Per Se
Thomas Keller's oysters and pearls, the savory tapioca pudding under caviar and warm oysters he made famous at the French Laundry, has been on the menu at Per Se since the room opened over Columbus Circle in 2004.
Why go
It holds three MICHELIN stars, retained at the 2025 Northeast Cities ceremony in Philadelphia alongside Eleven Madison Park, Le Bernardin and Jungsik.6 The tables sit far enough apart to talk, the windows look over Central Park, and the guide calls the service effortlessly choreographed. The salmon tartare comes in a cone the size of a battery, and the butter-poached lobster and the doughnut holes with cappuccino semifreddo have run since the beginning.
Pete Wells reviewed it for the Times in January 2016 off three meals in one fall and winter, found those dishes intact and everything around them aimless, and wrote that the paper's four stars from 2011 needed a hard look. The lobster came out chewy twice. A bacon-wrapped quail sat on cooked romaine that was crunchy and mushy at once. He tracked the money as well: nine courses cost $150 when the room opened and $325 the week he wrote, with caviar $75 more, the truffle risotto $175 and the foie gras $40.1 I have not found a later Times review of the room.
Wells was not first. The year before, Ryan Sutton won the James Beard Foundation's Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award for three Eater reviews, and one of them was headlined Once an Icon, Per Se is Showing its Age.
7 Allie Conti was still making the same case for The Infatuation in September 2024, when the tasting menu ran $425.5
Order this / avoid
- Order: the oysters and pearls. Wells found the sabayon broken on one visit in 2016, and the inspector still lists it as a signature.
- Order: the truffle risotto when the supplement is on. Wells called it transporting.1
- Avoid: a night with anything after it.
What locals & experts say
- Pete Wells, The New York Times, 12 January 2016:
the lobster was intransigently chewy: gristle of the sea.
1 - The MICHELIN inspector, on the room today:
An experience at Thomas Keller's Per Se is an extravagance to be savored, unfolding at a leisurely pace over hours.
2 - Allie Conti, The Infatuation, 5 September 2024:
Countless casual restaurants and wine bars now serve the type of food that used to be reserved for places like Per Se, and this once-vaunted restaurant doesn't seem to have gotten the memo.
She names the sea bass in sweet carrot butter and a portion of rare, chewy lamb with exactly two malfatti.5 - Ligaya Mishan, The New York Times, May 2026: she left Per Se off her hundred best restaurants in the city.4
Good to know
- Where: 10 Columbus Circle, upstairs.
- Prices: $425 for the tasting menu in September 2024. Wells's supplements are 2016 figures.
- The check: Keller prices service into the menu and the check still prints a gratuity line, so settle what you are doing about that before you sign.1
Verdict
should-visit — Per Se held its three MICHELIN stars at the 2025 ceremony, and four critics since 2015 have said the room has gone soft: Ryan Sutton headlined a review that it was showing its age, Pete Wells found the lobster chewy twice, Allie Conti wrote that casual rooms now cook this food and this one has not noticed, and Ligaya Mishan left it off her 2026 hundred. $425 buys the oysters and pearls and a dinner that runs for hours. Take a bottle: a sommelier argued with one of Wells's guests about a red by the glass and would not pour something else.