Daniel
French

This very grown-up restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Daniel Boulud’s flagship, maintains standards of service and cuisine — French haute cuisine, very much an endangered species today — that hark back to an earlier era. But the cooking is up-to-date and really, really good. (Think duck terrine with red-wine-poached pears, oven-baked black sea bass with syrah sauce and bone-marrow-crusted sweet potato, and roasted Millbrook Farm venison loin with celery confit and sauce grand veneur.) It’s so good in fact, that President Obama has been known to drop in, and it remains one of only six Manhattan restaurants with four stars from The New York Times.  

Click here to watch The Daily Meal’s interview with Daniel Boulud and Cyril Lignac on Cooking Across Continents. — Arthur Bovino