At Last

THE FRENCH LAUNDRY'S THOMAS KELLER ARRIVES IN NEW YORK

Not since all four members of Kiss released solo albums on the same day in 1978 has America experienced a blast of audacious simultaneity on the level of the so-called Restaurant Collection in the new Time Warner Center in Midtown Manhattan, where five chef-godheads—Thomas Keller, Charlie Trotter, Gray Kunz, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and Masa Takayama—are all opening new fine-dining establishments this year. It's Keller, though, who towers above the rest in Gene Simmons platform boots (ugh—sorry), for it's his new place, Per Se, which opened on February 16, that has eaters the most excited. Keller's restaurant in Napa Valley, the French Laundry, is widely regarded as the best in the nation, and Per Se's two-tiered dining room, designed by Adam Tihany, abounds with clever evocations of that lovely place: a replica of its blue front door, lampshades embossed with shirttag symbols for washing and ironing instructions, and, shockingly for a fourth-story space in a shiny new Manhattan tower, a wood-burning fireplace. Still more impressive is Per Se's enormous, hyperspecialized kitchen, which, as Keller proudly points out during a whirlwind tour, has its own butchering room, its own bakeshop, its own "ice-cream fabrication room," and so on—quite a step up from his last kitchen in New York, at Rakel, a fine but beforeits-time restaurant that fell victim to the '87 stock-market crash. Keller and his chef de cuisine,Jonathan Benno, are aiming to make the Per Se experience as mouthgasmic as that at the French Laundry, where one receives a succession of small courses, many of them haute allusions to commonplace cookery, like a "macaroni and cheese" that's really butter-poached lobster with mascarpone-enriched orzo, and a "coffee and doughnuts" dessert that's really a cappuccino semifreddo accompanied by little cinnamon-sugar fry cakes. Now that Keller is, as Ace Frehley would have it, back in the New York groove (again, sorry!), is he planning any special menu nods to the city? Perhaps, I suggest, something like "pastrami" on "rye"? "Well, as a matter of fact, yes," he says. "We're working on a 'deli sandwich'—made of black truffles and butter on country bread. We'll find a way to make it deli-like in the presentation." -DAVID KAMP

DAVID KAMP