Le Bernardin

Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert were close friends for decades — they wrote, travelled and appeared on television together — and Bourdain named Le Bernardin as his favourite restaurant in New York on more than one occasion, including in his own writing. It's a three-Michelin-star seafood room, which made the friendship an odd match on paper: the disciplined fine-dining chef and the man who'd spent a career mocking fine dining. It worked anyway.

The kitchen's reputation rests on precision with fish rather than spectacle — tasting menus built almost entirely around seafood, plated with the kind of restraint that lets the ingredient carry the course. It is exactly the kind of restaurant Bourdain spent most of his career being sceptical of, and exactly the one he kept coming back to.

It's a jacket-required, reservation-well-ahead kind of room — book before you land in New York, not after.