Le Bernadin - 155 W 51st 

"ERIC RIPERT has been the executive chef of Le Bernardin for 18 years, and people sometimes ask him if he gets tired of cooking fish. Clearly these people have never eaten at Le Bernardin. No other restaurant in the city makes the simple cooking of fish (and the fish at Le Bernardin is cooked simply, when it is cooked at all) seem so ripe with opportunities for excitement.

Some of the thrills are the hushed kind, like the way black garlic, pomegranate and lime support the crisp skin and white flesh of sautéed black bass. Others are scene-stealers, as when a white slab of steamed halibut is slowly surrounded by a crimson pool of beet sauce that, with crème fraîche stirred in, will turn the delirious pink of summer borscht.

A few are flat-out luxurious, like a small boulder of caviar nested inside a heap of sea urchin on a carpet of little gnocchi. I blinked my eyes a few times at the $70 supplement on top of the $125 set price for four courses at dinner. Then I decided not to worry, because a chance like this might not come along again. A year from now the sea urchin and caviar, along with almost everything else on a menu of nearly 40 items, may well have made way for a new crop of thrills.

For a restaurant so determined to stay on top, keeping such a deep repertory and refreshing it so often would seem to be a risk. It is also, of course, one source of its enduring success. Le Bernardin’s four-star rating in The New York Times has been confirmed every time the restaurant has been assessed, from 1986, when it opened, through 2005, when Frank Bruni wrote its most recent review. Why wait to say it: today I fall in line, happily, with my predecessors."

- Pete Wells, New York Times (****)