From Kliman Online's "Word of Mouth"

Ever wondered what it would be like to be a panelist on The Food Network's Iron Chef? No, not the part about having to play verbal smackdown with the crustily imperious Jeffrey Steingarten, or having to restrain yourself from rolling your eyes at the fawning, foodie patter of Ted Allen. I mean the chance to sup and render judgment on the beguiling and sometimes bizarre concoctions that define the show's mission. About the closest you can get is to swing by Farrah Olivia, where Morou Ouattara, who is competing this season to become "The Next Iron Chef," is spinning out some of the most dizzyingly creative cuisine the city has ever seen from his perch on a  sleepy side street in Old Town.

If his fascination with foams and powders and his predilection for oddly named plates that involve multiple components (and require some assemblage at the table), is mystifying to some (a trio of diners at a nearby table recently lifted their eyebrows in unison at the prospect of a scallop "chop"accented with melon seed milk and a small mound of dust made from bacon), it's a balm to diners suffering from palate fatigue.

Surely you've tried gazpacho -- but have you tried eggplant gazpacho? Cool, smooth and brimming with the bittersweetness of its signal ingredient, it's a reminder that the chef has long served up some of the most intriguingly conceived, most delicious soups around. At Signatures, his previous stop, he had a sushi menu adjoining the regular menu; here, instead, he deconstructs the genre with a single dish called "shocked escolar" (it's replacing, for the time being, a dish called "shocked tuna"). The chef surrounds postage-stamp squares of sweet, barely cooked fish with yellow ribbons of lightly pickled ginger, a mound of tapioca pearls filled with wasabi and a thin cocaine-line of powder made from Merlot. Halibut is too often a snooze of a dish, but this one commands your attention, the sweet lusciousness of its slightly undercooked flesh amplified by a limpid vidalia onion puree.

The menu, which changes frequently, is unified by a commitment to certain spices (anise, for instance, which formerly dressed up a filet of salmon and now animates the gnudi) and certain forms (like the sweet plantain fritters, a recent, less satisfying substitute for the exceptional black-eyed pea fritters). It's also unified by the chef's insistently global approach, which flattens distinctions and differences as it poaches liberally and joyously from the cooking of Asia, Africa and Europe. At peak form -- as in the case of the cured quail, sauced with a kind of runny, savory creme brulee and drizzled with chorizo oil -- the integration is so seamless, you're not even aware how heady it all is.

-October 2, 2007