http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/dining/beet-agern-restaurant.html 2016-09-08 13:57:19 Sliced at Tableside, That’s Not Beef. It’s a Beet. The root gets a lavish preparation at Agern, a Nordic outpost in Grand Central Terminal. === At Agern’s beet dish is described with minimal language on the menu: “salt and ash baked beet root.” But when the serving arrives, either à la carte or as part of one of the restaurant’s two tasting menus, the customer is treated to the sort of tableside showmanship usually associated with prime rib. The executive chef, First he cracks open the hard shell, an oven-baked carapace of salt, vegetable ash and egg whites that could be mistaken for a dinosaur egg. Next he removes a juicy beet nestling inside. He slices off the vegetable’s outer peel. What remains is a glistening red-purple core, as rich as smoked meat, that he places on the plate atop a nest of fresh, pickled and fermented beets. “What you are getting is four versions of beet,” Mr. Gislason, 38, said on Sunday evening at Agern. (Extra punches of flavor and texture come from ingredients like pickled huckleberries, fried caraway seeds and freshly shaved horseradish.) The beets are accompanied by miniature loaves of chewy rye bread, “the heart and soul of the Nordic kitchen,” as the chef put it. In spite of that elaborate presentation, the dish stands out as an example of resourcefulness. The vegetable ash in the crust gives Mr. Gislason a way to avoid wasting scraps like onion skins and carrot tops. (The vegetable parts are “incinerated,” he said, before being transformed into a black powder in a blender.) In Iceland, where Mr. Gislason oversees four restaurants, including the acclaimed Dill, cooking with fire is the norm, as is cooking outside. (This is a country where rye bread is sometimes made by dropping dough into a hole in the ground and letting the heat from nearby geysers take care of the baking.) His approach to gastronomy is rooted in the flavors imparted by flames and fresh air. But in a busy train station like Grand Central, it’s not so simple. Open fires are forbidden. So Mr. Gislason said that the salt-and-ash treatment, which unfolds over several hours in a 400-degree oven, represents “a way to get those flavors and that smell without the good people from Grand Central Terminal throwing us out.” Agern, Grand Central Terminal, 89 East 42nd Street, 646-568-4018,