On Saturday morning, the scream of buzz saws rips through the tranquil dining room of Susur Lee's New York outpost.
With only 2½ days remaining before the city's tastemakers get their first taste of Mr. Lee's cuisine at a Gourmet magazine party celebrating the chef's arrival, workmen in heavy boots are still painting walls, carting glassware and hauling furniture into Shang, the restaurant on the second floor of the trendy Thompson LES hotel. The kitchen still has no gas.
But three storeys below, in the hotel's main kitchen, Mr. Lee projects an aura of serene solidity as he stands over a tray of oven-dried tomatoes, deftly scraping out their innards, and quietly calling for an update on preparations.
One cook opens a large plastic bin to reveal racks of pink lamb standing upright, the flesh nestled in a thick grass of green herbs.
"Mmmm, smell this," Mr. Lee purrs appreciatively, as he dips his nose forward. He samples a morsel of seared duck breast and says it's ready to come out of its marinating bath.
Mulling the party a couple of days away, Mr. Lee says it's an extraordinary honour to be feted even before Shang opens, but he recognizes the double-edged nature of the undertaking.
"I feel very emotional, because it's like: Wow, they're throwing a party for me, it's such a great welcome," Mr. Lee says. "And at the same time, it's like: Okay, Susur, so whaddya got?"
The move to New York comes after about two years of discussions with the management of Thompson Hotels, a boutique chain popular among the moneyed young.
Shang, which opens in the first week of December, is in the company's newest hotel, on the Lower East Side.
For the New York fooderati, this moment has been a long time coming. Word about Mr. Lee's Chinese-influenced globe-trotting cuisine began spreading shortly after he opened Lotus in 1987 in Toronto, his adopted hometown. About 12 years ago, Drew Nieporent, a partner of Robert De Niro's in Nobu and Tribeca Grill, asked if Mr. Lee would like to bring his cuisine to New York. But his kids - Mr. Lee has three boys, now aged 10, 18, and 19 - were too small for him to consider moving the family. "Furthermore, I needed a little time to understand about business. So I give myself time - and Canada has been very good for me," he reflects.
Leaving the comfort of Toronto, which has nurtured Mr. Lee for more than 20 years and helped make him one of the country's superstar chefs, could prove to be a career-capping moment. Shang, he notes, is a Chinese word for up: "Everything is in high notes. It means high quality, moving up, looking up, looking forward," he said. "It's a very positive emotion." How appropriate: This is, after all, Susur Lee's Shang moment.
But it comes fraught with pitfalls. After all this time, and all the hype, he knows he needs to exceed expectations.
"Timing is very important to me. It's not about, 'Hey, there's this opportunity,' " he continues. "Opportunity is one thing. This is not about just supplying a product and putting it on shelves. This is a people business. It's about personality, teamwork, network, understanding the economy." Mr. Lee catches himself, rolls his eyes, stretches out his arms and turns his palms upward, as if to say, What can you do?
It hardly needs to be said: Now is a perfectly awful time to open just about any business, never mind a high-end restaurant in New York catering to that subset of the city that is now discovering en masse, for the first time in a generation, the notion of personal economic uncertainty.
