The Arcadia: Seasonal Mural and Cookbook

Rosenzweig, chef and co-owner of Manhattan's Arcadia restaurant, offers four festive seasonal menus in the New American Cooking style. She marries the urbane and the earthy in such recipes as roast quail with savoy cabbage and kasha, and corn cakes with creme fraiche and caviar. And the fare creatively utilizes natural seasonal offerings: e.g.,the summer menu features chimney-smoked lobster with tarragon butter, summer squash and potato fritters, and lemon-curd mousse with fresh summer berries in almond tuiles. Each dish is matched with appropriate wines, directions are terse but lucid, and culinary experience is assumed. Rosenzweig's meager narrative barely fills a page, but the scarcity of anecdotal material only serves to emphasize thevivid and colorful graphics, which overwhelm the recipes. Davis's multiseasonal mural, which recalls the bucolic, mythic Greek region of Arcadia and hangs in the real-life namesake, is reproduced here in a seminal accordion-fold format. (October)