“Why’s that? Can you cook?”
“Kibbles ’n Bits, Detective. That’s my entire repertoire.”
“How long have you known Luc?” I asked.
She turned her head to look at him. “My goodness, what would you say? Almost twenty years?”
I resisted the temptation to ask if they had ever been intimate, and whether that was why he hadn’t ever mentioned her name.
“Twenty years? Really? How did-?”
Now Gina was talking directly to me. “I met Luc through Brigitte, originally. When I first worked in the cosmetics business, she’d done some modeling for my company. She and I hit it off, got along well. So we spent a lot of time together hanging out in France on some shoots and business trips. Got to be very good friends.”
Of course, Brigitte would have been the perfect model-elegant, serene, almost anorexically thin, and beautiful. La Belle Brigitte-an aperitif that Luc had named in her honor-was still on the menu in Mougins, though his ex-wife was no longer around.
“See, if you knew Coop a little better, you’d realize she’s probably stuck on whether or not you and Luc ever hooked up,” Mike said, like he had been reading my mind.
“That’s ridiculous. That’s not even-” I tried to protest, but Luc talked over me.
“Alex, darling, you should have just asked me. I’d have told you all about Gina.”
Gina Varona leaned back, tilted her head, and looked down at me as though I were a child. Perhaps I’d been acting like one.
“Ask what? I’d never heard of Gina until last night. Now I find out you’ve been having dinner with her right here in New York. What was I supposed to ask?”
“Business meetings. Certainly dinners. But you knew that. You knew I was lining up partners and trying to get backers for Lutèce, Alex. I would have told you their names if you’d asked me. What difference would that have made?”
I shrugged my shoulders. The waiter reappeared with several large bottles of sparkling water and poured a glass for each of us.
Mike waited until he left the room. “You gotta excuse her, Ms. Varona. Coop would go nine rounds in the ring with Muhammad Ali if something dear to her was at stake. She’d come out bloody and bruised with her tail whipped, but she’d never walk away from a good fight.”
I waved Mike off. “Back to you,” I said.
“So, how’d you get together with Luc on this plan?” he asked.
“I’m in the South of France quite often, actually.”
“Visiting Brigitte?”
“I do that, too. I’m the godmother of their older son, so I see her and the boys as often as I can. But also, Detective, there’s a small town called Grasse. It’s the perfume capital of the world. I’m there on business several times a year. And it’s just a few kilometers from Luc’s restaurant.”
I knew that was true. Exotic, expensive perfumes and the home of Papa Mo, Gil-Darsin’s father.
“Luc told me that he was going to try to open Lutèce here in New York. I didn’t know the restaurant in his father’s day, but I was a regular when the great Soltner ran it. I already had word that I’d be transitioning out of my job with this big financial windfall, so what better than to shift gears and back my friend in his venture?”
“He’s a lucky man,” Mike said. “Do most restaurant owners have backers?”
“If you’re not talking about a mom-and-pop operation or a corner pizzeria,” Luc said, “the model these days is to have help on the business side. It’s prohibitively expensive to start up a serious place like ours. It’s a total crapshoot.”
“How much cash are we talking about, to get something like Lutèce going?” Mercer asked.
Peter Danton and Gina Varona both looked at Luc. He thought for a minute before answering. “For us?” He cleared his throat with a cough. “The real estate alone was four million dollars. The build-out has cost another three million. That’s before we talk about staffing and salaries and all the licensing.”
Mike and Mercer were dumbfounded. “Eight to ten million, at least? And I’m happy with a hot dog at PJ Bernstein,” Mike said. “Are you kidding me?”
“But you don’t have that kind of money, Luc,” I said. “I’m staggered.”
He rested his glasses on the table in front of him and stared at me like he was seeing me for the first time. “That’s right, Alexandra. I don’t have anything like the amount of money I need. That’s why I’m relying on Gina and Peter. Do you understand that this has been my dream-for, for most of my life? Do you understand what this project means to me, in my heart?”
I was trying to discern whether it was passion that was driving Luc’s speech, or disappointment in my business naïveté.
“When my father opened Lutèce more than fifty years ago, Mike, he had this idea to make it the best restaurant in New York-more likely, in the world. He had a great imagination and spirit to go with his style. The first thing he did was buy a town house. Do you know how many restaurant owners in New York own their buildings, too?”
“No idea,” Mike said.
“Fewer than one percent. One percent, do you see? A brilliant investment. Most places go broke having to pay rent to a landlord, raising it lease after lease. There are only a handful of great places today whose owners had the good sense to buy the real estate. Ken Aretsky at Patroon, the Kriendlers at the ‘21’ Club, the Massons at La Grenouille, the Pellegrinos and Stracis at Rao’s. So at the same time, my older siblings and I-we all lived above the shop,” Luc said, smiling briefly when he recalled one incident. “Mother had to take my roller skates away because I was tearing up the hallway in the apartment and diners complained that the chandelier was shaking so violently they feared it would fall.”
“I’m sure-”
“Let me finish, Detective. My father insisted on the most elegant appointments. He was the first restaurateur to serve on bone china, to use Christofle silverware and crystal wineglasses. No frozen food, nothing canned. He flew in fresh Dover sole from England and Scotch salmon every single day. It was he who discovered a twenty-seven-year-old chef-the great Soltner-working in a Parisian restaurant and the very next day, offered him the big job in New York.
“I think the reason I never got sick as a child is that our apartment was kept at sixteen degrees Celsius-the ideal temperature for wine-which was stored in our closets. It took him five years to get the restaurant going-selling off everything he and my mother owned-stocks, bonds, paintings by Degas and Rouault. A guy named James Beard was giving his first cooking lessons in our kitchen upstairs. Opening week, lunch was price-fixed at eight fifty-and the public screamed so loudly about it that my father had to cut it down to six dollars. But he did all the work and he paid for every bit of it by himself, and it paved the way for all the great restaurants that followed Lutèce.”
“None of that would be possible today,” Mike said. “I get your point.”
Luc took a deep breath and a long drink of water.
“So the way it gets done now is with backers,” Mercer said, trying to take the conversation down a notch.
“That’s the only possibility,” Luc said, ticking off names of the hottest places in the city. “Danny Meyer has Stephen Ross, Jean-Georges Vongerichten has Phil Suarez, Daniel Boulud has Lili Lynton.”
“Other women have done this?” Mercer asked.
“I may not be as brilliant as Lili, gentlemen-she was a financial analyst before she got into this crazy business-but I’m hungry enough to want to follow in her footsteps,” Gina said. “Boulud operates thirteen restaurants, eight of them in New York.”
“But that’s not your goal, Luc,” I said.
“ETB he calls it.” Gina Varona patted Luc’s shoulder and laughed. “Expansion to bankruptcy. I’ve got my eyes on the rest of the world, but Luc’s happy to keep what he’s got back home while replicating his father’s success here. It’s refreshing how sensible he is.”