Remember when uppity Frasier left Cheers and got his own Seattle-based spin-off and you thought, Oh no, this is going to be stuffy and not anything like the show I loved? And then you grew to love its urbane qualities and weren’t surprised when it won a cartful of awards? per se is just like that. It bears the same blue front doors as French Laundry (its country cousin in Napa Valley, California) and has similar high-end flourishes like nine varieties of salt, plus chef Thomas Keller’s legendary “oysters and pearls” dish of Island Creek oysters, creamy tapioca and caviar. But the 64-seat Per Se in the Time Warner Center—with its neutral brown palette and silver accents (like Frasier’s Seattle pad!)—feels more cosmopolitan and overtly ambitious in ways the pastoral French Laundry is not. Yet at its heart, Per Se offers the fine-dining indulgences fans worship Keller for (artisanal butter; a fierce focus on fresh ingredients), and it’ll still take you five hours to stuff yourself silly on foie gras and truffles as a cavalcade of servers fawn over you. (The daily-changing nine-course tasting menu—vegetarian option available—is $275, and a $175 five-course lunch menu is available three days a week.) So what if the new setting is a bit more buttoned-up? You won’t miss the original a bit.

per se Information:

• Contemporary American menu. Lunch (Friday-Sunday), dinner.