Insatiable (38 page)

Friends took Maguy and Gilbert to the Oyster Bar, Seafare of the Aegean, the Gloucester House. They ordered fish from André Soltner’s Lutèce supplier and then experimented with cooking it in the kitchen of Andre Sfez’s Pizza Pino restaurant (now defunct). There, the Italian chef, a twenty-year veteran of the local scene, assured them that parsley was the only fresh herb they would find in winter New York. And that was almost true. I brought them twenty-dollar pots of thyme and tarragon, basil and mint from Eli Zabar’s E.A.T. The dearth of herbs was real unless you were eager to send Eli’s kids to college or grow your own in a greenhouse. Gilbert experimented with the fish. We tasted. He didn’t look happy.

One night, I took the two of them to Xenon, the pulsating disco in an old theater, which I favored over Studio 54 (for the simple and painful reason that I couldn’t get by the doorman at Studio 54 but was persona grata at Xenon). We danced, the three of us. And then without even a word, Gilbert and I disappeared, leaving Maguy sipping champagne at a small VIP table. She tells me that at first she was surprised when she realized we were gone, but then, being used to Gilbert running off with a woman, she was not really surprised.

Well, our fresh fish wasn’t good enough for them at that moment. Gilbert found the best specimens shabby, the supply severely limited. The deal they were seeking never gelled. They came back again. Twice, perfect deals in midtown soured and they went home to Paris demoralized. But a few years later, Ben Holloway, eager to give cachet to Equitable’s new corporate home, offered to pave the sidewalk at 151 West 51st Street with greenbacks for Le Bernardin. It was a sweet-heart deal.

I was anxious about reviewing a chef I was sleeping with. They were wary too, worried, they said, that I would review them too soon. “I always wait a minimum of three weeks,” I promised Maguy. “I’ll come later, without warning, once you get going. A new place needs time to shake down.” Every foodie in New York had reserved at Le Bernardin that first week in January of 1986. I started getting calls: “It’s so French. It’s so perfect. The food is amazing.” “Eli Zabar arrived for dinner carrying his own bread,” one source reported. “They were fainting over the halibut.”
Halibut? Lowly supermarket fodder.
“We rated the desserts fifteen out of a possible ten,” one piranha told me. “It couldn’t be smoother if they’d been open two months,” a notoriously demanding foodnik insisted. I was feeling like an orphan, abandoned and deprived not to be there at the dawning. And so I went that first week, reserving anonymously, of course, but I was greeted with an angry glare by Maguy.

And it was wonderful, very French, very proper, the waiters drilled daily, to the point where many were protesting the extra hour required for the daily training session. The lazier ones left. The survivors got their rough edges sanded. Halibut (at two dollars a pound), never before seen on an upscale restaurant’s menu, was suddenly an aristocrat—the Eliza Doolittle of the sea. And more sophisticated New Yorkers—already disciples of the sushi faith—were primed to ooh and aah over raw black sea bass slivers with cracked coriander seed and thin ribbons of salmon “cooked” in an essence of tomato scented with olive oil, cracked coriander, and grains of cumin seed. So simple, so lush, so seductive, and right here on West Fifty-first Street. How wonderful to have a mouth. What a time to be a restaurant critic.

Dessert had never been especially tempting on rue Troyon. But while waiting for the liquor license to be approved, Gilbert and his pastry chef, François Payard, dreamed up a soul-stirring brûléed passion fruit mousse with raspberries inside, and the celestial variations on a caramel theme that would become a rage. There were all sorts of cookies, too, and searingly bitter chocolate truffles. I wrote a rave. The
Times
followed with highly un
Times
ean speed, dropping a four-star benediction.

I assumed Gilbert’s woman would soon arrive from Paris. I think she did, too. But Gilbert was on to a new life, rich with caboodles of blondes and restless wives slipping him telephone numbers, drinking late and dancing at Au Bar. He didn’t speak much English, but he didn’t have to. His smile, his kisses, and his hands spoke for him. He seemed to thrive on a few hours of sleep. Half a dozen of my women friends, women he’d met through me, had comments to make about Gilbert’s behavior in bed. Now that we were both always in the same town, the lust seemed to be less compelling. I guess we were always friends, but bed does confuse friendship. Anyway, now he seemed farther away on West Fifty-first Street than he had in Paris. Once every few months, we went out to dinner and sometimes danced after. It was a time when the fear of AIDS had transformed the city’s most wanton free spirits into neopuritans.

By 1993 Gilbert had met Amy Sacco, a young woman who ruled in the night world of restaurants and clubs.
*
He surprised even himself by falling in love with her and sharing his space. Maguy was living in Miami, running the LeCoze Brasserie there and the Brasserie that still exists in Atlanta. Perhaps that made living with Amy possible.

We continued to have late dinners once in awhile, gossiping, debating politics—he was endlessly curious, opininated, a delicious gossip, and interested in everything. Settled into my own predictable domesticity with Steven, sometimes in Aspen, sometimes in New York, I felt glamorous and sexy just walking into a room with Gilbert or feeling him soften and grow sensuous with the second or third cognac. I remember one evening at the now-defunct Sign of the Dove. He asked for a window seat so he could smoke (illegally) and exhale his cigarette smoke toward the street. The last thing he ever wanted to eat was someone else’s seafood. At night, when Le Bernardin’s service ended, he and Maguy could be found at a table near the kitchen, eating filet mignon. But this night, he let me order Andy D’Amico’s luscious rare tuna loin in a broth, even agreeing to taste it. I was pleased that he liked it, too. He had a Town Car waiting outside. He pulled up my skirt and put his hand between my thighs. I was wearing the shocking pink garter belt. He laughed. My bedroom was conveniently unoccupied that evening.

“How do you make love to just one person, the same one woman all the time?” he said quietly, very thoughtful.

We were lying in my bed on the balcony.

“You act out fantasies together,” I suggested, self-styled expert. After all, I was the author of
Delicious Sex.
“Or,” I went on, “you sleep with other women once in awhile and are extremely discreet, so that no one can ever know.”

He was just forty-eight when he died. It was impossible to believe that he could fall asleep in the gym and never wake. I was out of the country at the time. That made it seem even more unreal, though I managed to write a brief tribute for the magazine. He was not just a lover and my friend; he was the great god of fish. Everywhere, American menus acknowledge the fish he discovered and his minimal hand with raw slivers and fillets, and even the variations of caramel. Chefs who had never met Gilbert came to say farewell. It seemed especially cruel that a man who had so fiercely embraced life could simply stop breathing. “I’m not a domesticated animal,” he used to say to his chef de cuisine, Eric Ripert. “I’m a wild animal. I want to be a panther.”

I worried, of course, that Maguy might not survive, as did everyone who knew them well. But she threw herself into making Le Bernardin warmer and better and different in homage to Gilbert. Yet even now, her voice breaks and her eyes mist whenever she speaks of him, speaks of feeling him near.

And with the art and soul and passion of Eric Ripert, Le Bernardin is astonishingly more wonderful than ever. Except that Gilbert is not in the kitchen or flirting at the bar in his whites. I am never there without feeling his presence. I think of him when I walk down the narrow corridor where there used to be a window into the kitchen. I remember always stopping to watch the amazing ballet of dinner service, throwing a kiss to Gilbert. I wonder if he is furious for the cruelty of dying so young. I embrace Maguy—she still wiggles seductively. If I feel his presence, what must she feel every day in that room where they plotted together? There is always something unspoken between us, and I feel we are bound together forever.

47

M
Y
D
INNERS WITH
A
NDRÉ

H
E IS THE JOHN WAYNE OF BEURRE BLANC, DEFENDING THE FORT LONG
after the rebels have hoisted the flag of radicchio,” I wrote in September 1993. André Soltner, ruler of a tiny world on East Fiftieth Street, in a dollhouse castle eighteen feet wide by one hundred feet long, shepherd of America’s most celebrated restaurant for decades, struck me in the hebephrenic nineties as our town’s one pure chef—fearless in his conviction, immune to flash and fad, dedicated to his idea of perfection, endearingly modest. “I’m just a cook,” he liked to say. His streak of naïveté was refreshing, though one might also see it as stubbornness (like refusing to upgrade the house’s bland French roll when the city was rich with young American baking talent). “He is simply what he is, no apology, no pretension, proud of his faith,” I wrote.

Sirio Maccioni might phone a dozen strayed customers every morning to woo them back for lunch. André had never called one. It would never have occurred to him. Unlike the gallivanting playboys of the American range and the Bocuse mileage-plus gang, he famously never strayed from the kitchen. “We are cooks, not ambassadors,” he liked to say. “I missed just four nights in thirty years,” he told me proudly. Knee surgery forced two of his absences from the kitchen. Asked to join his confreres in a splashy tasting dinner to benefit Citymeals-on-Wheels, André agreed to send dessert. That way, he could rush over to take his bow after his Lutèce clients had been sufficiently cozened and fed.

There were no Technicolor drawings in his sauces, no layered pyramids, none of the flying buttresses on the plate, technical tics of the nineties. “
Cook
means what it means—to cook the food, not to architect it.” Unlike Sirio, who could always create a table at Le Cirque if an unexpected VIP suddenly materialized, André rationed out his tables judiciously but never had one left for the last-minute big cheese or friend of the house. One night, he had to send his onetime boss and partner, the creator of Lutèce, André Surmain, to Le Cirque for dinner. “I will call Sirio myself,” Soltner offered. “He will have a table for you.”

In 1975, I took a look at Manhattan’s top French restaurants—rating them not with stars or Michelin boutonnieres but with mouths signifying “culinary excellence” and hearts for “total pleasure” quotient. Lutèce led what I described as “the frozen-in-amber crowd” with five mouths and four hearts. “Lucullan appetites have one extraordinary hero,” I wrote. “André Soltner never stops inventing, perfecting, rethinking, improvising.

“In a world of so few eternal verities, there is Lutèce. The neighbors change. New gaudy awnings confuse. But there it is, two steps down to the narrow town house with its unassuming beige door, circa February 16, 1961.” That was the day André Surmain opened what he brashly promised would be “the best restaurant in the world.” He would be the first to serve on bone china and Baccarat crystal, he insisted, first to bring in Christofle silver, first to use Irish linen napery. (“We gave that up when we couldn’t find anyone to iron it properly,” he said later.) Everything would be fresh, a radical concept at the time. “Dover sole and freshly smoked Scottish salmon was flown in from England daily,” he told me. And it was he who tasted the filet mignon Wellington at a Parisian restaurant named Hansi and persuaded the twenty-seven-year-old chef, André Soltner, to bring himself and that pastry-wrapped hunk of meat to New York and run the tiny kitchen of Lutèce. “A miracle on Fiftieth Street,” as Surmain billed it, thrilled when his young chef returned home to compete and win France’s coveted Meilleur Ouvrier award a few years later. I loved it with an ingenue’s exuberance from my earliest review in 1970, though I knew that Craig had dissed it crankily in the
Times.

Claiborne, swayed by his admiration for Henri Soulé as the arbiter of fancy French dining—red velour banquettes, sketchy murals, cold striped bass with sauce gribiche in tempting display—found Lutèce sorely lacking. Surmain, in his country squire tweeds and suede Hush Puppies, was slammed as both rude and rudely dressed. And the pen in his pocket. To the ever-proper Craig, that was unforgiveably barbaric. Later, Craig admitted to me that he’d let Souléism blind him to André Soltner’s grace, and he bowed and threw in a few more stars in a later assessment.

Dizzy and genuinely thrilled by the high-wire acts of younger chefs, I would go often to Lutèce in the early nineties for a calming déjà vu. I would nod to Madame Soltner, the unsmiling Simone, tucked into her cloistered crib, tracking the bills. I’d walk past the scrawny Pullman kitchen with its pass-through eye on traffic, then into the parlor with its luxury of space, and sometimes into the trellised garden, where affection and expectation refracted the daylight. Always the same. There would be roses in a silver pitcher, the famous Redouté print of the rose on the menu, a museum piece with its retro foie gras en brioche, the venerable mousse of pigeon with juniper berries, that
ancien
relic of the sixties,
mignon de boeuf en feuilletée
—the signature beef Wellington by any other name. Habitués, of course, never saw the menu. We ate the plats du jour. Those who ordered “whatever André feels like cooking” ate best of all.

It was only after the day in 1972 when André Surmain, in a fitful midlife crisis, packed up his wife and four children and sailed his own boat across the Atlantic to Majorca, leaving the chef behind to buy him out, that Soltner was forced to emerge from the kitchen to do the dining room rotation that had been Surmain’s routine. “Smiling, eyes tilted up at the corners, Soltner stood, one hand on his hip in his laundry-issue whites—no custom embroidery here,” I wrote, in 1993. “There are chefs working six weeks and they must wear their name. Not me. I don’t need it. People know me anyway,” he said.

He would take the order. “What do you suggest?” we would say.

“Meat, fish . . . chicken?” he would ask. Not altogether graceful in this verbal rap, but never mind. How they loved him. Newcomers were thrilled by his attention. The devout (regulars) fairly gushed: “It’s like eating at home. He does dishes for us he wouldn’t cook for just anyone.”

His Alsatian mother’s
baekoffe—
layering lamb shoulder with onions and potatoes—was a rustic nostalgia prepared only for special friends. With that famous Soltner grin, he would deliver a portion of calf testicles—
“amorettes,”
he called them when we asked. Once I requested something lemony for dessert. Not to seem too sycophantic, I suspect, he ignored the lemon part and created a complex masterwork—what I came to call “the Sunshine Tart”—with fresh orange segments caramelized on top, a thin layer of genoise underneath to capture runaway juices, so as not to dilute celestial Grand Marnier-spiked crème pâtissière below in its buttery crust. “This is the best I could do,” he offered. “I spent the day with the tax man.” I begged him to put the Sunshine Tart on his menu, but he just laughed. Indeed, he never made it exactly that way again.

But witnessing the kitchen revolution abroad during his August
vacance,
he began to experiment. When Lutèce regulars raved about the specifics of a thrush mousse they had tasted at Troisgros, he nodded with interest. One week later, he served them tiny egg-shaped ovals of creamy pigeon mousse spiked with juniper berries gathered at his upstate retreat near the ski trails of Hunter. He had clearly succumbed to a taste epiphany at Frédy Girardet in 1979 and began to do what seemed like daring tricks for Lutèce. Just barely cooked
rouget
flown in fresh from the market of Rungis, outside Paris, appeared as the plat du jour. And French scallops with bright blushing coral still attached thrilled house loyalists. His new vegetable terrine was held together with its own juices, and there was a shocking presence of cilantro. But he was proud of thrifty improvisation, too. Every day at lunch, there was a different soup. “Try my chicken soup,” he urged. And when I complimented him, he confided triumphantly, “For this, the ingredients, it costs me ten cents to make it.”

André started offering tasting dinners—a forty-five-dollar parade of hors d’oeuvre and entrées with a Gewurztraminer marc-doused lemon ice in between and then two desserts. He began cooking fish noticeably less, though he still nursed old-fashioned notions. I begged him to do my venison rare. Just the thought of it made him screw up his face in distaste. Even now he likes to tell people how misguided I was to demand my chicken “pink” when I am sure what I said was, “Less cooked, André.” It was the squab I wanted rare. He acquiesced, and it was the best squab I’d eaten to date (in 1980), faintly gamy, with threads of celery root and rather punky spatzle. He came by to watch my reaction and was skeptical: “It’s not too bloody?”

He was almost sixty-one and complaining about his cartilage-ravaged knees the day in 1993 when I asked if he could do two tasting dinners for the four of us—a challenge for the finale of what I didn’t know would be my final review of André Soltner’s Lutèce. That evening’s new dishes were surprising in their complexity. And the simplicity of his mellow signature tarte flambé was stunning in its perfection. There were flaws and I listed them, too, of course.

“My affair with Lutèce mirrors scenes from a long marriage,” I wrote at the end. “The first storm of passion. The deepening of love. Affectionate familiarity. A certain ennui. The seven-year-itch. Irritation at the other’s inability to be anything but what he is. And now, admiration and tenderness for exactly that.”

How long could he fly down those stairs to the prep kitchen? I wondered. Who would take over? The Soltners were childless. He had told friends that Simone longed to go home to France. The staff was family (with pensions), and even the busboys had been there for twenty years. He could not simply leave them, he said. He’d brought in chef Pierre Schutz and a maître d’ for a six-month trial marriage, hoping they’d decide to buy the place. But Schutz found it an impossible dream. “Lutèce is André Soltner,” he told me. “No one can replace him.”

The choice was painful. To let Lutèce survive without its soul or to sell the town house minus its name . . . and see the legend disappear forever. A year later, Michael Weinstein was thrilled to add Lutèce to the mostly pop-feeding ventures of Ark, and the Lutèce family of regulars went into mourning. André’s kitchen staff scattered. Eberhard Müller, the first chef de cuisine of Le Bernardin, took up the fallen whisk. André and Simone bought a retreat on the Riviera but decided to stay in New York, living above the store as always.

“I always check the kitchen before we go to bed at night, to be sure the oven is off,” André reported. I thought that the compulsive workaholic would pine away in retirement. But he surprised us by joining the faculty at the French Culinary Institute and becoming a celebrity regular on the luxury-cruise circuit . . . seeing the world gratis in exchange for a few demonstrations. He would disappear for weeks at a time with the constantly radiant Simone smiling . . . yes, always smiling now. I like to think they float on gentle seas in a buttery pool on an endless honeymoon.