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Casa Mono has a lot to answer for. Founded by Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich in 2003, it was among the earliest and most influential restaurants to twist the Spanish tapas idiom into what New Yorkers learned to call small-plates dining. The Casa Mono style has spread far and wide, leaving in its wake a trail of cluttered tables, unpredictably sequenced dishes, and diners reduced to asking pathetically, “Will that be enough food?”

All of this might earn Casa Mono the historical notoriety bestowed on early tremors of annoying or inconvenient trends, like the first spam email, if it weren’t the case that almost everyone agrees that Casa Mono has always been very good. To that I’ll add a contention of my own. The pleasures of eating there are both richer and more varied than in 2004, when this tiny, perpetually crowded restaurant was last reviewed in The New York Times. (Marian Burros gave it two stars.)

Andy Nusser, the executive chef and an owner, kept the

COPENHAGEN — “Welcome to the new Noma,” the chef René Redzepi said on a bright summer day. “This is it.”

Mr. Redzepi, 37, the godfather of the New Nordic movement and the chef at Noma, arguably the world’s most influential restaurant at the moment, was standing outside what looked like an auditorium-size crack den. Used spray-paint cans lay in heaps amid the weeds of an abandoned lot. Street art covered the walls of an empty warehouse; inside, teenagers rumbled around on skateboards.

World-class culinary destination? The site, right outside the ragged border of this city’s freewheeling Christiania neighborhood, seemed more like the Four Seasons after an apocalypse.

But Mr. Redzepi envisioned something else as he climbed a staircase to a tar-papered roof and gazed out at a lake on the edge of the property. In what qualifies as a wildly risky roll of the dice, he plans to close Noma after a final service on New Year’s Eve in 2016. He hopes to reopen for business in 2017 with a new menu and a new mission.

As a crucial part of that, he wants to transform this decrepit patch of land into a state-of-the-art urban farm, with Noma at its center.

“It makes sense to do it here,” he said, despite visual evidence to the contrary. “It makes sense to have your own farm, as a restaurant of this caliber.” His plans are nothing if not ambitious. He will put a greenhouse on the roof. He will dig out the dank old asphalt lot and truck in fresh soil. He wants part of the farm to float.

“We’ll build a raft, and we’ll put a huge field on the raft,” he said. “We need a full-time farmer with a team.”

SPENCERTOWN, N.Y. — Ruth Reichl was in the kitchen she designed as both command center and comfort station, making a salami sandwich for her husband, Michael Singer, 75, a former CBS News producer who has been recovering from back surgery.

“He has this thing from his childhood about salami,” she said, smearing a slice of ciabatta bread with Dijon mustard.

“It’s not a Freudian issue,” he shouted from the Danish-modern kitchen table, where his head was buried in his laptop. “I just like salami.”

This, now, is life for Ms. Reichl. At 67, she is softer, less anxious and, her friends say, a happier version of the cautious workaholic who was the food editor at The Los Angeles Times, the restaurant critic at The New York Times, a best-selling memoirist and, for a decade, the editor of Gourmet, the oldest food and wine magazine in America.

She makes her husband three meals a day when she is not traveling. She writes in a little cabin set a few dozen paces behind the sleek house with glass walls that the couple built 11 years ago here on a shale plateau between the Hudson River and the Berkshires. And she cooks for just about anyone who walks in the door.

“At this point in your life,” she said, “you have to have as much fun as you can because you don’t know what’s coming down the road.”

In 2009, while she was in Seattle promoting a Gourmet cookbook, her horse was shot out from under her. Without warning, Condé Nast closed Gourmet, after 69 years, on her watch.

(She said she still doesn’t know why, although luxury advertising was in a slump and not all readers responded favorably to articles in which writers like David Foster Wallace were given 7,500 words to explore the moral implications of killing lobsters. Her memoir about her years at Condé Nastis in the works.)

In as much time as it takes to peel a peach, she went from the top of the heap into free fall. No more Condé Nast salary, black cars at her beckoning and $30,000 budgets to shoot a Thanksgiving spread. Her carefully curated team of writers, designers and cooks, many of them close friends, were gone, off to find work elsewhere with varying degrees of success.

Ms. Reichl, who often invokes her hippie bona fides, said she always knew she was a visitor in that world. It didn’t take her long to remember that one can get by just fine without those trappings.

Say ‘‘mushroom mille-feuille’’ to most veteran cooks and eaters, and they will most likely picture a golden mound of puff pastry filled with wild mushrooms in cream and herbs — a fine dish, if old-fashioned and increasingly rare.

This is nothing like that.

Early this summer, I was steered by the elbow to Dirty French, the newest New York restaurant from Rich Torrisi and his partners. Their first, Torrisi Italian Specialties, a reimagining of Italian-American classics, opened in 2009 on Mulberry Street. Dirty French, which opened in the fall of 2014 on Ludlow Street, handles sort-of-classic French food in a similarly playful manner.

And that’s where I was commanded by my dinner companion to order the mushroom mille-feuille: ‘‘It’s the best thing on the menu,’’ he insisted. I wasn’t sure what would be placed before us, but I certainly wasn’t expecting this: layers of paper-thin mushroom slices, seasoned, buttered, pressed in a pan and chilled for a day, then sliced and seared and served with a piquant sauce.

Think of the best pommes Anna, but with the firm, chewy texture of good mushrooms, perfectly crisped and graced with a colorful purée. It’s not literally a mille-feuille, which translates as ‘‘a thousand leaves,’’ but more like 50 or 75 layers. The sauce, which on my first visit was a green curry made with ramps, is neither irrelevant nor lily-gilding, though the mille-feuille itself is so enticing that just a little soy sauce and lemon would complement the mushrooms’ earthiness well.

Simple as it sounds, this dish was the most interesting thing I’d eaten in months. The next morning, I was on the phone with Torrisi, asking him if the mille-feuille was too complicated for us — that is, for you and me, ordinary home cooks. ‘‘With a little patience, anyone can do it,’’ he said. Soon I was in the Dirty French kitchen, where Torrisi, along with Dai Matsuda, the chef de cuisine, greeted me with a huge pile of sliced king trumpet mushrooms and a pot of melted butter. In their hot and busy kitchen, we went to work, buttering, salting, layering and repeating.

Nose around for borscht recipes, and you’ll find that most classic hot borschts call for beef stock or a beef or veal shank to simmer along with the vegetables.

I wanted to make a lighter, vegetarian version of hot borscht. But I also wanted my soup to have the kind of depth of flavor that a meaty backdrop provides, without overpowering the winelike, heady flavor of the beets.

So, as I often do when faced with this kind of challenge, I turned to mushrooms.

I made a strong broth by soaking dried mushrooms, and combined that with a red-beet-and-garlic broth that was the result of simmering beets with sliced garlic for 30 minutes. I used shiitakes for my broth one time, and porcinis another. The shiitake broth is a bit lighter, with more of a mineral edge to it; I like them both.

There are lots of fresh mushrooms in this soup as well. You can use regular white buttons or creminis. They’re sliced and cooked in olive oil with onion, carrots, celery and garlic, then simmered with the beets in the combined beet-and-mushroom broth.

Make sure to buy your beets with the greens attached, the more generous the bunch the better, as you’ll be adding the leaves to the soup toward the end of its simmer, making it all the more heady, healthy and satisfying.