Legendary Southwestern cuisine pioneer Stephan Pyles has distilled Texan, South American, Spanish, and Mediterranean culinary passions into a well-tailored, compelling synthesis. At the outset, Pyles dubbed his latest opus “New Millennium Southwestern Cuisine.” Which means what? It means you can mull and pick a wide range of ceviches, tapas, foie gras with Peruvian underpinnings, Texas steak and salmon with crab paella, and still go down for more. Ceviches are astounding little arias of flesh and enlivening splash with popcorn deployed as a palate cleanser.

At Fuego, Pyle’s 4-seat tasting menu experience within the restaurant where tweezers and liquid nitrogen serve as the New Millennium spatula and boiling water, you can pop down “hot potato-cold potato:” potato-leek ice cream topped with caviar and a glass of foamy hot potato soup topped with shaved truffles.

Pyles is a pleasantly arousing symphony of wood, granite, slate, plasterized concrete, copper weave, Texas flagstone, and white tablecloth with closed-circuit HD culinary voyeurism dispatched from the kitchen. Culinary masterpieces emerge from a stylized glass kitchen incubator—the central reactor core—where chefs and hands perform and test and tame flames and thrust agitating from rotisseries, wood-fired ovens, and blowtorches. Eat your liver out, you Pucks and Colicchios of the world.