Casual
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual A TABLE AT LUTECE: A MEMOIR Lutece, for four decades New York's premier French restaurant, is closing for good this month. The news has hit me hard. I remember Lutece from the go-go 1980s....
...It was the seventh arrondissement's pied a terre in Mid-town Manhattan...
...For me, Lutece has always been at the pinnacle of French cuisine in America...
...For some reason, most of the people in my literary set were at least 60 years old...
...Lutece it ain't, but it's good eatin...
...Life seemed full of promise, ambition's fires were ablaze, magic was in the air, and so was the name Lutece...
...As I say, those were heady days...
...He stormed out, never to return...
...His creativity did not stop at urging these concoctions on the barman...
...But I did move with the Lutece crowd...
...For some reason—just the vicissitudes of the literary life, I suppose—people in Donal's kept getting fired from their jobs...
...They must have done their writing at night, because they were in Donal's all afternoon...
...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...
...Joe got into an argument with the bartender over one of those accounting questions that were roiling Manhattan back then...
...I myself, for instance, drank stinky, room-temperature English bitter in those days, and Joe once asked me, "You like that Double Diamond...
...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...
...Giants walked on Broadway in those days—Leona Helmsley and Ivan Boesky, Keith Hernandez and Vernon Mason...
...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...
...And I for one am not too cold-hearted, as they clear out their last souffle pans, escargot clamps, and beer straws, to spare a thought for their pain...
...The guy at the door would inquire what I wanted...
...In this case, it was something about whether Joe's beverage ideas constituted payment-in-kind against his bar bill...
...Another sold ads for Coupling magazine, even though he didn't seem to know much about electronics...
...He didn't have an office, but he didn't need one, because he got better ideas in Donal's...
...It's a fact," said Joe...
...You can ask my wife...
...But the thing about intellectual ferment is, it cannot last forever...
...I was not alone in noticing this mystical kinship, for the name Lutece was often on the lips of Donal's patrons...
...This burger here," a fellow at the bar might say...
...Love it," I replied...
...To this end, Joe had personally invented a number of drinks, from the Seagram's 7 sundae to the Chocolate Gibson to the Beau-jolais colada...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Anyone famous inside...
...I had just been promoted to deputy associate proofreader on books like Around Lake Huron With Your Winnebago...
...He had a newsletter that catered to the bar trade called Profitable Drinking...
...Heady days indeed: A five-figure income—that magical threshold— was so close I could smell it...
...One wrote editorials for a Catholic weekly...
...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...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...and he would speak a few words in French that sounded like "move along...
...Selling alcohol to broads was easy, if one only remembered that they hated alcohol...
...I more often lunched in Donal O'Houlihan's...
...My perch in the Manhattan publishing world gave me a commanding view of it all...
...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...
...The old gang broke up...
...Obviously something similar happened at Lutece...
...The bar was always packed and the drinks were so cheap it would have been a waste of money to eat...
...Actually, if you insist on being literal-minded about it, I never once set foot in the place...
...The most successful was Joe Blau...
...I'd respond with a wry, "Hey...
...Although I liked to deprecate it as "the lunch room," it resembled Lutece in its ability to spur the imagination of a young literary man on the rise...
Vol. 9 • February 2004 • No. 23
