Get Nested Level from Recursive Menu

Question

I was looking at implementing the recursive function from this SO item: PHP: nested menu with a recursive function, expand only some nodes (not all the tree) to build a right click menu on my application and need to get the nested level. I am trying to think through the workflow here but can't think of where to put my increment by one and reset it to end up with variables such as:

$nestedLevel = 1; // main item
$nestedLevel = 2; // sub menu
$nestedLevel = 2; // sub-sub menu

I would like to use that to setup some if statements to I can handle each level differently. the Main level will be a simple list, Level 2 would be a horizontal button group, and the third will be simple lists assigned to tabs from the button group. Here is what I have:

function recursive($parent, $array) {
    $has_children = false;

    foreach($array as $key => $value) {

        if ($value['menu_parent_id'] == $parent) {       
            if ($has_children === false && $parent) {
                $has_children = true;
                echo '<ul>' ."\n";
            }
            echo '<li>' . "\n";
                echo '<a href="/page.php?id=' . $value['menu_item_id'] . '">' . $value['name'] . '</a>' . " \n";
            echo "\n";
                recursive($key, $array);
            echo "</li>\n";
        }
    }
    if ($has_children === true && $parent) echo "</ul>\n";
}

In the end it will look something like this (with some more styling of course):