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MADELINE'S

601 King St. W., Toronto. 416-603-2205. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $200.

Imagine you found yourself in Paris in the early autumn. What a wonderful time to take the one-day bus tour to Giverny and check out Monet's home. Monet's signature blue and yellow run through the house, but it is sadly empty; so is the pond. There are the water lilies immortalized on canvas, but it's all somewhat bereft. Until ... who is that little man sitting on a stool on the second bridge, painting the last blowsy roses? Could it be the master himself?

Thus it was last week when Susur Lee strode forth from the kitchen at Madeline's (formerly Susur) in impeccable chef's whites. He's still here! Cooking! For all who enter! Oh joy, this is a gift both unexpected and sublime. Last May, when Susur announced his imminent (we thought) departure for New York and the closing of Susur, we figured we had eaten our last (Toronto) Susur meal.

Truth to tell, we were not exactly crying in our locally brewed organic beer, because dining at Susur had become almost a chore, in the sense that in order to get all that great food one had to 1) pay $400 a couple, 2) tolerate their two-seatings policy, which meant either eating at 9 p.m. or being rushed through a 7 p.m. dinner and 3) eat the entire tasting menu, with no flexibility.

Making a reservation at Madeline's (which opened July 18) is as unpleasant as it was at Susur: They have two seatings, and will thus book a table at 6:30 or 8:30. You wanna dine at the more civilized hour of 7 or 7:30? No dice. In this respect, Susur Lee is already a Manhattanite; he'll do fine in the Big Apple, where diners are masochists who beg for tables and consider themselves lucky to be rushed through the early seating. But here in pokey little Toronto, we still cherish an old-fashioned idea of hospitality.

Despite the egregious reservation policy, dining at Madeline's with Susur cooking (apparently until mid-October) is kissin' cousin to heaven. The menu is downscaled, as in bistro-meets-Susur, and it costs half the money! Start with Welsh rarebit reimagined: four cheeses melted into a gilded butterfat cloud on toasts. Or big fat artichoke bottoms slow-cooked to develop their flavour, then filled with corn, peppers and smoked chilies. Or golden beets roasted to caramelize their sugar, with barely pickled fennel, orange and crunchy pistachio, all dressed in a delicate remake of green goddess dressing - dill and gherkins in fragile emulsion.

Remake is Madeline's byword. Gone are the stark white spaces of Susur and in their place is a fifties-style Chinese restaurant, with tongue-in-cheek. Brocade and flocking are everywhere in red or green. Ornate cut-out wooden screens divide the tables. But the menu is more west than east, save for the size of portions (small), which dictates sharing lots of them. That I remain cranky about tapas-style dining seems to have zero influence. Especially with such intricate and complex cooking as Susur's. But I am overwhelmed by sharing 12 dishes (as recommended) with three other people.

Take, for example, Madeline's crispy lobster beurre noisette, chili lime, egg, shallot and lemon balm in lettuce wrap. This is a big fat nugget of sweet perfect lobster in gossamer egg batter with a hint of brown butter inflected with the listed flavours in a crisp lettuce nest. One is to wrap the lettuce around the lobster, pour on the tiny shot glass of an unknown (to us) bittersweet citrus fruit and pick it up.

It is a play on rainbow chopped in crystal fold, and it makes superlative eating. I want more than one bite, but we're moving on - to crispy garlic Cornish hen with gorgonzola cheese sauce and sautéed apple. This, too, is magnificent - the juiciest hen flesh I've met in years, skin so crisp it's almost Peking duck, and the happy surprise of caramelized apple with delicate gorgonzola sauce.

Then comes a pale green sweet pepper stuffed in equally ineffable cumin-spiked minced lamb, and big fat uber-tender squid tentacles very lightly battered, barely fried, to dip in smoked chili mayo. Similar to the gossamer battered green beans to dip in choron sauce (hollandaise tinted pink with pureed fresh tomato). More irresistible animal fat comes in the form of pork belly - crisp on the outside with a melting heart, atop a sweet silken puree of celery root and potato.

By the time Susur leaves the kitchen to work the dining room, we have been seduced by ruby-red duck breast with honey-chili-orange glaze, scallops with fresh chorizo and potato puree zinged with lemon and garlic and fragile spinach gnocchi with an encyclopedic sauce. When the master appears, reincarnated as it were from New York, rescued, however temporarily, from Babylon, we get it: We have been eating Susur food. No wonder it's all so perfect.

Which is not to say that Madeline's chef, Dominic Amaral, can't cut the mustard. Chef Amaral has been cooking with Susur for eight years, since just before Susur opened. As sous-chef at Susur, he obviously did a lot of the cooking. And when Susur leaves to open his resto in New York's chic new Thompson Hotel, Chef Amaral will be the tall toque at Madeline's. We are not worried, but let's just say this: Eat at Madeline's ASAP, 'cause nobody cooks like Susur.