Restaurant Review | Luxee: High Concepts Fall Flat on the Palate

It’s easy to like Luxee, the dessert bar that opened last month on the Lower East Side. It feels like a simple neighborhood cafe, but it’s actually a satellite of L’École Vantan, a fashion and culinary school in Tokyo.

All the meticulously composed desserts are organic, though whether they’re good for you, as Luxee claims, is a discussion for you and your nutritionist.

Too bad some of these high concepts fall flat on the palate. The menu is short: five desserts, two salads and several kinds of cookies, including the addictive rosemary sablés ($7 for a box of 11). But the vegan Green Forest parfait ($12), a chocolate mousse made with whipped avocado, could have used some of the sin of dairy, while the Normandy cheesecake ($12), made with Camembert, could have used less.

The chef’s special caramel apple ($14), on the other hand, is a masterpiece, three manifestations of caramel (in a milk chocolate mousse, as a brittle and as a sauce), matched by four stages of apple (frozen in a sorbet with basil, as a gelée, in a semifreddo and as a neat row of raw slices), all arrayed beneath a sugar dome as thin as a soap bubble.

It’s an impressive sight. The interplay of flavors is kaleidoscopic, all you imagine caramel and apples could be. What a shame that it feels grandly out of place, a course in search of a meal.