Blastoff

Step right up to Fresh Bistro's giddy culinary theme park.

By Kathryn Robinson

Photo: Courtesy Fresh Bistro / Monique Cheung Photography

Fun with food: If Fresh Bistro wasn’t a restaurant, it would be a Florida theme park.

And a plate of the honey prawns, crisp-fried in a bewitching crust flavored with the Japanese aromatic shiso, arrived alongside candied pecans and a shredded green mango salad. Man, it was fine. It’s true that the dish registered somewhat heavily on the sugar sensors. But young chef Dalis Chea, a Cambodian American who did time at Canlis, marries a facility for tweaks of pan-Asian intrigue with a classicist’s reverence for execution. The prawns were cooked sublimely, popping with juice.

And that’s the happiest surprise about Fresh Bistro: The food is fun, but it’s not only fun. It’s the giggling party girl with the platinum-striped hair and a brain. Yes, the rack of lamb was served with lamb sausage. Yes, its accompanying potato was the overwrought result of twice-baking and frying and stuffing with celery root puree. But I haven’t tasted lamb this good, this respectfully treated or carefully cooked, in ages.

The crowd pleasing continues all the way through to the French press. Spiced apple crisp with panko breading, cranberry—orange brioche bread pudding, ginger creme brulee—you get the idea. These aren’t desserts; they’re the fantasies of people who dredge Oreos through peanut butter, then dip them in sprinkles.

I’m thinking now of the s’mores, where a thick, fudgy brownie square was topped with two scoops of irresistibly gooey housemade marshmallow ice cream, beside a toasted marshmallow into which was speared a housemade graham cracker in the shape of a flame.

Let me repeat: a housemade graham cracker in the shape of a flame. With noise like this, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest if it tasted any good. Which is why it’s so winning when it does.


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