By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 26, 2004; D01
NEW YORK -- A typical meal at Per Se lasts about three hours, and it's a party that your palate will never forget. It might start with a gin-and-tonic, in which case the bartender will actually make the tonic, right then and there, behind the bar, mixing quinine he buys from Brazil and bubbly water he imports from Wales, where the bubbles, for some reason having to do with atmospheric pressure, are smaller. It might end with a selection of chocolates, also made in-house, with exotic names like "Szechwan pepper" and "curry coconut." In between, there will be nine courses, each one a decadent little masterpiece. The menu changes every night, but you might start with a celery root agnolotti with black trumpet mushrooms and creme-fraiche-enriched madras curry sauce. You might move on to an anise-scented sirloin of rabbit, with confit of young fennel and sweet pepper tapenade. As a closer you might encounter something playfully called a "creamsicle," the likes of which no Good Humor Man has ever seen. It's orange-scented vanilla ice cream with Valrhona chocolate crunch hand-poured at tableside. The price tag on this French American opera for the senses: $150, not including tip and drinks, of course. (That gin-and-tonic will set you back $17.) But even if you think that's a deal, there's a catch: You can't eat at Per Se. Okay, there's a slim chance you can eat at Per Se, but it certainly won't happen anytime soon. The restaurant, elegantly modern and perched on the second floor of the new Time Warner building in Columbus Circle, holds just 16 tables. Because patrons are encouraged to hunker down for as long as they like -- only half the tables turn over on a given night -- just 100 diners waddle out the door on most evenings. Meanwhile, in a brilliant stroke of demand management, Per Se takes reservations just two months in advance and not a day beyond, which means you can't call tomorrow and say, "Put me down for April 20." Because the place is always booked solid, your only hope is to get through to the reservation line when the phones open every morning at 10, and book exactly 60 days ahead. Good luck. In a city obsessed with food and in love with any experience unavailable to the masses, a table at Per Se has become the ultimate chowhound badge of achievement, and meals here are recounted as if they were exotic safaris. The prix fixe stratum of Manhattan has been gaga for the place since it opened in May, especially after it began winning rapturous reviews, even from critics who seem to want to hate it. "Wondrous," slavered the New York Times, surrendering four stars. "The food is beautifully conceived, elegantly presented and as varied as the colors of the rainbow," panted New York magazine. The new Zagat restaurant guide, which is based on customer surveys, said Per Se would have been ranked No. 1 for food, service and decor -- the triple crown, basically -- had it been open longer and appraised by enough people. No, Without Reservation
Suffice it to say, the reservation line at Per Se is about as welcoming as the phone tree at the DMV. It's jammed all day long, and every chair in the restaurant is spoken for in a matter of minutes. Before noon, you can count yourself lucky if you're put on hold. Everyone else -- well, almost everyone else -- gets a busy signal.
"The hardest thing is that you have to say no to the thousandth person the same way you said no to the first person," says Peter Esmond, a maitre d' at Per Se. "Diplomacy is a huge part of this job."
Esmond has the sleek, angular look of an actor playing a spy. He seems far too mature and impeccably mannered to be just 26 years old. He doesn't say no on the phone -- someone else does that. But one of his many obligations is saying no to the multitudes who walk through the door every day and ask for dinner. Some are out-of-towners, shopping at the mall on the first floor, and they are merely clueless. Others are local gourmets, antagonized by that busy signal and ready for a showdown.
"My wife has been calling for days," one such visitor huffed to Esmond on a recent evening. "What do we have to do to get a table here?"
As Per Se's gatekeeper, Esmond hears plenty of tirades like that. Others try charm. ("My name is Peter, too!" said a guy in an overcoat later the same evening.) Still others try cash -- $100 is the richest offer to date -- or drop names, or beg.
None of it works. Well, connections certainly help -- space is set aside for friends and partners of the owner, chef Thomas Keller. When it comes time to pick people from the lengthy wait list on those occasions when there's a cancellation, cachet doesn't hurt. But never mind the folded C-note, or any of the importuning that is standard wherever the rich and famous queue up for a meal. Esmond says that he can't be bribed and that he has politely turned away the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Charlie Rose.
"What am I going to do with someone who booked their table two months ago?" Esmond asks. "Am I supposed to tell them they can't eat with us because Dustin Hoffman wants their table? Someone else came up with this analogy, but the restaurant is like an airplane. If somebody cancels or changes plans, we've got room. But there's no way for me to add another row of seats."
The trick is turning people down in a way that doesn't seem snobby, that sends potential customers out the door wanting to come back. That takes the sort of finishing-school restraint mastered by British peers. You can't ask Esmond a stupid question, even if you do. If you told him you'd like to pay for your dinner in wampum, he wouldn't bat an eye. But ultimately you'd pay in dollars, like everyone else.
"We have a dress code that doesn't allow jeans and we get customers in saying, 'My jeans cost $500 and you just let a guy in wearing Dockers.' " These people are gently guided toward the khaki section of the J. Crew on the floor below. Sometimes the suggestion "works right away. Sometimes it takes a little longer."
"He also brings us these beautiful hen's eggs a couple times a week," says Jonathan Benno, a Per Se chef. "There's a lot of repetition involved in cooking. You have to butcher fish every day, roast bones every day. We're constantly looking for new and better products to keep it stimulating."
The dining room has the atmosphere of a jacket-required bacchanalia. It's hardly homey, but it's not hushed or intimidating, either. There is plenty of space between tables -- a rarity in this city -- and no music, which keeps the noise at tolerable levels. The walls and floor are all earth tones, the furniture and settings spare without seeming severe.
Then there's the service. There's a lot of it: on any given night two sommeliers and at least 15 waiters and waitresses who form an elaborate command chain of station captains, kitchen servers and back servers, plus five more staffers to handle coffee and tea service. Before any of them dons a black suit and Armani tie, the employee is given a lengthy manual covering the history and philosophy of the restaurant, plus instructions on every detail of customer care, such as how to avoid putting thumbprints on the plates. Later there's a quiz or two on the particulars.
" 'Finesse' is a word you hear around the restaurant a lot," Esmond says. "Great service is service you don't notice."
The food is supposed to star here, and it's whisked from the kitchen in silent, carefully coordinated flourishes. When the plates arrive at Per Se, they don't land at the same minute, they land at the same second. One moment there's not a morsel in sight and the next -- poof! -- a circle of waiters simultaneously deliver six "reblochons," the name Per Se gives to a dish of poached French prunes and hazelnut crepes.
Then Esmond speaks. At first he sounds like a coach chiding his team a little for its performance in the previous game.
"Last night was an interesting night. There were only 87 covers," he begins. (A cover is restaurant-speak for a diner. The number of covers varies if, say, a table for four winds up occupied by a party of two, or fewer tables than usual turn that evening.) "Everyone slipped into a 'Great, I have the night off' kind of mind-set. People, it's really important on a night like that, when you have 87 customers, not all of them VIPs, those are nights that we should be at our best, those are the nights I should not have to worry about tables getting out on time, or things being broken, which happened quite a bit. Remember, every person who walks in the door has been waiting two months to eat in this restaurant, and every time, I mean the pressure is on us to perform 100 percent for every single person. And it should be easier on a night like last night."
It's one thing for a restaurant to get hot. To stay hot takes a type of paranoia, a vigilant hunt for slippage, well before there is any. Providing that paranoia is another one of Esmond's jobs.
He then moves on to the evening's guests. Per Se knows the name of virtually everyone who is coming each night, and in some cases it has a file on hand with notes about personal preferences. These people have eaten at Per Se before -- either they are very lucky or very connected -- or they've eaten at the French Laundry. Their favorite wine, dish and the pace of service they like is noted on a file card and stored till next time.
"Richard Parsons, chairman of Time Warner, Table 2 for four people at 7 o'clock," Esmond says. Hasn't got all night, likes his service on the brisk side. David Shaw, food critic at the Los Angeles Times: fan of hard-to-find red wines. The wife of the coach of the Arizona State basketball team will be here, as will Stephen Schwartz, the Broadway songwriter.
"He's been nominated for Tonys quite a few times," Esmond says, running through the list. Table 1, hostess is pregnant, so no raw or non-pasteurized food. One large party at 9:45. Head of the party is kosher, though not 100 percent kosher, so no meat or shellfish.
A hierarchy of deluxe treatment emerges. At the top are diners who are flat-out comped -- other star chefs, for example, or friends of the owner -- which means they eat free. Others get extra canapes, some free champagne; still others, a customized menu. There are gradations within gradations. "There won't be any supplements charged to her table," Esmond says of one diner, referring to add-ons like an $80 truffle dish. "But she will get a check."
The customers, when they start arriving, look giddy. By 6 o'clock the place is full and the waiters glide around each other, ambushing table after table with mini-loins of rabbit or puree of globe artichoke soup.
The show at that point is in the kitchen. The place is gleaming, all stainless steel surfaces. In the center is an immense cooking suite -- affectionately called "the piano" -- with four ovens, four food stations and an assortment of flat-topped surfaces. Aside from the occasional order shout and the sound of sizzling, it's amazingly quiet. Restaurant kitchens are usually war zones, where chefs curse at underlings and the wait staff fight each other. At Per Se, the scene is more like a beehive, where everyone is in motion but doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing, without instructions, as if by instinct.
"I've been in this business for 12 years and I've never seen anything like this," says a guy leaning against a wall. It turns out that he's a potential kitchen hire who has been asked to observe for the night as part of the interview process. "Look at that."
He points to a large table covered with a white cloth. Every dish is arranged and garnished here, and at this point in the night several dozen dishes have been swept up and taken out the door. But there's not a spot of food on the table. Not even a sprig of parsley.
At 8 o'clock there is finally some yelling. It's a customer, a burly guy who looks like an extra from "The Sopranos." He and a lady friend in a lacy pink top have stopped by to pay tribute.
"Whoa! It's like a hospital in here!" he shouts, loud enough so that everyone stops what they're doing for a moment and looks up. "Unbelievable." At this point, he's reviewing the food. "Amazing! Really. All of you guys."