A Tasting Menu That Uses Every Last Scrap

The meal is listed as six courses (seven, if you spring for a Wagyu supplement, eighty dollars for two), but what you’re served is actually closer to a dozen, because several courses feature suites of dishes, built around shared ingredients and interconnecting elements. A corn course, for example, has three parts: first, a quenelle of corn ice cream, soft and summer-bright, set over ribbons of marinated summer squash, confettied with fluffy shaved foie gras and bits of nori. Next, kernels of corn stud a beurre blanc draped over faceted hunks of summer squash with sweetly charred edges. Last, and almost dessert-like, is an intensely concentrated corn posset, dense and rich as cream cheese, under a cloud of sheep’s-milk-cheese foam and a dark dusting of the corn’s burnt husk. The dish is finished with a blob of caviar—the good stuff, platinum osetra. For once, in this caviar-obsessed town, a dish that justifies the use of roe by properly framing its delicate salinity.

Each of those corn preparations was entirely successful on its own; each could have served as a full course, a started-and-finished thought. I felt the same way about the lobster, which came in two parts: hunks of firm tail meat were served in a Thai-inflected red curry, intensely herbaceous and rich with coconut milk, and scattered with fresh-shaved black truffle; the more tender meat of the claw and knuckle was presented in a “taco,” with a tortilla made of pressed plantain, one of the menu’s many nods to Cardoso’s Brazilian upbringing. In the finale of “Top Chef,” one of Cardoso’s mentors warned her away from presenting multi-dish courses, lest one dish overshadow another. The only time this happened at Cynthia, though, was in the supplementary course of A5 Wagyu, a three-parter, in which a brisket-filled dumpling and a B.L.T.-inspired roulade of thinly sliced tongue both felt like drab afterthoughts compared to the main event: glimmering slices of rib eye, impossibly well marbled, served with creamy dollops of eggplant purée. Maybe the abundance just works better in a restaurant than it does at a judges’ table; there is an animalistic delight in being on the receiving end of so much thoughtful variety, even if, by the end of the proceedings, you may be approaching an Adephagian degree of stuffed.