Review: Charlie Palmer at The Joule

There is steak: wagyu flat iron, bison rib eye and a dry-aged New York sirloin on a plate smeared in a lithe Cabernet reduction. You can spoon a lustrous marrow flan from a polished yellow bone over the charred steak crags and watch it melt into a butterscotch slick. Marvel how it meshes with the nutty, extracted earthiness sloughed off by the dry-aging process.

Or relish fish. Monkfish possesses a wafer-thin crust of ground lentil, driving this "poor man's lobster" further into peasantry. The rich fish rests on a vibrant citrus endive marmalade. Better is the stuffed rainbow trout, a near whole fish stuffed with a chorizo and wild mushroom hash. Chorizo is hard to tease out of the hash, deliberate no doubt as trout has a delicate, pearlescent flesh that could easily be trampled by chorizo's assertiveness.

Better still among the fishes is arctic char in a roasted porcini emulsion with crisped skin and a scattering of fried Brussels sprout leaves creating an arresting textural effect for the moist fish, which peels off in rich flakes.

Duck is a crisped leg and a honey-glazed breast resting on a mound of salsify. It's as dense as it is tender, as pink as it is juicy. Finish with a dastardly sour Key lime tart and an assortment of sorbet balls—peach, lemon and pear.

In a sense, Charlie Palmer's at the Joule is the quintessential import because it doesn't feel like an outsourced afterthought. It's seasoned with Texas domesticity, honest stuff. Blowhard or not, Tihany did his work so that Palmer and Romano could do theirs.