New York - - As a diner in search of the extraordinary at Lespinasse, you could easily overlook it on the menu. But it is there, poulet roti a la broche, chicken roasted on a spit, without pretense and without apology.

If you should dare to order something so plain, a thrill is in store. A waiter will appear before you with a whole chicken, brown as nutmeg, with skin like a fragile shell shadowed with flat chips of truffle. The waiter will carve it, cutting through the bird as fluidly as if it were pie, and set it on your plate with a small heap of spinach salad and white asparagus as thin as shoestring.

Could it be an anomaly? A flight of whimsy on the part of the chef? Hardly, Daniel, Lutece, Le Cirque 2000, Bouley Bakery and Chanterelle serve roast chicken, too. Long the dish of bistros and home cooking, the safe bet of wary diners, roast chicken has become a staple on top menus. It is a dish to please the masses and challenge the master.

Rocco DiSpirito, the chef at Union Pacific, compared roasting a chicken to cooking an omelet. “It's a yardstick by which you can measure a chef's talent,” He said. Any chef can impress diners with luxury foods like foie gras and caviar, but the chef who can turn a humble, bony bird like chicken into something exquisite has talent, and most likely a following.

The truth is, of course, that as hungry as New York diners are for the latest in cooking, many go out enough to want something simple occasionally. Savvy diners may choose a restaurant because they know the chef can perform miracles with sweetbreads, but all they may really want to eat is chicken.

Eberhard Mueller, the chef at Lutece, learned that the hard way. When he was hired at the restaurant, he took roast chicken off the menu. “It just seemed a little too ordinary,” Mueller said. The regulars sent out a collective shriek. As a compromise, the restaurant now keeps chickens in the house at all times and roasts them by request.

These restaurants are offering chicken as comfort food, but plain roasted chicken it is not. At Daniel, it is slowly browned on a rotisserie, basted with lightly salted French butter or duck fat and served with large soft pieces of chanterelles and porcini. Milk-fed baby chickens are pan roasted at Gramercy Tavern and set on a sauce thickened with liver and a fondue of leeks. These roast chickens are full flavored like game: moist, toothsome and, yes elegant.

Chefs have raised the bar, demanding better chickens to work with and tossing aside classic roasting techniques to develop better ones. Which is much of the reason that chefs now serve chicken with as much confidence and frequency as for foie gras. “We were much more pretentious chefs a decade ago,” DiSpirito said. “And a decade ago, I don't think we had the same quality of birds.”

It was in the mid-1980s that New York chefs began using organic chickens. In 1986, when the quilted Giraffe, then one of the city's most expensive restaurants, put chicken on its menu, it raised eyebrows.

Back then, said Barry Wine, an owner of the restaurant, chicken didn't qualify as fine restaurant fare. “The impetus for putting chicken on the menu at a restaurant like the Quilted Giraffe was trips to France,” he said. “Whenever we traveled in France, in the three-star restaurants, there was chicken on the menu. When free-range chickens came along here, we saw it as the opportunity to be like France, to have chicken on the menu, but chicken we were proud of.”

Since then, restaurants have moved toward higher-quality products. Chefs began seeking free-range chickens just as they looked to buy organic vegetables, locally caught fish and cheeses from small farms. The movement has altered the spectrum of restaurant food. The improved quality of chickens has captured the fascination of chefs. “I have it because this chicken is so good it's worth being on the menu,” said Tom Colicchio, the chef at Gramercy Tavern, who uses organic, free-range chickens raised for D'Artagnan at Eberly Poultry, in Lancaster County, PA.

The best restaurants, like Jo Jo and Lespinasse, use Eberly chickens, which are free of antibiotics or growth stimulants and are fed organic grains and well water.

Bob Eberly, an owner of the farm, said his chickens have more flavor because it takes longer for them to grow to full size. They reach three pounds in seven to eight weeks, while commercial chickens take only five to five and a half weeks. The added time allows their muscles to develop more fully, and hence their flavor.

Now, though, some chefs are looking for even more in a chicken. Restaurants like Gramercy Tavern and Daniel want chickens from Four Story Hill Farm, in Honesdale, PA., which feeds its chickens milk to flavor the flesh like veal and give in more gelatin. Union Pacific uses chickens from New Yuen Roy Live Poultry Market in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, which gets organic chickens from Lancaster County, PA., and then slaughters them using Buddhist methods.

The difference between these chickens and those from commercial farms are tremendous. To show how different, Colicchio roasted a Perdue chicken, a Murray's all-natural chicken and an Eberly chicken. The Perdue was yellow and so plump it made the others look skinny. But its flavor was one dimensional, and the meat fell apart in my mouth; I barely had to chew it. The Murray's had a slightly better texture, but it was stringy and wet, had no aroma and was flavorless compared with the Eberly, which was rich, meaty and had a subtle gaminess like a bird from the wild.

The price differences correspond somewhat: at Food Emporium stores in Manhattan, Perdue chicken is $1.99 a pound, Murray's is $2.49, and D'Artagnan's private-label chickens from Eberly Farms are $2.79.

Chefs who make the effort to buy great chickens also tend to take great pains cooking them. About the only consideration most chefs agree on is that the chicken be small, three to three and a half pounds, so that it may be cooked to order.

A typical restaurant trick is to roast the chicken three-quarters of the way before service begins, and then finish it to order. But in better restaurants, this does not pass muster. “If you roast something and cut it up and let it sit out and reheat it, it's just a totally different experience,” said David Waltuck, the chef at Chanterelle. The skin retains more fat, so it tends to be flabby: the flesh loses moisture, which means it is dry.

To roast a chicken quickly, chefs will use the cooking equivalent of poetic license. At Gramercy tavern, Colicchio cuts the chicken into pieces, keeping the bones attached. He browns the pieces slowly on the stove before putting them in the oven. He keeps them skin side up, so that the bones beneath the flesh protect the meat from drying out. After roasting for a few minutes, he adds a healthy scoop of butter and herbs to the pan and spoons the melted mixture over the chicken every few minutes to give it a toasty skin infused with herbs. The chicken is served with glazed vegetables, which are cooked separately, keeping the flavor of the chicken pure.

At Jo Jo, the method is slightly different. The pieces are browned on the stove, then left skin side down and put into a fiery 500-degree oven. The chicken cooks quickly and turns a deep chestnut brown. A sauce with ginger, saffron, green olives, cinnamon and coriander is spooned over the top.

It is a simple dish. “We try to buy the best of the best and don't mess around with it too much,” said Chris Beischer, the chef of Jo Jo. “You have to have a great chicken, a well-made chicken stock and good olives.”

It is philosophy often repeated. “We start with a good chicken, and we take care of it while it's roasting.” Said Mueller at Lutece. “We make sure it doesn't burn.” His technique is surprisingly elementary. He seasons it inside and out with salt and pepper, trusses it and roasts it whole, deglazing the pan with water to make a sauce.

The great challenge in roasting chicken whole is getting the breasts and legs to finish cooking at the same time. Before the bird goes into the oven, Mueller makes small incisions on each side where the breast and legs meet. This allows heat to penetrate the cavity more quickly.

At Daniel, they hang whole chickens breast side down on a rotisserie so that the drippings pass over the breast meat, keeping it moist while cooking. They also press a mixture of butter, mustard, herbs and breadcrumbs under the skin. The breadcrumbs, said Alex Lee, the chef de cuisine, help to retain the moisture.

Christian Delouvrier, the chef at Lespinasse, uses a rotisserie, too, but his method could not be more different, nor his opinions more extreme. Cooking on a horizontal spit, he said, is ideal because as the chicken turns, the juices drip down over the flesh, so that it essentially cooks in its own juices. A spit also allows all of the fat to fall off the chicken so that the skin caramelizes.

Delouvrier uses no pepper and salts only the interior cavity. As the salt melts and the chicken turns, the seasoning soaks into the flesh from the inside out. Salting the skin, he said, creates a crust that tends to dry the meat and split the skin.

He slides slices of truffle under the skin and puts a few herbs into the cavity, then trusses it tightly. This step, he said, is the key to keeping it juicy. Then he rubs it with butter and lets it rotate, slowly browning, on the spit. When the breast is cooked, he takes it off the spit and sends it out on a silver tray. Then while the diner begins eating the carved bird, he finishes the legs and sends them out on a separate plate.

His pains are rewarded. Delouvrier's chicken is exquisite, each bite more sumptuous than the next. Diners who pay $70 for two trust him to provide nothing less.

At the James Beard House, where a fixed-price dinner starts at $75, organizers worry about diners making that leap of faith. The Beard House discourages visiting chefs from using chicken as a main course.

Mildred Amico, a program director at the James Beard Foundation, said, “People can go into their supermarket and see chicken for 59 cents a pound, and when that comes up against a $75 dimmer, that may come to mind.”

In the end, when elegance and luxury is the ideal, chicken is an act of bravery. For the chef, and the diner.