Wednesday, July 13, 7:00 pm
Members $100, guests $125

Many restaurants choose style over substance, with high-design bells and whistles and a glamorous clientele taking precedence over what’s on the plate. Not at Geisha, opened just over a year ago by restaurateurs Vittorio Assaf and Fabio Granato. The design (by none other than David Rockwell) and beautiful clientele are there, to be sure, but Assaf and Granato wanted diners to be just as wowed by the food—so they tapped Le Bernardin’s Eric Ripert to consult on the menu and Ripert’s protégé Michael Vernon to run the kitchen. Beyond the “white-hot” scene of the dining room, food lovers find a lilting menu of “rigorous (French) technique harmonizing ingredients that reflect freshness, lightness and style,” as Bob Lape put it in Crain’s New York Business.

A graduate of the French Culinary Institute, Vernon cooked at a number of New York’s top restaurants before landing at Le Bernardin, where he worked for seven years under Ripert, eventually becoming sous-chef. At Geisha, he combines his classic French training with the respect for seafood and other ingredients he learned at Le Bernardin, and his painstaking attention to detail and delicate fish preparations attest to his pedigree. Vernon “clearly got his mentor’s refined sleight of hand,” wrote the Daily News’ Pascale Le Draoulec. “Like haiku, the food is deceptively simple.”

Vernon also has a fan in New York magazine’s Hal Rubenstein, who raved, “I’m crazy about Geisha’s food. Smart, spare, and oh-so-pretty, studded with soothing surprises, Michael Vernon’s menu is a streamlined roster of near and total knockouts.” Rubenstein particularly liked the coriander-marinated shrimp and sugarcane lollipops that he called “more delightful than a heart-shaped box of candy.” Le Draoulec favored the chef’s rarefied miso soup, a “coppery, crystalline consommé poured over a canopy of grinning cockles,” and the “memorable” halibut with cabbage, hijiki salad, and ginger-beet purée.

Judging from Geisha’s rave reviews—and how hard it is to get a table—this is one “it” restaurant where the food stands up to its designer digs.