We are off on another gastronomic bender -- only now, as a restaurant critic, a professional eater, I can call it “research.” Just this noon we lurched around the last hairpin turn into Talloires in France’s Haute Savoie. We are settling into the third-floor pine-sheltered luxury of the Auberge du Père Bise with its windows onto the Lake of Annecy and the clamor of three-star choreography in the kitchen below. Now the man from “Newsweek” calls. “You’ve been on the road,” he says, “so I don’t suppose you’ve heard that Le Pavillon is closing. We’d like some comment.”
 I am silent.

        “Oh, is this a bit of a shock?” he says. “Perhaps you’ll want some time to recover and think about it.” Not nasty, just a little bit facetious, teasing. After all, I was so silent. And as we are both well aware…it’s only a restaurant, not a lover, not an idol, not a friend…just a restaurant. Just an institution.

       I believe in ghosts. And the ghost of its mythic creator, Henri Soulé -- a pale, plump, arrogant spirit -- haunted Le Pavillon. For me, no successor could exorcise that ghost. For me, Le Pavillon was no longer Le Pavillon anyway, not since Soulé died almost seven years ago. Ambition and hope simply postponed the official death notice.

       So there must be a flicker of triumph in the plump old ghost’s smile. He always said, “No one is indispensable. The chef is not indispensable. Only Soulé is indispensable. Without Soulé there is no Pavillon.”
   
       I remember lighting a cigar after dinner, somewhat tentatively, aware Soulé might consider the gesture unsuitably barbaric for a lady. Instead he seemed delighted, pleased to order fresh coffee for the first woman to smoke a cigar at Le Pavillon. And ever after, he never failed to arrive at the end of each meal with a handful of the small, fat beauties he deemed esthetically pleasing for me to smoke.

       How seductive he was with his petits fours and his Dom Pérignon and his caviar -- personally selected, personally tasted. Only a fool would try to foist an inferior egg of an inferior sturgeon on the celebrated Henri Soulé. Patiently he catalogued the dimensions of his restaurant genius for me -- mesmerized primitive from Velveeta country -- when I came to spend a week in the kitchen of Le Pavillon for The Ladies’ Home Journal and, later, to record the countdown to the opening day of La Côte Basque, his Pavillon annex “pour les pauvres…a soup kitchen for the poor.”  Click here to read Countdown.

       Our affair was brief. The foreplay was all in aspic. The consummation was tripes à la mode de Caen. Tripe was not permitted on his diet, defined as it was by the tyranny of biology and the cruel prudence of his doctor. Lunch at three was usually chopped steak. Not beloved pot-au-feu or lyrical cod salad. Literally, chopped steak. Chef Clément René Grangier chopped it himself with a knife. But Soulé had ordered tripe so that I could taste it at Grangier’s masterful hand, and that day all three of us defied time, gall bladder, cholesterol and authority with a sublime stew of tripe.
   
       That was Soulé’s Pavillon. A great poached bass might smell ever so slightly of diesel. Waiters might collide. Or corks disintegrate. Soulé soothed, scolded and snarled and demanded perfection. He spent a fortune on roses. He built a legendary wine cellar, created fashions for wine labels no one had ever heard of. He kept his suppliers competing with each other so he would never be offered anything but the tenderest beef, the aristocrats of pedigreed lamb, the most pampered young lettuce. If you wanted something not on the menu -- you had only to ask. A Pavillon regular craved freshly churned butter. Rumbling and cursing, Grangier would make it. Ailing Pavillon pets would get Care packages from Soulé at the Harkness Pavilion. He did not invent the tyranny of restaurant snobisme, but he was a master at snob dining games. The rich, the powerful, the famous and stray mongrels he just happened to like were pampered. Masochists thrived in his haughty disdain. His house was an academy. Disciples left as missionaries to bring the fine French dining gospel to a dozen crosstown streets of Manhattan. 

       Le Pavillon came to New York in our innocence, in a time long before just any submarginal bride would dare to attempt a quiche Lorraine. And boeuf bourguignon was not a cliché. In its glory Le Pavillon was our town’s greatest -- some said only -- French restaurant. And Soulé’s arrogance and passion for perfection were legend. His scorn could curdle hollandaise and turn an impetuous waiter into a pillar of salt. He ruled Le Pavillon with love and steel. When he died, loyalists and traditionalists had little hope for the survival of Le Pavillon.

       The first successor failed. With his departure, the restaurant emerged pitifully tarnished. Then came Stuart Levin to fight the ghost…to woo the ghost. Levin was man torn. “Perhaps it would have been better,” he once confided, “if I had changed the name.” How brave. How ambitious. How human that Stuart Levin should dare to try. His energy was extraordinary. His imagination leaped palace walls, bringing lunch in Styrofoam into executive suites -- Pavillon-to-go.

       At my last lunch there in the spiffy fresh-striped front room, the menu—with its merciful $9 lunch -- was, alas, sensibly limited. The service was elegant and snappy. But as the captain served the bouef en gelée, the jelly collapsed into a pool of soup. It was only aspic, a gelée that did not gel. Still, I sensed his horror and his resignation at this gastronomic mishap.

       But cuisinary calamities alone did not close the doors at 111 East 57th Street. The final blow was collision with the callous seventies. Le Pavillon was built for a time of conspicuous spending and elegance. The space is wanton. The dimensions are archaic. Even a decade ago Soulé admitted he had to feed 300 people in a day just to break even. Pure Pavillon is a habit incompatible with our time.

       André Surmain, proprietor of Lutèce, where the house is now fully booked a day or two in advance, considers the space on the 57th Street flank of the Ritz Tower hopeless…jinxed. “Once it was an automobile showroom and then a travel agency. I remember palm trees in the window. I wouldn’t take that spot if they guaranteed me a salary of $100,000 a year. The kitchen is two miles away. There’s no place to park; it’s at a bus stop, along a truck route. Restaurants should be on a side street. But Soulé was so stubborn.”
   
       Surmain, increasingly restless at East 50th Street (“I’m a big frog in a small pond”) is not modest. Why should he be?  Lutèce is a jewel, a moneymaker, the flower in our town’s withering garden of Gallic gastronomy. “The greatest move I ever made was to give a share of Lutèce to the chef. The second year he came, I gave André Soltner a partnership. If Soulé had done the same for Pierre Franey, Franey would still be there and there would be a Pavillon. It’s too late now. Almost all the great chefs are gone.”

       Perhaps even Soulé might have found it impossible to ride out the recession, the expense-account backlash, inflation’s stretch, the vagaries of chic and the evolving lifestyle of custom-tailored dungarees.

       Just as our epicurean passion reaches its prime, the great temples of la grande cuisine perish one by one. The Café Chauveron…shuttered in fully glory. The Colony gone…mummified in its last years, but once golden. La Seine…briefly brilliant, then snuffed out. Voisin and L’Armorique…
   
       And now Le Pavillon.
   
       There is one small seed of hope. Through the determined lead of La Caravelle’s brilliant chef, Roger Fessaguet, the stricken have organized the Association of Continental Restaurants, Inc., to fight the immigration law that has paralyzed the influx of European chefs. “The gates are not thrown open,” Fessaguet admits, “but there is a new, slight understanding. Thirty men are to be admitted. Four have already arrived. Two more will come in from Canada this month.”
   
       Perhaps among them will be a man of unswervable ambition, one stubborn chef from Bayonne or Alsace or Brittany with his eye on the dining room, one charming benevolent tyrant to bewitch our senses and pamper our palates with an élan that can outwit the impoverishment of the affluent seventies.

       They come for gold. The side streets beckon.  

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