Every parent who likes to eat well goes through the same set of emotions as we observe our growing children at the table. We swell with pride when, as voracious toddlers, they cram fistfuls of tofu and braised leeks in their cute little button mouths. They gobble up clams, seaweed salad, Parmigiano-Reggiano — most anything we think tastes good, they think tastes good, too.

Then they start saying "no," and we deflate. One week they love our asparagus vinaigrette; the next, they fling it from their highchair trays like worthless lottery tickets.

JESSICA MCGOWAN/SPECIAL (ENLARGE)

Chef Richard Blais (shown with intern Jeff Sigler, right, in March) is now cooking at Midtown's Element, a 'gastro lounge.'

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A few become "white food" kids, subsisting on mashed potatoes and mozzarella cheese sticks. (A show of hands, here: How many of you have had to return a plate of plain buttered pasta in a restaurant because the chef thought to sprinkle it with parsley?) Others draw lines in the sand: no onions, no shrimp, no mush of any sort.

Then your kids hit their teens, and you begin to catch an inkling of how they will eat as adults. Such is the case in my family. Our oldest is 16, and I'm proud to observe that she has become an adventurous eater for the most part. She won't touch mustard and gets skeezed out by strange meats (sweetbreads, venison), but otherwise likes to try new things.

I decided to put her to the test, and I knew just the chef to help.

You see, Blais is back in town. And he's cooking at Element — a Midtown watering hole that now calls itself a "gastro lounge."

You recall Richard Blais? He's the chef who may best be remembered in town for the punch line (his foie gras milkshake) to a cooking style that found humor in everyday food, re-imagined. First at Fishbone, then at Blais, Bazzaar and One Midtown Kitchen, this chef used his considerable technique and interest in trendy technologies to play around with the vernacular of middle-class American food. He decamped to Miami, where he served a lot of cocktails frozen with liquid nitrogen, but has since returned.

When Blais hits the mark, his cooking awakens your nostalgia for a guilty pleasure and delights you with a new sensation. Such food seemed perfect for the education of a kid like my daughter.

Before leaving, I told her she had to wear something better than shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt reading "Toronto: I Survived SARS." She changed into wedge heels, a slate-blue sundress and dangling Indian earrings, transforming herself into quite the gastro loungette.

We arrived at Element and found it to be an old house stripped of its interior walls. The floors were glossy, the furniture spare and the atmosphere dank with dim lights, air conditioning and a dull throb of music suggesting a party around the corner. The place was mostly empty.

The chef worked the room, hand-delivering dishes. He wore his hair teased skyward, like Zippy the Pinhead.

An industrial steel canister lurked behind the bar.

"That's liquid nitrogen," I told my daughter, about to embark on an explanation of how it can freeze foods solid on contact.

"Oh, is the chef into molecular gastronomy?" she asked.

Wow. That was unexpected. "How do you know about molecular gastronomy?" I asked.

"Top Chef."

Aha.

We wandered over to watch the bartender tap a few cups of the smoky, menacing liquid into a container and whisk it into margarita mix, which turned into a kind of icy sorbet. He also poured a bit onto the bar for our amusement. It skittered and smoked across the surface and felt like snowfall when the beads hit our fingers. We returned to the table, me holding a margarita.

Blais loves to send fun treats from the kitchen, and so our first bite was a cube of clear gel on a celery root chip. Biting into the gel, it bloomed with the flavors of salsa — tomato, onion, chile, salt.

My daughter let out her belly laugh — the same one she's had since she was a baby.

"Omigod! It's really chips and salsa," she said with a laugh.

"I'm going to try everything tonight," she added, looking suspiciously at our next course — an oyster mounded with pellets of Meyer lemon Dippin' Dots.

"I've never tried an oyster," she said, wincing slightly as she downed it.

I wish this hadn't been her first, as the garnish had frozen the surface of the fresh little bivalve.

She did like her maiden taste of sea urchin, successfully paired with pork belly, but found it bitter, particularly with its bed of bitter cucumber. I agreed.

She hated a fishy tube of grilled squid oozing chorizo, and I agreed.

The chef hand-delivered a plate of lamb prosciutto. He held a perfume atomizer filled with lamb fat, which he first sprayed on his wrists and licked off with a theatrical flourish. Then he sprayed some on the plates. The cured meat held a glossy white button of yogurt ravioli; as soon as you burst its membrane with your fork, it oozed thin yogurt over the lamb. I made an adolescent joke about what dermatological condition it looked like.

"Dad, you're gross," my daughter said, showing her first twinge of parent embarrassment of the evening.

She liked the intense pitch of flavors in this dish. I hated the lanolin taste of cured lamb fat and wanted a shot of Woolite to get it out of my mouth. We agreed to disagree.

Then came something the chef called "squash impasta" — two thin rounds of squash encasing a goat cheese filling so that the whole looked very much like ravioli, sitting there on its bed of tomato sauce. We both took bites and swooned; the sharp and creamy flavors found such a lovely balance. And in a kitchen fascinated with transformation, the best of all was the simplest: the transformative power of heat on tomatoes and onions in the sauce.

After a suitably weird dessert (vanilla panna cotta topped with crunchy crystals of frozen Coca-Cola syrup), we went home, exhausted from the roller-coaster ride of this food.

She turned in immediately.

"That was so much fun," she said, her gastro loungette attire exchanged for flannel pj's, hugging me good night.

"It was," I agreed, adding, "Next time we're doing oysters."