The average American spends $40.53 going out to eat, but at New York City’s top restaurant, Le Bernardin, that number is $162. (Both totals are according to Zagat and include one drink and tip.) But while that price tag may seem like it caters to the 1%, Le Bernardin’s Chef Eric Ripert says it’s possible to get a little bit of the restaurant’s trademark flare at home without breaking the bank.

It’s easy to create an intimate, festive atmosphere in your house. You just have to put couple of candles on the table. Maybe bring some flowers. If you have some nice china, put it on the table. Maybe a white table cloth. You play a little bit of music. You get involved in the kitchen; you don’t order a pizza. You have a bottle of wine that doesn’t necessarily cost too much. Or maybe you start with some bubbly or something like that. And then, maybe the light, you tone down the lights.

“I’m not saying you play Barry White,” he added, but pointed out that spending time and effort on dinner is an easy way to get a little bit of the Le Bernardin feeling at home. The key to the restaurant’s success, he says, is these kind of details. So by paying attention to your own details, you can emulate that style.

Le Bernardin has been named the number one restaurant in New York City by Zagat (GOOGL) a whopping 13 times. Ripert's staff often receives near perfect marks for service. That’s largely because of that attention to the little things. For example, women are offered stands to put their purses on. It’s the kind of thing you might never think of on your own, but ladies, imagine how nice it would be not to put your bag on the floor or squeeze it on the table?

The bay scallop and sea urchin dish is part of the Chef's Tasting Menu at NYC's top restaurant, Le Bernardin. More

When it comes to food, you may have a slightly harder time imitating Chef Ripert. He’s one of the world’s top chefs, a regular judge on shows like “Top Chef” or “The Taste,” and private dinners prepared by Ripert have been auctioned off for as much as $220,000. (He will only cook private meals if the money goes to charity.)

But you can adopt his motto – making the fish the star of the plate. Everything from what goes into the cooking, to the plating of the food, to the wine pairing is meant to highlight the fish. So you too can choose to highlight one special element of your food.

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This might be easiest to accomplish if you follow Ripert’s next tip - buy organic, sustainable ingredients from local farmers. “One trend that we see that doesn’t disappear - sustainability and organic,” he said. In New York, that means he buys from farmers in upstate New York and Long Island, but he notes the trend is catching on all over the country.



“Also the quality of products is very important,” he added. “Sustainability [as well] because now all of a sudden we have this awakening that, ‘Oh my goodness, the ocean is depleted, oh my goodness, we pollute the planet.’”

We also talked to Le Bernardin’s sommelier, Aldo Sohm. After all – when Ripert told us that to eat like Le Bernardin at home you needed “a bottle of wine that doesn’t necessarily cost too much,” we were a little skeptical. But for Sohm, expensive wine isn’t always better.

“I noticed that the people focus very often on the right side of the wine list,” he said, meaning the wine’s price point. According to Sohm, that would be like going to Prada and "looking immediately at the price tag instead of what’s on the list itself, what’s being offered." If you just want to buy the cheapest thing, or the most expensive thing, you could end up with the wrong wine entirely. To continue the Prada analogy, first you need to decide if you want a shirt or pants, and then what type of shirt, and then you look at the price. The same goes for wine.

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