Food: America's Best French Restaurant

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"We also get much better products now. Even eight years ago, we had trouble finding fresh chervil and I doubt there was a pound of girolles in the country. Now I get all the fresh herbs and wild mushrooms, as well as venison from New Zealand, fish from France, foie gras and naturally raised chickens from the Catskills." And Soltner works with a better staff, which includes an increasing number of native recruits. "It used to be that no Americans wanted to work in kitchens," he says. "Now we have many, along with French, of course, and several Dominicans. Young people think being a chef is a glamorous job, and that helps, as long as they are not afraid to work."

Diligent work and pride in the results are in Soltner's genes. His maternal grandfather was a renowned pastry chef in Alsace, where many main courses, as well as desserts, are baked in crusts. When Andre was 15, he signed on to a three-year apprenticeship with the chef of the Hotel du Parc in Mulhouse, near his native town of Thann. He learned to perform in every station of the kitchen. "As soon as my father signed the papers, the old chef looked at me and said, 'Now you belong to me,' and he wasn't kidding. But he was a good chef and a good man. We began assisting, three months at a time, at the grill, with the saucier, the garde-manger (where cold appetizers, salads and cold, unbaked desserts are prepared) and in the pastry kitchen." Through it all, < Soltner remembered things he had absorbed in his mother's kitchen. "She is a wonderful cook, and I still use many of her special touches," he observes, explaining her trick of frying uncooked fresh noodles until crisp and then putting them on top of boiled noodles for textural contrast.

Other than costs, Soltner considers competition his "biggest problem." When Lutece opened, there were several great French restaurants in New York, including Le Pavillon, Chambord and Cafe Chauveron, but today the pressure is to get publicity that will attract a fickle, restaurant-hopping audience. Last year's beef Wellington has about as much appeal to a food journalist as last year's A-line dress has to a fashion editor, and so chefs, like couturiers, now have to come up with a new line every year.

Soltner feels that he has a secret weapon in the dining-room war, and he points to his chef de cuisine of ten years, Christian Bertrand, and his sous chefs, George Troisgros, of the famed Roanne restaurant family; Joel Benjamin, whose father Roger is a captain at Lutece; and Bill Peet, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. "We know how to cook everything. Few chefs in boutique restaurants do," he said, referring to small restaurants with limited menus that do a narrow, trendy cooking like that dubbed "new American."