NEW YORK CITY (AP) — Tyler Florence is trying to block out the noise.

A packed dining room is watching him through a wall of windows as he orchestrates a nine-course dinner with a team of mostly borrowed chefs in an unfamiliar kitchen. And the watercress he’s arranging on plates of “beet soil” — impossibly sweet beets slowly baked, then ground with pistachios to resemble a gorgeously moist dirt — isn’t cooperating. Frustrated, he tosses the greens in the trash.