Best dining in New York

The Magic of Napa With Urban Polish
By FRANK BRUNI

Published: September 8, 2004

HE butter-poached lobster almost did it, but not quite. I had been wooed with succulent lobster before. The Island Creek oysters and Iranian caviar, mingled in a kind of sabayon that I was served during that same dinner and during others, made a seductive case. But I was wary of such ostentation.

In the end, it was a different night and a nine-course vegetable tasting, of all things, that made me drop any reserve, cast aside any doubts and accept the fact that I loved Per Se — and that this preening, peacock-vain newcomer deserved it.

I ordered the meal out of a sense of duty, with a heavy heart. Jicama ribbons? Warm potato salad? How transcendent could those be?

Silly, cynical, carnivorous me. The jicama was sensational, so packed with moisture and so faintly sweet that it could have been a new, undiscovered fruit, and the cilantro and avocado that came with it were like idealized essences of themselves, so flavorful that they seemed to have been cultivated in a more verdant universe. The bite-size marble potatoes in the potato salad popped like grapes in my mouth, and an exquisitely balanced mustard-seed vinaigrette gave them a subtle zing.

Lobster is easy; potato salad is hard. And a restaurant that turns a summer picnic staple into a meal-stopping, sigh-inducing dish — and makes that dish a legitimate course in a $135 tasting menu — cannot be denied. Per Se is wondrous.

It is not wondrous 100 percent of the time, and it can be maddening: at moments too intent on culinary adventure or too highfalutin in its presentation and descriptions of dishes, one of which came with a choice of four salts from three continents. To get a reservation may well require a degree of planning and effort that verge on masochistic, and a multicourse, mini-portion extravaganza may well require four hours, which is more time than many diners have or want to spend.

But here is the thing: the return on that patience and that investment is more than a few mouthfuls of food that instantaneously bring a crazy smile to your face and lodge in your memory for days and even weeks to come.

My no-meat meal (with plenty of eggs, cheese and butter) went on to include a creamy but correctly firm risotto that was anointed with a decadently generous mound of summer truffles from Provence. I shared the dish, so I had only eight bites. A month and half later, I still remember the first of those, and how insanely happy it made me, and the last, and how ineffably sad I was.

Yes, yes: Per Se suffers somewhat by comparison with the French Laundry. That is the Napa Valley restaurant where Thomas Keller, the chef at Per Se, made his reputation as one of the most talented American cooks of his generation and created a culinary Mecca, drawing worshipful pilgrims from near and far. Per Se is Mr. Keller's attempt, amid dauntingly great expectations, to recreate that magic in New York, a city that failed him (or that he failed) earlier in his career.

An exact replica is impossible. After several visits to Per Se, I traveled to Napa for a night and ate at the French Laundry. It inhabits a 19th-century house among vineyards and rolling hills, and that setting dilutes the starched formality of a prolonged meal. It also emphasizes the kitchen's connection to the land around it. Ask a waiter at the French Laundry where a vegetable on your plate came from, and he or she will likely say, "Across the street."

Per Se is across the street from Central Park, in what is essentially a shopping mall. With its brown tones, dark woods and shimmering metal surfaces, it looks like a gilded corporate boardroom, not just touched but kissed by Midas. It offers opulence in place of hominess: an appropriate adjustment, I would argue, from Napa to Manhattan.

It also feels blissfully indulgent. The space between tables — only 16 of them — is vast, and every table has a view of the park and the grand buildings that skirt it. If you can wangle a reservation that puts you in Per Se around dusk and allows you to watch the light fade over Manhattan, do it. The reward is a profound sense of peace that very few of this frenetic city's restaurants can offer.

I am handicapped slightly in evaluating the service, because the vigilant staff repeatedly recognized me, and kept a special watch over my table. But I, in turn, kept watch over other tables and listened hard to acquaintances' reports of their experiences. I am convinced that everyone at Per Se is pampered.

The service departs compellingly from the traditional French model by mingling formal attentiveness with breezy, even cheeky banter. I laughed one night as a server poured a slowly hardening chocolate shell over orange-scented vanilla ice cream; he alluded to an earlier dish that no one at my table had loved enough to finish.

"Maybe," he said, "we should have done this to the rabbit."

The dessert was listed on the menu as a "creamsicle," an example of the way in which Per Se tries, with its food as well as its service, to inject a bit of wit into the proceedings. Mr. Keller's canapé of salmon tartare — one of several carry-overs from the French Laundry — is served like a scoop of ice cream atop a black sesame cone that is filled with crème fraîche. No utensils required.

Mr. Keller divides his time between New York and Napa, often leaving Per Se in the hands of the chef de cuisine, Jonathan Benno, who was in charge on most of the nights I dined there. It is to him as well as Mr. Keller, then, that I owe prodigious thanks for a simultaneously comforting and thrilling dish of agnolotti filled with a sweet corn pudding. For a dizzyingly rich egg custard infused with white truffle oil. For tagliatelle with black truffles, which Per Se keeps frozen for use year-round. Sybaritic to the core, Per Se is big on truffles, and it is big on foie gras, which it prepares in many ways, depending on the night. I relished it most when it was poached sous vide, in a tightly sealed plastic pouch, with Sauternes and vanilla. The vanilla was a perfect accent, used in perfect proportion.

Per Se hunts down superior ingredients — turning to Elysian Fields Farm for lamb, Snake River Farms for Kobe beef — and lets them express themselves as clearly as possible. This is cooking as diligence and even perfectionism, not sleight of hand, and little fillips go a long way. That Kobe beef comes topped with a sliver of sautéed marrow that deepens the richness of the meat tenfold.

But Per Se also dares to be different, and insists, sometimes to its slight detriment, on departing from favorites like grouper or Dover sole for something like cobia, a game fish that, at least at Per Se, was too chewy to warrant the trouble.

Per Se wants to dazzle and sometimes to challenge you. I recall in particular what I came to think of as a Wizard-of-Oz course of four different dishes of organ meats, including calf's brain (as delectably molten as foie gras) and calf's heart.

Those were part of an extended chef's tasting menu that Per Se presented to three friends and me as a special option, something it does for a few tables during every lunch and dinner. The usual options are a nine-course tasting menu for $150 and a five-course prix fixe for $125. Each of these proceeds from appetizer to seafood to meat and tacks on a reliably superior cheese course, with cheese being defined liberally enough to include, say, ravioli filled with it.

I recommend the nine courses, and I recommend that you let Per Se do wine pairings, which cost about $120 per person for a meal of that length. (Many bottles here cost more than that.) Per Se can be trusted with such decisions.

It lavishes attention on every aspect of a meal. The gin and tonic I had as an aperitif was an unusually smooth-tasting knockout that used tonic made in-house and came with a gorgeous, gleaming silver stirrer. The shallow pool of crème brûlée that Per Se throws in, as an unheralded extra, among more elaborate desserts would be a lesser restaurant's claim to fame.

But this restaurant shoots straight for the stars. And it soars high — and often — enough to grab four of them.

Per Se

****

Time Warner Center, Columbus Circle; (212) 823-9335

ATMOSPHERE A large, plush, brown-toned dining room with just 16 tables, a great deal of space between them and a lovely view of Central Park.

SOUND LEVEL Relatively quiet, but not downbeat.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Chilled carrot soup; chilled pea soup; sabayon of oysters and caviar; warm potato salad; tagliatelle with truffles; lobster; Kobe beef with marrow; chocolate tower with peanut soup; "creamsicle."

WINE LIST Expansive, thoughtful and widely varied in geography and price, with many bottles under $100 and many wines by the glass or half bottle.

PRICE RANGE Five-course prix fixe, $125 plus $25 supplement for foie gras. Nine-course tasting menu, $150 plus $25 supplement. Nine-course vegetable tasting, $135.

HOURS Lunch, Friday through Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Dinner, daily, 5:30 to 10 p.m.

RESERVATIONS Extremely difficult. Call exactly two months in advance, at 10 a.m., when the reservation line opens. Expect to redial and to hold. Another option is to get on the waiting list.

CREDIT CARDS Visa, American Express and MasterCard.

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Accessible.

WHAT THE STARS MEAN:
(None)|Poor to satisfactory
*|Good
**|Very good
***|Excellent
****|Extraordinary
Ratings reflect the reviewer's reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.