“The best restaurant is the restaurant where I am best known.” The truism has been variously attributed, but it was the operating principle of Charles Masson during the roughly four decades he made La Grenouille a celebratory spot for any occasion. La Grenouille was a place of surpassing elegance and beauty—but never snobbery.
I say “was” because, though it still exists, La Grenouille bears little more than a passing resemblance to what it was. In late 1974, Charles left university at the age of 19 to help run the place when his father, also named Charles, fell ill and died of cancer. Forty years later, in 2014, he left the business with not a single share in the restaurant after unsuccessfully trying to oversee it with his brother, Philippe.
With their late mother’s consent, which Charles says Philippe obtained while living with her in the late 2000s in an isolated house in Brittany, France, Philippe took control. He informed Charles that he was now merely an employee who had to justify his every decision, according to Charles—for instance, the preventive maintenance that Charles says he had always been religious about scheduling. After three years of trying to work with his brother, Charles found the stress so great that his wife told him he needed to leave or she might become a widow.
Now the 1920 building is for sale, with an asking price of $15 million for 5,500 square feet, and seemingly in need of attention. In June of last year, the restaurant closed for its annual summer break with a notice on the door saying it had failed a gas-pressure inspection. It missed its reopening date of September 7, finally opened on November 3, and is now closed again for vacation through, the Web site says, January 23. There’s no guarantee of when or for how long it will reopen—or what will happen when a buyer is found.
It’s easy to lament the current state of La Grenouille, particularly if you knew it in the Charles Masson days. Just after Christmas I visited for the first time since Charles left, inviting my brother and a food-expert friend whose schedule required an early, six p.m. arrival. On being seated we saw the restaurant offered a “happy hour” à la carte menu until 6:30 p.m.; after that the only option was a three-course prix fixe starting at $186. Once we declined the waiter’s offer for cocktails, no one asked whether we might like wine with our meal.
I requested the restaurant’s signature dish, quenelles de brochet, as an à la carte option, and after successfully negotiating its availability, for $55—higher than almost any other à la carte entrée—the waiter brought three distressingly drab, tennis-ball-shaped fish globs coated in a wan, pale-brown sauce over a few tablespoons of buttered rice. And nothing else. At least the lamb chops came with stuffed eggplant and a few sautéed cherry tomatoes, and seemed a bargain at $42.
Aside from the freezer burn on the indifferent vanilla ice cream in my brother’s poire belle Helene, with barely a dribble of chocolate sauce and only a tiny bit of poached pear hiding at the bottom of a parfait cup, there were no actual errors with the food. But food wasn’t really the point of La Grenouille: it was an impeccable extension of the entire room. Our dinner lacked any luster, any sparkle.
The waiter brought three distressingly drab, tennis-ball-shaped fish globs coated in a wan, pale-brown sauce.
And so did the room—perhaps the greatest tragedy of the restaurant’s current incarnation. When you entered the Charles Masson La Grenouille, the huge floral arrangements took your breath away. They filled the room with light and life. Like his father, Charles constantly paints—he now sells his work through the Upper East Side gallery and décor store, KRB—and that artist’s eye made him go to the flower market and arrange the flowers himself. His guiding philosophy was that flowers are a kind of food and should reflect the season just as strictly as the menu: flowers and food should inform each other. By the time you sat down amid the towering bouquets and your own private table bouquet, your life already felt lifted.
Now the room looks like your great-aunt moved in, installed her favorite tchotchkes—stuffing the vases with cheap filler flowers and tinselly Christmas balls—and generally coarsened and kitschified the whole place. My place setting obliged me to sit on a crack in a stiffly upholstered banquette, which was like being seated straddling a table leg, only more intimately uncomfortable. The cord from the table lamp fell between my legs because the outlet was right behind them, so every time I shifted position the lamp dimmed or came unplugged. The lack of illumination might have been a mercy: nothing looked like you wanted to shine a bright light on it.
Exactly two hours after we had been seated, Philippe Masson, a tall, barrel-chested figure in a black Nehru suit, who during dinner had broodingly surveyed the room and occasionally greeted a group, knelt beside me. “You need our table,” I said pre-emptively. He smiled and said, “Well, it is that time.” He offered us drinks at the bar, where we helped ourselves to the gougères and cheese sticks and watched the room fill.
A restaurant needs to turn tables. We’d had our two hours. My brother’s champagne and the gougères were on the house. And at least we were spared the half-hour musical sets, in which Philippe himself sings jazz standards and accompanies himself on guitar as the head of a jazz trio. But the whole experience was dispiriting, especially compared with the glorious anticipation of entering the old Grenouille.
Which is why there’s no joy in chronicling its demise. Like the old Penn Station, restaurants such as La Grenouille are irreplaceable parts of New York.
In Exile
Charles Masson has the melancholy, gentle air of someone who created, and was exiled from, greatness. Or so it appeared when he recently spoke with me by Zoom from his apartment in West Palm Beach. He moved there after finding himself jobless and with no income or health insurance. “I learned the hard way.”
As we spoke about La Grenouille, he was careful not to criticize the restaurant, which he called “a love story” between his parents. Of his father he says, “Of course I’m partial, but there’s never been a better restaurateur, ever”—with the exception of Fernand Point, of La Pyramide, in France, “but he was God.”
As Charles takes me on a virtual tour of his apartment, which he shares with his Brazilian-born second wife, Christina, and their 11-year-old daughter (his first wife, and the mother of his two older children, died in 2010), he casually stops the camera at the many flower arrangements that fill the rooms—simple flowers, like carnations and Peruvian lilies available in any supermarket, but carefully clipped and clustered as at La Grenouille.
Charles is 68; Philippe, 61. Charles is currently suing to wrest control of the building and business from Philippe, accusing him of “outright fraud,” and using La Grenouille’s funds to pay for personal expenses, according to a 2018 report in the New York Post. (Air Mail could not reach Philippe for comment through either the restaurant or his attorney.)
Charles chooses his words carefully. “You cannot imagine how painful this is,” he said. “The last thing I would do is hurt the restaurant—a house my parents built.” However, the moment he saw the For Sale sign, he assumed the restaurant’s days were numbered. “I don’t think my brother would put it up for sale unless he had to. If it were successful, there would be no reason to do this.”
Charles recognizes that whoever buys the building, if they decide to continue it as a restaurant, will and should rename it and make it their own. “Laisser sa griffe,” or “Leave their mark”: before Gisèle Masson died, in 2014, that was what she told Charles she had to let Philippe try to do, since he had never found the success or purpose of his older brother.
“The last thing I would do is hurt the restaurant—a house my parents built.”
As for whether Charles could find a group of buyers who would restore him as manager: “Of course it’s crossed my mind,” he says. “But then the constant drama that has unfortunately always existed—a jealous tug-of-war, whatever you want to call it—would not end.”
Whoever buys and runs the restaurant would do well to take lessons of the kind Charles has given several dining establishments as a consultant since leaving La Grenouille, notably Majorelle, in the Lowell hotel. It boils down to attention and intuition, he says. “It sounds so simple: You have to be there. You have to be present.” It comes as no surprise that when friends took him to the Knickerbocker Club, 10 blocks up Fifth Avenue from La Grenouille, he felt a very familiar sense of being taken care of: it turned out he had trained no less than eight of the club’s staff at La Grenouille. “We had one hell of a team,” he says.
Running a great restaurant is a matter of making people feel comfortable and at home. Charles recalls innumerable late nights in New York at JG Melon, where after exhausting days at La Grenouille he would turn up very late and Margie, the server, would bring him a burger and a “flat beer” he was happy to drink because Margie put it in front of him.
Or at Antonucci Cafe, on the Upper East Side, where you didn’t go for the food but for knowing you’d be relaxed and glad you came. Or Basta Pasta, a decades-old restaurant in the Flatiron District whose Japanese-born owner suffuses it with a “very pure serenity.” “It’s noisy,” Charles tells me. “There’s paper over the tablecloth. There’s an open kitchen. But you’ll feel at home. You feel love.”
That love is what made La Grenouille irreplaceable. Perhaps it will again.
Corby Kummer is the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Food & Society program. A senior editor at The Atlantic, he is also the author of several books, including The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors, and Recipes