Daniel is in many ways the ideal New York restaurant. The staff can't do enough for you. The wine list is expansive. The dining room is spacious and refined. Chef Daniel Boulud is revered, of course, and he has just brought on (or, more accurately, repatriated from Adour) pastry chef Sandro Micheli, a master of classicism. Looking over the dining room, a guest of mine thought it was rakishly reminiscent of Mad Men, retro but sexy. None of this is surprising, because Boulud, in addition to his skills at the stove, is also one of the great restaurateurs of our day.

The food at Daniel has changed over the past decades. It's now intricate, beautiful, multi-dimensional and worldly. Lobster, like so many of the dishes, comes three ways—the most fabulous of the three, a lobster samosa, should be named the official snack food of the Taj Mahal.

The reason I don't rank this restaurant closer to the top is entirely personal and perhaps unreasonable: I have an entrenched fondness for the cuisine Boulud prepared in the early nineties, when I considered his establishment the best restaurant in New York. Back then he specialized in uplifting the dishes French people ate every day, some of it home cooking, some of it rustic. In my opinion, no chef anywhere turned everyday French food into haute cuisine as well as he did. (You can get some idea of his talent in this regard by ordering in advance his canard à la presse, or pressed duck, an upscale dish made famous at La Tour d'Argent in Paris. There, it's good. At Daniel, it's astonishing.) While I understand that the days are gone when such food made economic sense, I hope I can be forgiven for wishing I could eat that way again.