As nearly as I can tell, chef Robert Gadsby’s mind is moving at warp speed. His complex, multi-ingredient, Asian-inflected French cuisine took shape when he opened the first Noé restaurant, in the Omni Hotel in Los Angeles, in 2003, and his globe-trotting experiments continue at the second Noé, in the Omni Houston. Some dishes are classic: Lovely, tender roasted veal sweetbreads are served with a black-truffle jus. Others venture out on a limb: A chicken-vegetable salad artfully molded into a perfect cone comes with a smoothie-like mango-mint frappé on the side. Still others pull out all the stops: Foie gras is dolled up not one but three ways, including blended into a minted-white-chocolate panna cotta for an unapologetically unorthodox combo. Occasionally, a dish simply doesn’t work (that panna cotta, for instance; I’m not sure that liver and white chocolate could ever coexist happily), but nothing Gadsby dreams up is boring. His food always engages the imagination and the senses. PATRICIA SHARPE
