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.
Mr. Lee, however, insists he is undaunted. "Even with the way the economy is now, I think a lot of people are really curious, and willing to spend money to come to the restaurant," he replies. Though he is still pricing the menu, he and his partners are using the watchword "affordable."
Two days later, at Monday night's Gourmet party, Mr. Lee's old friend Mr. Nieporent dismisses suggestions of bad timing. "Cream rises to the top," he shrugs.
Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet, notes that waves of people have called her office for an invitation to the cocktail party - the list ballooned to almost 400 - and she expects them to be dazzled. "His food is amazing, and New Yorkers always feel like we ought to have everything great here," she says.
While she allows that it's not the best moment to open a restaurant, she says Mr. Lee's timing was wise in other ways. "I think he was smart to wait until New Yorkers were sophisticated enough to really understand the kind of food that he does. This is a city that has been very Eurocentric for most of its history, and I think in terms of people really understanding what he does and giving it the respect that he deserves - only in the last few years has that really been the case."
On Monday, one after another guest accepts a plate or spoonful of Mr. Lee's food, takes a bite and responds with astonishment. There is that lamb (delicately curried and served with a taste of fried banana, carrot and cardamom) and duck (à la Chinoise with a spiced nut chew) and 10 other hors d'oeuvres, including tiny balls of foie gras mousse with green onion pancakes and a huckleberry jam, caramelized sablefish with miso mustard and salmon caviar on a rice chip, and Mr. Lee's famous Singapore slaw salad.
Much of this is new territory for New York, not that Mr. Lee would say so. When asked what he brings to the local market, he prefers to spin out anecdotes about his years in Hong Kong or Singapore. He hasn't spent long familiarizing himself with the local culinary landscape, and seems uninterested in becoming part of the city's cult of food personalities. Still, in the few months he has been here (albeit flying back and forth to Toronto, where he still oversees Lee, and his newest restaurant, Madeline's, opened last summer), he has been impressed with the city's way of doing things.
In October, Mr. Lee cooked a small private event for a handful of VIPs, including Madonna, which required some fancy stage managing, given that the dining room still wasn't ready for habitation and all the food prep had to occur in the main kitchen three storeys below.
"It was almost like Cirque du Soleil," he chuckles. "Upstairs, it was just a construction site. They cleaned everything out, put in furniture - it was like a stage, suddenly it becomes another restaurant - and then they rented out some chairs and tables. We cooked everything down here and brought it upstairs, co-ordinating with walkie-talkies."
"That's one thing I like about New York," he says. "They make things happen."