Restaurant Review: Lysée

Panna cotta with puffed grains and a pour of perilla oil.Photographs by Heami Lee for The New Yorker Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner’s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.The question of what to eat before dessert is not, usually, top of my mind. You eat a meal before dessert; you eat dessert after a meal—it’s not one of life’s persistent mysteries. But what do you eat before arriving at a dessert-focussed restaurant to experience a three-hour, ten-course tasting of almost entirely sweets? I considered a sad little salad at home, or a street-cart hot dog; in the end, I chugged half a protein shake and set out for Flatiron, where I had a reservation to experience the Journey with Lysée.

If you have a sweet tooth and you live within view of the Empire State Building, you’ve probably heard of Lysée, the chef Eunji Lee’s brilliant pâtisserie on Twenty-first Street, and you’ve more than likely had one of her inspired creations, such as her extravagantly—and justly—famous corn mousse cake, which is shaped and tinted to look like a plump ear of corn. For four years, since its opening in 2022, Lysée has been mostly a daytime shop. You can enter the serene gallerylike space to pick up a box of pastries to go, or book a table in the lower-level seating area, where you can linger over a seasonal fruit tart and a coffee. (The menu is mostly à la carte, but real sugar-heads know that booking the prix-fixe “signature reservation,” which comes with four bakery items, is the only way to guarantee receipt of a corn cake and one of Lee’s sticky-flaky kouign amanns, both of which tend to sell out early in the day upstairs.)

The pea tart (left) and a deconstructed version of the Lysée, Lee’s signature brown-rice mousse cake.The Journey, which Lee débuted earlier this year, on Thursday evenings only, is something of a return to form for the chef. Before opening her bakery, she worked in high-end restaurants, including Alain Ducasse’s gilded Le Meurice, in Paris, where she trained under the superstar pastry chef Cédric Grolet; in New York, she reinvented the pastry program at Jungsik, the three-Michelin-star Korean restaurant in Tribeca, where her creations—including a trompe l’oeil banana, perhaps a foreshadow of the corn mousse cake—became objects of cultish obsession. Her 2022 book, “Plating Dessert,” published the same year that she opened Lysée, covers just ten dishes, each documented with the component-by-component obsessiveness of a person who thinks about sweetness as a composer thinks about sound. The Journey, which is available to at most sixteen guests each week, showcases this way of cooking, and of thinking: not the self-contained packages of the pastry case but elaborate, expansive dessert.