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Authors: David Kamp
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these hotels’ head of restaurant services and acting in a similar capacity for the luxury cruise lines that sought his imprimatur. * Escoffier’s 1903 book,
Le guide culinaire
, became the primer for all cooks seeking to understand the complete repertoire of proper French haute cuisine, its 5,012 recipes effectively standardizing the fancy French menu and giving us the hit parade of rich dishes that, until the final decades of the twentieth century, defined four-star dining: velouté of chicken soup, lobster
à l’américaine
, poached Dover sole in champagne sauce, filet mignon with bordelaise and béarnaise sauces, veal kidneys in mustard-cream sauce, crêpes suzette, etc.
HENRI SOULÉ AND his charges were hardly the first people to offer fancy French food in the United States. Lorenzo Delmonico cemented his reputation as New York City’s greatest restaurateur of the nineteenth century by hiring the Frenchman Charles Ranhofer to run his kitchens in 1861, and, amongthe wealthy families of the nineteenth century’s second half, it was a status symbol to employ a French chef at one’s Fifth Avenue mansion or Newport “cottage.”
But Soulé made his mark as haute cuisine’s great disseminator in America. Delmonico’s represented an old way, with menu items numbering in the hundreds and multicourse banquets that stretched on for hours—a Ranhofer meal typically progressed from oysters to soups (one clear, one stewlike) to hors d’oeuvres to fish to game to viands to terrines to salads to a variety of desserts, among them Baked Alaska, invented by the chef to honor Secretary of State William Seward’s 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia. It was Gilded Age gorge-athon eating for wealthy robber barons, probably fantastic to have experienced, but not as
raffiné
as the Escoffier-derived cookery and modern service that the French Pavilion offered fairgoers in 1939. (Soulé had actually waited on Escoffier several times in the 1920s, when the great chef was retired and lunched twice weekly at Soulé’s place of work, the Hôtel Mirabeau in Paris.)
Soulé’s timing was good, too. As the fair began in May, the U.S. restaurant industry was recovering not only from the Depression but from the effects of Prohibition. Though the Volstead Act of 1919 had been repealed in 1933, making booze and undiluted wine legal again, the alcohol ban had already exacted a devastating toll on the hospitality industry, wiping out the luxury pleasure palaces of the previous century, Delmonico’s included. * For the Manhattan swells old enough to remember the good old days before Prohibition, the Restaurant Français at the French Pavilion was a gustatory reawakening. Crosby Gaige, Lucius Beebe, and their epicurean comrades from the International Wine and Food Society made a pilgrimage to Queens and were duly impressed, as was the still-unknown Jim Beard, who went asa guest of the Society’s Jeanne Owen. For those traveling to the World’s Fair from other parts of the United States, the restaurant was an outright revelation, its capons in tarragon aspic and noisettes of lamb with stuffed artichokes unlike anything the folks were eatin’ back home in Wichita. Even with prices that were high for 1939—$1.60 for
Coq au Vin de Bordeaux
, $5.50 for a bottle of 1929 Cheval-Blanc—Soulé was doing overflow business, making room for customers on benches meant for his exhausted staff when all the regular tables were full.
The success of the Restaurant Français, which served upward of a hundred thousand meals over the two-summer run of the World’s Fair, stoked Soulé’s ambition. New York, he recognized, was essentially an untapped market, with only a handful of restaurants serving haute cuisine, such as the Colony and the Café Chambord, and even there not with his flair. Few in his homeland believed that a decent French restaurant could even exist in New York. The
New Yorker
writer and self-styled epicure Joseph Wechsberg, one of
Le guide culinaire
, became the primer for all cooks seeking to understand the complete repertoire of proper French haute cuisine, its 5,012 recipes effectively standardizing the fancy French menu and giving us the hit parade of rich dishes that, until the final decades of the twentieth century, defined four-star dining: velouté of chicken soup, lobster
à l’américaine
, poached Dover sole in champagne sauce, filet mignon with bordelaise and béarnaise sauces, veal kidneys in mustard-cream sauce, crêpes suzette, etc.
HENRI SOULÉ AND his charges were hardly the first people to offer fancy French food in the United States. Lorenzo Delmonico cemented his reputation as New York City’s greatest restaurateur of the nineteenth century by hiring the Frenchman Charles Ranhofer to run his kitchens in 1861, and, amongthe wealthy families of the nineteenth century’s second half, it was a status symbol to employ a French chef at one’s Fifth Avenue mansion or Newport “cottage.”
But Soulé made his mark as haute cuisine’s great disseminator in America. Delmonico’s represented an old way, with menu items numbering in the hundreds and multicourse banquets that stretched on for hours—a Ranhofer meal typically progressed from oysters to soups (one clear, one stewlike) to hors d’oeuvres to fish to game to viands to terrines to salads to a variety of desserts, among them Baked Alaska, invented by the chef to honor Secretary of State William Seward’s 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia. It was Gilded Age gorge-athon eating for wealthy robber barons, probably fantastic to have experienced, but not as
raffiné
as the Escoffier-derived cookery and modern service that the French Pavilion offered fairgoers in 1939. (Soulé had actually waited on Escoffier several times in the 1920s, when the great chef was retired and lunched twice weekly at Soulé’s place of work, the Hôtel Mirabeau in Paris.)
Soulé’s timing was good, too. As the fair began in May, the U.S. restaurant industry was recovering not only from the Depression but from the effects of Prohibition. Though the Volstead Act of 1919 had been repealed in 1933, making booze and undiluted wine legal again, the alcohol ban had already exacted a devastating toll on the hospitality industry, wiping out the luxury pleasure palaces of the previous century, Delmonico’s included. * For the Manhattan swells old enough to remember the good old days before Prohibition, the Restaurant Français at the French Pavilion was a gustatory reawakening. Crosby Gaige, Lucius Beebe, and their epicurean comrades from the International Wine and Food Society made a pilgrimage to Queens and were duly impressed, as was the still-unknown Jim Beard, who went asa guest of the Society’s Jeanne Owen. For those traveling to the World’s Fair from other parts of the United States, the restaurant was an outright revelation, its capons in tarragon aspic and noisettes of lamb with stuffed artichokes unlike anything the folks were eatin’ back home in Wichita. Even with prices that were high for 1939—$1.60 for
Coq au Vin de Bordeaux
, $5.50 for a bottle of 1929 Cheval-Blanc—Soulé was doing overflow business, making room for customers on benches meant for his exhausted staff when all the regular tables were full.
The success of the Restaurant Français, which served upward of a hundred thousand meals over the two-summer run of the World’s Fair, stoked Soulé’s ambition. New York, he recognized, was essentially an untapped market, with only a handful of restaurants serving haute cuisine, such as the Colony and the Café Chambord, and even there not with his flair. Few in his homeland believed that a decent French restaurant could even exist in New York. The
New Yorker
writer and self-styled epicure Joseph Wechsberg, one of
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