as La Grenouille was known in the pages of
Women’s Wear Daily
. That trade paper responded to me with a special issue defending its favorite luncheonette.
La Grenouille survived my attack and improved over the years, outlasting all its rivals from the 1970s to become a justifiablybeloved refuge of old-style elegance, the kind of place where
New York
’s perspicacious critic Adam Platt took his mother for a nostalgic meal in 2011.
Less sensational but more fundamentally influential was my review of Lutèce; I raised it out of the limbo of three stars to the golden summit of four.
It was clear to anyone with basic experience of great French food in restaurants in France that on merit alone Lutèce stood well above the other high-luxe New York French restaurants. But it was not part of the old-boy network of Le Pavillon clones, the
quenelles
-mongers who vied for the same high-society clientele.
Lutèce was different. Alone among its rivals, it felt like a real French restaurant, with topflight dishes you might have found in France and an unsnobbish atmosphere that also reminded me of my time in the
Newsweek
Paris bureau. One of my reasons for taking the
Times
job had been to give Lutèce its rightful fourth star. I bided my time, following Rosenthal’s advice not to play all my trumps right off the bat. So nearly a year after I became restaurant critic, on January 14, 1972, Lutèce’s two Andrés, Soltner the chef and Surmain the owner, awoke to unexpected but well-deserved fame and fortune.
On the strength of this accolade, Lutèce was launched for the next thirty years as the top restaurant in the United States. The combination of André Soltner’s talent with the authority of the
New York Times
made this happen. But I was the one who made the connection, and within a year my rebel’s judgment had won over the most grudging acolytes of the old order.
Ironically, the rise of Lutèce, which symbolized the final ascendance of authentic haute cuisine in America, coincided with the beginning of the end of Escoffierian haute cuisine in France and of France’s domination of fine dining in the world at large. I got aglimmer of this future just a few months after the Lutèce review, in Paris just before Easter.
I got off the plane with no thought of discovering anything more than a minor shifting of the way things had been in the glacially advancing world of French cuisine when I’d left the
Newsweek
bureau in 1967. Nothing I’d read in the food press had prepared me for the upheaval that was finally bringing radical change to French food after the paralysis of the Depression, the tragedy of the war, and twenty-five years of postwar recovery.
This ferment was not, in fact, what you were likely to hear about in Paris, even from most resident gastronomes. I had arranged to have dinner my first night in town with John and Karen Hess, he a
Times
correspondent and future
Times
restaurant critic, she a notoriously precise cook and, later, an eminent food historian. John had been called away to cover the latest atrocity in Northern Ireland; so I ate alone with Karen at Chez Denis, an aggressively traditional small restaurant of the most refined sort. It might have been 1960.
I told Karen my plan to eat at a three-star restaurant outside Lyon run by Paul Bocuse, whom I’d heard about in 1967; my bureau chief, Joel Blocker, had proposed him unsuccessfully for what would have been an extremely prescient
Newsweek
cover story on young French chefs. Since then, Bocuse’s restaurant, named after himself, had risen from two stars to three in the Michelin guide. Even I knew that. Karen Hess, however, evinced no interest whatever in Bocuse or my trip. Despite her obsession with food, she, like most Parisians, had not yet realized she was living in the middle of a moment of historic change in French cuisine.
I did find accurate guidance by reconnecting with Jack Nisberg, an American expat photographer who really did know what was
Women’s Wear Daily
. That trade paper responded to me with a special issue defending its favorite luncheonette.
La Grenouille survived my attack and improved over the years, outlasting all its rivals from the 1970s to become a justifiablybeloved refuge of old-style elegance, the kind of place where
New York
’s perspicacious critic Adam Platt took his mother for a nostalgic meal in 2011.
Less sensational but more fundamentally influential was my review of Lutèce; I raised it out of the limbo of three stars to the golden summit of four.
It was clear to anyone with basic experience of great French food in restaurants in France that on merit alone Lutèce stood well above the other high-luxe New York French restaurants. But it was not part of the old-boy network of Le Pavillon clones, the
quenelles
-mongers who vied for the same high-society clientele.
Lutèce was different. Alone among its rivals, it felt like a real French restaurant, with topflight dishes you might have found in France and an unsnobbish atmosphere that also reminded me of my time in the
Newsweek
Paris bureau. One of my reasons for taking the
Times
job had been to give Lutèce its rightful fourth star. I bided my time, following Rosenthal’s advice not to play all my trumps right off the bat. So nearly a year after I became restaurant critic, on January 14, 1972, Lutèce’s two Andrés, Soltner the chef and Surmain the owner, awoke to unexpected but well-deserved fame and fortune.
On the strength of this accolade, Lutèce was launched for the next thirty years as the top restaurant in the United States. The combination of André Soltner’s talent with the authority of the
New York Times
made this happen. But I was the one who made the connection, and within a year my rebel’s judgment had won over the most grudging acolytes of the old order.
Ironically, the rise of Lutèce, which symbolized the final ascendance of authentic haute cuisine in America, coincided with the beginning of the end of Escoffierian haute cuisine in France and of France’s domination of fine dining in the world at large. I got aglimmer of this future just a few months after the Lutèce review, in Paris just before Easter.
I got off the plane with no thought of discovering anything more than a minor shifting of the way things had been in the glacially advancing world of French cuisine when I’d left the
Newsweek
bureau in 1967. Nothing I’d read in the food press had prepared me for the upheaval that was finally bringing radical change to French food after the paralysis of the Depression, the tragedy of the war, and twenty-five years of postwar recovery.
This ferment was not, in fact, what you were likely to hear about in Paris, even from most resident gastronomes. I had arranged to have dinner my first night in town with John and Karen Hess, he a
Times
correspondent and future
Times
restaurant critic, she a notoriously precise cook and, later, an eminent food historian. John had been called away to cover the latest atrocity in Northern Ireland; so I ate alone with Karen at Chez Denis, an aggressively traditional small restaurant of the most refined sort. It might have been 1960.
I told Karen my plan to eat at a three-star restaurant outside Lyon run by Paul Bocuse, whom I’d heard about in 1967; my bureau chief, Joel Blocker, had proposed him unsuccessfully for what would have been an extremely prescient
Newsweek
cover story on young French chefs. Since then, Bocuse’s restaurant, named after himself, had risen from two stars to three in the Michelin guide. Even I knew that. Karen Hess, however, evinced no interest whatever in Bocuse or my trip. Despite her obsession with food, she, like most Parisians, had not yet realized she was living in the middle of a moment of historic change in French cuisine.
I did find accurate guidance by reconnecting with Jack Nisberg, an American expat photographer who really did know what was
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