The country's newest gastro-temple, Romera New York, a $5 million restaurant in the Dream Downtown hotel opening in June, is set to buck trends. At a time when elite chefs try to lure postrecession diners with casual bistros and beer-and-sausage bars, Romera will serve only a 12-course, $245 tasting menu. While the city has developed a taste for specific ethnic niches—Asian barbecue! Roman trattoria! High-end-Korean-meets-American!—Romera's culinary style is so high-concept and unique the team behind the project throws around made-up terminology ("neurogastronomy," "holistic cuisine") to describe it.

But the most unorthodox thing about the restaurant is undoubtedly its chef, Miguel Sánchez Romera. The 57-year-old Argentine, who has lived more than half his life in Spain, until now has never cooked at any restaurant other than L'Esguard, the one he opened outside Barcelona in 1996, where he earned a Michelin star in just two years—all the while working as a neurologist at a nearby hospital. The introverted doctor, who devoted his medical career to epilepsy and Alzheimer's, is surely the only physician who moonlighted his way to a chef's ultimate dream: a fully bankrolled paean to his culinary vision, right in the heart of Manhattan.

Some food critics in Spain have declared Romera's cuisine the most radical on the global food scene, even taking into account El Bulli's Ferran Adrià, widely considered the father of avant-garde cuisine. So when Romera offered me a sampling of his work during a recent visit to his New York apartment, just behind the Flatiron building, my expectations were high.

I was not disappointed: The evening began with a palate-awakening course of tomato and garlic, which tasted as fresh and fecund as a tomato garden smells, then an inscrutably delicious flavor circus of seaweed, rosemary, mint, vanilla and a smoky hint of bonito flakes, and finally, a warming marriage of daikon radish and black truffle. Romera delightedly rattled off the Mad Lib list of ingredients as he served each preparation: "It's coconut, garlic, ginger and truffles! Dried blueberry, star anise, mandarin rind and clove!" I was starving when we started, but by the end of the tasting, I was sated, stuffed even. Amazing, considering that I'd not eaten a single bite of food and consumed almost no calories. The chef's entire presentation consisted of multicolored waters, served in tiny cordial stemware, warmed to just over body temperature and flavored with ingredients he'd bought at the farmer's market.

For dipping, olive oil with black olive puree and pansies. Oliver Brenneisen

"People think you eat with your stomach. But you don't—you eat with your brain," he explains. The flavored waters produce "a trick to the satiety system in the hypothalamus, having ingested water instead of food, but associated with the work of our taste buds and our olfactory system, very much like the associations you make with the full gastronomic experience."

I first met Romera eight years ago, when I was invited to a demonstration dinner he was cooking in New York's TriBeCa neighborhood, where the chef David Bouley had loaned him one of his kitchens for the night. I spent the evening eating a series of pretty, odd and delicious dishes, most made with Cassavia, an ingredient Romera invented. A fat-free paste made from yucca root, Cassavia is capable of carrying any flavor and taking on nearly any texture—a kind of magical, no-butter roux. After eating the multicourse meal, I felt satisfied yet light, not near-nausea as I often do after a bacchanal of haute cuisine.

The contradiction of the meal—food that was rich-tasting yet delicate—turned out to be an appropriate metaphor for the dualities of Romera himself. Born to Spanish parents in Córdoba, Argentina, he was an artistic child with a mother who loved cooking the dishes of their multiethnic neighbors. In college, he leaned toward a fine-arts degree, but as a severe asthmatic seeking his own cure, Romera was also drawn to medicine. Amid an atmosphere of fear—he had friends "disappeared" by the Argentine dictatorship—the life of a bohemian artist seemed filled with danger, while medicine was a ticket out of Argentina. At 26, he accepted a scholarship in Spain, then married, had two daughters, and settled into the life of a successful doctor—albeit one with a growing obsession with cooking. In 1996 Romera and his wife self-financed L'Esguard in a converted farmhouse about 40 minutes from Barcelona.

“ People think you eat with your stomach. But you don't. You eat with your brain ”

But while L'Esguard quickly earned a Michelin star and several Spanish critics deemed it among the finest restaurants in the country, Romera never hit the fame stratosphere of some of his much-lauded peers. Over the years, when I talked to other hot Spanish chefs, Romera never came up as a major player in the local scene, and American chefs who went on dining pilgrimages to Spain tended to miss L'Esguard, telling me they'd never heard of it. In 2006, the Trade Commission of Spain sent a delegation of 10 top avant-garde Spanish chefs—including Ferran Adrià, Juan Mari Arzak and Joan Roca—to host and cook a gala dinner for the James Beard Foundation. Romera was not invited.

Some Spanish critics have expressed outrage over how Romera has been overlooked. "The geniuses of gastronomic criticism have had no alternative but to concede his conceptual superiority, and, overcome by it, have opted to ignore his work," wrote the Spanish-language newspaper La Vanguardia about Romera in 2005. Josep Vilella, one of the authors of the piece, theorizes that because Romera "appeared out of nowhere, as if by magic," fellow chefs who had climbed the ladder through long, hard apprenticeships considered him "an intruder, a stranger in the profession." Also, "he wasn't media savvy," and thus was largely ignored, Vilella adds. The James Beard Foundation became aware of Romera after its gala, when a participating Spanish architect lamented that he had not been included, says vice president Mitchell Davis, who subsequently invited Romera to cook at the institute.

Medley of vegetable purees drizzled with a gel the chef extracts from yucca root Oliver Brenneisen

"I wasn't a member of the club," Romera concedes, with a nearly imperceptible wince. His explanation speaks to years of alienation in his adopted country: "Don't forget, I've treated patients there for over 20 years, I speak fluent Catalan, but I'll always be Argentine to them." Jeffrey Shaw, marketing director for Foods from Spain, a division of the trade commission, says Romera "just wasn't on the list of people who were on the radar" at the time.

But it was this outsider status that would become the ticket to a golden opportunity: the chance to take neurogastronomy global. In 2006, Sant Chatwal, an Indian-born hospitality tycoon who built Bombay Palace restaurants around the world and runs Hampshire Hotels & Resorts, was vacationing on his yacht in the south of France. Some friends sailing with him recounted an extraordinary meal they had recently eaten, Chatwal remembers. The chef, they told him, not only created edible art that was actually healthy but was a working neurologist. It so happened that Chatwal had been searching the globe for a little-known chef capable of drawing attention to his upcoming Dream Downtown hotel in New York's meatpacking district. On the strength of his friends' tale, Chatwal flew by private jet with a party of 10 to have lunch at L'Esguard, only to find that the chef had yet to arrive from his medical practice. Through a restaurant window, Chatwal watched Romera walk through the garden, wearing medical whites and a stethoscope, enter the building through the kitchen door, and then proceed to cook an "amazing" lunch in which "every dish was something new."

“ He watched Romera walk through the garden, wearing medical whites and a stethoscope, enter the kitchen door, and proceed to cook an amazing lunch ”

"I said, 'This is the guy I want,' " recalls Chatwal. He convinced Romera to close down L'Esguard and move to New York—and then hold on throughout the financial crisis that spurred a two-year delay. Romera gave up practicing medicine in 2009, although he says, "I consider myself still working as a doctor, even though I'm cooking." Chatwal says he recognizes his chef is largely unknown, that he is a serious, soft-spoken doctor in an age of flashy, telegenic chefs, that his food is high-concept, and that expensive tasting menus, such as the one Romera plans to serve, have largely died out in New York City over the past decade. Chatwal says it is understandable to characterize his anointing of Romera as a "total risk, but I am 100-percent positive that there are enough people who will create a market for his uniqueness."

That uniqueness should not be confused with "molecular gastronomy," Romera insists. While his dishes look like modern-art compositions, and he utilizes surprising ingredients ("I use snapdragons and coffee flowers. Except poison ones, all flowers are edible. It's a question of dose," he says), he stands apart from leading exponents of Modernist cuisine, such as Adrià, Chicago's Grant Achatz or Britain's Heston Blumenthal, and is a critic of many of their core principles. On Romera's plates, food looks and tastes of what it is—he doesn't dramatically alter form or texture, saying unfamiliar foods provoke a rejection response in the brain—and he doesn't do deconstruction, irony, or even foam. He denies that molecular gastronomy is scientifically novel, taking aim at one favored technique: "Spherification—turning different flavors into imitation caviar—that's Chemistry 101!" he says, pulling rank as a true scientist among dabblers.

Shellfish and seaweed cream in a daikon-radish wrapper decorated with pansies Oliver Brenneisen

His main criticism of most avant-garde food is deceptively basic: "It's mostly cold. My food is hot. Hot, fully cooked and brightly colored," he says. At first, this struck me as nitpicking. But then I contemplated how chefs seeking to impress the eye have long sacrificed the diner's craving for a sink-your-teeth-into-it meal: Nouvelle cuisine's tiny patches of brilliant-hued, near-raw baby vegetables are one notorious example; molecular gastronomy's billowing gales of liquid nitrogen–treated savory ice creams another. Theorizing that primitive man's all-important discovery of cooking meat over fire has left us with a deep love of hot food that comes in a color spectrum from ocher to brown, Romera tries to integrate these hues into much of his food. Brain scans show that as people eat, taste and smell, areas become activated in the prefrontal lobe—the area which controls the orchestration of thoughts—but also in the limbic lobe and hypocampus, areas of the brain responsible for emotion and memory, Romera says. Seeking to tap all wells of pleasure, Romera aims for food that teases the intellect and aesthetic sense without sacrificing the primal urge for hot, amber-colored meats and brilliant colors as found in nature.

Sworn to the Hippocratic Oath, Romera considers it anathema to send diners home filled with fat, salt and booze. He uses a minimum of butter and other fats, relying on Cassavia for thickening everything from sauces to gelati. In a statement of restaurant-industry heresy, Romera says that wine pairing is a "complete fraud." The way to ensure wine improves rather than inhibits the taste of food is not to drink too much of it, he says.

Twelve varieties of grains with black-truffle shavings in a curry-accented sauce. Oliver Brenneisen

The U.S. team working on Romera New York has thrown their energy into translating his cerebral vision through style and service. Architect Glen Coben, who designed Mario Batali's luxe Del Posto, among other restaurants, has attempted to "channel L'Esguard" into the cellar of the hotel, filling the white, windowless space with transparent walls, butterfly-embossed light fixtures and brilliant-green plants. The space-age-meets-urban-garden look will transport patrons to "Miguel's world," says Coben—a world of focus (each diner's plate will be spotlit from above) and contrast (in the gleaming white space, the colorful waters will be assembled atop a glass bar). General manager Trevor Sherman, who previously managed restaurants for Gordon Ramsay (Romera's "exact opposite," Sherman says with a chuckle), is planning menus that read like opera programs. "Every act will have an explanation," he says of the evening's courses.

Before I left New York, Romera wanted us to eat together at the city's most expensive restaurant, Masa, thinking a traditional Japanese meal would help demonstrate the state of grace he hopes his food will provoke. However he was sorely disappointed, nearly shaking with frustration, as chef Masa Takayama ignored us in favor of a loud group of Wall Street types, and each dish failed to transport us. We debated the case: I argued that because we felt slighted by an ambience that didn't live up to the punishing cost of the meal, we couldn't enjoy the food. He shook his head vigorously.

"Great food, perfect food that touches all the paths to pleasure, it can make you forget anything, forgive everything," he said. When I cast a dubious look, he spoke to me gravely, a doctor prescribing a cure. "Promise me you'll come back to New York when I open," he said. "I need to cook for you."