Lifestyle
Celebrity Chefs Gather at Andre Soltner Memorial
André Soltner, the influential French chef who died at 92 in January, was remembered warmly by family and friends for his frugal habits, though a memorial to celebrate him on Saturday afternoon in Manhattan was anything but.
A 16-piece orchestra perched above the cathedral-size ballroom at 583 Park Avenue welcomed guests to their gilt chairs with strains of Handel and Bach filling the air, a rampart of yellow and apricot flowers lining the stage. Beneath a massive crystal chandelier, a sea of chef’s whites assembled to honor the man behind the famed restaurant Lutèce, who many in the room considered a hero, if not a close mentor.
Daniel Boulud, who is Mr. Soltner’s fellow Frenchman and the chef of the Michelin-starred restaurant Daniel, sat next to Thomas Keller, of Per Se and the French Laundry. Danny Meyer, the restaurateur behind Gramercy Tavern and Shake Shack, sat in a row just behind them, with the celebrity chef Tom Colicchio nearby. Jacques Pépin, at 89 one of Mr. Soltner’s few contemporaries present, donned his chef’s uniform for the afternoon.
The concentration of culinary star power should have required a designated survivor.
“Lutèce was not a fancy restaurant,” Mr. Boulud said affectionately, recalling the restaurant in a cozy townhouse on East 50th Street that Mr. Soltner helped make into a destination for French cuisine from its opening in 1961 to its shuttering in 2004. “You walked in and there was that little bistro feeling in the front, and it felt like a home.”
Mr. Soltner began as head chef at the restaurant, eventually buying out his partner, Andre Surmain, in 1973. He was a constant presence until he sold it to Ark Restaurants in 1994, whereupon he became a dean at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan.
Mr. Soltner and his wife, Simone, who died in 2016, lived above the restaurant, which drew the likes of Henry Kissinger, Marilyn Monroe and Mick Jagger. At the memorial, a slide show projection with photographs of notes left by notable, and well-fed, patrons through the years drew oohs and ahs from the crowd.
A large screen projected photographs of Mr. Soltner throughout his life, ranging from his youth in the Alsace region of France through his years at Lutèce and later as an educator and mentor, many with his companion of eight years, Maryvonne Gasparini; his mirthful, Gallic smile unchanging.
“I have yet to find a picture where André didn’t look happy,” said Glenn W. Dopf, a longtime friend of Mr. Soltner’s. Mr. Dopf and Jacques Torres, the pastry chef and chocolatier, were emcees of the memorial, which included remarks from Mr. Boulud, Mr. Keller, and Rodrigo Campos, who met Mr. Soltner as a 16-year-old while working as a cleaner in his building in New York and is now a chef himself.
Mr. Campos spoke of how he had expressed his desire to be a chef, with Mr. Soltner taking the teenager under his wing and arranging for him to eventually attend culinary school. He is now the executive chef at Mr. Boulud’s Centurion New York restaurant.
“He didn’t expect anything back,” Mr. Campos said of Mr. Soltner’s generosity.
Anne Vandevoorde, a niece of Mr. Soltner’s, was one of a few family members who spoke, remembering her famous “tonton” with fondness. “Having no children was a source of sadness, but you have been a father to many,” she said.
Bill Peet, who is the executive chef at Tavern on the Green and was a chef at Lutèce for 15 years, shared an anecdote of his old boss having knee surgery in the morning and showing up for the evening dinner service later that day.
“André was the example,” he said. “He never took off.”
As guests descended to a lower level for lunch, a band that evoked Mr. Soltner’s Alsatian roots played “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, while a silent coterie of ushers from the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, which organized the afternoon’s proceedings, herded the likes of Martha Stewart and the chef David Burke down to the awaiting feast.
Hardly a typical post-service repast, the various stations boasted such delicacies as smoked mushrooms by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, bacon tarte flambeé by Gabriel Kreuther and bonbons by Mr. Torres.
Mr. Pépin’s table in a far corner became the center of gravity as relatively younger chefs, like Mr. Keller and Mr. Boulud, knelt in conversation to the room’s elder statesman and plates from each food station were delivered.
“André would be very unhappy with all the waste,” Mr. Pépin said with an ironic smile, indicating a half-eaten plate of smoked salmon crepe in front of him. Mr. Soltner’s propensity for economizing had been recalled by Mr. Dopf upstairs earlier, with reported habits like judiciously saving wine corks to use to balance unsteady dining tables or placing burned out lightbulbs in the freezer with the belief that the cold could revive the filament.
In a room of people known as celebrity chefs, Mr. Soltner had been the prototype.
“He was very much,” Mr. Boulud said. “But he hated to get the attention. He didn’t want it. André was humble.”
Mr. Boulud described his late friend’s food as honest.
“André was someone who didn’t need caviar, truffle or Foie gras to prove that he could cook,” he said before describing some of his favorite dishes with relish: a soup of mussels, then a pheasant with braised cabbage, and a souffle.
“Simple and just perfect,” he added. “He made New York his village, and they all came to his house.”
Phil Pritchard of the Hockey Hall of Fame works the 2019 NHL Awards at the Mandalay Bay Events Center on June 19, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
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Paul W. Downs can’t help it that even on the weekends, his life intersects with “Hacks,” the HBO comedy he co-created and co-showruns with his wife, Lucia Aniello, and their friend Jen Statsky. (He also appears on the show as Jimmy LuSaque Jr., the besieged manager of its two stars, played by Emmy winners Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder.) The fifth and final season of “Hacks” premiered last week, but on Downs’ days off, he often finds himself at its previous filming locations or hanging out with cast members who have become like family.
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
Downs moved to Los Angeles in 2011, but soon after, he and Aniello were hired to write (and for him to act) on the über-New York show “Broad City,” keeping them away from the West Coast for years. Now the couple live in Los Feliz, which they enjoy with their young son.
“I love Los Feliz because it’s a real neighborhood with restaurants and bars, but also feels close to nature with Griffith Park,” Downs says. “Also it’s very central to my Eastside friends and Westside agents.”
And if he had to live at a local mall, like the character Ava Daniels did in the third season of “Hacks,” which would he choose?
“It would be the Americana, obviously.”
Here’s how he’d spend a perfect day in L.A.
10 a.m.: A late rise and a li’l barista
I’m sleeping in if I can, which I can’t because I have a toddler, but let’s say I can sleep ’til 10. That would be insane.
Then I’m making coffee at home. I’m making it with my 4-year-old because he likes to make my coffee now. He always wanted to help, now he really wants to do it on his own. I’m still there to supervise, but he does do a lot of it.
I do batch brew. I’m doing Verve Coffee that I’m grinding there, and then I’m brewing four cups because I need my coffee. I had a Moccamaster for a long time, but I recently got a Simply Good Coffee. There’s no plastic — it’s all glass and metal.
11 a.m.: Chocolate croissants for everyone
We’re driving to Pasadena and we’re going to [Artisanal Goods by] CAR, which is the place to get the best chocolate croissant, I think, in the world. I don’t just think in L.A., I think they’re better than Paris. I’m going there with my wife and my kid and I’m having another coffee and some pastry. We’re ordering three [chocolate croissants]. We’re not doubling up.
11:45 a.m.: The family business
We’re driving to Fair Oaks in Pasadena. There’s a place called T.L. Gurley. We shot “Hacks” there, actually. Not only in Season 1, but also full circle in Season 5. We’re going to shmay around and look at antiques. My kid is going to want to play a vintage pinball machine. We’re going to find a little piece of art for the house or what have you. It’s not necessarily that I’m on the hunt. It’s to pass the time and to have some fun. If I could do anything and have a leisurely day and take my mind off work, that’s what I’m doing.
People love to interact with my kid when he’s there. We’re really training him to appraise things at a young age. My parents are part-time dealers of antiques. My grandmother bought and sold antiques. It’s kind of a family business.
1:30 pm.: Baguettes and books
We’re driving to Larchmont and we’re getting a sandwich at Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits & Cheese. I’m doing prosciutto-mozzarella-basil on a baguette.
Then we’re going to Chevalier’s Books. What’s sad is that I’m often not looking for leisure material. I’m looking for something that I’m interested in learning more about or writing about, or that they’re turning into a show I want to audition for. But we’re also doing Little Golden Books for my son. He’s obsessed. We’re not huge on screen time, so we really encourage the book-buying.
2:30 p.m.: Cast pool party
We’re having some family fun in the pool and we’re doing that until evening. We invite people over all the time. My sister-in-law is a New Yorker, but she actually wrote last season on “The Rooster” and she’s often writing on shows in L.A., so she’s often here and she’ll have a couple friends come over. I know this sounds like a piece of PR or something, but we’ll really literally have Hannah [Einbinder] and maybe Mark Indelicato from “Hacks” come over to swim. Jen, our co-creator of “Hacks,” will come over.
6:00 p.m.: Family dinner
Sometimes we’ll order Grá to the house, which is a pizza place in Echo Park — excellent sourdough crust pizza. But if we don’t do that, an ideal evening is an early dinner at All Time on Hillhurst in Los Feliz. We’re ordering the ceviche and my son is having all of it and not sharing with anybody at the table.
8:45 p.m.: A thrilling ending to the day
After putting my kid to bed, my wife and I, in an ideal world (full disclosure: we haven’t done this in two years), we’ll watch something together that we’ve been meaning to watch. We have a long list of movies and we either want to revisit or that we haven’t seen that we need to watch.
We don’t watch a lot of comedies. It’s a dream to watch a “Black Bag” or a little espionage thriller. We really like that because it’s so different than the stuff that we’re working on in the day.
Often the things we watch are things that we admire. We like deconstructing it as fans of film and television. We do like talking about the making of it, but it’s less of a critique and more of a listing of the things we appreciated about it.
10:30 p.m.: No work tomorrow
And then it’s lovemaking ’til morning on a perfect Sunday. If it’s a perfect Sunday, there’s also a Monday that’s off.
Jay (not pictured) found himself alone and hopeless in a jail cell when a fellow inmate’s unexpected words of comfort changed his life.
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When Jay was 22 years old, he was a self-described loner. In this story, he is being identified by his nickname to allow himself to speak candidly about the following experience and his mental health. He says the few people he did hang out with at the time had questionable morals.
”I chose my friends poorly, and your friends have a tendency to rub off on you. And so I started making poor decisions,” Jay said.
One evening, when he and his friends were out drinking, someone suggested they should try to break into the chemistry building on his college campus. Most of the group shrugged the suggestion off, deeming it impossible, but Jay was convinced he could pull it off.
“The next night I made a plan of how to do it, and I did it,” Jay remembered. “And I didn’t get caught doing it, [but] I got caught afterwards.”
At around 1 that morning, Jay was placed in the county detention center. Sitting alone in his cell, reality began to sink in.
“I pretty much thought that my life as I knew it was going to be over, and I had decided that the world would be better off without me in it.”
Jay made a plan to end his life. As he prepared himself, he began to cry.
“But just in that moment when I was ready to do it, I heard a voice coming from the top left corner of my cell, from a little vent. And someone called out to me and said, ‘Hey, is this your first time?’”
The man who called out was an inmate in the cell next door.
“I collected myself a little bit, and I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Can I pray for you?’”
Jay had grown up religious, but had stopped going to church years before. In that moment, though, he knew he needed support. He said yes, and listened as the man began to pray.
“I wish I could tell you that I remember the [exact] words that he said to me, but what I remember is that his words landed with me, and instead of wanting my life to be over, suddenly I saw hope,” Jay said.
The interaction happened nearly ten years ago, but it was a pivotal moment in Jay’s life, and one he thinks about all the time.
“[Now], I have a good job. I have a girlfriend who loves me. I have a life. But I have a life because somebody who was in the same situation I was in had the courage to talk to a fellow inmate and be kind.”
Jay says that he wishes he could meet that man again and express his appreciation.
“[I would] shake that guy’s hand, give him a hug, and tell him what his small gesture meant for me, how he changed the course of my life.”
My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.
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