AS James Haurey tells it, the inspiration struck while he was having a drink with some mates, shortly after he took over the kitchen of this opulent restaurant in June 1999. ''Wouldn't it be great,'' someone asked, ''if you could have a menu with all appetizers -- just pick and choose?'' And someone else, perhaps Mr. Haurey himself, replied: ''Hey, wait a minute. We've got a restaurant. We can do it here.''
What evolved was not quite the same as a tasting menu, which was already available here when The Times last visited, in 1998. Courses are small, but not microscopic. You can order four, five, six or seven, counting dessert, for a fixed price of $62, $72, $82 or $92. (Or, I suppose, you could just keep going, adding $10 a course, until you keel over.) It's like a salad bar -- or, maybe, heaven. Everything is up to you.
Some diners seem to take extreme license with this newfound freedom. Mr. Haurey says one of his regular customers -- a woman he describes as thin and petite -- always orders the same courses: two seared foie gras, two foie gras terrines. She knows who she is. For the rest of us, the possibilities are liberating, if not daunting.
Mr. Haurey, 32, graduated from the Johnson & Wales College of Culinary Arts but learned the hard part of his trade in the relentlessly exacting kitchen of the Ryland Inn in Whitehouse, where he rose to executive sous-chef before moving to Short Hills. The resemblances between that great kitchen and this one are not hard to spot: both chefs start with fresh, seasonal ingredients of very high quality, then apply a laserlike focus to bringing out their essential flavors and textures. ''A carrot should taste like a carrot and a steak should taste like a steak,'' Mr. Haurey told me. ''Don't take a squab and overwhelm it with maple syrup glaze. That's confusion cuisine.''
The only confusion here is likely to result from the effort to order. While the menu lists just two dozen choices, counting desserts, the permutations are staggering.
You might start with either -- or both -- of two lettuce salads, each wonderful and as different as two lettuce salads can be. In one, four baby lettuces, chosen for maximum contrast of flavor, color and texture (black-seeded Simpson, Cimmaron romaine, lolla rossa, arugula), are tossed with 50-year-old balsamic vinegar and a shot of white truffle oil whose aroma ricochets across the table. Caesar salad is a witty deconstruction of that Prohibition-era cliché: a base of chopped romaine surmounted by a tower made of crackling disks of Parmesan crisp and a garlic crouton, all of it draped with a Spanish anchovy, whole and surprisingly mild.
Many of the choices that follow are likely to change as the seasons do and fresher ingredients come on the market. Fennel-crusted fish, for example, was quietly, insistently flavorful and beautifully balanced on each of two visits, but the fish was different -- skate one night, turbot another. Like all the seared dishes, including foie gras, steak and lamb, the fish is cooked on a slab of superheated slate.
A few dishes were a bit less exciting on a quiet Tuesday night than on a busy Saturday, when every table was full and the kitchen seemed to be hitting home run after home run. Open ravioli -- a single sheet of silken homemade pasta over a filling of lobster, chopped prawns and cuttlefish, and a sprinkling of panko bread crumbs in a powerful seafood-tomato reduction -- was brilliantly alive on Saturday, a bit flaccid on Tuesday. Seared salmon, though of top quality and perfectly cooked on that slate slab, was undercut on our second visit by a brown sauce that seemed heavy and unfocused.
On the other hand, a thick, bright orange soup of puréed cod had extraordinary depth on both visits, and no wonder: its base of vegetables, wine and seafood stock had been simmered, in stages, for hours.
Ragout of lamb and côte de boeuf are exquisitely miniaturized, in portions just large enough to be satisfying. The lamb, in particular, has its own abundant flavor enhanced by a powerful jus and by baby artichoke, roasted red pepper and watercress.
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