“You don’t see a lot of products on the plate, and the ones that you do see either have a lot of work put into them, or nothing at all,” Mr. Yu said in a phone interview. “It’s kind of all or nothing for us.”

Before his European tour, Mr. Yu worked for about a year and a half at Ubuntu in Napa, Calif., the late restaurant that was known as much for flavorful, resourceful vegetable cookery as for its location inside a yoga studio. Nearly everything served there came from an on-site garden, and Mr. Yu began to pay the kind of attention to vegetables that a mountain climber gives to rock ledges. He talks about once a week to a farmer at Utility Research Garden outside the city. “He understands my wants or needs: pick things young, or let them sit in the ground a little longer so they develop more sugars,” Mr. Yu said.

Utility Research Garden supplies the carrots for an Oxheart dish that makes use of several varieties of them at different stages of life. Some are shaved and sprinkled with two kinds of coriander leaf; others are roasted and set in a sauce made with coconut milk, Moroccan spices and even more carrots. From this one humble root, Mr. Yu had extracted fleet, herbaceous flavors; deep, meaty ones; and several others in between that I never knew carrots had in them.

Some things about Oxheart, like the stack of vinyl, the 11 seats at a kitchen counter (there are 19 more at the tables) and the ceramic coffee cups with twisted handles, reminded me of other new restaurants that emphasize the personal and the handmade. The naturalistic look of Mr. Yu’s dishes, too, is familiar. But every course of my meal showed an instinct for the delicious that is rare in any city. Encountering it, even in a restaurant as often praised as Oxheart, is always a discovery.