True New Yorkers love the pace of this city: the everyday rush of urban life, the hustle of millions of people trying to carve out a space for themselves in this overcrowded metropolis. But even the city's biggest adrenaline addicts need to slow down sometimes-and it can be hard to find a place to really relax in New York, particularly if you're interested in doing it with style. Enter Michel Nischan. At Heartbeat, Drew Nieporent's hip new restaurant in the ultracool W New York hotel, Nischan is gently cooling over-heated Gotham pulses with his serenely beautiful food, so deeply flavorful and perfectly balanced, it seems as though every element must have been meant by nature to taste this way.

Improbably, the talented Nischan dis-covered his true calling while working as a breakfast cook at a truck stop on the Wisconsin/Illinois border to support his "real" life as a rock and jazz musician. Once he decided to give up club dates for cassoulets, Nischan never looked back. In Chicago, he worked on the line at La Tour in the Park Hyatt, at the highly touted Pump Room, and at Jovan Trboyevic's celebrated Le Perroquet. He eventually moved to Milwaukee, where he opened Fleur de Lis, a French restaurant that revolutionized the city's dining scene. In the years that followed, Nischan put in time at a few Interstate Hotel properties across the Eastern seaboard. But he missed the hands-on engagement of the kitchen, so in 1991, he opened Miche Mache in Stamford, Connecticut. The restaurant earned glowing reviews from The New York Times, the Stamford Advocate, and other publications across the region. New York foodies in-the-know headed up the interstate in search of Nischan's creative New American cooking. To their great relief, the commute is now at an end. At Heartbeat, Nischan has set out to reinvent healthful fine dining: his cooking here is elemental, deceptively straightforward, and natural in a whole new way. He is pushing flavor without the fat, and word is, an evening at Heartbeat is every bit as good as a day at the spa and maybe a little bit better. In a recent New York Times, Ruth Reichl told her readers that Heartbeat "wins you over."