By Mark Goldberg

What does a restaurant do when it loses its notable chef? If you’re Wish, the delectable dinner spot at the Goldman Properties-owned The Hotel, you perform a nationwide search for a high-caliber chef with culinary insights. The menu doesn’t have to remain the same, but the level of creativity and kitchen skills must. Enter newly-appointed executive chef E. Michael Reidt, who arrived in South Beach on a wave of success: his French/Brazilian creations in Boston’s Bomboa had already placed him in Food and Wine magazine’s America’s Ten Best New Chefs for 2001.

Chef Reidt created a new, evolving menu in a matter of weeks, based on good basic ingredients, Brazilian exuberance, and solid French cooking techniques: Foie gras is dressed with sour cherries, salmon simmers in a coconut broth, and seared tuna sits atop a slice of spicy seared watermelon.

Wish itself remains the same, with the smaller turquoise-and-peach Art Deco dining room in a spangle of lighting and color, while the spacious outdoor terrace features a ceiling of huge white umbrellas surrounding a palm tree fountain supplying soothing sounds. It’s so tropical and secluded, you’ll forget that just beyond is 8th Street and Collins Avenue. Most of the servers have remained, adapting themselves to the new chef enough to go into knowledgeable detail about the new dishes.

Exciting appetizers
These began with a bit of performance art, as a spectacular terrine of shrimp salad, with salmon roe clinging to the sides of the bowl, arrived. Our waiter poured a deliciously velvety chilled avocado Vichyssoise ($9) of leeks, potato and avocado around the shrimp, freeing the beads of roe. It was a triumph of contrasts: colors, flavors and textures.

More in the order of an entrée than an appetizer, a perfectly cooked, tender marinated grilled quail ($15) is irresistible. Set over a huge ravioli stuffed with the intriguing earthy and smoky flavors of huitlacoche (the South American fungal delicacy that grows on corn husks), apple-smoked bacon, serrano chili and goat cheese, the dish is enhanced by a touch of horseradish cream and a rich black trumpet mushroom ragoût. Two enormous pan-seared scallops ($14), albeit slightly undercooked and flavorless, were redeemed by the delicious brandade de morue topped with brandied onions and baby corn.

Chef Reidt’s ceviche of tuna ($12), set over a bed of almond-corn couscous, is a glorious symphony of contrasting colors and refreshing citrusy flavors ­ dark red chunks ofcitrus-and-cilantro marinated tuna mixed with green avocado ­ toned by a sensuous rum and coconut emulsion. Contrasting flavors play a big role in the original terrine of foie gras ($15). Accompanied by a bite-sized taco stuffed with a rich duck confit, the smooth foie gras rests on toast topped with a smattering of hot and sour cherries, setting the taste buds alight.

Sharply-flavored, complex entrees

Marinated in olive oil and rosemary, grilled sirloin ($30), thick-sliced and fanned out on the plate, is a hearty dish, rich with crunchy lentils du Puy over crispy polenta sharing the plate with pickled chanterelles and foie gras emulsion.

Exquisite in its complexity, the pan-seared cachaça-marinated tuna ($29) looks and tastes like no other tuna dish. It begins with a base of cumin and hot spices, builds up with a side of jicama quinoa salad and a little chayote slaw, and, against all odds, is set over a bright red, juicy slice of pan-seared, hot watermelon. This is a dish so perfectly good that anything after that pales, such as the pan seared sea bass ($27), in spite of the accompanying creative stack of baby vegetables ­ zucchini, carrots, haricots verts and fava beans­ and the garlic/shrimp bolino cake with ginger-and-mint tea sauce. Reidt is passionate about baby veggies and greens that he scours the country for. While the pan-roasted grouper ($24) was bland and unimpressively subtle-flavored, the potato and mushroom risotto and sweet corn sauce were delightful, and carried the dish through.

Sweet wishes

Fairly good desserts (all $8) include the ubiquitous molten chocolate bombe, except this one featured sour plums and a scoop of coconut sorbet. Ginger and lemongrass crème brûlée was amazingly good, rich with unedited fragrance. Mt. Manzanas, described as a mountain of apples, was an ice cream sandwich, with spiced sugar/almond/apple cookies separating scoops of black walnut ice cream.

If you were wishing for things to remain the same, forget it. Wish took the right steps, discovering yet another up-and-coming executive chef and allowing him to do what he does best: create an excellent, new menu that is totally his. And ultimately ours.

Mark Goldberg is a dining critic and a freelance copywriter.