhood place. On the way out, there was large basket filled with little white packages of Breton sea salt. "Help yourself!" said our waitress. This must be the first restaurant where people would rather steal the salt than the shaker.

5 East 20th Street460-9100

dress: Casual

noise level: Low

wine list: French and Californian, many bottles under $50

credit cards: All major

price range: Lunch main courses $15 to $16.50, prix fixe $28. Dinner prix fixe $52

lunch: Monday to Friday, noon to 2 p.m.

dinner: Monday to Saturday, 6 to 10:30 p.m. good

very good

excellent

outstanding

no star poor

John Paul's shirt was already mantled in sweat. He set up his ball, then walked away from it and waggled his club in the air as if it were a dowsing rod. He took weird breaths and seemed quite distracted. Then he marched toward the tee and drew back the club in a very slow back swing before hitting the ball out of sight.

I was eager to endure the company of grim doctors with rounded shoulders and Young Turks with razor haircuts for 4 hours because of John Paul's book, The Fine Green Line , which was published this summer by Broadway Books. A chronicle of his year playing pro golf and trying to qualify for the P.G.A. tour, it has lately gone into a second printing and attained that Holy Grail, word of mouth, among thoughtful sportsmen and other middle-aged aspirants for a simple reason: It's a wry comic triumph.

"An anti–Horatio Alger story," said Booklist . "A revelation or a delight on every page," said Time .

I have to admit I was as surprised as anyone that my friend pulled this off. I shared an office with John Paul back when he was starting his book. He is tall, handsome and blue-eyed; a former star high-school quarterback in Fort Worth. And under that exterior, you've never met such a neurotic.

He met his deadlines, but after what torture. I watched him pace the room talking to himself with flop sweat soaking his shirt, set his watch alarm to go off at arbitrary deadlines in mid-afternoon so as to force himself to finish a passage, suffer Dostoyevskian money woes that would make you grind your teeth. And often he stared implacably at the computer screen for hours, fists jammed into his ears.

More than once I whispered to a friend that John Paul should try a different line of work.

Then this. You read a friend's book with sympathy and rivalry. Your murderous heart is quietly pleased by the awkward transition you would have avoided. Your little fund of loyalty swells at the nicely phrased insight. And you skim. John Paul's story takes you past all that. With nary a pretentious word, it takes on a big theme-trying and failing in middle age-and does so against a drab comic backdrop, from Key Biscayne to Pompano. The Fine Green Line teems with colorful characters, from a rascal who picks up the beverage girls using subliminal-suggestion techniques to Captain Kurt, an Army veteran and better golfer than John Paul who, with uncommon grace, volunteers to caddie for him in his crucial match.

Now a writer for Maximum Golf , John Paul turned to the game 15 years ago, when he was at Fortune and his boss saw him hit a ball 340 yards on a corporate retreat.

"'Holy shit!' the publisher said. Those glorious words are seared in my mind," he recounts in his book. "After we putted out the final hole, he took me aside, clamped both hands on my shoulders, looked me full in the face, and said, 'You simply must take up golf.'"

The publisher got fired, but John Paul took his advice. And one summer day he shot 69 on Long Island, and a friend said, "Why don't you turn pro?" He decided to try, budgeting $25,000 for a year.

Michael Hebron, the master pro at Smithtown Landing Golf Club, instructed John Paul, and gives away the book's ending at the start when he tells him that, at most, he'll shave one stroke off his performance.

Getting from really good to great takes years.

"A good athlete can go from 100 to 90 in a season if he leaves his ego at home," Mr. Hebron says. "But John was already so good [2.7 handicap]. And he was cursed by time. Still, I thought it was very interesting how the guys on the mini tour accepted him. An 85 golfer gets pissed when he has to play with a beginner. But really good golfers don't mind, they understand how hard it is to get birdies and pars."

On Amazon.com, readers write about what a funny book this is. John Paul argues with his wife that the reason she believes golf is about "plaid pants" is that Dean Martin wore them as a drinker's joke in the 60's. He struggles with his feelings about playing the Hooters tour. "The whole exhibition was shameful," he writes. "Afterward I allowed myself to be photographed with a half dozen Hooters girls hugging my neck. Two were named Tiffany."

This stuff might be cute, except that John Paul, the son of a prominent Baptist theologian, the late John P. Newport, gets so obsessed that his self-defeating behaviors swarm to the surface. What I didn't know when I watched him torture himself was that he was actually going to show the reader this madness, and it makes the book.

He is consumed by the religious ordeal of the self-absorbed, the necessity to believe in yourself.

" 'I do deserve to be here,' I started telling myself in a panicky tone," John Paul writes in The Fine Green Line . "'I'm as good as these guys. I'm a really good golfer. I swear I am, I really am.'

"But I didn't believe it. That's the problem with positive self-propaganda. You have to genuinely believe it or it's just words."

Fear and doubt so overwhelm him that he spends hours reorganizing his golf bag and, as tee time at the final qualifying match approaches, he agonizes over a change of socks.

"My slacks through repeated washings were a bit on the high-water side, and the rag-wool socks had shrunk in the dryer. Thus, a generous portion of my calf was visible … every time I addressed the ball I would be aware out of the corner of my eye that I looked like Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy . Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump! My heart was in my throat."

Returning home after this performance, he is afraid for weeks to admit to his wife how humiliated he feels. "'What's the problem?' she asked. 'What did you expect? To make it to the TV tour?'

"'Of course not,' I scoffed. 'Obviously not.'

"'Of course not?'

"'Of course not!' But then I began to think, maybe I had."

After our 18 holes (he shot 80, I shot 160; John Paul told me to work on my putting), we had beer and burgers in the clubhouse, and I asked him why he'd been so ashamed.

"Shame is a function of pride," he said. "I was surprised by the degree to which my male vanity or my athletic vanity was assaulted. I'm a guy of around 40, reasonably accomplished, and here I was around 24-year-old guys who in any other aspect of life I didn't have much to say to, or didn't particularly respect. But I felt like a kid, like a protégé. An inadequate admirer. That was the pride coming in. I was competing with these guys on an athletic basis. It was inescapable.

"I was always among the worst players, and the fear just took over. It worked on me," John Paul told me. "You're always thinking how many things can go wrong on any golf swing. Then, when pride is on the line in a new way, the consequences of a ball going in the woods become soul-shattering or potentially soul-shattering. I'd broken par regularly before, I didn't break par in the entire year. I froze."

He asked the waitress for mustard for his cheeseburger. "I tried to keep an intellectual perspective, that this was just an experiment," John Paul continued. "And what could be more fun than playing golf for a whole year? 'This is fun, this is fun,' I'd say.

"I still think I could have played better. But I can't say that because I didn't play better. I couldn't do better. The anxiety, the freezing up, the sense of being in over my head-they say that golf is life with the volume turned up, and my neurosis-I take it to golf."

I asked him how he'd gotten clear of that to write the book.

"I figured out what it takes to be a really good golfer, and I realized it's not important enough for me. I quote Byron Nelson saying, 'A fine golfer has only one fine thing, his fine golf game.' He meant there's no room in your life for anything else. Well, I no longer feel compelled to be a really great anything. I don't want to be the greatest writer that ever lived, the greatest date. There's a huge price people pay for that.

"The year helped me move beyond that, and left me at peace with myself as a middle-aged person. Now I like the things I always liked about golf. The thrill of occasionally hitting a really good shot. The atmosphere, the qualitative stuff. It doesn't matter if I shoot 72 or 80, as long as I'm challenged in an interesting way. I don't have to be the best, awesome or extraordinary. It's much better to revel in the ordinary human qualities."

The beverage girl with the blue eyes from the back nine passed through the room and we shot her a glance.

But what about the tortured person who could drive you crazy from across a room? I asked.

John Paul drained his beer. "I'm just not a self-confident person. I'm someone who always tends to assume-not the worst, but a lot of writers write a sentence and think it's the most genius thing that's ever been written. I'm just the opposite. I have this assumption of mediocrity. I went through 10 paralyzed moments in writing, then one non-paralyzed moment, and the non-paralyzed moment wouldn't be possible without the other 10."

And in writing, you get to throw out your bad scores.