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In today’s newspaper I elevate Eleven Madison Park from three stars to four, the kind of promotion that’s one of the happiest, nicest privileges of being The Times’s restaurant critic. When I step down later this month, I’ll miss being able to shout so loudly about dining experiences I’ve loved and to direct diners to places that deserve more attention than they’re getting.

If you’d told me five years ago that I’d come to feel so strongly about Eleven Madison Park, I wouldn’t have believed it. But this is a restaurant that kept improving—that insisted on improving.

Why four stars? What does it take to get there, and what do four stars mean?
During my years I’ve doled out that highest measure of stars to Per Se, Masa, Le Bernardin (which already had them), Jean Georges (ditto), Daniel (ditto) and now Eleven Madison Park. All, I realize, are restaurants that hew to a fairly conventional fine-dining idiom — to an atmospheric gloss and a level of pampering long associated with the greatest ambitions, the highest standards.

But to the extent that any of us know ourselves or our motives clearly, I don’t think I’ve done that because I’m rejecting newfangled approaches. I think it’s still the case, for the most part, that the chefs and restaurateurs who muster the most discipline, demand the most perfectionism and institute the highest standards embrace and tuck themselves into that idiom. I also think that when you’re talking four stars, a certain degree of coddling — a sense that you’re luxuriating in a meal — matters, and these restaurants coddle in a way that many less varnished restaurants don’t.

Momofuku Ko is a great example of an ambitious, inventive, utterly serious restaurant that breaks from the usual fine-dining idiom. That’s a big part of the excitement of it and, to my mind, no impediment to getting four stars. Sure, the online reservation lottery (not a literal lottery, but not far off) and the backless stools and the unadorned setting all limit the audience who will fully appreciate it, but the formality (and cost) of, say, Per Se limit its audience, too. Ko ditches the tablecloths and other niceties, but puts you face to face with your cooks, an arm’s length away. For many diners today — perhaps for most diners today — that’s an acceptable, even preferred trade-off.

But the facts that you exert no choice over your multicourse meal and that Ko needs to nail a limited number of dishes on a given night put a premium on almost all of those courses being knockouts. And that wasn’t the case across my three meals there during its opening months. There was inconsistency and there were moments of letdown, though perhaps that’s all changed, and perhaps Sam Sifton, my very wise and very able successor, will revisit Ko and reappraise it.

Maybe, during his tenure, he’ll elevate an Italian restaurant to the four-star pantheon. None is currently there, though some have aspired — or do aspire — to it. Del Posto and Marea come most quickly to mind. There was lot of four-star speculation before Del Posto opened, and there’s been a lot surrounding Marea, which is still in its first months, as well.

I’m a huge lover of Italian cooking. But Del Posto in its first months had some stiffness and some lackluster dishes that definitely ruled out four stars, and when I revisited the restaurant late last year, I had a keenly disappointing meal. Maybe that was a fluke. But this city has hundreds of ambitious restaurants, and a critic has to try to give many of them a shot. He or she can’t keep circling back.

Which is a shame, because some restaurants do improve in fundamental, noteworthy ways, taking customer feedback and reviewers’ comments to heart. Eleven Madison Park is just one particularly happy example.

Craftsteak made quick, sharp adjustments after a wobbly start. When the chef Michael White, in concert with his partners, rethought L’Impero and renamed it Convivio, he emerged with an appreciably superior restaurant — superior, that is, to the L’Impero that he’d been running post-Scott Conant. He trotted out a lineup of pasta dishes that rocked the house. And somewhere in that transition he stepped up his game and stepped more squarely into the forefront of the city’s most exciting chefs. He’s now testing that newfound regard and prominence in a whole different, bigger way at Marea.

After my first review of Eleven Madison in 2005, which reaffirmed the two stars Ruth Reichl had given it in 1999, I filed not one but two reappraisals, including today’s. What kept me coming back?

The first reappraisal was prompted by a chef change, though a chef change doesn’t — and, during my years, didn’t — always prompt a reappraisal. In this case the new chef was Daniel Humm, who’d been such a huge hit and earned such a stellar reputation in San Francisco that it seemed almost compulsory to take stock of what he was doing at Eleven Madison. And shortly after his arrival, many food lovers I trust were raving about his work. Checking it out seemed necessary and right.

And then, even after I upgraded the restaurant to three stars in January 2007, I kept hearing that he and the restaurant were getting better still. I circled back a few months ago, and my experience dovetailed with that assessment. Then I went again: another wonderful, wonderful meal. What I was eating at Eleven Madison Park and what I was feeling in that grand, glorious room added up to a magnitude of enchantment much greater than that at other three-star restaurants, and I felt Eleven Madison Park deserved separation from them. In the end the star system is a relative one, with restaurants being measured against one another as much as they’re being measured against some scientific paradigm.

Something else factored in as well: I realized that I’d been recommending Eleven Madison to people more often than I did its four-star betters (then), because it came close to their intensity of coddling without a tariff quite as high, a code of conduct quite as rigid, a set of airs quite as intimidating. It found a hugely appealing compromise in this regard. Wasn’t that worth something, in and of itself? If Eleven Madison wasn’t exactly as steady as Le Bernardin or exactly as dazzling as Per Se, wasn’t the greater ease with which it could be navigated a compensatory virtue all its own?

Some restaurant aficionados and four-star analysts will look at all of this and say: well, by that logic X shouldn’t have four stars, or Y should. And in some scientific sense, perhaps they’ll be right.

But at the end of the day, a four-star rating — just like a three- or two- or one-star rating — has never been scientific for me. It has always been something of a gut feeling (filtered, at some point, through a more cerebral inventory), the answer to such questions as how often a meal made me swoon, how privileged it made me feel, how eager I was, during and after it, to tell people about the dishes I’d had and the pleasure I’d experienced. Did the word “extraordinary,” which is how The Times defines four stars, fit in with that pleasure?

About Eleven Madison, I’d like to add a few particular observations that weren’t accommodated by today’s review. Its main players are young, so we can expect a lot more from them in years to come, and they’ll be exciting to watch. I mentioned in the review that Mr. Humm is 32. John Ragan, the wine director, is 35. And Will Guidara, the general manager, is 29.

The goat’s milk butter that’s served along with the cow’s milk butter for the bread is absolutely terrific, and makes me wonder why more restaurants that are already in the butter-with-bread business don’t do something similar. It makes a diner feel so much more indulged.

And I recommend, when deciding on a reservation time, to factor in sunlight and sunset. Eleven Madison’s enormous windows mean that if you dine there early in the evening, especially in summer, there’s an amount of light pouring into the dining room that will either please you mightily or bum you out, depending on what you like. Plan accordingly.

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