A great restaurant may yet emerge from David Toutain’s @feuillehk . Whether it has already done so remains less clear. Three years into its run in Hong Kong, Feuille still seems caught between his vision and the hazards of exporting it. For every Cristal Room — an arguable success — there is Plaisance, a rogue byproduct of Mauro Colagreco’s global apparatus. And for every gougère and fatty fish drowned in beurre blanc enriched with ikura, there are progressive, welcome dishes like local lobster with pumpkin gut and guava, crowned with flowers that looked suspiciously like the feathers plucked from Big Bird.

What’s admirable is that Feuille does not seem eager to concede to the local palate except, nominally, in terroir. Even the gougère is anointed with sobacha, though how it was applied escaped me, as did the sermon I had hoped for on Toutain’s “Grains and Seeds” philosophy.

With enough prodding, a kind server may eventually produce Toutain’s doctrine of layering odd ingredients — nutmeg, sea grapes, kombucha, fig leaf — into savory dishes. These can muddle things: corn custard blighted by cumin; caviar steamrolled by salty potato crumbs; and an excellent cauliflower sorbet with no business beside smoked vanilla ice cream.

But Feuille can also thrill. A threadfin lavished with a foam of sake and elderflower that barely registers may be one of the city’s great fish entrées of late. Sweet green peas stood in loving contrast to the ma yau’s bitter finish. I admired, too, Feuille’s use of pumpkin, especially in the lobster, which recalled the one Hélène Darroze did with tandoori.

And with tighter calibration, the prawn tartare might seem less muddy beneath cucumber and fig leaf; the clam custard might yield more gracefully to the caviar; and the gentler acidity of the sabayon — a Toutain leitmotif — might allow the wampee berry to sing. The local-ish ingredients are indeed there, and welcome: mango from Hainan, pigeon from Shiqiao, lobster from Sai Kung. What Feuille needs now is not less ambition, but more confidence in the ideas already on the plate. Until then, it remains one of the city’s more compelling unfinished thoughts. Less