Le Pavillon – a forest of olive trees above Grand Central

On the second floor of One Vanderbilt, directly across 42nd Street from Grand Central Terminal, Le Pavillon turns a corner of Midtown's newest skyscraper into something closer to a conservatory. Daniel Boulud opened the restaurant on 19 May 2021, the very day New York lifted its pandemic dining restrictions, inside an 11,000-square-foot space built with architect Isay Weinfeld and the firm KPF. Twenty-foot olive trees, trucked in from a Florida nursery, rise through a dining room that seats 120, with a further 46 places at the bar beneath a hand-blown glass chandelier. The name borrows from Henri Soulé's legendary Le Pavillon, the French restaurant that shaped American fine dining from 1941 until it closed in 1966. Boulud's version trades white-glove formality for a seafood- and vegetable-led menu rooted in French technique and New York's own larder. It holds one MICHELIN Star.

01The room and the setting

Guests arrive through a dedicated entrance off Vanderbilt Plaza and climb toward a double-height space where, as the restaurant's own architect noted, the biggest design problem was the ceiling height itself, solved with an indoor garden and lowered panels to keep the room feeling close rather than cavernous. Twelve black olive trees, each weighing close to half a ton, form the backbone of the planting, installed by landscape architect Future Green Studio alongside plum yew and umbrella plant to suggest a temperate forest rather than a tropical atrium.

A winding footpath threads between the tables, and roughly half of the floor area is given over to greenery rather than seating. The bar and lounge break away from that garden hush with floor-to-ceiling views of the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Terminal, gathered beneath a chandelier of hand-blown glass totems by the American artist Andy Paiko. A separate Garden Table, tucked among the olive trees, seats up to fourteen for semi-private dinners, guest-chef collaborations and winemaker evenings.

02The chef

Daniel Boulud, born in Saint-Pierre-de-Chandieu near Lyon, has lived in New York since 1982 and built an empire from his flagship Daniel on the Upper East Side outward to Toronto, Montreal, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai and Riyadh. At Le Pavillon he set the concept and the seasonal discipline, while day-to-day cooking runs through Executive Chef Will Nacev, who presents the seafood- and vegetable-forward menu, with Yohko Ogata leading the pastry kitchen.

Insider tip

Business casual dress required; entrance at One Vanderbilt Plaza, north side of 42nd Street.

The restaurant is owned and run by Boulud's Dinex Group, and its kitchen sits beneath a raised office that gives the chef a full view of the pass — a practical detail of a build that also includes an 8,000-square-foot kitchen below the dining floor.

03The cooking

The kitchen calls its organising idea "terre et mer" — land and sea — and the dinner menu is split accordingly under those two headings, built around the bounty of Northeast fishermen and farmers. Starters on the "mer" side run from golden osetra caviar with lemon crème fraîche and potato blinis to spaghetti alla chitarra finished with Bordier seaweed butter, crispy dulse and osetra caviar, while the "terre" column offers a Vidalia onion tart with Époisses emulsion or a pot-au-feu of braised veal cheek and short rib with bone marrow and VSOP cognac.

Main courses continue the split: charcoal-grilled Maine lobster with Calvados and sauce homardine, wild Dover sole farci with black truffle and chive sabayon, and a roasted Atlantic monkfish with chorizo crumble on one side; rotisserie Sasso chicken with spätzle and sauce Albufera, or a roasted Double R Ranch striploin with short rib croquette on the other. The MICHELIN inspectors have singled out the kitchen's spaghetti alla chitarra with Kaluga caviar and its produce-driven vegetable dishes as evidence of a genuinely contemporary, globally inflected French carte.

04What to order

The Huitre "Vanderbilt" — John's River oyster gratinées with hazelnut and a parsley-seaweed crust — takes its name from the address and is one of the kitchen's signature openers. Among mains, the Homard Pomme pairs charcoal-grilled Maine lobster with wild Twist apple, spelt and celery root under a Calvados-scented sauce homardine, while the Fettucine I Champignon brings wild mushrooms, Comté emulsion and black truffle to the vegetable column.

To finish, the Figue I Cassis combines emerald fig with blackcurrant yogurt sherbet and fig-leaf chantilly, and the cheese course, Fromage I Abricot, rotates raw-milk selections from Switzerland, the Auvergne, the Pyrenees and Tennessee alongside IPA-glazed apricots.

05Wine and drinks

The cellar is overseen by wine director Daniel Johnnes, whose list runs to more than 650 selections weighted toward France, with a strong showing from American producers and reach into Burgundy and Bordeaux across multiple vintages. A rotating by-the-glass list is matched to the season, and rarer, more mature bottles are kept on Coravin, the system used across all of Boulud's restaurants to pour older wines without pulling the cork.

06When to go and booking

In October 2026 the restaurant publishes lunch Monday to Friday from 11:30am to 2pm, dinner Monday to Saturday from 5pm to 9:30pm, and a bar and lounge open Monday to Friday until 9:30pm and Saturday evenings from 5pm. Dinner is built around a three-course menu at $145 per person, with wine pairings at $90, alongside six-course tasting options; lunch offers two-, three- and six-course formats. Business casual dress is requested, with no athletic wear, shorts or sandals for gentlemen in the dining room, and prams cannot be accommodated. The entrance is at One Vanderbilt Plaza, on the north side of 42nd Street, a few steps from Grand Central Terminal.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.