Sooner or later, those of us who follow the career of Jean-Georges Vongerichten reach a point where our memories can’t keep up. The tuna tartares start to run together; we can’t recall whether it’s served in lettuce cups with threads of shiso at Perry St. or at JoJo. At some point it’s hard to recall what makes the chicken breast inside a resoundingly crunchy Parmesan crust at Nougatine different from the Parmesan-crusted chicken at the Mark.

With his partner, Phil Suarez, Mr. Vongerichten has founded scores of new restaurants around the world. Nearly 40 of them are still up and running, 15 in New York. Devising menus for each new place, he repeats himself occasionally, but more often he rearranges old patterns. Lime juice is traded for yuzu, cherry vinegar comes in for balsamic. Almost always, the result is a dish that is similar enough to his past work to be recognizably Vongerichtenesque but different enough to seem fresh.

Maybe he can keep track of it in his head, but for the rest of us it would be really useful to have a family tree of every dish he ever invented, with its parentage and offspring. Something like 23andMe, it could tell you which strands of kitchen DNA are shared by which Vongerichten restaurants — 23andV.

This service would come in handy in times like the present, when critics and superfans are trying to metabolize the two restaurants Mr. Vongerichten opened in New York City during a single week in May. One is the Paris Café, a casual, all-day proposition inside Eero Saarinen’s T.W.A. terminal at Kennedy International Airport, now gloriously resurrected as the TWA Hotel. The second is a polished seafood house that sits out in the East River on the end of Pier 17, next to the wreck of the old Fulton Fish Market; it’s called the Fulton.