Per Se

Four Floors Up, Worth the Elevator

4 of 5

Thomas Keller opened Per Se in 2004 as his New York answer to The French Laundry, and it still sits on the fourth floor of the Deutsche Bank Center with Central Park and Columbus Circle laid out below. You ride up through a mall to get there. That is the New York joke, and the payoff is a quiet room that Adam Tihany designed to make you forget it.

The kitchen holds three Michelin stars and cooks classic French technique, with a nine-course tasting menu that changes daily and a nine-course vegetable menu for people who want the same rigor without the animal. The wine program runs past 2,000 bottles, including old vintages and small producers. The main dining room starts at $200 a head as a deposit on Tock, and the real bill grows from there.

If the full tasting is more evening than you want, the Salon lounge offers a four-course menu with a $150 deposit, which is the grown-up way in. A restaurant like this lives or dies on consistency over decades, and that is the thing to pay for. Treat it as an occasion and let the room do its slow work. The first bite of a long menu is never the one that tells you anything. The sixth is, and by then you are no longer checking the time.

Order this: The daily nine-course tasting menu, The nine-course vegetable tasting menu, The Salon four-course if you want a lighter night
The damage: $$$$
Go: A weekday evening, with a window seat and no rush
Find it: 10 Columbus Circle, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10019