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MONDAY APRIL 21
Grand Dame: Closing Dinner A relic of Old New York, how La Grenouille recaptures the glamour and indulgence of French classics. April 2008New York is a city always turning over with trendy new culinary thoroughbreds, but La Grenouille is one of the last great warhorses. While virtually all the sumptuous Gallic dining rooms of the postwar era (Le Pavillon, La Côte Basque, La Caravelle) have closed — victims of old age and changing fashions — this ageless doyenne, now in its forty-sixth year, merrily chugs along, owing largely to owner Charles Masson’s intimacy with his clients, the restaurant’s cosseting Old World service and an extraordinary menu that melds classic French fare with lighter, cross-cultural creations. The celebrated main dining room sports red-velvet settees, gold damask walls and the most extravagant floral displays this side of the Rose Bowl (the restaurant spends $100,000 a year on the lavish arrangements). Closing dinners — such as those recently held for PricewaterhouseCoopers, General Electric and IBM — are hosted upstairs in a 28-foot-high loft of whitewashed brick and burnished wood, with a large, marble-faced stone hearth and a “wine wall” holding 3,000 bottles, in addition to coolers storing another 1,000 (the jaw-dropping Bordeaux stash goes back to the restaurant’s opening). In the 1930s and ’40s, the loft served as a studio for Bernard Lamotte, a French painter who also used it to entertain friends such as Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo and his childhood friend Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. |
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