It’s one of those rare restaurants where the combination of the lighting with the colors and the design of the space enhances everybody, both appearance and attitude, flattering one and all. This also is elevated by the excellent service and a perfect menu.
Place. In its early days the restaurant became famous for its fashionable lunches. Indeed, John Fairchild, the innovative Boswell of an editor/publisher of Women’s Wear Daily, held court there at the lunch hour during the week. His presence drew the fashion crowd – designers, merchants, the chic ladies who lunched – like moths to a flame. His flame (or so he was perceived).
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| Freshly cut Hydrangeas at La Grenouille. |
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Fairchild had his own corner table, perfect for a reporter, from which he could see all entering and exiting, something that all those moths were very conscious of.
History. Prior to John Fairchild’s aegis, WWD had been only one business publication of a family business and owned by his father. The son turned it into the social bible of its day, augmenting it with W, which was to the rich, the chic and the shameless what Andy Warhol’s Interview was to the art crowd and flying hipsters (and later the rich, the chic, the etc.).
Those two “magazines” (they both started out as newspapers in style), it turned out, created the marriage of culture and fashion (which I suppose could be classified as culture) media, and the cult of the “celebrity.” The hybrid of that combination today is Vanity Fair which, while a re-creation of the earlier version created by Conde Nast -- the man, not the company – was the natural exponent of Fairchild and Warhol.
This is New York. |
