There comes a time in everyone's life, when full disclosure is of the essence. For a restaurant scout, this nasty procedure is prescribed when writing a report of a restaurant owned by a friend. The matter is nasty both ways. If the report is even slightly negative, it could cost a friendship; and if it is positive, it will have less credence with the readers.

I've known Michael Sniatowsky for close to 20 years. Sniatowsky, a peripatetic entrepreneur, went into the restaurant business three years ago, by opening Koji's Kaizen, which became an instant favourite of Montreal sushiphiles.

Fortunately, there was no need to write a full story on Kaizen, because the late and great Helen Rochesterhad already lionized it, naming it one of her best of the year in 1995. Now, however, I must plunge into the tricky waters of reviewing him, because Sniatowski has raised the stakes by inventing Treehouse toshowcase the enormous talents of chef Tri Du.

Treehouse is on the second floor of the office building whose ground floor houses Kaizen. I enter via a heavy glass door to take a zippy elevator. Upstairs, I am face to face with a sumptuous bar in a foyer that isspacious and intimate all at once. There are playfully bold decorator touches - deep colours, complex lighting,
speckled marble, gold-leaf - touches that would seem random and nonsensical were they the work ofanyone less than the fabulous Andreas Escobar, one of the city's foremost interiordesigners.

Off to the edges, there are private-dining tatami rooms more or less in the traditional Japanese pattern, and in the front, with a view of all Westmount, a pleasant corporate lunch room that shuts out the rest of the world. This room is dedicated to Donald K. Donald and is apparently ideal for hashing out rock-concert deals.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the entire back half of the space is the dining room proper. It ishighlighted by a wall-to-wall sushi bar, where Tri presides over a display-fridge full of the freshest and most precious sea-products money can buy.

Tri is no ordinary chef. He's an all-Québécois success story. Part of the Vietnamese boat people diaspora, he inched his way to this country after the haphazard sail through the South Seas and a harrowing stay in a Philippines outpost. Once here, he worked at a Lac-Saint-Jean farm before descending on Montreal and learning pastry-making and then sushi-making, courtesy of Alan Lieberman's Croissanterie, and then the erstwhile Sushi Bar on St. Laurent Blvd. Since then, he has married a Victoriaville native, had two
children, starred as a local sushi uber-chef and finally hooked up with Sniatowski, first at Kaizen, now as the master of the Treehouse, named after him, but misspelled to avoid being pronounced "try-house."

Tri is an inventor and a maverick. He's free of blind devotion to convention. He understands the crux of Japanese cuisine - its worship of fragile beauty and its attempt to echo the wonders of nature. But he goes beyond. He stretches the concept of sushi to its limits, while fusing it with Pan-Asian influences.

Yes, I can have normal sushi and sashimi at Treehouse, but why should I bother? If I let loose, I'll be dazzled and go home a better person. Instead of the normal salmon-roe caviar, Tri uses trout roe. It has a smaller grain, is less salty and has a sweeter flavour.

Alongside red tobiko (flying-fish roe), Tri has found black tobiko, which tastes like real caviar. Speaking of real, the chef offers Russian caviar with an escalating tariff: by the ounce, sevruga is $33, osietra $49, and beluga, $69.

Tuna can be had in the usual maguro (red) and toro (belly), as well as smoked, and also minced and combined with tempura bits, red tobiko and wasabi sauce that leaves me breathless. This is a far cry from any tuna I've ever had.

Like all sushi moderns, Tri has designed very personal maki sushis, combining several ingredients with rice, rolled in (or out) of seaweed and sliced into intriguing circles. I start with the Blue Note maki, named after the famed New York jazz joint, to celebrate the Kaizen empire's accent on jazz, canned and also live (downstairs Sunday to Tuesday nights).

The jazzy maki marries spicy tuna with sliced tuna, salmon, whitefish and avocado. In appearance it's like one of the more cerebral phrases of Coltrane, but goes down as smooth as Oscar Peterson.

Kaizen maki adds melon to eel, tobiko and cucumber for a tropical look and clean taste. Toro-hamachi rainbow puts a twist on the notion of draping fish outside the roll by using the prized yellowtail and tuna-belly. It is very luxurious.

Local sushi greats are also fond of creating rice-less makis, called sashimi rolls. Tri sets a new standard for this practice, with his Eye of the Dragon, a clever interplay of a sheet of fresh daikon-radish around salmon, squid (ika) and tobiko, with a wheel of scallion as the central punctuation. All these are wrapped in seaweed and dipped in a light batter, to be quick-fried. The result is then sliced into a flower patternand served on a spicy sauce. Exquisite.

Tri even makes art of a simple barbecued eel (unagi)
hand-roll, by adding avocado, tobiko, wasabi sauce
and the usual caramel sauce. A golden couple of mouthfuls; a perfect dessert.

On a second visit, I order the "chef's choice" Omakase, Tri's version of a whimsical series of dishes, some cold, some cooked, in the tradition of Vancouver's well-regarded Tojo and New York's even more famous Nobu. This meal costs $60 per person
and affords an entertaining sampling from the menu as well assurprises. I get a lovely feast of many deluxe tastes and a pleasant, not over-full sensation at the end. It starts with delicate raw tuna and halibut petals on a special sauce spiked with crisped garlic. This is
followed by a tuna tartar in a creamy sauce of miso and wasabi as well as a spoonful of caviar.

Fresh crab wrapped in daikon and served on a fiery sauce with fried yam threads paves the way to jumbo shrimps poached in sake and served on spicily dressed salad. A Blue Note maki from the sushi bar rounds out this part of the menu.

Marinated and grilled filet mignon tataki brings in the last round, with a surprise ending of a-first-in-town sea-urchin (uni) tempura. The creamy eggs of the faraway echinoderm, wrapped in shiso (mint) and seaweed, are battered and flash fried. Extraordinary
and revelatory. Also firsts in Montreal are the related (à la carte) tempuras of glistening duck foie gras, and textured lobster.

As if all this were not enough reason to rush up to Treehouse, there are also the satisfying yet light finales of dessert chef Hélène Arseneau. Sweet nibbles of properly caramelized Chinese pear tatin, and a trio of satin- smooth crème brûlées, flavoured respectively with star anis, Caribbean chocolate and Banyuls sweet-wine.

Treehouse is a tasteful, very appetizing escapade into the culinary adventures of a marvellous chef. It is a truly worthwhile extravagance, which I'd recommend whoever the owner.