Encanto

It would have been easy for José Avillez to open a vegetarian restaurant as a gesture. Encanto is not that. It is a full tasting menu built entirely from vegetables, fruit, grains and pulses, cooked with the same technique and the same seriousness as anything at Belcanto — and crucially, it never once tries to convince you that something is meat.

The pleasure is in watching familiar ingredients get taken apart. A tomato course arrives in four states at once and tastes more like tomato than a tomato does. Cabbage is charred until it is closer to caramel than to a vegetable. There is a mushroom dish with the depth of a braised shin, achieved entirely with fermentation and patience. The desserts, unsurprisingly given the house, are among the strongest courses of the night.

The room is small, low-lit and comfortable, and the service is the polished Avillez standard — attentive without hovering. Wine pairings are adventurous, which they have to be: matching wine to vegetables is a harder problem than matching it to a steak, and the sommelier here clearly enjoys the challenge.

Honest notes: it is priced as fine dining, and some guests balk at paying tasting-menu money for vegetables, which is a bias rather than an argument but a real one. A few courses lean more clever than delicious. And unlike Arkhe, which grows much of its own produce and feels rooted in the soil, Encanto's pleasures are more technical than agricultural. Whether that is a criticism depends entirely on what you came for.