Now, at long last and a year behind schedule, Bullion is ready. With opening tentatively scheduled for the second week of November, the 400 Record building's owners put on a welcome party to show off the restaurant's interior and a little of its food — and they pulled out all the stops.
Most of the guests seemed perfectly at ease in an environment with a 10-piece jazz band playing behind Bullion-branded music stands, buffet line descriptions inscribed on glass Bullion paperweights and acrobats dangling from silks in custom-made Bullion catsuits. Most of the guests seemed untroubled by the party's constant surveillance: a half-dozen roving photographers, a blinking GoPro stashed away in a high window above the oyster bar, a drone whirring along the sidelines.
But there had to be a few members of the working classes in attendance, wondering: Who exactly paid for all this? And who paid Davaillon enough salary to spend two years at the height of his career not cooking?

The entry to Bullion, a staircase curling around a sculpture by Jean-Michel Othoniel.
Brian Reinhart
Bullion did not show off formal menu previews at its party, but there were rabbit rillettes (a Davaillon mainstay), duck pastrami, tiny puffs of bread oozing comte cheese and Wellfleet oysters freshly shucked at a bar that was, in fact, a huge bar-shaped ice sculpture. Scardello, the beloved cheese shop, was on hand, too.
The restaurant invited guests to peruse its new dining room and lounge. Bullion is literally a gold bar, a second-floor space jutting out of the building's south side, looking suspended in time and sheathed in a scalloped, scaly, gold-colored coating. The entrance is a curved staircase in a glass entryway on the southwest corner, a staircase that curls around a floor-to-ceiling sculpture by French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel.
Art is a big deal at Bullion. Othoniel has had work exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Louvre, and the dining room features a 23-foot-wide aluminum and steel sculpture by Kathryn Andrews, who was featured at the Nasher Sculpture Center in fall 2016. Gorgeously textured crimson canvases by the young American artist Matthew Chambers grace one particularly lavish booth.

An aluminum and steel artwork by Kathryn Andrews is displayed about booths in Bullion.
Brian Reinhart
We'll be excited to dine here soon. If we have a concern about the interior, as shown off at Friday's party, it's that the space feels slightly cramped: To get the desired number of tables (we counted about 24), Bullion squeezed some together into rows that might politely be called intimate and trimmed walkways to be as narrow as practical. The risk of an acoustical nightmare with so many people dining in close quarters is very real, so we hope that Bullion has invested in substantial sound absorption. But it appears, so far, that it has thought of — and spent money on — every detail.

The lobby of the 400 Record building, just underneath Bullion's dining room, features artwork by Alex Israel.
Brian Reinhart
Bullion, 400 S. Record St. 972-698-4250; opens early November.