The restaurant is more like a $300 pair of jeans: Calling them casual and edgy betrays how long you've lived among the moneyed classes. A meal at Prospect costs $80 a person (and that's without counting cocktails); drinks and appetizers more like $50. After an anticlimactic first meal, I revised my expectations, ditching comparisons to the herd of wild-haired, experimental, lower-cost restaurants stampeding into town this summer. And when I returned, it became clear that everything Prospect actually wants to be ― urbane, subtle, playful in the mannered tones of an 18th-century French noble ― it realizes beautifully.Ravi Kapur's dishes are honed to a blinglike polish ― they're far from raw, which is just fine with Kauffman. Especially in a dish offering up the double-pork pleasures of braised cheek and belly, served with shaved fennel salad and orange-scented grains. Lovely, sure. The anti-Boulevard French revolution? Nope.
Oh, and don't forget to get a taste of Prospect (without dropping the inevitable couple hundred) by clicking through photographer Lara Hata's slideshow, Chip Off the Old Boulevard.
