Daniel Boulud Brasserie at Wynn Las Vegas has an attractive, country French interior, but the emphasis is on the food. Photo by Ralph Fountain.

This is about the food," my friend said with a contented sigh, gesturing, as she did, to take in the entirety of Daniel Boulud Brasserie.

Indeed. Chefs express their philosophies through their restaurants in many different ways. Some strive to demonstrate how many balls they can keep in the air at once, some to show how avant-garde their thinking. Some are in it solely to make money and may as well be widget-makers instead.

But there are many that are truly passionate about food, and fascinated by its flavors, aromas, textures and colors. This group seems to be growing, as many who were otherwise engaged are turning away from the frivolity of foams, edible menus and totally dark dining rooms and getting back to the basic, simple purity of the food.

That Daniel Boulud, widely regarded as one of the best chefs in the world, is a charter member of the latter group can be seen simply by visiting his restaurant at Wynn Las Vegas, where executive chef Philippe Rispoli communicates and expands on Boulud's philosophy.

We dined early -- victims, so it seemed, of the 5:30-or-9:30 virus that has infected New York, which dictates that whose who call relatively late are given a choice of those times, despite the fact that lingerers will see plenty of empty tables at 8, as we did.

No matter; dining before 7 gave us the opportunity to choose from the $48 three-course prix-fixe menu, which, it seemed to us, would be attractive especially to locals who'd like to sample the master's work without a visit to www.ditech.com. Besides, the prix-fixe menu offered us plenty of supremely appealing choices, most of them updated takes of classics of country French cuisine that have been refined and improved over centuries.

For example, the roasted chicken. I'm not a huge fan of chicken, even less so of chicken while dining out, when it tends to be dry and substantially flavorless. Regular readers of this space also know I'm loathe to venture onto limbs, always anticipating the next-best-thing right around the corner. But this was, without question, the best chicken I've ever had.

What made it so good? I'm not sure, because this menu resists giving every detail and simply reads "roasted chicken." It may have been Bresse chicken, although I'm unsure of the current import/export rules. It may have been Amish, and most certainly was free-range. All that matters is that it had a crinkling-crisp skin and meat that was juicy, moist and so flavorful I could only think of farms -- in the most pastoral sense, of course. Haricot verts -- crisp, crunchy thin green beans -- that had been dressed lightly and served atop leaves of butter lettuce, and a mound of impossibly creamy roasted fingerling potatoes completed the plate.

My friend didn't use quite the same qualifiers to describe her P?te de Campagne Forestiere, but did enthuse that it transported her back to Perigord, France, ground zero of the p?te world. This was a suitably coarse p?te in the country style, with plenty of texture and flavor. And just to be sure the palate didn't dull from all of that lush richness, Boulud and Rispoli added a selection of homemade pickles, which included some unfamiliar but most agreeable crunchy little spirals that our server said were a Japanese vegetable.

There was plenty of crunch, also, in the pumpkin soup, thanks to a sprinkle of pumpkin seeds, but the duo didn't stop there, adding a filigree of apple puree atop the soup and a slice of gingerbread -- small in size, huge on flavor -- on the side.

We went traditional with our other entree, as well, with steak frites, the whole prepared quite nicely.

Since we'd economized on dinner we splurged just a bit on wine, choosing a 2001 Edmunds St. John Wylie Fenaughty from El Dorado County ($65), which was just what we were looking for, sort of brash but not brassy. It was served flawlessly, and particularly enjoyable with the selection of country breads.

For dessert, my friend chose the thin, crisp apple tart, which she pretty much polished off without offering any. But that was OK, since I was occupied with my little crunchy cocoa-crusted profiteroles filled with rocky road ice cream and topped with a nice dark chocolate sauce.

I particularly liked that our server asked early on if we were going to be seeing a show, so that he'd be aware of our schedule, and the fact that he seemed agreeable to letting us linger over our coffee and tea. An extra lagniappe was the show beyond the windows in the Wynn's Lake of Dreams, where we saw huge flowers floating in the air and a behemoth frog peeking over the waterfall. We think it all might have made more sense had we been outdoors where we could've heard it.

No matter, there was show enough right in front of us. At Daniel Boulud Brasserie, it is indeed about the food.

Las Vegas Review-Journal reviews are done anonymously at Review-Journal expense. Contact Heidi Knapp Rinella at 383-0474 or e-mail her at hrinella@ reviewjournal.com.