When Restaurant Daniel first opened eleven years ago on East 65th Street, it was magnificent, and a welcome addition to the New York scene. To create his flagship restaurant, Daniel Boulud chose a designer who had never done a commercial space before, and who was known for creating luxurious residential interiors. The idea was a good one – an attempt to build a dining room that looked as inviting as the apartment of a very rich family. The effect, however, was charming but awkward.

Daniel Boulud’s success rests on his singular attention to detail, and his discipline. He is the most relentless of restaurateurs, and that is why his places are so pristine. So, in a few short years, he completely redesigned Restaurant Daniel, this time using the famous ADAM TIHANY, who is renowned for his commercial interiors, specifically those he has conceived for restaurants.

Last year Restaurant Daniel reopened after the re-design, and the results are worth the decade-long wait. The dining room feels substantial, and creamy, and hospitable. The lighting is particularly good, and everyone looks lovely, and happy. As with all of Tihany’s best designs, the space is a skillful blend of contemporary and classical. Good thing, too, because if you’re spending about $400 for dinner for two people, you (I guess I should say I) want the surroundings to match the food.

A very sophisticated woman of a certain age recently quipped, “The clothes I wear today to go out at night I wouldn’t have dreamed of wearing to the supermarket thirty years ago.” That got me to thinking about how much fashion has changed in just a generation. And when I say fashion, I mean food fashion, since that’s my obsession.

If it’s true, as fashion anthropologists report, that the formal clothing of today is the casual clothing of the past, then the same can be said for the evolution of food. The high end restaurants of this era are serving food that was decidedly low end in our parents’ time. This became clear to me when I visited the Louis XV restaurant in the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, when it first opened under the direction of Alain Ducasse. In one of the most formal dining rooms in the world (the Louis XV was the first restaurant to offer little upholstered stools to hold ladies’ handbags during dinner), one could order a completely boned-out pig’s foot, breaded and crisp-fried. Mon Dieux! Shocking, and shockingly delicious.

First the de-formalizing of the food, then came the atmosphere. Some of the most highly touted restaurants in the world today are emphatically informal. The Spotted Pig, which has been hotter-than-a-pistol since it opened a couple of years ago in the West Village, doesn’t take reservations, and many of its seats are backless. No teeny upholstered stool for your purse in that place.