Our table at Per Se in New York was terribly crowded. It wasn't the place setting, which was a model of simplicity: a glass or two, polished to a shine, a knife and a fork each, a flounce of pleated napkin. And it certainly wasn't the table itself, which was a snowfield of crisp, custom-made linen, with room for at least eight elbows, occupied tonight by just the four.
It was the memories of all the other truly great meals I have eaten, clamouring around it, as if trying to get a look. It was the memory of the whole black truffle en croute at l'Auberge de l'Ill in Alsace, the eating of which made time stand still; it was the foie gras and crab biscuit and the pigeon pastilla at the Fat Duck in Bray; the Nantucket scallops in their own buttery juices at Craft on the other side of Manhattan; the whole suckling pig shared with friends at St John in London; the first puff of sweet steam from the chocolate and mint souffle at the Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham, which started it all.
And now here I was at Per Se, the new restaurant from Thomas Keller, the legendary chef of the French Laundry in California, itself regarded as the very best restaurant in America, twice named best restaurant on the planet by a panel of experts. Per Se means 'in and of itself' though this venture is nothing of the sort and never can be. The settings may be different - the chrome and glass gilding of the big city here, to the fields and wide open skies of the Napa Valley there - but Per Se and the French Laundry are still each other's siblings. They share the same DNA. Anyone ordering the $150 chef's tasting menu at Per Se would be entitled to expect greatness, to wonder whether they were sitting in what fellow American superstar chef Eric Ripert has already described as 'the greatest restaurant in the world'. Let's put it this way: I was rather looking forward to my dinner.
And so it began, all 15 courses of it, though there were many more individual dishes than that, for Keller is famous for his jazz-style riffs on ingredients. Much of the time my companion Simon and I were given the same ingredients or idea, but realised in a different way. So, for example, to start, a fresh and creamy chilled onion soup for me, poured atop a quenelle of minced pickled apples, and for him, a soup of sweetcorn slicked with basil oil. Next, for me, a Keller signature dish called pearls and oysters: a single fat oyster in a rich, oniony sabayon of tapioca - the pearls - with a generous spoonful of caviar; for him (allergic to oysters, poor sap) a cauliflower panna cotta as a foil for the caviar.
There are eggs: a soft-boiled hen's egg, with rich black truffle puree and melba toast for me, a white truffle oil-infused custard set in an open egg shell for him. We share a piece of striped black bass, cut to look like a lamb shank for presentation at the table with a sprig of thyme, then filleted and laid on a buttery tangle of roasted endive and almonds. We have the sweetest tails of Nova Scotia lobster, with sweeter garden carrots and peas for me and melted Savoy cabbage for him. There is a truly stunning fillet of Snake River Farm beef, with chanterelle mushrooms and a tiny, exquisite slice of a bread and bone marrow pudding on the side.
Now it's time for pudding. I am brought a dish with what looks like a solid, shiny chocolate lid. The waiter sprinkles on crystals of Maldon sea salt and then dribbles very hot olive oil on top. It melts a hole in the middle to reveal a void in the bowl and at the bottom a scoop of delicate thyme ice cream. Simon gets a melting chocolate pudding with a scoop of olive oil ice cream.
A sorbet each: one of fragrant hibiscus with an avocado coulis, another of quince with a yogurt panna cotta. Then two further chocolate dishes, one a brownie with coffee ice cream and caramel chocolate croustillant, another a combination of chocolate 'sweetened salty hazelnuts'.
And this list is only the highest of the highlights, perhaps less than half of what we ate, all of it coordinated by as cheery and unstuffy a bunch of waiters as you could hope to find. At the end we were brought mint tea. We were offered hand-made chocolates. We were presented with bags of tiny flavoured meringues to take away, in case we were still feeling peckish on the short cab journey home. There were, of course, wines to accompany this: 13 of them in all. We arrived at 8.15pm and we left at a little after 12.30pm.
The extraordinary thing about this is that by Per Se standards there was nothing extraordinary about it at all. This is what they do: dinners of 15 tiny courses, each no more than two or three mouthfuls, lasting four or five or even six hours. It's their shtick. So, was it the greatest meal in the world? Was it the best dinner I have ever eaten? Jesus, give me a break! It's only been a week. I'm still digesting.
Above the door out of the kitchens at Per Se is an inscription. It reads 'Finesse. Noun: refinement and delicacy of performance, execution or artisanship'. I ask Keller about it when we meet the next day. He looks up at the sign and says simply, 'Life is all about finesse.' It certainly is if you're Thomas Keller. He's sodden with the stuff, has a bearing and poise uncommon among his professional tribe (even wearing his trademark black clogs) and an apparently unshakeable self-confidence.
Per Se is situated in the $1.7 billion Time Warner Centre at New York's Columbus Circle on the southern corner of Central Park. It is a massive secular cathedral, glittering with the best retail opportunities money can buy and here nothing comes cheap, certainly not a top-end restaurant. Though his people prefer not to discuss money, it is said that Per Se cost around $12 million to open - very little of it Keller's - making it possibly the most expensive new restaurant on earth. All the crockery, with its hound's-tooth motif, is custom made, as is the linen and the silverware. The floors are of Italian bronzed tiles, the carpets unique, the kitchens unlike any I've ever seen. There might, therefore, be grounds for anxiety. If so, Keller doesn't show it.
'If you're really happy with what you're doing does it matter what the critics say?' he asks. 'Or even what the guests say? If we're having a good night in the kitchen the by-product is your happiness.' It is perhaps easier to say this now that Frank Bruni, restaurant critic of The New York Times, has awarded Per Se four out of four stars, and admitted to being 'ineffably sad' at the finishing of a risotto of summer truffles during a meal there. In a city full of top-end restaurants, fewer than half a dozen have the top score.
Even so, Keller does not appear to be a man swayed by the opinions of others; he has always followed his own path. Keller, who turns 49 this week, began his career aged just 17 in the kitchens of the Miami country club his mother managed, when the chef quit. For years he worked his way through kitchens in New England and New York, picking lowly jobs in top restaurants over loftier positions in less well-regarded places, before heading to France for a stint at the famed three-star Taillevent. 'Taillevent has been a model for me,' he says now, 'and my kitchen is modelled on that.' In the Eighties he returned to New York and opened Rakel (the name is a combination of his name and that of his then business partner Serge Raoul). It was there, Keller says, that he started developing his food philosophy. 'I reinterpreted the shrimp cocktail so it was true to the flavour profile of the dish but different. So there was a tomato consomme infused with horseradish and we grilled the shrimp and put it all in a highball glass.'
Such culinary high jinks enthused the critics, but then came the Wall Street crash of 1987 and business collapsed. Within a few years, Serge Raoul had downgraded the restaurant to a neighbourhood bistro and Keller quit. It wasn't his thing. So he travelled about again, picking up consultancies he hated, and executive positions which didn't suit him. In 1991, while living in Los Angeles, he was told about a restaurant that was for sale in the Napa Valley town of Yountville. 'I went there, saw the French Laundry and somehow knew it was the place I was looking for all my life,' he later said. 'I remember thinking, Yeah, this is home.'
He raised $600,000 from dozens of small investors, which he matched with bank loans, and then set to work creating the greatest restaurant in America, a place that would become famed for the hand-rolled cornets of salmon tartar and creme fraiche with which all his meals begin, and his delicate ways with panna cotta or walnut soups and, above all, the supreme quality of his ingredients. In October 1997 Ruth Reichl, then restaurant critic for The New York Times, said the French Laundry was 'the most exciting place to eat in the United States'. The reservation book filled up and stayed filled.
Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck has eaten at the French Laundry twice. 'It is just possible,' he told me, 'that the best example of precise classical French cooking is not in France but in the United States.' As we talk Keller refers constantly to his 'philosophy' and I ask him to describe it. All his chefs are entitled to create dishes in a way that 'brings out the integrity of the product', he says, but they must 'not be intrusive on another course. There must be no repetition of any one item across a menu.' Really? 'Absolutely. When fava beans come in and I want to use them on a meat dish, someone else can't use them on fish. It pushes our imagination.' It also results in the most extraordinary list of dishes. Most restaurants have a couple of dozen on at any one time. The French Laundry - and now Per Se - has a repertoire of literally thousands.
He has even written a declaration of intent for his staff describing the philosophy behind the myriad tasting menus. 'With each course we want to strike quick, mean and leave without getting caught,' he writes, like some Norman Mailer of the stove. 'All menus at the French Laundry revolve around the law of diminishing returns. That is the more you have of something the less you enjoy it.' So lots of tiny courses and lots of intense flavours. 'Imagine one carrot having as much sweet, earthy and fresh characteristic as a pound of carrots or a spoonful of pea soup with the impact of a thousand peas.' I don't need to imagine. I've tried it.
In time, the French Laundry spawned a nearby baby brother, Bouchon, and then a bakery, and then another Bouchon in Las Vegas. Next came the approach from Kenneth Himmel, developer of the Time Warner Centre, who wanted to put together the greatest collection of restaurants in the world. He knew he had to have Keller, and Keller in turn was ready to return to New York, to vanquish the demons of Rakel's failure. 'It is part of America,' he says. 'You've got to be ambitious, you've got to move on. I suppose I wanted to find out how hard I could make it for myself and how hard I could be on my staff.' Plus, as an incentive, he was given complete power to choose who else would be in the collection.
'It wasn't about wielding that power,' he says. 'It was about making sure we had like minds around us.' One of the criticisms of Per Se is that it is, essentially, a restaurant in a shopping mall. All Keller will say about this is that 'if the Centre succeeds we all succeed' but there is no doubt that he has tried to stack the house in his favour. So the famed Charlie Trotter will open his first restaurant outside Chicago downstairs from Per Se. There's a steakhouse from Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and a Japanese place called Masa offering tasting menus at $240 a pop. The Time Warner restaurant collection is so top end, so damn bling, it hurts.
But for a while it was almost dead before it started. A week after Per Se officially opened in February a fire ripped through the kitchen, closing it down for four months. 'We had also closed the French Laundry for four months so we could bring all the staff out here to train up the new lot to send back,' Keller says. 'Now we had no way of training them.' But somehow they got back on track.
He takes me into the kitchen, through the 'breezeway', a corridor specially created to give the waiters a chance to adjust from the clatter of the kitchen to the hush of the dining room. He leads me round, introducing chefs, telling me that his job is to make them the best they can be, to pass on leadership skills. The company now has a staff of over 500 across America, a leap from the dozen or so he started with at the French Laundry. At one point he tells me he has acquired an executive coach, and I hope he means he's bought himself a fancy car. But in fact an executive coach is someone who teaches people like Keller how to run large companies. 'It's something I need to be able to do,' he says.
Keller clearly loves this management stuff. He shows me the manuals for his employees, hundreds of pages on fish and cheese and meat and how to serve them; the correct way to store ingredients; how to lay tables. And that's before you get to the recipes. All are now online, on a protected website. Soon there will be video link between the French Laundry and Per Se so Keller can see what's going on.
They also keep track of thousands of meals, making lists of what many of their key diners have had and when. I am startled. Really? 'Oh yes'. He pulls up sheets of menus from the night before. They even have ours, which he presents me with. This is when the system becomes a little less shiny, reassuringly a touch less professional. For example our two menus mix up a number of the dishes that we had. One course - the cheese - is completely wrong. And there, two courses apart on my menu, is proof that the philosophy of non-repetition doesn't always work in the heat of service. Horror: I was served Cipollini onions twice. I thought it was a neat bit of conscious self-reference. From the look on Keller's face, though, this is clearly a screw up. 'Damn,' he says. 'If I hadn't told you, you wouldn't have known.'
Errant Cipollini onions aside, is Per Se the best place to eat dinner on the planet? Was this my greatest meal ever? Is Thomas Keller the best chef in the world? No, no and no. This is not the damning criticism it looks like. When I ask Keller himself how it feels to be described as the best chef in the world he responds repeatedly as if I had asked him what it feels like to be merely 'one of the best chefs in the world.' He says 'I accept my place in that list because enough people have said it. Thing is, I go to work every day just as I have done for 25 years. It's that experience that has made me one of the best.'
The problem, as ever, is hype. If Per Se were in France, it would be regarded as a top player. I have no doubt it would have three Michelin stars and Keller would be spoken of alongside the likes of Pierre Gagnaire, Michel Bras and Marc Veyrat. But because he is in the US, he stands proud of the pack. He has to be the biggest, the most accomplished.
The truth is that not everything works. The 15-course dinner idea sounds great in principle but, in practice, creates an unmeetable challenge. It is impossible for every course to deliver, and so it proved with our meal. A dish of 'grouper cheek' in a chickpea crust was underwhelming - two so-what fragments of fish goujon. The 'salad' course was some pretty inconsequential ingredients, shepherded together for no good reason. And, as ever in the US, the cheese was just plain lousy.
But that is to judge the restaurant by its hype. I will never forget the striped bass dish, or the beef, or the foie gras, or the oysters and pearls or the lobster. And the chocolate dish with the hot olive oil was truly inspired. If my meal had been just those dishes, it may well have been the best I had ever eaten but because of the others it wasn't. Will Thomas Keller care what I think? I doubt it. He's too centred for that, too focused to let my opinion get in the way. And it's exactly this that makes him one of the best chefs in the world.
· The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller is published by Workman at £40. Thomas Keller's new book, Bouchon, will be published by Workman on 18 November. www.frenchlaundry.com/perse.htm
