View From the Top

Jorge's menu is small and precisely focused. You get the sense of harmonies deftly woven — there is no appetizer, for instance, that wouldn't make a terrific starter for any of the entrées. The flavor profiles of each dish are distinct, yet the whole menu is of a piece. It's a quiet, modest vision that's immensely pleasing when you realize how rare it is for chefs these days to exert such self-control.

We started with the Kobe beef salad and fried ravioli stuffed with lump crab and celeriac ($18). The Kobe salad is a 210-million-dollar-take on Thai beef salad — emerald-green stalks of watercress tossed with daikon radish and cucumber, larded with paper-thin slivers of melting Kobe beef, a hot-and-sour dressing given texture and weight with ground peanuts. This was wonderful. Oversized ravioli were golden and gently crusted, stuffed with a flavorful mix of lump crab and faintly celery-scented celeriac, a drizzle of shrimp and lemongrass nage to swipe each mouthful through. This too came with a perfectly dressed watercress salad, fresh and cool and peppery.

We followed these with seared branzino fillet ($32); the fish of the night — mahi — which comes with your choice of three sauces (market price was $29.95); and a lobster salad ($22). The branzino — a Venetian striped bass — was superb, fillets bathed in a broth made with white miso and flavored with ginger, with the lightest of vegetables — wilted bok choy and cubes of kabocha squash, the Japanese version of pumpkin or butternut. The branzino's skin had been seared crisp for texture, and it exuded a condensed, sea-rich flavor against the tender white flesh. Since we couldn't decide which sauce to have with the mahi, we asked for two, the first a gorgeous raspberry-colored vinaigrette made from the sweet, lavender-fleshed Okinawan potatoes from Hawaii, the second a mustardy, pale-yellow Dijon wakame. The potato vinaigrette was fruity and faintly sweet; the Dijon-wakame, flavored with brown seaweed, was sharper on the palate — but both were excellent, unexpected accompaniments to this very fresh fish. Along with a deconstructed lobster salad (baby arugula on one side, on the other, a terrine of lobster chunks, mined with hearts of palm and mango tahini dressing and set on a pink round of watermelon), these three dishes made one of the prettiest palettes of tropical colors I've ever seen on one table.

Desserts at Solu are a knockout — particularly the chef's choice "dessert flight" ($28), enough for three of us and as varied and delightful an ending as you could ask for. A baked chocolate egg roll, warm and soft in the center, came topped with luscious mango-banana salsa; lychee fruit coated in milk chocolate had been set on a sugared mille feuille alongside a chunk of sake-soaked mango; there were miniature cinnamon-sugared churros; a fantastic crème brûlée decorated with candied ginger; and a deep-purple sweet potato pie festooned with a taro chip and served alongside chewy, housemade minimarshmallows.

Prices are high. Solu may be a special-occasion restaurant for most of us — but what an occasion! Our nice waiter was content to let us linger as long as we wanted, tucked into our leather booth by a window, and truly we didn't want to go anywhere at all — if we'd planned ahead, we might have just commandeered one of those $400-a-night suites (discounted for the grand opening) and stayed the night, with a massage the next morning and a dip under the waterfall. No doubt the view from the 21st floor is spectacularly unobstructed. When you've got a choice, it's always preferable to be on the inside looking out. 3800 N. Ocean Dr., Singer Island. Open for breakfast Monday through Friday 6:30 till 11 a.m., Saturday and Sunday 7:30 till 11:30 a.m. Lunch Monday through Friday 11:30 a.m. till 2:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday noon till 2:30 p.m. Dinner nightly 5:30 till 10:30 p.m. Call 561-340-1795.