Food: America's Best French Restaurant

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That mix is something Andre and his wife Simone cherish as well, and they try to seat newcomers near celebrities when possible. Soltner also takes pride in remembering what he served to each guest on each visit. "I have one couple who has come for dinner every Monday night for 18 or 20 years," he says. "They never look at a menu, and I never give them the same thing twice. Others like familiar dishes and order them in advance. I try to please them and often serve dishes like choucroute (Alsace's national dish of sauerkraut, sausages and assorted cuts of pork) or my original veal with kidneys as a daily special. I like to try new combinations, not that anything is really original. Every 'invention' in the nouvelle cuisine can be found in some form in old cookbooks. And I know one thing. No matter what they say about wanting light food and liking new dishes, guests love the old tastes. When I make a blanquette, or marinated venison or any kind of stew, guests grab my hand in the dining room and practically get tears in their eyes. 'That was real food,' they say."

This was hardly the tone and style of the Lutece unveiled by Andre Surmain, the original owner and creator 25 years ago. It was then the city's most lavishly decorated and expensive restaurant, with a price-fixed lunch at $6.50 and a la carte main courses at $8.25 that evoked gasps from customers. Nor was its success instantaneous. In a review written one month after Lutece opened, Craig Claiborne, then the restaurant critic for the New York Times, allowed that two dishes -- foie gras baked in a brioche loaf and roast veal stuffed with truffled kidneys -- were superb, but, he summarized, "the food at Lutece could not be called great cuisine."

Now the owner of the well-established Le Relais a Mougins in the south of France, and a clone of the same name newly opened this winter in Palm Beach, Fla., Surmain, 65, recalls early triumphs and failures: "I wanted not a restaurant, but the restaurant. And to become famous, it had to have a short name without the word restaurant in it," he says, explaining that he finally chose Lutece from the ancient name for Paris, Lutetia. When he was making his | plans he heard of Soltner, then the chef at Chez Hansi, an Alsatian brasserie in Paris. Surmain went over, tasted Soltner's food and offered him a job with the promise of a partnership if they succeeded. "It sounded like a crazy idea, but I thought that at least I'd learn English," says Soltner. "We were a good team, the two Andres," Surmain recalls.

If Lutece has changed in 25 years, so have conditions of running a restaurant. It may be easier in some ways to please customers, but in others it is more difficult. For one thing, Soltner feels, Americans have become more sophisticated and know about food and products, and he finds that rewarding. Yet a surprisingly large number of specialties remain from the original menu, among them the creamed pea soup, creme Saint-Germain, the mignonettes of beef in puff pastry, the salmon in crust, and snails in tiny terrines with shallot and garlic butter. Recently Soltner worked out a new and delectable variation on those snails, combining them with the traditional herb butter and Riesling wine and baking them inside crusty brioches.