Per Se, the restaurant, isn't where I go for lunch or dinner. It's ideal for a wedding, a Bar Mitzvah, a coronation, any sort of once-in-a-lifetime event. The meals are so long—nine courses plus canapés and petits fours—that seasons seem to change while you're seated in the main dining room, looking over Central Park. Service is too intimate and too loquacious—I feel the way I did as a kid when my Aunt Bella trapped me in a corner and started meddling in my personal life.

I haven't mentioned the price, which is way up there, because what you eat at Per Se is worth whatever you have to pay. Thomas Keller's cuisine, French technique combined with American creativity, is extraordinary, gorgeous, and unlike anyone else's. A foie gras terrine with all manner of brilliant accents had more colors than a Kandinsky painting.

For someone like me, who finds the dining room experience excessive, the salon is perfect. It's the first room you enter after passing through the tricky front door, and in the early days of Per Se, it was depressingly empty. Three years ago, someone came up with the clever idea of offering no-reservation, à la carte dinners there. In this case, "à la carte" is defined as eating a normal-sized meal at a price normal humans might consider reasonable, although it will approach $300 for two. I no longer think of the salon as bleak. Now it feels intimate and private, just me and a few other discerning folks seated on soft, velvety couches or cushioned chairs, eating with good flatware off extra-wide coffee tables. It's informal, which everyone seems to find desirable these days, and it's dignified, which I still desire these days. If you come early enough, you can grab the single couch that overlooks Central Park and watch Manhattan sink into darkness. Pair such ambience with Keller's legendary butter-poached lobster, and you'll be experiencing the best of New York.