Marigold Kitchen

Robert Halpern had been forewarned. The 33-year-old Villanova native was well-informed when he embarked on his bubbly avant-garde adventures as the new chef-owner of Marigold Kitchen. Stiflingly conservative Philadelphians, it seems, are just not keen on the futuristic food movement known as molecular gastronomy.

"I've heard people here aren't just neutral about foam," he said. "They dislike it. It makes them angry."

That assertion, which didn't deter Halpern, is certainly borne out by the paucity of chefs pushing boundaries with scientific techniques for reimagining food, along the lines of those innovated by pioneers such as Spain's El Bulli, Chicago's Alinea, and New York's wd~50. Yes, there are plenty of foaming canisters and quick-freeze liquid-nitro tanks in town. But few places, since the demise of Salt, have dedicated themselves as wholly as the new Marigold does to the pursuit of deconstructing and re-extruding our food.

Halpern, it seems, hasn't met a piece of flesh at Marigold he didn't want to slice to bits and sculpt back together with a little meat glue. ("We like perfect cylinders here," he said.) No wonder the tenderloin in his "pork, beans & beer" was such a strikingly smooth pillar, albeit dabbed with a sudsy toupee of bubbled Guinness over pureed white beans.

There were some ridiculously overwrought flourishes on the plate, like those microscopic yellow and red gummy-gel dots reduced from the zest of 20 lemons and who-knows-how-many cranberries. But this dish overall, like much of Marigold's menu, showed fundamental virtues in its strong pairing of vividly steeped flavors and textures, the stout's snapping bubbles an aroma as much as a sauce, the beans adding a starch of creamy silk, the pork as tender as ever. Hey, meat glue is not half-bad.

Too many young chefs, caught up in the whiz-bang of their immersion circulators and soy lecithin powders, forget the basic concept of simply making their food taste good - not just weird. Halpern, whose impressively varied experiences range from the crunchy veg mecca of Ithaca's Moosewood to Santa Fe's Southwestern trailblazer Coyote Cafe, and Radnor's 333 Belrose, clearly isn't one of those.