If this restaurant ever tumbles, the ripples will be felt throughout the French butter industry.  Guy Savoy is named, of course, after the great French chef, and it opened in May 2006 in a new annex of Caesars Palace. Unlike his peers Alain Ducasse and Joël Robuchon, Mr. Savoy didn’t plant his flag in New York as well as Vegas. The neon-lit Nevada desert is the only place outside France where he operates a restaurant, and that may explain the efforts that have gone into making it seem like a singular event.  Before we were presented with the encyclopedia-heavy list of more than 2,000 wines, a small table was set down to act as its pedestal. There was a gleaming silver coaster under our bottle of still water, and another beneath the sparkling.  But what’s more impressive about Guy Savoy is that it keeps this pampering from teetering into parody — a mistake that was sometimes made, for example, at Mr. Ducasse’s restaurant in the Essex House in Manhattan. There’s no gold paint at Guy Savoy, whose aesthetic feels Japanese, even somewhat minimalist.  The servers were illusionists, absent until the moment we needed them and then — abracadabra — present.  The best of the food was exquisite, as well it should have been. Our 10-course tasting menu was $290 a person for food alone. An advertised “90-minute experience” of four courses would have been $190. À la carte appetizers range from $38 to $90, entrees $60 to $95.  Worth it? A dish called colors of caviar made me think so. It came in a tall, rounded glass, and it was composed, like a terrarium, of horizontal bands: a caviar gelée at the bottom, pure caviar at the top, a caviar cream in between.  The different textures and forms dispersed the flavor of caviar and managed its intensity so that I could savor so much of it in so few bites without being overwhelmed.  This restaurant’s genius lies not in wholly new culinary adventures but in fresh treatments for familiar (and beloved) luxuries. Roasted foie gras came in a duck consommé with hints of cardamom, and there were sweet chestnuts with it, along with some bitter chocolate: a deft, delicate balance.  Black truffle was not only sliced thin and made to float like dark lily pads on the surface of an asparagus soup but also mixed into a butter for toasted brioche beside the soup.  But for this kind of money, the bliss should be constant and every dish a major success, and the meal petered out as it went along. Two small rectangles of slightly dry, excessively lean veal were sad, pale echoes of the glistening roast that had been presented to us before carving.  And while a dessert combining chocolate fondant, crunchy praline and chicory cream was pleasant, a four-hour meal with trappings and rituals this sublime demanded something more. Where was the magic when it was needed most?  With the first course came an unusual instruction: I was told to dab some perfume on my wrist.  Not perfume exactly, but an oil made with pink grapefruit, tarragon, ginger and black pepper, all ingredients in the appetizer before me, which I would experience first as a scent and then as a taste, the sequence underscoring the way these senses work in tandem.  I dabbed, inhaled and only then ate, from a bowl with a grapefruit and tarragon salad at the bottom, a grapefruit sorbet above it and, over that, a grapefruit mousse infused with black pepper and ginger. The process unequivocally heightened my attunement to the flavors.  It also made me feel a little absurd.  That’s how it goes at Coi (pronounced kwa), which turns dining into art, into religion, into Chanel No. 5.  There’s no more perfume after the first course, at least none applied to a pulse point. But there’s a lingering appreciation — at times, reverence — for the meticulousness with which the chef, Daniel Patterson, approaches his cooking, the ambition he lavishes on it.  The restaurant’s name is from an archaic French word for tranquillity, which is what I found in its windowless, generously upholstered main dining room, with just 29 seats and one way to eat: an 11-course tasting menu ($115).  A small lounge between this inner sanctum and the street has its own selection of about a dozen savory and sweet dishes that can be ordered à la carte ($4 to $19). But the tasting menu is a mostly fixed affair, with several options along the way so that vegetarians can hew to a meatless, fishless path.  The restaurant’s scrupulousness was evident at the start.  “Would you like some double-purified water?” a server asked. I did, and after several glasses of it he remarked: “You seem to have a prodigious thirst.”  Mr. Patterson has a prodigious talent, wedded to a celebration of the bounty of fruits and vegetables available to a California cook. (He is an occasional contributor to The New York Times, but I’ve never met him and have no relationship with him.)  He filled a crisp, flaky tart with caramelized endive so sweet it seemed to straddle the line between fruit and vegetable. After that came an opulent soup of puréed cauliflower, almond milk and beautifully calibrated spikes of cilantro and blasts of preserved lemon.  And later there was a raviolo brimming with sautéed hedgehog, yellow foot and black trumpet mushrooms. Above it was toasted hazelnut; below it, a purée of celery root, hazelnut oil and butter. I wished there were more bites of it. I wished there were infinite bites of it.  Mr. Patterson certainly knows how to work with fish (a lovely scallop tartare, abalone à la plancha) and meat. My final savory dish was guinea hen, poached sous vide and then seared in duck fat. It was fantastic.  But he clearly prefers to take a daintier, more delicate route, and it’s possible, after all of these modestly portioned courses, to hunger for something messier, something more.  And the service didn’t always have a finesse to match its preciousness. My glass of wine was poured without a pause for me to taste it. A server forgot my request for a copy of the printed list of purveyors in the menu.  And when I left, I found my coat tossed across a chair in the lounge. The goodbye didn’t smell as sweet as the hello.  9411 Culver Boulevard, Culver City, Calif.; (310) 839-6800, fraicherestaurantla.com.  As our server spoke, my spirits tanked.  She was telling us monkfish. We were looking at entree options including flatiron steak, pork chop and halibut, and she was telling us monkfish.  “It’s my favorite thing on the menu,” she insisted.  Fine. We’d do it her way. We’d get monkfish, even though it’s so frequently disappointing: too bland and spongy, too cold in the middle.  This monkfish wasn’t. It had been cut into three medallions almost thin enough to qualify as cutlets, which were floured, dipped in egg and sautéed in olive oil and white wine. They had edges and the faintest suggestion of a crust. They had character. And they were placed on a generous bed of garlicky sautéed spinach and puréed potatoes, all for $24.  Fraîche isn’t about pyrotechnics or lavish indulgences. It’s about abundantly flavorful food cooked with skill and sense and presented at restrained prices.  Those prices in part reflect the restaurant’s location in a city on the western edge of Los Angeles that has only recently acquired a dab of luster.  Fraîche takes advantage of California, and grants the wishes of many diners everywhere, with its attention to superior produce, like the blood orange, watercress and mint in a terrific farro salad ($10) and the arugula and endive in an even better sautéed mushroom salad ($12) that I could eat every day. That I would eat every day, if I had my druthers and if I lived near Fraîche.  It’s a determinedly user-friendly restaurant, stocking raw-bar and charcuterie selections for people who want to do that kind of grazing while they sample wines from a list with many affordable options and no particular allegiance to California.  Mediterranean countries get much more consideration, and that’s in keeping with a menu that focuses on Italy and France. There were seven pasta dishes, two of which I tried and one of which I adored: al dente pappardelle tossed with sweetbreads, cipollini onions, pea tendrils and — bring ’em on! — brandy and butter ($14).  For entrees my two friends and I took another piece of advice from our server, who was at once relaxed and entirely professional, and got lamb stew ($24). It required more strenuous chewing than it should have.  But the kitchen re-established its mettle with branzino cooked inside parchment with a strong cast of assertive sidekicks, among them roasted red peppers, black olives and fennel. They infused every bite of the moist fish.  The chef is Jason Travi. The pastry chef is Miho Travi, his wife, whose very fine work can be more rococo than his. The layers of her majestic Mont Blanc, for example, include Japanese sweet potato purée, roasted sweet potato, Chantilly cream, chiffon cake, vanilla ice cream and meringue ($9).  We ate deep inside the restaurant, against a handsome stone wall. Through open French doors we could see many tables under strings of tiny white lights in a tented all-weather area on the sidewalk.  Those lights are the kind of faintly hokey, populist touch that Fraîche uses to establish its lack of airs and position itself as a restaurant that, while plenty sophisticated, is approachable enough for a weekly visit.  My friends vowed to return soon and often — and to get the monkfish. Only an irredeemable pessimist wouldn’t.
The second in a series of four articles that rank 10 of the country’s most acclaimed, ambitious, promising or intriguing new restaurants.