LUTECE, for four decades New York’s premier French restaurant, is closing for good this month. The news has hit me hard. I remember Lutèce from the go-go 1980s. Giants walked on Broadway in those days–Leona Helmsley and Ivan Boesky, Keith Hernandez and Vernon Mason. My perch in the Manhattan publishing world gave me a commanding view of it all. I had just been promoted to deputy associate proofreader on books like “Around Lake Huron With Your Winnebago.” Heady days indeed: A five-figure income–that magical threshold–was so close I could smell it.
It was a time of twilight concerts in Central Park and champagne breakfasts at the Waldorf, of whispered intimacies in Checker cabs and wild nights downtown snorting cocaine with fashion models. Not so much for me–for me it was more a time of getting mugged, feeding quarters into the dryer at the laundromat, and craning to avoid the damp underarms of straphangers on the F train–but for other people, definitely. Life seemed full of promise, ambition’s fires were ablaze, magic was in the air, and so was the name Lutèce.
For me, Lutèce has always been at the pinnacle of French cuisine in America. It was the seventh arrondissement’s pied à terre in Midtown Manhattan. So it may come as a surprise that although it was just half a block from my office, I didn’t dine there most days. Actually, if you insist on being literal-minded about it, I never once set foot in the place. But I did move with the Lutèce crowd. Occasionally on my strolls past the elegant brownstone that housed the restaurant, I’d stop and chat with those culinary alchemists who worked such magic with the simplest of ingredients. The guy at the door would inquire what I wanted. I’d respond with a wry, “Hey! Anyone famous inside?” and he would speak a few words in French that sounded like “move along.”
I more often lunched in Donal O’Houlihan’s. Although I liked to deprecate it as “the lunch room,” it resembled Lutèce in its ability to spur the imagination of a young literary man on the rise. I was not alone in noticing this mystical kinship, for the name Lutèce was often on the lips of Donal’s patrons. “This burger here,” a fellow at the bar might say. “Lutèce it ain’t, but it’s good eatin’.”
The bar was always packed and the drinks were so cheap it would have been a waste of money to eat. It was mostly Irish people–usually there was a two-day-old videotaped hurling match playing on a TV over the bar–but the place also drew aspiring writers who hadn’t yet caught their break.
For some reason, most of the people in my literary set were at least 60 years old. They must have done their writing at night, because they were in Donal’s all afternoon. One wrote editorials for a Catholic weekly. Another sold ads for Coupling magazine, even though he didn’t seem to know much about electronics. The most successful was Joe Blau. He had a newsletter that catered to the bar trade called Profitable Drinking. He didn’t have an office, but he didn’t need one, because he got better ideas in Donal’s. We never saw a copy of this newsletter, but Joe’s theory was that bartenders (or “beverage vendors”) didn’t do enough to sell to women (or “broads”). Selling alcohol to broads was easy, if one only remembered that they hated alcohol. (“It’s a fact,” said Joe. “You can ask my wife.”)
The key was to keep a lot of dairy products and a blender behind the bar and use it to mix them various fizzes and floats. To this end, Joe had personally invented a number of drinks, from the Seagram’s 7 sundae to the Chocolate Gibson to the Beaujolais colada. His creativity did not stop at urging these concoctions on the barman. I myself, for instance, drank stinky, room-temperature English bitter in those days, and Joe once asked me, “You like that Double Diamond?”
“Love it,” I replied.
“Next time you’re out with the wife,” he said, “order one for her, and have the bartender throw a scoop of ice cream in it.”
As I say, those were heady days. But the thing about intellectual ferment is, it cannot last forever. For some reason–just the vicissitudes of the literary life, I suppose–people in Donal’s kept getting fired from their jobs. Joe got into an argument with the bartender over one of those accounting questions that were roiling Manhattan back then. In this case, it was something about whether Joe’s beverage ideas constituted payment-in-kind against his bar bill. He stormed out, never to return. The old gang broke up.
Obviously something similar happened at Lutèce. And I for one am not too cold-hearted, as they clear out their last soufflé pans, escargot clamps, and beer straws, to spare a thought for their pain.
–Christopher Caldwell
