The Wright impression

Simon Wright, editor of the AA Restaurant Guide, visited New York for the first time to learn how the city's restaurants live up to their international reputation.

East 30th Street, 7am. The sidewalks are beginning to fill up with workers and the sunlight is channelled directly between the blocks of towering buildings on either side of me. It seems to give the light an extra intensity - it's staggeringly bright, and walking directly towards it is almost blinding, making it hard to avoid collisions with the stream of oncoming pedestrians clutching their breakfast bags.

Reaching the shadow of Park Avenue, I see the Les Halles restaurant across the carriageway. It's a surprisingly unassuming, small shop front with gold lettering stencilled on the window in a Parisian font. This is the place where Anthony Bourdain, author of the ground-breaking Kitchen Confidential, holds the title of executive chef and still, on occasions, plies his original trade. I'm booked in tonight, but already I need to cross the road for a closer look. I take a quick look at the menu on the door before heading off in search of coffee and doughnuts.

Twelve hours later I'm pushing open the same door, eager to find out just what the Bourdain legend is rooted in. To be fair, he's never claimed to be a boundary-breaking chef, just a dedicated one. There's plenty there in the pages, though, among the cacophony of blood, sweat, tears, yelling, drugs and drink, to let you know that he's exceptionally passionate about food.

Shoulder-to-shoulder seating
As it turns out, Les Halles fits the script perfectly. Kitchen Confidential is a no-bullshit book, Bourdain is a no-bullshit writer and Les Halles is a no-bullshit brasserie serving no-bullshit food. I love it. The place is captivating, much smaller than I had expected, and narrow, with every available space employed, from the coats packed just inside the door to the shoulder-to-shoulder bench seating along the walls.

Already it's full, except for our circular table in the centre of the room. White-aproned waiters gyrate among the tables, swivelling through the tiny gaps between chairs, delivering plates decked with smoked herring and potato salad, grilled calamari with fennel salad, cassoulet Toulousain or fillet of beef béarnaise. February, though, is the month for choucroute specials, and I don't take much persuading to take on the heavyweight choucroute garnie, comprising pork loin, smoked pork breast, veal sausage, frankfurter, boiled potatoes and sauerkraut cooked in Pinot d'Alsace.

So how good is the food? In an effort to be subjective, let's take the personality out of the equation. Remove the spice of the Bourdain connection and how would the place rate? No doubt about it, it would still be a great restaurant, a place I'd love to visit again, repeatedly.

And let's take away the bustling excitement and sassy service from the picture, and what are we left with? Terrific, honest, soulful cooking. Eight meals (no, I didn't go back every night, I had seven people with me) yielded no disappointments, top ingredients, deep flavours and classic dishes assembled with real care. There's nothing new here, but you rarely see these dishes done so well, so faithfully. Conclusion? Well, if you were wondering if there was any culinary substance behind the man who brought us "Tales from the culinary underbelly", on this evidence there isn't any doubt - Anthony Bourdain is the real thing.

Ironically, and I suppose inevitably, most of the New York restaurant guides pay more attention to the lure of the Bourdain name than to the intrinsic merit of Les Halles. It gets decent reviews, but the superlatives are focused elsewhere, most consistently in the direction of Daniel Boulud's eponymous East Side restaurant. The general view seems to be that Daniel is the number-one restaurant in the city. As always, that depends what your criteria are and what you are prepared to spend, but even given the subdued state of the restaurant trade at the moment, getting a table at Daniel still demands some forethought. It would seem a terrible omission to visit New York without eating there.

That's the way I justified it to myself when I booked a couple of weeks ahead. Advance warnings put the size of the bill on the scary side but, as it transpired, the prices were pretty much comparable with the upper end of the London market - which I suppose is scary enough in itself - but it didn't seem unreasonable given the status of the place.

Of course, when you are shelling out £100 a head for reputedly the best food in New York, it's reasonable enough that expectations are high, but nevertheless I didn't go there looking for faults. Believe it or not - and some won't - it's my nature to take a generous, benefit-of-the-doubt attitude until proved otherwise. Anyway, the restaurant turns out to be appointed in classic grand hotel dining room style, with studied and slightly aloof service to match. It's appealing enough if you like that kind of thing but, in contrast to Les Halles, there is little about the place to suggest that you're in New York.

The menu is rooted in classic French, with a noticeable lightness about the combinations. It reads attractively but without any real personality, which serves fairly well to describe the cooking - it was pleasant, charming even, but ultimately a bit insubstantial. Courses came and went among the four of us in the dining party, but after each dish I still felt like I was waiting for something to happen, and gradually it dawned on me that nothing was going to.

As I sat there underwhelmed, the inevitable London comparisons began to float through my head, and it didn't take much analysis to conclude that, on this performance, Daniel really isn't in the same street as London's best fine-dining restaurants. There was little that was really striking, either in terms of conception or depth of flavour - nothing, in fact, that would wow you in the way that Gordon Ramsay or Pétrus can. It's a snapshot, I know, but I really don't think this would stand out among the best of London's classic French restaurants. I can still remember much of a meal I had six months ago at Orrery - I've already forgotten this one.

As it turns out, the Daniel experience is a blip. The next night we're at the Odeon, a TriBeCa legend known as a honeypot for celebrities (though we didn't see any). An extravagant version of a typical US diner in style, it has the same excited buzz that was apparent at Les Halles. Once again, it's packed at 7.30pm, noisy and with barely enough room to get to your seat. A fat man could wreak havoc just getting to his table. Service is, frankly, brilliant. It's not formal in any way but the staff are confident, razor-sharp and shockingly well drilled. Once again, there is nothing on the menu that you won't have seen a hundred times before, but the point is, it's all done so well. From an authentic bouillabaisse to simple Caesar salad, it's fresh, full-flavoured and deeply satisfying.

On the Sunday, just before flying back, we stumble into Balthazar, a sparkling French brasserie masterpiece in SoHo, which turns out to be yet another version of the same recipe that made Les Halles and the Odeon such a success. This, it seems, is what New York does uniquely well - unpretentious restaurants that do the important things superbly.

These places are somehow less self-conscious than much of London's eating out, perhaps taking themselves less seriously, being less uptight. What are the London equivalents in this respect? Places like Moro and St John come to mind. The food may be different but the attitude is similar.

In my experience, these places, much like their New York counterparts, are usually packed. Perhaps there is a lesson there.

New York's state of mind - a tourist's impression

There are long queues for tickets to the platform that allows an elevated view down into the rubble that is still being cleared from Ground Zero, but you really don't need to see it from above to gauge the enormity of the event.

Among the densely packed skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan there are few open spaces, and the view across the empty expanse that is Ground Zero is, therefore, all the more astonishing.

I hadn't been to New York before and, although I felt a strange familiarity with it given the amount we see and read of the city, I was still bowled over by the vibrancy of the culture and the open, upbeat character of New Yorkers.

I've no idea what things were like before the twin towers fell - maybe those who have been there before can detect a difference in people's attitudes.

We were treated with incredible kindness throughout our stay. On the subway one day, a woman heard us discussing our route and interrupted to tell us that we were heading the wrong way. "I hope you don't mind me interfering," she said, "I just wouldn't want you to go home with the wrong impression of New Yorkers."

She really needn't have worried.

Bites of the Big Apple

(Maximum rating: five apples)
Brasserie Les Halles
411 Park Avenue South
(between 28th and 29th streets)
00 1 212 679 4111 Food
Service
Ambience
Value
Total 15
Lively, authentic and honest, serving comforting French brasserie food. There is heart behind the hype. Salade d'Auvergne, pied de cochon pané, filet de boeuf béarnaise.

Balthazar
80 Spring Street
(between Broadway and Crosby Street)
00 1 212 965 1414 Food
Service
Ambience
Value
Total 14
Sit back and marvel as the staff manufacture order from apparent chaos in this extravagant, always-crowded, Paris-style brasserie. Goats' cheese and caramelised onion tart, sautéd skate, beurre noire.

The Odeon
45 West Broadway
(between Duane and Thomas streets)
00 1 212 233 0507
Food
Service
Ambience
Value
Total 13
Bustling, souped-up SoHo diner. Fried calamari with spicy sauces, grilled leg of lamb with couscous and red wine rosemary sauce.

Daniel
60 East 65th Street
00 1 212 288 0033
Food
Service
Ambience
Value
Total 12
Accomplished cooking but falling somewhat short of its star billing and top-end pricing. Warm sea scallops with wild mushrooms, bacon and lentil broth with rosemary, paupiette of Atlantic sea bass in a crisp potato shell, tender leeks, Syrah sauce.

What AA rosette awards would these places achieve? Well, remembering that rosettes are really just about the food on the plate, Daniel would probably make three rosettes - it was far from poor, just disappointing, given its status and upmarket prices. Les Halles and Balthazar would be good two-rosettes and the Odeon also might make two rosettes, but not quite as strongly as the others. Whatever their rosette awards, I'd be back at the last three like a shot, given the chance.