“I thought opening a restaurant would be a lot more fun,” Sam Mason says, referring to his highly anticipated (and delayed) restaurant Tailor, a three-ring circus of sweet/savory flavor precision. We’re pulling for the guy, who spent five years as pastry chef at wd-50 and has recently taken a bit of a beating in the blogs for what ultimately has been a couple missed deadlines (hey…aren’t we all guilty of that?). Mason has built a career out of envelope-pushing fare—expect dishes such as seared pork belly with miso butterscotch and artichokes that have been braised in apple cider and whiskey.