June 26, 1975 | Vintage Insatiable

Box Tree: Please Don't Eat The Calla Lilies

        Suddenly, with neither rhyme nor reason, just gay abandon, the flower of the hour is the calla lily. Perhaps you've already noticed. But likely the calla lily message has not yet filtered through. Sometimes the advance of chic can be an anvil chorus: Lucite. Lucite. Lucite. Or chic can be sneaky. All of a sudden everyone is bisexual and eating caviar out of a hollow new potato. The botanical clue tells you something about the Box Tree as you sit there a few steps above East 50th Street, unable to lean an elbow on the rickety little antique gate-leg table, aesthetically dazzled by the Box Tree's calla lilies…three of them, archly posed in an exquisite Art Nouveau vase set into a niche between panels of Tiffany glass, an authentic Tiffany stained-glass forest salvaged from an old Chicago mansion. Charmed, too, by the house's whimsical candelabra of calla lilies in tole.

   

        The calla lily is a clue to the genre that spawns a Box Tree: the loving amateur in the kitchen, the adorable waiters, the super-mannered detail. Yet the Box Tree is infinitely above its genre. The size is too-too precious, but the restaurant is quite genuinely beautiful, with a studied grace and pleasing detail and a kitchen of remarkable skill. "Where only the best will do…" says the sharply limited menu, garlanded with grapes and cherubs and fractured French. Alas, at Box Tree prices, flaws are not easily forgivable.

   

        There is something almost maddening about pinching so much beauty into such a mean little space. For the Box Tree is handsome, with its cotton-lace curtains, the tubs of fresh flowers at the top of the stairway flanking the door, its dark stained wood moldings and deep green walls, the tilty little tables with their melamine circle place mats from Harrod's in London (floral still lifes, horses, birds) the fresh spring flowers, the chinoiserie service plates, the Japanese prints, the pewter salt shaker and pepper mill, the oversize tulip goblets, the sweet butter in china shells just like those of Lutèce, and, on every napkin, a bright red tea rose.

   

        Crowded into the entrance, waiting twenty minutes for the languorous first sitting to go, pressed into the cloaks (at any moment I am afraid someone will tip me) is like standing in a French elevator. The dining room might be a Pullman parlor in a gentler age. There are shiny red apples in a copper pot and pineapples in brass on the floor. Impressive to think that just a few months ago this artistry of nook and cranny was one dumb graceless rectangle, a Spanish bookstore. All this cozy architecture has been lovingly applied. But sliding into the flame-stitch-padded intimacy of the U-shaped rear alcove formed by four tiny tables, I feel I am sliding into a four-poster bed with six strangers. I cross my legs and bruise two waiters with one innocent ankle. There is not much space in the middle. Only one slim servitor can advance at a time. The official capacity is twenty-two, but the house owns precisely twenty chairs. Recently proprietor Augustin Paege had to run across the street to borrow a chair from Lutèce to accommodate twenty-one. He returned it next day with a flower.

   

       Paege's phony accent is not phony at all. It's Bulgarian He's an anthropologist who just fell in love with cooking, paying homage to the masters of France with a bit of informal apprenticeship here and there, then braving an offshoot of England's Box Tree in an early American house in Purdys, New York, and finally this newest grafting on East 50th Street. There are wrinkles. A hard-hat with a ponytail crowds the kitchen at lunch one day installing a grease trap. The cellar is still aclutter. "You are in luck," Paege informs a dinner duo. "I cannot find the '69 Lynch-Bages you ordered, so I am giving you this '67 for the same price." The pace is painfully slow. At the end of a three-hour lunch, my companion's umbrella has disappeared. "Won't you take this one?" a waiter urges. "It's really very nice." And the two seatings at dinner -- a torture essential to making a profit in such a tiny spot -- makes snarls inevitable. "We haven't figured out how to make people leave," Paege apologizes.

   

        There is a kind of theatrical exaggeration to the service. Harpsichord music on the stereo comes with it. All the beautiful young men delivering the aged-Stilton-cheese-doused-with-port routine or toting Evian water on Turkish coffee trays perform with the haut mien of a prep-school dramatic society…and not quite enough rehearsal. After we waited ten minutes for strawberries, the waiter arrived triumphantly, then backed sheepishly away…"They've forgotten the Grand Marnier." And another long wait for the check prompted sympathy from a busboy. "I swear to God it's at least on its way."

   

        The kitchen produces a flaky, fine croustade filled with a school of tiny shrimp in a delicate cream pool and a silken mousseline of duck liver, but it takes ten minutes for a page with silver tongs to scavenge a basket of heated bread. The cucumber yogurt soup, tangy and faintly perfumed with garlic, is a Paege personal -- "We make our own yogurt. After all, I am Bulgarian." And there are fat Pernod-soused snails. Sent back to the kitchen -- "not hot enough" -- the snails return with the sampled two generously replaced. There are three courses at lunch. Dinner includes soup, a salad in mustardy vinaigrette, and that port-spiked Stilton. There are four entrées to choose from, changing with the season -- tonight, the bass was impeccably poached in a splendid sorrel sauce and the filet in a cognac sauce was rare, as ordered, tender and remarkably flavorful. But the rack of lamb, served with a grassy dab of mint-dominated herbs, was less than best quality, and the calf's liver -- "veal liver," the captain called it -- was knotted with veins and tasted strangely poached rather than sautéed. The purity of two crisp stalks of asparagus would not have been stained by a bit of butter. The Box Tree's pride is its raspberry vacherin, and at dinner there was also crème brûlée, much too sweet, "more amorphous than a custard," the captain observed, and "wet."


       Box Tree's highly personal wine list offers the most celebrated chateaus at predictably insane prices, with a scattering of the '68 vintage at $28 to $35 and an international sampling at more modest prices: a Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon at $11, Ludenne at $12, a Brouilly for $10, and a Bourgogne of Latour, which Paege considers "tops," at $9.

   
       The check arrives with another red rose, which does not quite diminish the blow -- $40 for two at lunch, $77 with a $20 bottle of wine, no drinks, at dinner. To play in the fields of calla lilies is a costly exercise. I want to believe that Augustin Paege's love and pride will ultimately eliminate the imperfections.

Box Tree Restaurant, 242 East 50th Street.

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