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With New York City still under a sous vide crackdown, which has forbidden the use of newfangled vacuum-packaging and low-temperature cooking to make heretofore impossibly tender and tasty meals, the city's most innovative chefs have had to return to old fashioned resources to keep propelling the art of fine dining forward. While cuisine's latest technological craze may be on hold for the moment, chefs in the Big Apple are turning out inventive new takes on the square meal thanks to bold combinations of ingredients and high-concept dining areas which at times compete with the food for pride of place.

Here is a look at three restaurants Influx thinks are taking fine dining to places it's never been before:

Cru
Chef Shea Gallante is an accolyte of acclaimed restauranteur David Bouley and his cooking is very much inline with the inventive style Bouley perfected at culinary hotspots Bouley, Bouley Bakery, and Danube. Building his dishes delicately by juxtaposing contrasting flavors on the plate, Gallante wows diners with his signature take on mediterranean staples. His gnocchi, for example, is served with oxtail simmered in Barolo. His risotto is blended with sea urchin, tomato, and tarragon, the finished dish a brilliant orange color. With sous vide preparation forbidden until health standards are drawn up for the technique, Cru, like so many other New York restaurants, is relying on other buzzworthy culinary trends to keep picky diners interested. One such trend is the popularity of crudo, Europe's answer to sashimi. A staple at restaurants all over town, Gallante's take on this raw fish appetizer is typically inventive: artic char with smoked pepper, apples and a drop of vanilla or pieces of langoustine with gin.

For many people, however, it's not Cru's food that makes the dark wooded dining rom a few blocks north of Washington Square Park so special. It's the 65,000 bottle wine collection, lovingly referred to as "the portfolio". Presented in two hefty volumes (one for red, one for white), Cru's wine collection is among the largest and best in the city and it has made the restaurant a must-visit destination for long-time oenophiles and post-Sideways neophytes.

Thor
Melodramatically-named, Thor is thankfully not a Viking eatery. In fact, the name is merely a reference to the restaurant's home inside The Hotel On Rivington. Helmed by Kurt Guttenbrunner, one of New York's more accomplished chef's, Thor is the centerpiece of the swank new hotel on Manhattan's historically diverse and eclectic Lower East Side. Housed inside a soaring, glass-roofed space inside an even more soaring, glass-sheathed tower jutting out from a block of crumbling tenement buildings, Thor is probably the neighborhood's flashiest eatery by miles. While the technologically inventive Wylie Dufresne holds court a few blocks away on Clinton Street, Guttenbrunner's characteristic restraint holds sway over the uber-modern black and white dining area designed by Marcel Wanders.

Fusing his traditional Austrian cooking with elements drawn from Mediterranean cooking and a devotion to using greenmarket items such as seasonal produce, Guttenbrunner gives Thor an edge his two other New York outposts lack, making it ideal for the throngs of leggy models and hipsters dining there regularly. Tweaking his classicist's repertoire for the downtown scene, Guttenbrunner's menu favors small plates and spices up classic Austrian fare with inventive entrees like his monkfish, which is wrapped in crispy strips of potato and served over sauteed zuchini and tomatoes seasoned with thyme.

Monkeytown
Taking the private restaurant idea into the realm of licensed establishments, the founders of Monkeytown turned their immersive multi-media supper club into a proper restaurant/immersive multi-media space at the close of last Summer. While Monkeytown's founders initially hosted their events from their loft in East Williamsburg and were beloved for hosting arty folks like Black Dice, who performed while a small crowd of attendees ate a multi-course meal and home-baked weed brownies, they have grown up and quickly grown into a venerable Williamsburg institution.

Now housed in a cavernous two-room industrial space, Monkeytown offers a traditional dining experience featuring "experimental cuisine and classic dishes from a country that doesn't exist" courtesy of chef Coleman Lee Foster, previously of Chanterelle, Gramercy Tavern, Esca, Bouley Bakery, and Union Pacific. Over the low-slung tables and padded banquettes full of slouching artists and musicians chowing down on kaffir lime meatballs and black bean lasagna hangs a massive chandelier constructed entirely from corrugated cardboard. Through a long, dimly lit hallway is the other half of Monkeytown, a rear dining room complete with 6.1 surround sound, 4 wall-size screens, and communal seating for 32 very switched-on patrons who can expect to chow down while wigging out to video art, short films, feature-length screenings, and even live music, dance and performance art.