Per Se's private dining room
Photo: Scott Whittle Photography
The Zagat Vintage Dinner series rolls merrily along, offering rare history lessons, surprise culinary guests and Rockefeller-inspired dishes. Last Tuesday's dinner at New York City's Per Se may have been the most elegant yet.
Per Se is renowned for its meticulousness, and the ambiance set for this one-of-a-kind dinner was no exception. The "room was certainly half the
success," says chef Thomas Keller, who notes that perfecting the ornate setup was "probably the
most challenging part of the entire meal." Harking back to traditional
presentation – white-glove service, carving in the dining room, cut crystal glasses – Keller wanted to "go back
to that period of time, when ornate was really what it was all about."
Guest speaker Tim Zagat described the room as "absolutely stunning." Plush red velvet draped the walls, lush bouquets of flowers adorned the tables and nearly $750,000 worth of silver decorated the space. But amid all that elegance, personal touches gave the evening an intimate feel, which included calligraphed place cards that Zagat deemed fit to "frame and put on a wall."
Place settings at Per Se's Vintage Dinner
Photo: Scott Whittle Photography
For the menu, Keller (along with chef de cuisine Jonathan Benno) strove to "feature some luxury items – caviar, oysters, lobsters – and use those items in the same way that they had been used at the turn of the century or before." In dishes like lobster Thermidor, the chefs married modern ingredients with recipes from the 16th–19th century. According to the four-page menu notes, the pièce de résistance, selle de veau à la Maintenon, was partially inspired by the cooking habits of Madame de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV.
“These are dishes that were very popular in the 19th century, and you just don’t see them anymore. But they are delicious," Zagat notes, summing up the pleasures of a culinary trip through the past.
Left to right: lobster Thermidor, which was first served at Parisian restaurant Marie's to honor the opening of the play Thermidor by Victorien Sardou; Thomas Keller in the kitchen; the menu's pièce de résistance, selle de veau à la Maintenon.
Photo: Scott Whittle Photography
For more with Thomas Keller, stay tuned for updates later in the week.
– Jacqueline Wasilczyk