Toward a Better Life

by Peter Morton Coan

  I feel very blessed and lucky that my life has given me a lot of opportunity, and I'm thankful to both my parents for the sacrifices they made. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I stayed in Cartagena. I have this cousin there who is my age, and she is a lawyer as well, but she was also a beauty queen a few years ago, and I was in Cartagena in January and she had taken a leave from her job to work in the mayor's office. It was amazing because as we talked about all the high-power issues of women who try to do too much, both personally and professionally, and we were both reflecting on how we would be the same wherever we were because we're trying to do more with our time than we could. So she's sort of my parallel half of me who went on to live there.

  I first went back to Cartagena in college. It was really wonderful. Most of the older generation that was there on my father's side has died. All the Gomezes are deceased, but back then, there were more of them and a huge extended family. To even go to my grandparents' home the first time, I brought home [from there] a beautiful picture they hung in their house of my mother when she was maybe fifteen or sixteen in its original frame, and they gave it to me to bring back, and it was a really touching chance to be with them before they died.

  I became a citizen as an adult, after 1996. I had to take the test, and I went to the American Red Cross in Boston, and there I was sitting with people who would ordinarily be my clients [laughs at the irony] and I was so embarrassed to get up. I didn't want anyone to feel bad, so I just made myself sit there until enough of the people in the group left before I took mine because I was embarrassed. A graduate from law school, a practicing attorney, working in immigration law, sitting in a room taking the test with everyone else—bizarre. And the sad thing is some of these folks around me had taken the test before and failed, and they're trying so hard, but adult learning is very different from learning as a kid.

  How would I advise immigrants thinking of coming here? I've worked with a lot of persecution victims: people who have been tortured, held in detention for prolonged periods of time in clandestine jails. I've worked with people from Africa, Central America, all over the world, and for them, it's not really a choice. I think it's a question of survival. The human spirit has an instinct for survival that is beautiful and noble, and whatever people have to do in that situation to get out of their country to come here, I think they have to pursue it. I have a lot of sympathy for people who come here with false documents because it was the only way they could get out of that kind of situation, so for them it would be arrogant for me to even pretend to give someone in those circumstances any advice about how to do it.

  But as far as wanting to come here to have a better life, I just salute them for their desire to do better for themselves and their children, and the main thing is to continue—even after they come here—to help those who are not in as good a situation and who are still adapting and try to give back some of what they've gotten.

  It has not helped that we've been in a sustained period of economic difficulty. I've been touched by layoffs, and everybody in my community has been touched by layoffs. There have been very wide-ranging dramatic economic consequences over the last few years. And pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant attitudes fluctuate with the economy. So certainly that's affected the “promise” of the American Dream versus what's ultimately delivered. But to me, the deeper way that we've changed is that at the beginning of this nation's history, there were the people who first settled here, who were one group, and then the new groups gradually made their way in, so there was still a “They are they, and we are us” [mentality]—but today, increasingly, and not just in terms of immigrants but in terms of the descendants of slaves, we have a much more racially mixed population, so much more racial intermarriage when at one time there was prohibition on racial intermarriage, so now it's like, “We have met them, and they are us.” [She laughs.] So I think that over time, perhaps the biggest transformation is that what an immigrant is is almost a myth because now we've mixed in our families and in our blood all these immigrant communities, and so it's harder and harder to separate out one from another.

  The “promise” is also affected by the back-and-forth of the other economies. I mean, we have this joke in Massachusetts: For a long time we had a lot of undocumented Brazilians in Massachusetts, and for some reason each community and ethnic group sort of carves out their own niche, whether they're taxi drivers or restaurant workers, but the Brazilians, for some reason, ended up largely in these cleaning companies, and they were very good entrepreneurs, but then the Brazilian economy began to turn around and get better while our economy was going down the tubes. So the joke was, “We're all losing our cleaning ladies.” [She laughs.] So it's a much more global world, and as things get better in one place, the outflow and the inflow get reversed.

  He grew up in a small Alsatian town on the French-German border. He came to America from Paris in 1961, recruited as a young chef for a new upscale French restaurant in New York, which he would later own. That restaurant turned out to be New York's legendary Lutèce, a four-star restaurant that in its day was the benchmark against which other restaurants were compared. It opened in 1961, and he operated it for more than thirty years. Julia Child once called Lutèce the best restaurant in the United States. Old guest books read like a “Who's Who in America.” Chef André cooked for them all, from regular folk to presidents and everyone in between. A chef's chef, he is the quintessential classically trained French chef, revered by his peers and the recipient of innumerable awards, including the prestigious Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, Officier du Mérite National, the Chevalier de L'Ordre du Mérite Agricole, the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Légion d'Honneur, the highest decoration in France. The coauthor of The Lutèce Cookbook, he has served for more than twenty years as Délegué Général of the Master Chefs of France and more than fifteen years as the dean of classic studies for the French Culinary Institute in New York. A devoted husband, he has been married since 1962 to his wife, Simone, whom he met in Paris at a restaurant where she was a waitress and he was the chef. They never had children, but they worked together to create culinary magic of their own. “In Europe, we think America is the land of opportunity, and it is, but it doesn't come by itself,” he said in his thick Alsatian-German accent. “It's not free. The freedom's not free. You have to work for it. If somebody asked me if they should come, I would tell them if you're serious, if you're disciplined, and if you're willing to work—you don't fail.”

  I was born in Alsace in a little town called Thann. It was a nice little town near the mountains, the Vosges, eastern France, about seven thousand people. I grew up there until the age of fourteen. School stopped at that age, and then you had to decide what you were going to do, and my first choice was to be a cabinetmaker because my father was a cabinetmaker. I also had an older brother who was a cabinetmaker, and my mother was completely against having two sons in the same business. I said it doesn't matter because I also loved to cook. I used to watch my mother cook and how she did tarts. There were no other chefs in the family, but my mom was a very good chef-housewife. She was an amateur chef. She inspired me and gave me the love for cooking.

  In those days, to be a chef you had to do an apprenticeship. So I did an apprenticeship at the Hôtel du Parc in Mulhouse, which is about twenty miles from Thann, and I spent three years there in apprenticeship. We worked long hours, twelve- to fifteen-hour days there, six days a week, sometimes seven days a week, and were paid very little. My first year I made about six hundred francs, which was a little over a dollar a month, plus room and board, and the second year it was about two dollars and the third year about three dollars a month. And like most apprenticeships at that time, it was very tough—brutal, even.

  For example, next to where I did my apprenticeship was a restaurant called Le Paon D'or, and the chef there punched the apprentice, knocked him out, threw him in a garbage can, and put the lid on! [He laughs.] The parents of the apprentice later took
the chef to court, and the chef was banned from Alsace for ten years! Ironically, I later hired that apprentice when I was a chef in Paris at Chez Hansi. And the banned chef? I bumped into him years later in New York. I was walking home, and at Second Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street, there was a French restaurant, and the back door of the kitchen was open, and being a chef, if we see a kitchen we look in, so I look in, and who do I see but him. I said, “What are you doing here?” and he said, “André, what are you doing here?”

  Where I worked, they put you pretty far from the head chef. His name was Rene Simon. He was my first chef, and he was tough, too. One time he slapped an apprentice, who fell back on a pile of coal—in those days we cooked on coal stoves—and he grabbed him by the shirt, dragged him across the kitchen floor, opened the door, and threw him out. The next day, seven a.m.—that's when we started work—the boy was there, he was at work, because we admired the chef. He was a very good chef. And believe it or not, he was a nice man, too, but he was a disciplinarian, and so to be an apprentice, sometimes it was brutal. We worked sometimes from seven a.m. to two a.m. the next morning without sitting down. He was very tough, but I loved him. [He laughs.), I was fourteen and a half when I started. I did three years under Rene Simon, and he was my mentor. He taught me what I know about cooking, and he also gave me the love for cooking. He's really the chef I admire the most in my whole career because he was very talented.

  After my apprenticeship, I took a certification exam all young chefs had to take to become a professional cook in France, and from there on, like most other chefs, I went from one city to another and from one restaurant to another. I started in Mulhouse and from there went to work at the Hotel Royale in Deauville, big hotel, maybe twenty-five cooks; the Palace Hotel in Pontresina, Switzerland; and the Hotel Acker in Wildhaus, Switzerland, near Zurich. I came back to France for my military service. I was drafted into the Alpine troops in the French Alps. I didn't tell them I was a cook; otherwise they would have put me in the kitchen, and I love to ski. I was always a skier. Then, after a few months, I was sent to Tunisia, to North Africa, because of the troubles between Tunisia and Algeria and France. In the Alpine troops, we were in the mountains in Tunisia. We were there for nine months until I was released in April 1955.

  My idea then was to go to Paris. For a young chef, Paris was it because there were lots of jobs, many restaurants. I began working at Chez Hansi, an Alsatian restaurant, as the “round man.” The restaurant was open every day, six days a week, so I changed posts and replaced the cook who had the day off. I was chef de partie, which means you take care of one part of the kitchen. So one day I might do sauces, another day vegetables [and so on], so I had the full experience there. After a few years I became sous chef, and a few years later, I became head chef. At the end of my time there, I had fourteen chefs and two pastry chefs working under me.

  I was there for six years, but if you stay in the one place too long that's not good, and then I had an opportunity to come to this country. I played Ping-Pong® in a chef's club. My pastry chef and another pastry chef, we played together. And the other pastry chef had been to America and worked at Idlewild Airport [now Kennedy Airport] as a chef for a man in the airline catering business. His name was André Surmain, who planned to open a restaurant, a very high-class restaurant, in New York, and he was looking for a young chef. This pastry chef told Surmain about me.

  So Surmain flew to Paris and had dinner at the restaurant where I was working. After dinner, he asked for me and told me about his plans for Lutèce [the name comes from “Lutetia,” the ancient name of Paris] and said, “Are you interested in coming to America?”

  At first I was a little surprised. He promised me a lot of things and convinced me to come. But I was already a little brainwashed because when I was a child my grandfather came here earlier. He came to America, one of two boys and two girls. They came through Ellis Island around 1900. He was a baker. The two boys were bakers. They came to New York and then went west to Nevada and California. So he told me all the time about Nevada and California, and so finally I said to Mr. Surmain, “OK, let's try it. I am willing to come.” So I went to the American consulate in Paris, and I left two hours later with the green card; people don't believe me anymore because now to get a green card is so difficult, but in ‘61 the quota for France was never full, so it was easy.

  A few months later, I came to New York. I was thinking I would come for a year or two, learn English, and go back. That was my plan. I really wanted to see how people lived here. It was not for the money because my salary in Paris was the same that he offered me in New York: ninety-five dollars a month. But, you know, I was single, I was just twenty-eight, and he said if things worked out he would make me a partner, and I thought, OK, let's see. What did I have to lose? I had met my wife, Simone, by then. She was a waitress at Chez Hansi, and I was dating her, but I came here single. I said, “OK, if I like it there I will come back for her. Then maybe we will get married and she will join me.” And that's eventually what we did. She came about a year and a half after me.

  So I flew to New York, and at first you feel a little lost if you don't know anybody. But the next day I started my job, and we opened the restaurant at 249 East Fiftieth Street. Most of the employees were French, so I got along very quickly. And right away, I must say I liked it because the people who came in, American people, they were different than the clients in France. In France they could be a little snobby, you know, but here I noticed right away a big difference in the relationship with the customers, and I liked it very much.

  My biggest problem was I didn't speak English, but I am Alsatian so I spoke both languages, French and German, so it helped me a lot, especially for the food buying because many suppliers spoke German. So I had a little difficulty with the language at first, but I didn't have time to go to school, so I just picked it up as I went along.

  We opened Lutèce in 1961, with Surmain as the owner and me as the chef. But it was not well known then, and the big problem was that Surmain charged high prices right away. We were very expensive. We were the most expensive restaurant in New York, maybe the most expensive in the United States at that time, and that hurt us very much, and we didn't do much business. And then little by little we did better, but after a year and a half I felt it wasn't quite working out as I had hoped. We just had different philosophies, and he also had promised many things, so I said to Surmain, my boss, “Look, this is not really going as I hoped. It's time for me to go back,” and he said, “No, no, no, André. You cannot go now! The restaurant is doing better, much better now than a year ago. If you stay, I will take you as a partner.”

  I said, “You told me that in Paris two years ago and that never happened.” He said, “No, I mean it. You stay and we go into partnership.”

  He sold me 30 percent of the restaurant. We were partners until 1972, when he decided to go back to Europe and I bought his shares. Our partnership did not go too well. It did OK, but he didn't work hard. And I believe in working hard and always being there, and he was away all the time. He sailed to Europe, and he had a farm in Majorca, Spain. So I said, “Yes, I have 30 percent but I'm doing all the work.” My wife worked the front of the restaurant—taking reservations, greeting customers—while I worked the back, and we decided it wasn't fair and decided to leave, but Surmain said, “No, no, no. I'm fed up with this business. I'm burned out! I don't want it anymore. I leave!”

  I said, “OK, but if you leave, you leave.” So we drew up papers. It took about nine months to find a way, you know? Because I didn't have the money to buy his shares, and then we found a way to do it, and he left and I bought him out in 1972.

  When he left I thought I could do it because I was in the kitchen; I was not in the dining room. I was the chef, but I was a little scared and shy. This was a huge thing for me and I thought I could do it, but after two or three months my accountant came. He came every two weeks, and he said, “Look, André, it doesn't look good. You don't have enough c
ash flow. You have to pay staff. You have to pay the suppliers and everything. If you don't bring money in, the company will go under. You cannot survive.”

  I said, “What do I do?”

  “You have to look for money.”

  This was the beginning of 1973. It was wintertime. I put a coat on over my chef's jacket and went to Bankers Trust on Fifty-Second Street and Third Avenue. I went to the teller, and the teller asked, “How can I help you?”

  I said, “I need money.” He was smiling a little bit and said, “Go to the gentleman over there in the office and talk to him.”

  So I did. I told him, “I have a restaurant and I don't have the necessary capital,” and he said, “How much do you need?” Well, I was a cook, you know? I was not a businessman. I said, “I don't know. I think it was $40,000.” [He smiles.) Remember, $40,000 in 1972 was a lot of money. He made me fill out a few papers, but he did not ask me much. In France, they would have asked me everything, including when my grandfather was born [laughs] and the last time I went to the dentist. So he made a few calculations, drew up a few papers, and I signed everything and left the bank with $40,000 on the spot. They put it in my account. Just like that. Today when I think back, it's just unbelievable, you know? And I never saw the banker again.