Jean-Georges has fine dining (and French fries) down to a science

"We're experimenting with some of Heston Blumenthal's approaches to French fries," Eric Johnson, chef partner of Jean Georges, told me a few months ago. "Come in anytime, our kitchen is your kitchen," he said. I did not need any more prompting. Heston Blumenthal is the chef extraordinaire at three-Michelin-starred The Fat Duck in the U.K. He's one of the trailblazers of molecular gastronomy, which is like a combination of chemistry and mad science aimed at perfecting and expanding on cooking techniques.

On my kitchen visit, I learned that Johnson and his team have even added more steps to the process of Blumenthal's signature "triple-cooked chip," transforming it into an exemplar of Jean-Georges' perfectionist standards.

There's nothing I like better than trying not to make a pest of myself inside the secret domain of chefs. At Jean-Georges, you may think you can easily see everything that goes into the cooking because technically it's an "open kitchen." But if you don't understand what you're seeing, you may believe they are cooking the same way you cook at home, just with nicer ingredients.

Actually they are using cutting-edge techniques like sous-vide and liquid nitrogen, as well as age-old practices that even pro chefs have trouble mastering like hand-beating Hollandaise sauce (while I was in the kitchen, one young chef ruined two batches before successfully whipping it up on the third try).

I was greeted by the exceptionally enthusiastic and affable executive sous chef Lam Ming Kim, who is as much a linguist as a chef. He rapidly switched between beautiful English and fluent Mandarin-his native language is Cantonese. He knew the various ingredients in the kitchen, such as the home waters of every type of fish, in intimate detail.

We immediately got to work on French fry perfection, or tried to. The problem was that the special potato necessary for fry nirvana required pre-ordering. All they had in the storeroom were two other kinds of potatoes, one high-starch (good for mashed) and one low-starch (good for crispy scalloped). So Lam had to show me the process using the wrong potato.

Fortunately, they had fries in the freezer made with the correct, medium-starch potato. We put our potato through the paces: peel, cut, cold water bath, boil until very soft (that's the first cook), quickly put in the sous-vide machine to extract water content, deep fry at 140 degrees (second cook), back into the sous-vide, freeze overnight (we skipped this step), fry at 180 degrees (voila, triple-cooked), salt. At this point, we also deep-fried some of the frozen correct-potato fries.

Finally, I had two bowls in front of me, correct potato and wrong potato. I started off with one of the correct fries. The outside was golden, crisp and finely textured, the interior, fluffy and airy; it was triumphantly delicious. Then I ate one of the wrong fries. It was not crispy, and the texture was more limp than cloud-like. "What a difference!" I said. Lam smiled, he was in his element.

The other chefs whirled through their dishes, prepping duck leg confit in sous-vide bags and fruit-wood-smoked mashed potatoes (in their own smoker). I will be back, I thought, I could get used to these experiments. And Lam promised that next time, he'll actually put me to work.

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