Ken Aretsky is anxious. He gets up early every morning now so he can “get ready to be aggravated sooner.” But a perpetually nervous man makes a good restaurateur, because he never stops sniffing for disaster. And he is charming, too, ever so slightly ingenuous, eyes wowed behind those round glasses that clasp so tightly you wonder how his head stays on when he takes them off at night. If he sleeps. And he doesn’t sleep much because he became the front man in the greening of ‘21.’

        It is Monday, May 11, the official opening day of the new—strike that disrespectful “new”—newly restored ‘21’ Club, which is 65 years old and never was a club, but was, even after its heyday, the toughest restaurant in town to get into: a haughty, eccentric, clubby joint for the rich. Entry for mere mortals was often a lesson in advanced humiliation. For the past week, the staff -- 220 raw recruits, creaking veterans, hired guns -- has fumbled, collided, improvised, soared to deliver tidbits and booze to dozens of parties, a staggering of galas for grand muckamucks and taste arbitrageurs of every persuasion. Even punk.

        Pals invited to rehearsal lunches and dinners critiqued the new – oops --newly renovated chicken hash, and loved or hated the herbose green ooze that chef Anne Rosenzweig dreamed up to keep the legendary ‘21’ burger moist. That last Friday, a glamorous boodle lunched on the cuff, David Webb bracelets flashing over the lobster on brioche with its too hefty dose of herbs. Old-timers demanded their Sunset Salad chopped, driving the already frazzled kitchen bonkers and obscuring much of the dish’s renovated elegance.

        Eli Zabar’s singed sourdough -- onion-flecked and sculpted into chewy, log-shaped rolls -- may be dangerous for the house’s dentured habitués, but it signaled ‘21’’s stunning culinary turnaround. Anyone willing to brave Eli’s famous turbulence merely for great bread must mean business. And serious foodies were murmuring tribute to fine black-bean soup, a dazzle of barely gelled scallops glazed under the broiler, and a small, juicy chicken deviled with mustard and crumbs. The air was electric. Thank heaven God invented weekends.

        There are sprightly new hedges behind the shiny black gate. The famous iron jockeys still wear the colors of fabled stables owned by ‘21’ customers (many departed), but they’re harder to see on a stretch of 52nd Street where architectural monoliths have edged out jazz joints and nightlife. Police have set up sawhorses to keep a line of pickets away from the door.

        “Don’t say pickets,” says Aretsky. “It’s a freedom-of-speech demonstration.” Some employees say they were fired with two weeks’ notice and are planning a lawsuit, claiming age discrimination. “We’re a union house,” Aretsky says, “and everyone is working.” Running top-rated Truman’s on Long Island (four chef hats from Newsday before it closed), exploiting the East Side singles scene at Oren and Aretsky, and overseeing the gemlike perfection of tiny Arcadia have prepped Aretsky to ride out such madness. Let the lawyers defuse the lawsuits. (Some Arcadia investors are suing, too, over the fact that Rosenzweig is not at Arcadia full-time.) It’s just noon, and there is a new crisis.

        Four pampered graybeards are in a snit. They want to see the chef, Alain Sailhac, who sees “four angry guys looking at me as if I’ve committed murder.”
 
        “We have a rule here at ’21,’’ one informs him. “The toast must be very thin.”

        Alain Sailhac looks calm, but he’s feeling disoriented. Thirty-six years a French chef, he left Le Cirque last fall “to sort of retire, to become a consultant.” Because, as he told boss Sirio Maccioni, “you only live once.” Now, suddenly, he is feeding a 450-seat house -- and American restaurant with two different menus at dinner, round-the-clock banquets, cocktails, a brand-new breakfast club (300 memberships sold at $1,500 each, dues $250 a year), late suppers, and soon tea in the afternoon -- ultimately 900 covers a day. No wonder he is dreaming in English. Crab cakes. Chicken hash. “I ask myself, ‘What am I doing here?’” And then there is the Rosenzweig factor. She is the vice-chairman of the board in charge of food, 33, acclaimed but a comparative fledgling...and a woman. He is the executive chef, 52 years old, a trained professional.

        Anne Rosenzweig couldn’t have been happier in bucolic Arcadia, with only 50 seats and a loving clientele. “I wanted to be like André Soltner and just be in the kitchen every day,” she says. Chef stardom seems to embarrass her. “It’s not really an art, it’s a craft.” How does she -- a tiny onetime anthropologist and American -- run a kitchen run by Sailhac?

        “With great respect,” she says, ducking her head, biting her lip. “I bought him James Beard’s book, American Cookery. ‘Just so you’ll know what a Lady Baltimore cake is,’ I told him.”

        It’s not easy,” says Sailhac. “I feel this great weight on my shoulders.”

        They are skittering sideways like two nervous thoroughbreds, trying not to bruise egos, both determined to make it work. “I believe in common goals,” Aretsky soothes. There is already $30 million or so of Marshall Cogan’s money riding on this team -- an estimated $21 million to take the lease, $8 million or $9 million for the spruce-up, perhaps $1 million insiders say he lost last year before the shutdown.

        New Yorkers long to own restaurants. Dentists, furriers, real-estate developers, politicians, athletes get into the business thinking life will be a nonstop cocktail party. Not Marshall Cogan. Slight, with a close-cropped, almost military haircut, he is a fiercely aggressive businessman. Since buying (with other investors) General Felt Industries in 1974, he has constructed a fiefdom that grossed an estimated $2.5 billion in 1986. Cogan likes to say he bought ‘21’ because he couldn’t buy the Red Sox. And to prove how little he needs to play host, he is in Paris on opening day, having whisked 25 couples overseas to celebrate his fiftieth birthday in a private dining room at Tour d’Argent.

        “I’m the custodian of an extraordinary institution,” Cogan says. “My guiding vision is the Connaught Hotel in London. I want to see that level of quality and classicism. Ken is the boss and chairman, the CEO. He and Anne are my operating partners. My job is the support them psychologically and financially.” That means, says Aretsky, “whatever it costs, whatever it takes” to complete a tricky renovation in just three months -- workmen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “I believe, as Mies van der Rohe did, God is in the details,” says Cogan by transatlantic satellite.

        Monday noon. The ‘21’ phones are disconnecting, sparing Aretsky a measure of insult from long-lost buddies crawling out of the woodwork to claim already-booked tables. The formidable desk that once stopped you cold at the door is gone. Now there is an eighteenth-century English escritoire, inconspicuous against the wall, but the old “ropes” are still there -- Harry and Shekhar -- now instructed to make you feel loved even if you’re wearing brown shoes and white socks.

        Instead of rushing back to Washington, as he normally does each Monday, Postmaster General Preston Robert Tisch has lingered for the opening day lunch. The Fisher brothers are there, and Carl Spielvogel, Ted Kheel, John Loeb, Marty Raynes, too. Spry septuagenarians are out in force. “I’m as pleased with how it’s going as anyone can be who’s always troubled,” Aretsky admits.

        Old-timers sigh with relief. “They haven’t messed up the bar,” they say, noting that the toys -- trucks and planes and football helmets representing customer enterprises -- hang just where they’ve always hung, not minding that 65 years of grime is gone.

        “We photographed the room from every angle to get it put back right,” says Aretsky. The naugahyde banquettes are leather now, but the original upholstery buttons remain. Every Sunday night for the past three months, Aretsky drove down from the country at eleven just to see what the 150 workmen were up to. One night, he had “a major heart attack” when he discovered that the barroom walls had been painted. He went berserk, scrounging through debris until he found a chip of the original cigar-smoke-stained yellow and ordered the patina restored.

        The dark plaid and layers of shellac are gone, and the platoon of salmon leather wing chairs and brown velvet sofas now encourage lingering in the parlor. There’s a new little service bar that looks like it’s been there forever. And air-conditioning. A full gown horse flanks the cigar stand—pine before, mahogany now. The wood horse, American weather vanes, and English antiques are Cogan touches.

        Peter Kriendler and Jerry Berns -- the founding family, on contract and roving ambassadors -- hold court. “It’s not a renovation, it’s a cleanup,” says Berns. “You know, originally, it was clean.”

        “God bless you, Jerry,” says John Ryan, stopping by to just check the scene. “God bless you,” he greets me, turning to bless the headwaiter Walter Weiss, a 41-year veteran. “I’m just back from Lourdes,” Ryan says. “Did you get my card?”

        “I did not,” Berns responds,” I must complain to the postmaster general.”

        “Doesn’t it look wonderful?” Weiss wants to know, reminding me where I sat on my last visit to ‘21,’ several years ago, and what I ate. “Well, you know, they never spent $5 on the place. And they never bought a drink. As the boss, Mr. Pete, used to put it, ‘What ya give away, ya can’t sell. When the bank gives you a buck, that’s when I’ll give ya a buck.’ But they didn’t have to,” Weiss says proudly. “People begged to get in. They thought it was a private club. They were happy to discover all they had to do was come in and spend their money.

        Well, not quite. There were always classier “speaks,” with better food than the joint that Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns built, but none with stiffer prices. ‘21’ cashed in by never underestimating New Yorkers’ incurable masochism and by maintaining a powerful Kriendler-and-Berns family presence. Born on the Lower East Side (his immigrant father was a welder; his mother, a midwife, delivered 3,000 babies, including Jerry Berns), the grown-up Baron Jack, with his box at the opera and his sable-lined coat, was “handsome, dudish, congenial” to his friends, “haughty and aloof” to strangers, wrote columnist Louis Sobol. And his friends just happened to be the rich and famous. Damon Runyon liked to suggest that the owners kept a secret hideaway where they retreated after presenting the tab -- to laugh hysterically. Taking note of the prices, Groucho Marx once ordered a lima bean, then sent it back to be peeled.

        In the earliest days of New York Magazine, I wrote “The Graying of ‘21’”. A snobby gastronome, shuffled off to the darkest corner of the upstairs Siberia, I noted the salmon-ringleted ex-flappers in the eensy mink shrugs, and stolid businessmen sipping milk with their boiled beef. Even the famous ‘21’ burger ($4.50 then, $22.75 at dinner today) was a bitter disappointment. Yet what seemed to me a desultory small-town country club could still make some hapless out-of-towner feel as if he had egg on his tie.

        ‘21’ was never about food. Even when the dining room upstairs grew shabbier and more forlorn, the regulars never stopped coming. Chipped beef in a baked potato can become an unshakable habit. They shuddered when Cogan took over and Aretsky and Rosenzweig appeared. Eighty-two-year-old Hubie Boscowitz was justifiably nervous. A regular for lunch at table 9—in the coveted ‘21’ section downstairs -- seemingly forever, Boscowitz worried he would starve when they decided to close January 19 for the rehab. Aretsky called La Grenouille and asked if Charles would take special care of an old friend. ‘21’ feared the worst. “Don’t fancy up the menu,” they begged. “We don’t need the Palladium upstairs.” “There are three great institutions in America,” a regular wrote. “Coca-Cola, AT&T, and ‘21.’ The first two have been f---ed up. Don’t f--- up the third.”

        Aretsky has promised the kitchen he’ll keep the bookings down. But the demand is brutal. Refused a reservation, some people simply walk in and demand to be seated. Dinner Tuesday in the bar is nonstop long past midnight. “It’s a family restaurant for families with $30 million,” my companion reflects. And it’s true Bergdorf’s Andrew and Nena Goodman with a young couple are not the only cross-generational gathering. The Comte de Chandon sits on a banquette with Anne Slater. (If you devour WWD as I do, you’d recognize them, too.) Bill Beutel works the room. Two derrières to my right, Mary Martin is Peter Pan in pink.

        “Does my snapping my fingers disturb you?” she asks my companion.

        “Nothing you do could disturb me,” he replies. Leaving, she lingers to say good-bye, speaking of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and exits, kissing most everyone in sight.

        Does it matter that the food -- a mix of ‘21’ tradition and not-too-fancy contemporary notions -- will quickly add up to $100 for three courses at dinner with wine, tax, and tip? Will old-timers be unsettled and the self-exiled returnees seduced because the food can be good -- at times, even this early, quite brilliant? The terrine of short ribs and root vegetables is that old favorite, boiled beef, in triumphant guise. Glazed pigeon is pink and juicy; salmon, rare and delicious in a snipped-basil crust. Chocolate cake Didier is rich, dark, and moist; the maple pecan pie, a delight. A ragout of shiitake on toast is heavy, overly suffused with butter, and the chicken Grandmother’s Style is merely good, not thrilling. But strict critical judgment is unfair so soon. As Aretsky observes, “We’ve got a long way to go.”

        And the going is bumpy. Outside testers were called in to assess the old staff. Cooks were asked to do omelets, waiters to set a table. Many failed, according to Aretsky. “If I watch anyone cut an onion, I know he’ll cut off his finger,” Alain Sailhac says. “So I chose them my own way. Most of the cooks that were here started as dishwashers.” Some were duds. He kept 23 and hired 39 more. “The old crew has to learn everything new -- my béchamel, how to serve on the plate. The brown stock they did -- if you stuck in a spoon, it stood straight up. So we learn under fire -- 850 covers today, 300 for buffet, they are almost crying. I tell them we are invaders. Soon it will be easy.”

        “What do you think is American cooking?” he asks everyone. He presses the top of a rice pudding as it moves toward the dining room, nods approval.

        “I spent fifteen days eating hamburgers all over town,” he recalls. “The best is at Taste of the Apple on Second Avenue—just $3.50. They line up at lunchtime. But Anne worked on the hamburger before I came.”

        And black-bean soup?

        “She gave us her recipe, but we didn’t use it,” he admits. “My chef, Geoffrey Zakarian, did his. The sous-chef did his. The saucier did his. And the sous-chef, Joe Friel, from Ireland, was the winner.” Cogan asked for a great steak. The Aretskys took Sailhac to the Coach House. He was not impressed by the famous sirloin in its tense peppery syrup. “Too rough. I can’t say I was enchanted by Peter Luger either,” he reports. “But I love the steak at Sparks.” Sailhac is frankly feeling schizophrenic. Too French, not quite French. “What am I doing here?” he asks. “‘21’ is an institution. It’s so American. The people are so powerful, so demonstrative [he means outspoken]. But we’ll do it,” he says, cheering himself up. “When you’re about to drown and you pull yourself above, it feels wonderful.”

        Wednesday lunch upstairs. Hollywood-handsome Terry Dinan, who started at ‘21’ in the kitchen snapping string beans 24 years ago, choreographs the action in the newly brightened dining room, where the family’s silver collection shines and the chairs wear shirred pink-and-white-striped cotton pinafores. Mr. Pete sits chatting with my guest, looking rich and happy at 81, soon to be off on a fishing trip. Yes, they asked him to sign a contract. “I said, ‘You’ll have to negotiate with God.’”

        What does he think of the face-lift?

        “They did a great job,” he says. “In all the years we were here, we put about 32 cents in the place. I spent everything on myself.” The captain whispers that Mrs. So-and-So wants to say hello. “I’ll be right there,” he says. “There’s a woman worth a million dollars for every pound.”

        “Peter Kriendler is my mentor,” Aretsky confides. “He’s made the transition easy for me. He’s a wonderful elder statesman. But he was unhappy when we decided to close. ‘It will fall apart,’ he told me.” (Kriendler was off the next day for the Dodgers training camp.) When he saw what the demolition crew had done in just one morning, he was in tears. “You’ve ruined it,” he told Aretsky.

        “Five different people asked me this week if I’d been to ‘21’ yet,” my guest reports. “I was just waiting for the right moment.” He is unabashedly moved by the gratin of cod and potato. “It’s so old-fashioned,” he cries. “It opens a door to my childhood. I must call my mother after lunch.” A thick and rare slice of calf’s liver impresses all of us, but a too creamy chicken hash provokes regrets.

        “We’re getting lots of feedback on the hash,” Rosenzweig admits. “I just say we decided to put a little chicken in it, and they think that’s very funny. A lot of people want plain food, and we’re giving what they ask for. I don’t mind serving them a gray sole overcooked, no salt, no pepper, no butter -- if people want to murder it. I just hate doing that to Dover sole.”

        Watching Rosenzweig take the steps two at a time and listening to her, it’s impossible to imagine anything daunting her: septuagenarian toast authorities, 50-pound stockpots, or ‘21.’ Born on the Upper East Side, she decided, at eighteen, to go to Africa. She studied anthropology and ethnic music, but ultimately found herself drawn to what was cooking wherever she went, and shocked her family -- “They expected me to be an academic like by brother” -- when she suddenly retreated to the kitchen.
   
        She likes to forget she was one of the first students in the six-week intensive professional course of the New School’s Culinary Arts Program (forerunner of the New York Restaurant School). Rosenzweig prefers to say that she began as an apprentice without pay, cleaning 50 pounds of squid under a chauvinist chef who became a devoted mentor once she’d proven her determination. Discovered by the critics at Vanessa, she went on to Arcadia, which took a year of grunt and sweat to open—quietly, without a murmur of publicity, but swift to acclaim.

        The new breakfast chef interrupts with a question. He’s so tired he can barely talk. “He’s a night person and he’s doing the breakfast,” she explains. “I can’t look at you,” she teases. “It saps my energy.” Rosenzweig will be in the next day for the rehearsal breakfast. “I really adore breakfast, and I want it to be wonderful.” At noon, she will fly off to California to spend a day with her man and be back on the red-eye in time for Monday’s debut breakfast.

        At 4 pm, Aretsky is off to the dentist, his only relaxation of the day.
   
        Wednesday dinner upstairs creeps and creaks. For Sam and Ethel LeFrak, celebrating their forty-sixth wedding anniversary with the entire LeFrak brood, it’s a nightmare of fitful delays and fish bones. The crowd is peppered with foodies -- the Zagats, French cooking teacher Richard Grausman, and Martha Stewart celebrating her daughter’s graduation. My friends are so caught up in the drama that they don’t mind the lengthy stalls. They are willing to forgive listless sweetbreads with homely mashed potatoes and pale, bland, supposedly grilled turbot, while loving a perfection of foie gras piccata and Kentucky bourbon steak, astonishingly tender and flavorful in cracked-pepper sauce -- not rough at all. The fare is fussy, a calculated lure for gourmands and wine lovers.

        If Aretsky senses the chaos and klutz, he doesn’t reveal the anguish. He looks fresh. “I changed my suit,” he says. And he seems recovered from the day’s trauma: being called the four-letter k word by a customer for whom he had no table.

        “Some people come to ‘21’ instead of going into analysis,” Rosenzweig offers.

        Aretsky put a plaque up for Hubie Boscowitz, he tells my friends. It says HUBIE’S TABLE, making history along with the Nixon plague -- RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON, PRESIDENT’S TABLE is engraved in brass. And there is BOB CONSIDINE’S CORNER, BENCHLEY’S CORNER, and BOGIE’S CORNER.

        “What does Hubie Boscowitz do?” someone asks.

        Aretsky ponders. “He’s 82,” he says. “He eats lunch, and he eats dinner.”

        It’s no trick at all to keep Mr. B. happy. But it may take some time to win the new wave. With no mortgage and no rent and no renovation, it didn’t take a lot of chicken hash for “the family” to keep ‘21’ solvent, but the Cogan team will have to turn those tables from dawn until after midnight. They have the drive. They have the energy. They have a pre-Castro cache of Cuban cigars, and an irresistible legacy. Given how many New Yorkers want to love ‘21,’ they may only need to be almost wonderful.