Is it too melodramatic, too histrionically Rachael Ray of me, to say that I believe Eric Ripert, more than any other chef in the United States, can change your life?

Well, I'm beginning to think he can. Because to this day, six months after I slipped a spoon under his pan-seared monkfish, scooping up bits of peppers, chorizo and Albarino-scented patatas bravas, I still can't see the word "monkfish" on a menu without salivating.

Please don't press me on what the man's skate wing tasted like because, suffice to say, it fared even better than the monkfish. And my reaction went something like Meg Ryan going hormonal on Billy Crystal in the middle of a coffee shop in When Harry Met Sally. Lots of eye rolling, table grabbing and guttural moans so deep they belong on a CD of Gregorian chants.

So yes, I do think Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin in New York can change your life, for no other reason than he will make you revere seafood. Sample his monkfish and you'll feel compelled to sample other chefs' monkfish. Every restaurant's monkfish. And the tragedy of it all, the sour twist of lemon, is that you may never, ever, taste monkfish quite like it ever again.

I know. I know. Bad timing, right? Praising the New York restaurant scene now?

Now? After years of every East Coast restaurant critic with a dog-eared press credential sauteeing, broiling and flambeing our restaurants? Now? After we finally get a forkful of recognition by the likes of Esquire, Gourmet and Food + Wine for what we've got right here off Lake Michigan?

It wasn't, I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my original intent. Benedict Arnolds aren't born. They're made. Or to be more precise, converted —Êwon over by Frenchmen who can make monkfish taste sweeter than buttered lobster tail.

Originally, I planned on spending two days and three nights wandering New York in a kind of "cuisine-of-conscious" haze. I'd float around Manhattan from taxi to taxi, seeking culinary oddities — unique restaurants, cuisines and decor schemes unlike anything we can lay claim to here in Chicago.

Prior to the trip, I'd spent six months asking everybody with operable taste buds —Êfellow reviewers, chefs, New York expats and the occasional taxi driver — what the Big Apple has that we don't. I figured I'd fly over there, sample the fare and then report back that — whoops! — we got 'em beat. Across the board. There's nothing in Manhattan, I predicted, that's not a half-tank away from any address on the North Shore.

Which is, of course, before I actually went to New York, ate said monkfish and came home with an entirely different denouement.

There were, of course, ground rules. Before deplaning at LaGuardia, my wife and I outlined the broad strokes of what I'm calling "the Fifth Avenue Accords," a to-do and not-to-do list for our three nights in Manhattan.

Eating, we decided, was a sanctioned activity no matter the time, the place or the potential stress on our waistlines. Would we spend a few hours in Central Park? Yes. Visit the Met? OK, only because they have still-lifes (and those are often food-related). Were we granting each other (read: me) unlimited stops for corned beef and hot dogs? Yes. And yes. Would we waste our evenings scouring for celebrities? No. Evenings, we decided, were reserved for restaurants, for dining, not for playing amateur paparazzi. Check. Settled. Agreed.

Dateline: That Very Night, Gotham Bar and Grill, New York City.

"The sighting."

I, for the record, didn't notice him, but my wife —ÊE! Channel junkie, HBO subscriber and good-natured celebrity stalker —Êcertainly did. Next to us, with his big mane of raven hair, cocky gait and dizzyingly obnoxious stump speeches, sat someone who — how to put this? —Êused to be a "Big" player on Sex and the City. (Yes, ladies, that BIG player.)

Now, I can't confirm any of this. I never saw a full episode. And I didn't ask for an autograph. But I'd trust my wife more than any photographer from the National Enquirer in spotting washed-up Sex and the City stars.

She stared dreamily. I looked for a waiter.

During my last four years in Chicago, I've dined out an equal number of nights as I've dined in, and I can count the number of celebrities I've shared a dining room with on one hand. Maybe one finger. Vince Vaughn. Mike Ditka's Restaurant. A couple years back. Nice guy I think, but I was more interested in the pork chops.

Out here, celebrities are as ubiquitous as car horns and fresh-baked bagels. Some people, I assume, take pleasure in this sort of thing, the prospect of dropping their napkin, reaching down and then looking up to see Cameron Diaz or Nicholas Cage sitting next to them, eyes, teeth and nose job twinkling like they've just been sprinkled with pixie dust. Not me. I don't know of a single meal that tastes better in the vicinity of an HBO star than one that doesn't. Gotham Bar and Grill included.

What I do know is that there's no place, aesthetically speaking, quite like Gotham anywhere near our particular ZIP code.

It's like walking into a DC comic from the '50s, the kind of sprawlingly vertical, opulently appointed space you expect Lex Luthor to take his supper in. The long rectangular space, stretching approximately from here, the south side of East 12th Street, to eternity, boasts more straight lines than anything Mies van der Rohe ever designed.

Even though draped chandeliers parachute down from the ceilings like white tablecloths in freefall, the space is an exercise in verticality. The ceilings are tall enough to dwarf an NBA star. Obelisks guard the door. Tall magnums of wine line the walls. And lanky, lithe statues peek from behind tables. It's all so vertically slimming that everyone looks 10 pounds lighter. No wonder Mr. Big comes by so often.

But the design scheme brilliantly mirrors the linear architecture of the food. Gotham's executive chef, Alfred Portale, trained to be a jewelry designer before trading in his loop for a timbale. But his creations still sparkle like they belong beneath a pane of glass at Tiffany's.

Look at Gotham's tuna starter. Thin, slightly elevated smears of avocado and wasabi are squeezed line by line to form a rectangular box. Inside lie pink slivers of tuna, which are slowly washed with ladles of ponzu broth, then sprinkled with a potpourri of glittering spices and colorful rock salts. The dish glitters like a half-submerged treasure chest filled with pink gems.

Salads arrive in the shape of skyscrapers, with flying buttresses of pear slices and sesame seeds acting like black cornices. Nova Scotia halibut flecked with lentils in a clam vinaigrette is so tall you need to cut through its layers as if it were a birthday cake.

My eyes were dazzled, my taste buds seduced, and my ears were ...

"Well, I think we ought to pass a law preventing anyone in the South from voting in the next general election ..." the "Big" fella next to us shouted. "I mean can you name one thing that anyone down there has contributed to society, to the arts, in the last 20 years ..."

The next dish we were served was an amazing crab leg dish sprinkled with bacon and chanterelles, buttery and rich, a testament ...

"Go ahead, name one thing ... go ahead ..."

I think Gotham's peach sorbet, mixed with a watermelon granite, tastes like Grant Park in July, it ...

"I just can't take it anymore ..." the big fella is still screaming. "I mean who do these people think they are ..."

The trouble with eating in New York, I've realized, is that you have to eat next to New Yorkers.

Thankfully, a few minutes later, one of Gotham's managers dropped by to chat. We talked about the old neighborhood (she used to work with Rick Tramonto in Chicago), exchanging notes about restaurants and performing other sacred North Side rituals like discussing the Cubs bullpen and the glory of deep-dish pizza.

She wondered how our meal was, whether the service was up to snuff and so on.

Excellent, I said, across the board.

Too bad she didn't ask about the caliber of her Hollywood customers.

I'll be honest with you, I've eaten sushi-flavored wax paper and liquid-nitrogen-frozen chocolate bonbons. And by far the meal that's twisted my taste buds the most remains the 15-course, three-hour odyssey that is the small-bite chef's tasting menu at Aquavit on East 55th Street.

There's no doubt that molecular gastronomists such as Homaro Cantu of moto and Grant Achatz of Alinea are the reason that foodies from Montreal to Melbourne realized there was more than rib-eyes and deep-dish pizza coming out of Chicago. They came for the skin-on French onion soup with Vidalia-flavored magma and stayed for our local specialties, the Melrose-pepper risotto and cappuccino-rubbed bison.

So when I started batting around the idea of surveying New Yorkers to find unusual restaurants, I figured somebody would end up pointing me toward New York's lone representative of the genre, wd~50, where chef Wylie Dufresne has been known to fry mayonnaise and create goat-cheese consommes.

And a few did, but there was one name that re-emerged more often, whether it was in the New York magazines I scoured or the natives I pestered: Marcus Samuelsson.

I'm not particularly sold on the idea that great biographies make for great chefs, but there's no doubt that Marcus Samuelsson's past informs everything he cooks in his kitchen. Born in Ethiopia, he was adopted at the age of 3, swaddled up (in God knows what kind of parka) and transported from the sunny climes of Africa to the southwestern coast of Sweden, to Gšteborg. There he was taught by his new grandmother everything one needs to know about the Swedish kitchen: how to forage, how to jam, and the salvation that comes with knowing how to pickle your herring.

Which is what you'll taste at Aquavit — acidity and stubbornness —ÊMarcus Samuelsson trying to make ungodly ingredients taste divine. Give the man your too strong, too pungent, unwanted ingredients — your cardamom, your fennel, your currants and caraway seeds — and he'll bed them with the most royal items in his pantry — black truffles and lobster meat and slivers of Kobe beef. And the results are often more avant-garde than anything you can produce using liquid nitrogen or a blowtorch.

Four-star Scandinavian cuisine? An oxymoron, right? Maybe. But have you ever sampled a flight of herring — yes, herring — that progresses from zephyr-light (mango-apple) to Viking heavy (pepper vodka) in just four bites?

It doesn't particularly matter if you're familiar with Scandinavian cooking. My wife, a native Minnesotan who, on more than one occasion, has pinched her nose and swallowed her lutefisk, knows how gravlax should taste. But she's never tasted it paired with an espresso-mustard port-wine reduction served next to goat-cheese ice cream. Now, she's glad she did.

So yes, there are classics to be had like knŠckebršd (rye crisps) and aquavit (a potent liquor made from potatoes or grain and infused with everything from lingonberries to horseradish), but Samuelsson, who sees symmetry between what the Scandinavians do with their spice cabinet and what India has done with its, is loyal without being reverential. His smoked trout with asparagus is bathed in a horseradish-green-apple broth, a Nordic wrestling match of sugar and spice. Duck pastramis are matched with Middle Eastern mint-yogurt sorbets. Lamb is lacquered in paprika and cardamom, while crab is paired with tart yuzu.

After 15 nibbles, you'll want to permanently move to Andersonville.

There's only one problem. They don't serve monkfish at Aquavit (or at least they didn't when I visited). Which of course is why I ordered it at Le Bernardin the next evening.

You know the result. If Gotham was chosen for its creative flair and Aquavit for its iconoclastic cuisine, then it must be said that I chose Le Bernardin because I thought it would offer the best overall dining experience in Manhattan.

I'd like to tell you that I have a sound reason for choosing Le Bernardin over, say, Daniel or Per Se or Masa, three of New York's other contenders for the Best Restaurant title, but I don't. I broke the deadlock because, to be honest, I revere Ripert's cookbook (see sidebar) and wanted to taste what I'd only read about.

So yes, there are other worthy contenders. But this much I know: Eric Ripert knows how to cook seafood so well — and this I think is the kicker — that my wife cleaned her monkfish plate. This being a woman who hasn't tasted anything pulled from the sea since she baked a package of Gorton's fish sticks in the seventh grade.

How does he do it? Well, Ripert is the kind of chef who'll spend 15 minutes spelunking through a mountain of soft-shell crabs to find one worthy enough for your dinner plate, a guy who says he likes fish so fresh that he can still see them in the throes of rigor mortis. It shows.

You can tell the restaurant is a real labor of love. It was opened in 1986 by the late French chef Gilbert Le Coze and his sister, Maguy, after moving from their original Michelin-starred outpost in France. After establishing themselves on this side of the Atlantic, Gilbert eventually hired Ripert as executive chef in 1991. Lucky for all of us, he's never left.

Ripert, unlike other celebrity chefs, still cooks in his own kitchen, emerging before the dinner rush to tell us simply, unpretentiously, that he hoped we'd enjoy our meals.

We did, probably more than he'll know. Everything was perfect, from the Alaskan salmon au natural (cooked only on one side) with mushroom pot au feu with asparagus in a mushroom-truffle butter sauce to the aforementioned skate wing transformed into a surf-n-turf luxury by pairing it with pork belly braised in mirin wine with brown butter, soy and ginger.

So when I say that the tragedy of eating Eric Ripert's monkfish is that you may never taste monkfish quite like it ever again, it's not so much a lament over geography — that we live in Chicago and Ripert lives in New York —Êas an undisputed fact about the ephemeral nature of eating.

I know this much, I'll never have that particular loin of monkfish again. It's the first law of gastronomy. No two meals are ever the same.

You can record a song. Tape a movie. Photograph a panorama. Then you can spin that CD, play that DVD, look at that photograph and find some modicum of permanence. Some things can be frozen and revisited. And some things, like food, should never be frozen.

Great meals are one-time performances. Tomorrow the basil will lack a certain sweetness that it had the previous day. Yesterday the rib-eye was more richly marbled. Next week, the beets will taste sweeter than a candy bar. Nothing is predictable on a dinner table.

And so it is. Maybe this is our decade, Chicago's decade. Maybe we're living in what's destined to become the culinary epicenter of the U.S. Maybe New York is going to take back its crown. Maybe San Francisco, restaurant for restaurant, will be named the most exciting place to eat in the nation by October.

Finding an answer doesn't matter as much as asking the question. For in perpetually asking the question, we're given a reason to continually seek an answer. To eat. Everywhere.

I hope, however, you'll excuse me now. I have a date.

In Chicago.

It's with a monkfish.

I hope she's my type.