xecutive Chef/restaurant proprietor extraordinaire and Manhattan bad boy, David Bouley, has ventured far from the bustling isle to unveil his first Miami venture. Still cooking fresh new-French concoctions par excellence, Bouley is consistently and deservedly fawned on by the foodie set. An altruistic evolution, he has deemed Miami deserving of his deft culinary hand.

Jacques Garcia's mixed-bag-of-elegance design draws influence from innumerable and myriad sources, including neo-gothic, nu-Eastern, and, of course, Art Deco. All this is the big budget layout for the kitchen's innovative dishes. All the courses on the tasting menu were excellent, but heavily oriented toward meat and fish.

Take the roasted chicken for example; an aggressive truffle-mushroom sauce brings a tender, skinless chicken to life. A scallop-crusted sea bass was curiously dressed with a bouillabaisse sauce. Coconut jasmine rice, firm but gentle, rounds out the plate. A sage-infused Cooperstown organic lamb is drizzled with a surprisingly rich zucchini-mint puree, and plated with a few nicely done gnocchi. A rather insipid Cape Cod lobster, meanwhile, arrives with bright, colorful mango, papaya and some baby bok choy, striving in vain to make its presence felt.