Here’s how I got into south Minneapolis’s white-hot Bûcheron, an extravagantly chic and intimate 38-seat pine-and-gold spot tinkered out of the historic Nicollet Avenue corner spot that once birthed restaurant icons Corner Table and Revival. I deployed a sophisticated technique known as: busting in the door at 4:58 p.m. when the staff was still tying on aprons and grabbing one of the 10 walk-in bar seats. From my perch, I watched the show—five cooks absolutely hauling, firing, dancing with rising and falling towers of flame—and I ordered stylish, understated cocktails fashioned of fascinating homemade ingredients and dishes of such encyclopedic complexity that my mind seemed to drift away as the server listed the twelfth or maybe hundredth component.

I quickly discovered that true culinary joy can be seized by ordering the celery root tortellini in acorn broth, the seafood plateau, the exquisite foie gras, and the staggering sticky toffee cake. But I didn’t exactly know why.

I phoned up chef and co-owner Adam Ritter, who opened the restaurant in January with his former Bellecour front-of-the-house managing star wife Jeanie Janas Ritter. “Tell me about the tortellini,” I asked. I wondered if the dish, with a brief menu description citing ‘acorns’ was really made with the thing that squirrels like and you crunch on the ground in autumn, or perhaps some Italian liqueur, or simply a play on the restaurant’s name, which is French for lumberjack?

The flavors of the dish are subtle, elusive, fascinating: woody, but fresh, like an aged wood-cask sherry, but without any sweetness or alcohol. Paired with mushrooms and celeriac, the bowl of pasta in broth is really a whole symphony of earthy tones, like music made primarily for bassoon, and then, in a novel counterpoint, the familiar wheaty flavors of the fresh pasta come across as a sweet and light, fluty top note.

It all started on his parents’ farm near St. Cloud, Ritter said, with an oak tree fitted with a tire swing. Then he took me through the various elements of the dish, which, in my notes, soon ran to a thousand words. The acorns are indeed the real-world sort. After they are gathered and the caps get knocked off, they’re cracked, go in a pressure cooker with water, and then an actual acorn stock begins. It is combined with a slow-simmered, cloudless chicken stock made with onions and thyme, which, while not technically a consommé, is effectively a consommé. I thought of the copy of a Robuchon cookbook that rests above the bar. Ritter spent formative early years working for Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas. Is this what it’s like to work for Robuchon, I wondered, where people in authority constantly pester you about the technical differences between consommé and stock? Now, for the pasta, which is made daily, hand-rolled, filled with a puree of roasted celeriac and mascarpone cheese—the celeriac roast with onions and thyme, pureed, run through a chinois, as perfected by Ritter when he worked at Gavin Kaysen’s Demi. Next, a grapeseed mushroom oil is built in a sous vide Cryovac bag using locally foraged mushrooms as well as local black trumpet mushrooms. Finally, West Coast maitake mushrooms are pan-roasted with butter, garlic, and thyme to order; the tortellini are boiled to order; everything meets in a bowl with a soup’s ladle of chicken-acorn stock, a halo of dots of mushroom oil, and Bob’s your uncle!

I fanned myself and sought a chair, but of course discovered I was already sitting.

So much work! So many steps!

At first you might think $22 is a lot for a bowl of tortellini en brodo, but then you learn it took a lifetime, and then another six months, and then all day, and suddenly it seems cheap at half the price.

Everything I asked about on the menu at Bûcheron was similarly elaborate. As I spoke to Ritter, I began to envision a kitchen with a mise en place of hundreds, if not thousands, of ingredients. (Mise en place refers to the setup of stuff you need to make a dish. For instance, if you were to make pesto, your mise en place would include basil and oil, but if you dotted a bit of pesto on a finished dish, your mise en place would include the pesto.) When the Ritters explained that Bûcheron would be part of the “bistronomy” movement of using fine-dining techniques in casual settings, the phrase landed on my ears meaning nothing. Hasn’t everyone been sous-viding everything for 20 years at this point? But eating at Bûcheron and learning about the food changed my understanding: This isn’t mere fine-dining technique; this is the real stuff—the 19-course, checker-sized entrée, tweezer precision of Demi, but used on big, normal-sized food at a chic little family spot in Minneapolis. Wow.

The results can be fantastic. I adored the petit plateau, an intimate, for-two version of the big-splurge shellfish tower, with kampachi crudo in olive oil; fat, plump peeled poached Gulf shrimp; and four fresh oysters from Maine. All of this is served with three sauces: a rhubarb mignonette, a black garlic aioli, and a warm espelette pepper butter. It’s very much the spirit of Bûcheron, on ice: What do fine-dining power-players want when they are on a real-world budget and live in south Minneapolis? A $48 seafood tower, which, of course, is expensive for an appetizer but cheap for a seafood tower. Pair Bûcheron’s plateau with a couple glasses of blanc de blancs Champagne from G. Richomme, and take a picture of your good self, because I assure you that no one on God’s green earth—not Beyoncé, not Elon Musk, and not nobody—is having a better seafood tower experience. Perhaps Elon or Beyoncé might have one as good but not better. It’s like the perfect strawberry: This is it, this is the top, this is all there is. Clink glasses—we made it, baby!

Many of the dishes are like this: There’s no better to be had—this is the top. The pommes dauphines are basically tater tots such as they must serve in heaven: crispy balls of lush potato, a warm Gruyère cheese sauce of knee-weakening delight. Ritter serves a foie gras terrine of such satiny silkiness it glides through your soul, pairing it with a warm, just-baked scone is an insight of genius. The tart Minnesota raspberry fall jam perks up your palate and prevents the whole thing from becoming too rich, bite by bite, as does the piped fluid apple brandy and apple cider agar agar gel, and the butter-fried crumbs of chestnut puree, arrived at by so much work I invite one of you to make an hour-long documentary about it.

“What we’re supposed to do as chefs is take something we learned from our mentors, build on it, make it better, make it modern,” Ritter explained to me.

Another supreme delight: The sticky toffee cake, which I’m mad about, involves homemade toffee boiled for an hour and turned into a sauce with cold cream; a cake of pureed dates and chocolate; homemade hazelnut crémeux, that is, pipeable hazelnut mousse; candied hazelnuts; fresh mandarin zest; freeze-dried mandarin orange segments; and a quenelle of homemade mandarin sorbet. It reads on the palate like one of those chocolate oranges you smash to make it fall into segments, but instead of falling into segments of one thing, it splinters into segments of a dozen flavors and energies—this one a party, that one a snow of citrus, this one a sparkle, that one a truffle. Oh, what fun. It’s my leading dessert of 2024, so far, an absolute delight, a height of heights. One night I paired it with a textbook-perfect cappuccino—frothy but concentrated, prettily plated—and I thought: Oh, this is it, the reason you go to restaurants. No mere mortal could ever do this at home.

You know those phrases like: a writer’s writer, a pitcher’s pitcher, a safe-cracker’s safe-cracker, and so on? Bûcheron is, without question, something in that world—a fine-dining chef’s casual restaurant by a chef’s chef. The sort of place that the more you enter having familiarity with phrases like “Sakura Wagyu culotte” and “wild rice furikake,” the more you will be delighted with Bûcheron. Adam Ritter has a work-harder and work-harder-still philosophy of cooking, which is one of the things that made Demi so delightful during the five years he led it.

That said, I didn’t love my first visits to Bûcheron. I kept ordering dishes I found to have too many clashing elements or that tasted like no one had sampled the final versions before sending them to the table. I disliked the little gem salad with half a dozen nubbins of lobster, citrus segments, tarragon, and sherry mayonnaise—the whole thing tasted bitter, bright, unharmonious. I disliked a bitter roast turnip paired with bitter turnip greens, bone marrow, and a pear-ginger puree that got lost in the mix. I disliked a pallid combination of soggy cod and acrid sunchoke. I disliked more than I liked on my first visits, and it took longer than I felt it should have for me to find what was amazing about it. I wished the menu was mapped like ski hills are: These are the bunny slopes, these are the double-black-diamond dishes, for experts only. If you haven’t been yet and want my advice: pommes dauphines, shellfish plateau, foie, tartare, your choice of any and all of the desserts.

The beverage program at Bûcheron, by Jeanie Janas Ritter and general manager (and Demi and Bellecour alum) Tyler McLeod, is, in every aspect, astonishing, world-class, phenomenal. The first day I went to Bûcheron, I happened to have received a crabby bit of mail from a reader about restaurants’ inability to make a good cappuccino. As I contemplated the fluffy bit of foam over the potent, fresh coffee from local roaster Wesley Andrews in my beautiful handmade mug, I thought: problem solved. They also offer it decaf, and with a shot of orange cognac as a lovely after-dinner grace note you typically only encounter in fine hotels.

All the cocktails are graceful, enchanting, superb. I particularly adored the Paper Plane. Made with reposado tequila, a red aperitivo with a resemblance to Campari, amaro, and a house-made honey-apricot syrup, it reads as smooth, bitter, light, chic, novel—everything you want in a cocktail.

The dessert wine program is the best I think I’ve ever seen in Minnesota: so many interesting aged dessert wines from around the world—this one from a secret cache of 1990s zinfandels, this one a chestnut cask–aged Madeira—all so fun. And the staff is happy to split them between two glasses, so you can try and share more. It is all clearly the work of insider restaurant professionals with great taste who have been in close conversation with other insider restaurant professionals for years and years.

But, will Bûcheron be for you, personally? I imagine I’ve given you enough information, and the burger-and-wings afficionados have likely left the chat (though you burger folk really would enjoy those pommes dauphines). As for the folk who want to know what it’s like to eat the foods top chefs eat when they’re having a night out and want to know what top chefs will be eating in a generation, they will be lining up outside to get a seat at the table. As you make your own decision, I’ll just leave you with a thought: There are no mighty oaks without acorns, no bright future without reaching for the stars, and if you want to know what those concepts taste like in one spoon, you know where to go.

4257 Nicollet Ave., Mpls., 612-255-5632