The Ground Floor is a long-running identity crisis.

        Those Bobbsey Twins of Esthetic Elegance atop the char-gray monument on West 52nd Street—CBS sachems Paley and Stanton—have come to regard the Ground Floor as a conspicuous indulgence. The CBS feeding station is now in its fourth incarnation. Business is better. Losses are down. A measure of intimacy has been imposed upon an awesome space clearly designed as a Rolls-Royce showroom.  But the future is uncertain.

        Long ago we visited the Ground Floor and found it grand, rich, slick, calculated, spare...intimidating...Contemporary Wasp...a measured, computed, engineered cathedral of rosewood, granite, steel honeycombs, tufted leather, scarlet plush and sleek contemporary tableware. A perfect room to end an affair in—discreet, stern enough to discourage sloppy emotionalism.

        In charge then: Charles Chevillot, scion of a distinguished clan of Burgundian innkeepers. Chevillot had been assigned to rethink an earlier futile experiment in pomp and ultimessence...and he was determined to appliqué the granite with "soul." Le Grand Charles brought in breadbaskets, copper casseroles, colorful paintings. A Stella was the first to violate the icy virginity of spare.  He simplified the elaborate menu, introduced the $3 silent breakfast. You could help yourself to juice, fruit, croissant and the New York Times as a mute waiter poured coffee.  Everyone loved it. But nobody came. The vexed powers of CBS called M. Chevillot to account and bought up his contract.

        In Our Town's effluvium of paranoid egomania, the forced retreat of young Chevillot resembled revenge served in a glaze of pique au naturel. It cannot be ignored that the agency Chevillot had hired to enhance the cachet of the Ground Floor—Gifford-Wallace Public Relations—was then also engaged in hyping the cruel warfare between CBS and the embattled Smothers Brothers. This irony of simultaneous flackery was noted one day by the New York Daily News' TV columnist Kay Gardella. Four days later Chevillot got his premature adieu.

        Candidates for conspicuous martyrdom are not impossible to scare up in this mecca for masochists. An ambitious team, eager to pilot the Impossible Dream, auditioned in the board room. Emmanuel Zwaaf, Dutch-born veteran of fancy feeding, Restaurant Associates-style, cooked veal Cordon Bleu. Phil Sloves, now proprietor of Sam's and its annex Louie's, served. They proposed a simplified menu with a gravity of steaks. Proposition accepted. Zwaaf thought music would help. Network musicologists were assigned to orchestrate the fine line between charcoal-gray granite and eggs Benedict. After a detailed and debated presentation, the board approved an outdoor cafe. Sloves was not particularly demoralized by the whims of corporate bureaucracy. "One thing about talking to the heads instead of the backs is you get an answer," he philosophizes. But Sloves found the space economics unconquerable. He quickly made a strategic exit. And the Ground Floor went into its fourth incarnation under the solo hand of Zwaaf, an eager, charming major-domo.

        The Ground Floor at midday: high-priced vibrations of communications and garment-center brass—irritated duodena and pulsating blood pressure.  A subdued jungle of living greenery has been posted to break up the bowling-alley grill.  At first the greenery looked too happy to be real. It is real. I tasted. Now time has mottled the perfection...but gently. And what amazing warmth quotient there is in small round centerpieces of autumn chrysanthemums or spring anemones and armeria. The huge bouquets, fruit and stuffed pheasant in edible still life flanking the open kitchen warm even the stainless steel.

        The new tablecloths—heavy buff linen with centered racing stripes of kelly, orange, royal, yellow, burgundy, black—are an unabashed steal from Morris Louis' acrylic painting in the dining ell, an improvement even, Morris forgive me. Zwaaf is so taken with his innocent larceny, he has had a tablecloth framed and hung south of the wine racks. The shiny menu Chevillot thought too slick is back again with Irving Penn's extraordinary photographs. Now entries are in English, pointedly, with French translations. The sugar bowl is tarnished. That is homey, too, I suppose, but surely a felony in the cathedral. The service varies: sometimes pleasant, professional—waiters know who ordered what without asking—but not remarkably interested, and occasionally even madcap. Late after one lunch waiters were throwing ice cubes—at each other I hope—but one hit my ankle and I wondered if it was a signal we had overstayed.

        The menu is clearly a compromise, no reach at all—depending upon quality, efficiency and alertness in the kitchen rather than the brilliance of the chef. Manny Zwaaf faces reality...and compromises. Lunch is à la carte, entrees $4.95 and up—chopped steak, beef in red wine, sautéed veal with curry sauce, veal scallops in lemon butter, sole meunière, striped bass in a sorrel-scented wine sauce, omelets from $4.95. Dinner entrees start at $7.25...steaks, chops, boned duckling with cherries, veal Cordon Bleu and a reprise of the luncheon roll call. House policy offers a vegetable and potato with each entree, plus salad at lunch. And the salad is sheer glory: an inspiration of minced watercress, endive spikes, thin mushroom slices and toasted almonds on a bed of Bibb.

        The Ground Floor is not nearly as haute Wasp as it was.

        The affection for garlic is now uninhibited, a refreshing fissure in cool contemporary gentility. At dinner, boned chicken, sautéed in garlic butter ($6.75) was crisp, nutty, juicy and sweetly heady. But garlic bread, served unwrapped, grew quickly cool, its zesty dress turning into an oily ooze. A liaison of lobster and sweetbreads in herbed cream sauce spiked with sherry ($9.25) seemed like an inspired idea, but the lobster was tough and tasteless, the sauce grainy and flat.  Tough, too, were the shrimps sautéed in garlic butter ($7.25), and here the garlic had been burned, lending an unpleasant acrid bite. With consistent inconsistency, cold lobster, served with a sharp unpleasant mustard mayonnaise ($6.25) was sweet and tender, but too much to eat as an hors d'oeuvre. Better half the portion at half the price. Filet mignon au poivre ($9.25) was tender—rare, as ordered, though slightly mealy—and the sauce was a fine savory essence. Except for a lone boiled potato with the lobster-sweetbreads and acidy globs of stewed tomato escorting the shrimp, the entrees were imaginatively garnished. The chicken was served with a purée of peas, regrettably unseasoned, and riced potato. Sautéed mushrooms in a pastry shell came with the filet. Mushroom salad ($1.75), ordered as an hors d'oeuvre, was superb. Two more happy beginnings: potage breton ($1.50), a blush-pink cream of white bean and tomato soup, and an elegant smooth cream of barley.

        A joking request for eight espresso (at a dinner for four) brought a welcome response: four standard (rather than demitasse) cups of real espresso. From a handsome wine list curiously graced with temperance slogans—"There is a devil in every berry of the grape" and “Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune"—we chose a favorite dry white Graves, Château Olivier ($12). The list has more depth than that of most new restaurants (its debt to Chevillot connections back in Beaune, I suspect). But it is safely contemporary in its hefty markups.

        The desserts look magnificent. Looks are deceiving. The chocolate mousse ($2) had too much sugar and not enough chocolate. The Black Forest torte ($2), with its traditional hidden cherries, was reasonably moist at one lunch, hideously stale and dry at dinner. An unconventional gâteau St. Honoré ($2) studded with bits of glaceéd fruit was more successful.  Strawberry tart was crisply crusted, sweet and wanton beneath a puff of rich whipped cream. 

        Manny Zwaaf is energetic, humble, unpretentious—an amiable pussycat with watery blue eyes, pale red hair and, it seems, a candid and regretful grasp of reality. He has abandoned the Impossible Dream. He accommodates. He knocks himself out to please. Sidney Poitier likes fresh fruit and orange juice. One day Poitier arrived to find fruit on the table and freshly squeezed O.J. nestled in a champagne cooler. Poitier was dazzled. Zwaaf pampers and indulges. Publisher John Fairchild's kiddies get hot dogs from the "free lunch" at the bar and cotton candy spun by Manny himself ("My hands get red all over... such a mess").

        Zwaaf was first a cook, briefly garde-manger on the Holland-America Line, then rose through the Restaurant Associates ranks at the Tower Suite, the Brasserie and Tavern-on-the-Green, where his name was "Edward" by order of then RA president Joseph Baum—to whom, one suspects, "Manny" was clearly not properly haute.  Zwaaf came to CBS' floundering feeding station after being fired from L'Etoile—"a personality conflict," he says. For months he brooded about the Ground Floor's tasteful isolation. "People have trouble finding us at night," Zwaaf complained to the upstairs brass. "We need a sign." He filed a request. "No," was the reply. Zwaaf re-entered his plaint: "I'm fighting for survival." At last the powers relented.  So Zwaaf got his sign.

        It is small—48 by 11 inches—neat, elegant is understatement...not easy to spot, but it is there from five o'clock until it is banished indoors again at midnight lest it pollute the monument's integrity by day. In his reign, Zwaaf reports proudly, he has cut the house's losses to a mere $150,000* [* A modest drain compared with the $5,000 weekly loss that, with other ills, finally doomed brilliant, haughty and very expensive La Seine. Opened to glory: March 14, 1968. Closed Friday, April 16, 1971] …but instead of a long-term contract, he is surviving on a month-to-month renewal basis. The giant is in a slump. CBS personnel and salaries have been slashed. Ed Sullivan is out, and even the company's jet plane may have to be sacrified.

        Upstairs the fate of the Ground Floor is being writ in red pencil. No wonder the complimentary petit fours fail to appear...Manny Zwaaf is understandably nervous.

***

 Chill at Petite Ferme

        And meanwhile... what has become of the deposed Charles?

        After a brief period of germination, M. Chevillot has bloomed again in a two-cow barn stall on West 10th Street. His bitsy La Petit Ferme is already a nervous succès fou, with limousines descending from Sutton Place and dinner booked up two weeks in advance.

        If you just happened to be strolling along 10th Street west of Seventh Avenue and stumbled by chance on the five-foot storefront with its fresh potted geraniums, you would be totally charmed. The nook is a knowing naïf-ery, artfully staged. There are live doves in a wooden slat cage, barn-red paneling, forsythia in a handsome copper pot, giraffe-necked anemones in a pewter pitcher, glossy fruit and long French breads in beautiful baskets, giant strawberries still in their flat crate from the market, cheeses and braids of onion and garlic hanging above a poetry of fragile bare branches. The primitive pine slab tables are set with heavy peasant stoneware and soft blue-and-white tattersall dishtowels as napkins.

        The à la carte fare is chalked on a slate set on an old steamer trunk. Strollers can't resist peeking in as they pass, ooing and cooing as if at a baby in a buggy.  It's that sweet.

        A petulant jeune fille in homespun midi serves, and you can feel a living presence in the kitchen. He whistles. He sharpens his knife. He chews out the busboy. It is Charles Chevillot, sautéeing thin scallops of calf's liver ($4.50) and pan-broiling steak ($6 and $6.50) or anointing asparagus with a lemon-butter baptismal ($1.50).  You bring your own wine—or order it delivered—and dine for under $10. The vegetables are miraculously crisp...the charcuterie ($1.25) is superb. Dessert is cheese ($1.50) or fruit (90 cents)...the coffee (50 cents) spiked with chicory. All this, discovered by chance, would be a joy.

        But if you have waited two weeks for your precious claim on one of the 21 chairs at La Petite Ferme expecting a satori of glorious bourgeois dining...there is grave potential for disappointment, even rage. The room is crowded. Guests at one table must rise so that others can be seated. The Kultur Maven found himself wedged into a space one inch narrower than his expanded chest. A reservation for dinner at 9:45 could not be honored—after all, no one can predict how long guests will linger over coffee—but even once we were seated, it took three hours to consume the simplest imaginable three-course dinner.

        M. Chevillot is not out to dazzle. Indeed, his theme is purity. And it may be overstated. Those gems of green bean and carrot so impeccably crisp are quite tasteless...no seasoning, no lemon, no herbs. The bass is similarly underadorned.  The lamb stew with carrots and turnip is quite competently done; the steak, alas, was hemmed with gristle. All over town we are served rhinestones in gem setting.  Here we get uncut diamonds. There is a fine arrogance in Chevillot's strategy. It is a refreshing change of pace...too coldly cerebral. The soul is on the walls and not in the kitchen.

        The Ground Floor, 51 West 52nd Street, 751-5152.

        La Petite Ferme, 189 West 10th Street, 242-7035. No credit cards.