There are many ways to elevate a meal into an experience you'll carry with you for months or years to come.

You can stumble upon great cooking at a dive bar, hit one of those Stockton Boulevard strip malls for something so exotic that you'll think you've left the continent, or sit down at an intimate neighborhood bistro where everybody knows your name.

For me, the most memorable way to dine is prix fixe or, for those uncomfortable pretending to be French, fixed price. The idea is simple, the experience sublime.

The menu is predetermined, the price is set. All you have to do is show up, pay attention and enjoy the best work the restaurant has to offer. Food arrives in waves, telling a story - with flavors, with combinations, with colors, shapes and textures - and building toward a climax.

In the yin and yang of fine dining, prix fixe changes the restaurant dynamic in a crucial way: It allows the customer to relinquish control and it hands the reins to the chef. Yes, for the very best experience, you resist your instinct to call all the shots and instead willingly submit to the talent in the kitchen.

This is a chance for the best chefs to do their best work, often without limitations. The prices are usually high, and the ingredients and techniques are often arcane - but the food, if all goes well, is an inspiration.

In recent years, prix fixe dining has grown in popularity. It's what you get at the French Laundry in Yountville. And during a recent trip to New York, it was the way I experienced the city's best restaurants - when I wasn't ordering from one of the incredible food trucks or dropping in someplace for pizza.

In Sacramento, we're fortunate to have several options at different price points in the prix fixe category, including Ambience Restaurant and The Kitchen Restaurant - two heavyweights that take entirely different approaches. Both have major strengths and, yes, a few weaknesses. They are superior restaurants that reflect the personalities and visions of the chefs-owners, Morgan Song (Ambience) and Randall Selland (The Kitchen). If we combined the best of each place, we might approach the perfect dining experience.

To compare and contrast, we recently visited both restaurants, excited at the prospect of back-to-back dining extravaganzas.

Broken down into the essential categories, here is what we found.

The menus

The Kitchen: The menu changes every month, but the main choices are always crowd-pleasers and don't stray into areas that would scare off fussy eaters.

One thing hasn't changed in six years - dinner is still $125 (in 1991, it started at $35).

The menu is divided into seven acts, and the first does not involve food. It is a talk by the talented and personable Noah Zonca, who has taken over for Selland as day-to-day chef, though Selland retains the title of executive chef and fills in on occasion. (He was there the night The Bee took pictures.) Selland said he still designs the menus.

Adventurous diners might deduct a point for The Kitchen playing it safe. When we visited in December, the menu included steak, salmon and lobster courses, though the lobster was part of an outstanding mac 'n' cheese creation.

There is also an element of eccentricity and whimsy. The so-called "intermission" offers guests a chance to stand and stretch and sample excellent sashimi and sushi. This culinary non sequitur is an abrupt shift in style and makes no sense to me. It works only because it's delicious. That's just the way Selland the improviser likes it.

Ambience: In contrast to The Kitchen, the menu offers two dining options - the basic five-course dinner for $55 and a new seven-course offering for $75, which everyone at the table must order for reasons of pacing.

Song initially set the larger menu at $95, but sadly there were no takers for several nights, so he scaled back the price. If that takes off, he plans to have a 10-course menu for $115 and even a 12-course offering, for $145, that would stretch beyond three hours.

The food tends to focus on mainstream favorites mixed with exotic but user-friendly selections like wild boar, venison, elk and squab. The general design is based on nouvelle French cooking, with occasional Asian flavor influences that tend to complement the focus of the dish.

Generally, the balance of food at Ambience tends to be leaner; at The Kitchen, it tends to be richer.

Cooking and plating

The Kitchen: This is an area where prix fixe can really shine - or collapse. Because of the pacing of one course after the next, there is little room for error in the timing. That's often what all the yelling is about in the kitchen.

At The Kitchen, both the timing and the cooking are at a very high level. The soup - "Randall's French onion soup" - probably takes three days to make. The cheese-crouton centerpiece was decadent, complex and, yes, gooey good. On the night we were there, we overheard the one person in the world who dislikes cheese - I didn't say he's allergic or lactose-intolerant, he just doesn't like it - ask for a cheese-free serving of soup.

Not sure how he navigated the next course: outstanding mac 'n' cheese featuring Maine lobster and showcasing deep flavors, an intriguing use of the crustacean and precise plating.

The steak, an Angus strip loin, had been cooked for two hours sous vide, a modern technique in which the meat is sealed in a cryovac bag and immersed in a water bath at a low temperature intended to prevent overcooking. This steak had excellent flavor and complexity on the palate, but the meat was surprisingly toothsome, bordering on tough. It was a much more fibrous cut than the steak we had on our previous visit, a Piedmontese tenderloin, which was one of the best steaks I've ever had - and which is back on the January menu.

Overall, the cooking outshines the presentation at The Kitchen. Plating is stylish but not necessarily artistic.

One quibble: The host jumped into the equation and made a production of carefully wiping each plate, even though the plates were spotless. It was a bit showy and overdone, especially when she ran her fingers through her hair in the middle of handling the dinnerware.

Ambience: The design of food on the plate is by far the most artistic in town and, at its best, Morgan Song's plating is world-class. He is a true artist, and the result is often mesmerizing - the layout, the shapes, the streaks of sauces, the assembly of proteins atop starches. Ambience also gets high marks for its pacing.

But what about flavor? The tastes are clean and true and refined, subtle without being meek. Song uses a variety of techniques to arrive at meat courses that are tender and full of flavor. His best work may be with seafood. The lobster medallions are cooked sous vide and served with diced cucumber, a wasabi coulis and caviar. And the Chilean sea bass over Arborio rice with corn and braised leeks with dill butter was exceptional - cooked to perfection, its richness tempered by the gentle bitterness of the leeks.

The look and feel

The Kitchen: This is where the names get crossed. The Kitchen is supposed to be all about the food, with a spare-no- expense approach to purveying ingredients. Yet the ambience is excellent. It's lively, informal, communal, funny, sometimes outlandish.

Selland is a showman, and what he says is unfiltered. Zonca is also a real pro in the kitchen and a gifted performer. Two hip replacements in 2005 cut short Selland's full-time cheffing days.

The Kitchen evolved over 20 years from an intimate and informal incarnation that was practically a secret dining experience into a big-ticket performance dining experience. It's like a TV show without the cameras.

It's impressive how the restaurant has emerged and come to define a part of the Sacramento-area dining scene. The movement, the energy, the banter.

Oh, yes, the banter - it's informative and often amusing, but once you've heard it and heard it the next time, it starts to get old. The repetition makes it difficult to enjoy The Kitchen more than once a year. Once a month and you'll start to finish Zonca's sentences. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a second dining option at The Kitchen - without the lecture and with a pared-down show?

Ambience: What? It's a place called Ambience, but ambience is its weakest point. There's no view, so they can't do windows. It doesn't have architecture, so they can't accentuate the lines of the room. It's simply quiet, which some diners will appreciate, given the preponderance of noisy joints all over town. But sometimes it's too quiet.

I like a room that feels as if it's a celebration of life. The only thing worse than being too noisy is wanting for noise. When it's a full house, the din is its own music, but we need something more upbeat.

Overall concept

The Kitchen: Here's a little secret the folks at The Kitchen may not want you to know: It's a demonstration dinner, but there's almost no demonstrating.

That's right. You get a rundown about the impeccable sourcing of ingredients; live lobsters are, unfortunately, waved around; and you might get a guest celebrating a birthday by flambéing a shot or two of Maker's Mark in a pan on the cooking stage. But cooking? The magic happens in the back, and it starts hours before the doors open. I think I saw Zonca sauté some mushrooms, take a taste of the soup and deftly prep the salmon.

That said, the general idea remains a winner. The Kitchen's aim is to showcase food and cooking, and it's done in an entertaining way and by embracing the very best food available.

Out front, there's no sign. It still feels like you've walked in on a secret dinner. It remains a cool place as well as a great place.

Ambience: Despite its limitations in vibe, this may be the best restaurant we have when it comes to the actual food that arrives at the table.

We have plenty of talented chefs in this town, and there may be some with a more creative feel for recipes, but no one I have encountered can match Song in his combination of precision and artistry.

Giving this chef room to show off with a seven-course dinner evokes thoughts of Frank Sinatra with a microphone or Miles Davis on trumpet. He's just that good. If he ever puts out his 10-course dream menu, watch out.

Summing up

The Kitchen: Go for the show and stay for the dinner. You'll laugh, you'll eat, you can even ask for seconds. That cheese-hating guest? He got seconds and thirds of the bone marrow. I asked for a second soup, but somehow it slipped our server's mind.

Ambience: This is the story of a man, his dream and his talent. It all shows up on the plate.

Song is shy, so you won't see him step out from the kitchen, but there is joy, talent and skill on every plate he sends out.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

---

Call The Bee's Blair Anthony Robertson, (916) 321-1099.

• Read more articles by Blair Anthony Robertson