1 Central Park West, New York (001 212 299 3900).
Meal for two, including drinks and service, $350 (£200)
Seated at a prime table in the dining room at Jean Georges in New York was an elderly Japanese man attached to an oxygen tank, the thin transparent tubes snaking elegantly around his neck and disappearing up his nose. It seemed to me the kind of scene Terry Gilliam might have cut from his movie Brazil, for being over the top: the chap may no longer be able to breathe unaided; his entire life support system might be collapsing. But there is still time to burn a few hundred bucks on lunch. It's curious, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone on an oxygen tank in PizzaExpress.
The week I visited, Michelin had just launched its first-ever guide to New York and Jean Georges, flagship restaurant of Alsace-born chef Jean Georges Vongerichten, had been one of four places to win the maximum three stars.
Located on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel near Central Park, Jean Georges has that 'restaurant at the end of the universe' feel about it. The dining room is walled by cathedral-high windows. They flood the space with light which, on a clear autumn day, can have a limpid and breathtaking clarity. You may be at street level, but it feels like you're eating at altitude.
Naturally, Jean Georges is expensive, nose-bleedingly so. Five courses is $125 before tax, drinks, and the 20 per cent service which is standard in the US. Even three courses is $95. Nobody should go expecting to spend less than $175 a head, and quite possibly an awful lot more. (A friend of mine happened to be eating there the day I went and managed, with admirable effort, to spend just short of $300. By himself.)
Lunch here cost me not a cent, however. Michelin had invited New York's finest: the cathedral-height windows open out on to an autumnal Central Park 15 journalists to celebrate the launch of its guide and I was one of them. So not a review, exactly, for I was neither anonymous nor paying my own way; more a dispatch from the very fringes of luxury, in which even the most humble idea acquires the embellishments of excess.
Take the first course, a Vongerichten special, which is described merely as 'egg caviar'. An egg arrives at the table, its top sliced off. Inside the shell is loosely scrambled egg. On top of that is whipped cream, seasoned with salt and pepper, and adulterated with vodka, the whole finished with a very generous scoop of caviar. You reach down to the bottom with an espresso spoon to get a mixture of hot egg, cool cream and salty fish. This is the tiny made huge, comfort food turned indulgence. I rather liked it.
This was followed by a bowl of raw and very high quality bluefin tuna, with slices of crisp radish. But what defined this dish, and indeed the whole meal, was the cool spicy broth surrounding it, which had a pronounced but never overwhelming sweetness and acidity. This use of mediated vinegar notes with fish cropped up three times: with the tuna, with a sashimi of Nantucket scallops on a livid-red cranberry-based jelly, and with a tranche of black sea bass, whose pearly white flesh stood up well to a sauce of coconut juice and lime. Vongerichten owns eight restaurants in the city and a number of them are known for pairing Asiatic flavours with French traditions. Normally, when a chef starts playing these sorts of games, I reach for the hammer to nail my own tongue to the table so I won't have to eat it. But here, because the ideas were so simple, it worked.
Somewhere in these fish courses came a bowl of light cheese ravioli in a beef broth, all of which was merely a backdrop to a snowfall of white truffle slices, from what has to be the biggest single truffle I have ever seen. It was the size of an orange, and filled the room with its dirty, sexy scent. This was the egg trick repeated: a humble ingredient - pasta - lifted above itself by the application of the luxurious.
It was not, though, all a matter of Wow! Amid the parade of dishes being relayed to the table there were a few duff notes. A piece of venison with a blue-cheese foam was a nice bit of meat and sauce, but not the fireworks I would have expected if I were burning my own plastic.
And puddings - a slice of pineapple drenched in kirsch, a plate of tiny desserts, including a slightly overdone butternut squash souffle - merely made up the numbers.
No matter. What actually completed the lunch for me was the moment when a waiter upended the entire milky contents of a shot glass over a diner at another table. The Michelin three-star experience is about the suspension of real life. In these rooms, with their heel-clicking waiters, the chaos of daily existence is kept away, so that even those on oxygen tanks no longer feel out of place, for we are all of us out of place. And then a glass is spilt, a jacket is drenched and - Hurrah! - the real world intrudes.
