PER Se needs a better stimulus plan.
Thomas Keller’s magnificent but unaffordable restaurant at the Time Warner Center, buffeted by the Great Recession, just launched an a la carte “salon” (i.e., bar) menu for the first time. But it won’t help New York’s most exalted eatery beat the first blues it’s known in its short history.
Dining room dishes dragged piecemeal into the lounge — even favorites like Keller’s famous butterpoached lobster — seem shrunken when they’re cast adrift from the tasting menu, which presents courses in a measured progression.
Spending up to $46 each for tiny dishes served on lounge seats seems less digestible than splurging on the nine-course, $275 dining room menu. (Maybe because of how puny the salon dishes are, Per Se wouldn’t let us photograph them.)
That $275 — an unparalleled, 83 percent hike over the cost of the same meal less than five years ago — buys you the full Keller joy ride, savored in well-timed stages and with service as polished as at any room in America.
But Per Se needs viable, lower-priced alternatives. Not just so I can eat there every so often, but to better connect it to the city on which it seems to peer down from space.
During the bubble years, Per Se dwelled inside a bubble of its own, presiding imperiously from its Columbus Circle perch over a dining scene whose every other excess paled by comparison.
Today, scoring tables isn’t nearly as hard as it once was. A few weeks ago, the Times’ Frank Bruni found 8 p.m. bookings on short notice.
I counted six empty dining room tables from 10 p.m. on last Tuesday, when I dropped in to sample the “salon” offerings. On Wednesday, I reserved a 9:15 dining room table for the following night.
Yet the dip in bookings — a fact of life at all top eateries — offers a chance to draw a broader clientele without in any way diluting Keller’s work. It’s too much to ask for a price cut. That would say, “Sorry, folks — we were just trying to make a few extra bucks! Ha, Ha!”
The obvious, overdue solution is to offer shorter, less expensive prix-fixe dinner menus than the $275 bank- and stomach-buster.
Per Se offers a five-course lunch for $175. Why not dinner as well? Or how about six courses for $195? Even these numbers would dwarf those at other great Manhattan eateries. At Le Bernardin, Jean Georges and Daniel, the cheapest options run from $98 to $105. The priciest is $185 for an eight-course tasting at Le Bernardin.
Has Keller’s place, spawn of his French Laundry, gotten away with pricing murder? In 2004, Per Se’s ninecourse menu was $150.
Today’s additional $125 does not buy an ounce more of food than it did in 2004.
Per Se’s opening prices might have been artificially low. But the main reason it later shut most of us out was infuriatingly simple: because it could. Wall Street’s boom made it easy to fill 16 tables with the super-rich. So did a cheap dollar that foreigners regarded as play money.
Too many seats went to hedge-fund scoundrels and sheiks in Brioni suits splurging on wine too pricey for all but the filthy rich.
I’m not alone among New Yorkers who can, on occasion, dine at Per Se’s costliest competitors, yet feel priced out from Per Se on any occasion. More modestly scaled menus will attract locals who’ve felt disenfranchised.
Yes, nine courses are the norm at the French Laundry — an atmospheric, wine-country retreat. But the fourth floor of Time Warner Center is not the Napa Valley.
And prolonged tasting menus were better suited to obese gluttons of yore. Per Se’s nine courses approach the limit of my patience, even at a feast as memorable as the one I had last week.
A melodious sequence of Romaine lettuce veloute, “oysters and pearls,” globe artichoke salad, smoked sturgeon and poached lobster (to oversimplify them) was followed by herb-roasted squab with squab “sausage” — a terrine-like press of leg meat, egg and lord knows what else. It was the grandest climax you could want. Only it was not the climax — because next came veal ribeye that was a letdown after so intense a game dish.
A recession, it’s been said, can be a great editor. But I’d rather have Keller do the editing. Let him break out the No. 2 pencil. New Yorkers will love him for it.
scuozzo@nypost.com