Toward a Better Life

by Peter Morton Coan

  Soon after, Malcolm Forbes—he was a customer, and I always took to him a little bit, and one day he came in and said to me, “André, I heard André Surmain left?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “André, if you need money—whatever you need, you tell me, I'll give it to you.” He didn't say “I'll lend it to you,” he said, “I give it to you! And if one day you can pay me back, you pay me back,” but I never took him up on his offer because in the meantime the bank gave me this $40,000. When Malcolm Forbes passed away, his son Steve called me about two or three months later. Steve was also a customer. He said, “André, you're in my father's will.” [He laughs.] As a gesture, I guess, Malcolm Forbes put $1,000 in his will for me!

  Around this time, I became a citizen, but in my mind I was already a citizen. When I came here, I felt good right away. I already had a green card, so I didn't think going for my citizenship was important. But my lawyer said, “Look, André, you're not a citizen. You have a liquor license; if, God forbid, something should happen, you could lose your license. You should be a citizen.” But who really pushed me was then governor of New York Hugh Carey. He came to eat many times—his office was on the same block as Lutèce—and he said something once to me, and I said I wasn't a citizen yet, and he said, “You're not a citizen? I'll sponsor you.” So I called my lawyer and said I wanted to be a citizen, and I went downtown to take the test for citizenship like everybody else….

  Before Surmain left, we never did one hundred covers. He always said, “If we make one hundred covers I'll pay for the champagne,” but we never did it. After he left, we changed the ambience of the restaurant. He was a little snobbish, you know. He snubbed the customer a little bit if he didn't like the way they looked or dressed, and we changed that and made it more comfortable. We quickly went to 120 covers. We were still expensive, but we were in the same price range as a few other French restaurants in New York—Le Cirque, Le Caravelle, Le Cygne, Le Grenouille. We cooked traditional French cuisine, and I would go from table to table and personally greet the customers, make them feel welcome, and if I had good relationship with a customer, I always had one or two Alsatian dishes that were off-menu, like my potato tart. When I grew up my mother did what's called tarte aux pommes de terre or potato pie that I loved. It's my favorite dish, and it's very simple to make. It's hard-boiled eggs, potatoes, and bacon done in a pastry—very inexpensive to make, so I could not put it on the menu and justify charging thirty dollars for lunch.

  We were rated four stars in the New York Times, and that gives you a big push. We once were in Playboy. We were rated the number-one restaurant in America. And for two years after that people came from all over—from Kalamazoo, you name it.

  If there was one customer, President Nixon was one of the great guys for us. He was so gracious. Always so nice. He stopped in the kitchen; he talked baseball or football with my guys. He would come with a large party, and I would say, “Mr. President, what would you like?” And he would say, “Just order for me like you usually do.” And there was once an article in Newsweek about Nixon, and they were talking about dining, and Nixon was quoted as saying, “Our main favorite is Lutèce because we like owner André Soltner so much—and now and then we go to Le Cirque.” When this article came out, it was a huge thing for us [makes grand gesture]. We refused people. Unbelievable! That was a real boon!

  I helped bring Alsatian wine here to America because I used to serve it at Lutèce, and to thank me, the town in Alsace where I was born put this memorial in the vineyard. There was a ceremony with the mayor and a senator to thank me, and I thought, what could I do for them? And then I had an idea. President Nixon liked Alsatian wine very much, and I thought if he could say something about how much he likes this wine.…So one day he came, party of eight. I said to Nixon, “You know, Mr. President, the wine you like, it would be nice if you could give me a few words,” and he said, “No problem, no problem.”

  Then I said, “Should I call your secretary to tell her?”

  He looked at me and said, “You think I'm going to forget?” [He laughs.] I said, “No, no.” What a smart guy he was! He gave me a letter about how much he liked the wine, and at this ceremony with the mayor and the senator, I gave them the letter from President Nixon. They have it now at the town hall there….

  To run a successful restaurant, you must be serious and you must be present. I was always at the restaurant. If I wasn't there, I would not open the restaurant, and that's it—you cannot cut corners. Same is true with the customers. They look for value. They know you will make some money, and they understand that, but they want value. If you say “fresh” to a customer, you have to be serious, and if it's not 100 percent fresh, don't serve it.

  We rarely had staff meetings. I asked from my dining room staff that they were clean, welcoming to customers, not snobbish French [smiles]—that was a big one—and to stay serious. My kitchen staff was serious, no drinking, clean, and on time. We had discipline, you know? I incorporated many of the things I learned from Rene Simon. His rule was if you start at seven a.m., then it's seven a.m., not five after seven. I had the same rules. And I respected my staff very much and expected that they respect me the same. There were forty-two staff. That's a lot, and that's why a restaurant has to be profitable.

  Today you have Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller—it's completely different now because the business is different. You see these guys and they have four, five, six restaurants—they're real businesspeople. I had one restaurant, and I never considered myself a businessman. I considered myself a craftsman, a cook. But they came along because it was a different time. They became businessmen. They are still chefs—they are good chefs; otherwise they would not be where they are—but to be in the business now you need backers, investors. To open a restaurant in Hong Kong or Las Vegas for me, at my time, it was not so. I had offers, but it was not my time.

  I once had Japanese people approach me. It was the beginning of going bigger, and they came to me about opening Lutèce in Japan, and I said, “I'm not interested.” They said, “André, you owe us the courtesy to listen to us.” I said, “OK,” but in my heart I was always a chef, a cook, you know? So we had a meeting in an office, a big building, and there were five, six guys there, and they said, “We would like to open seven Lutèces in Japan.” And I said, “I'm not interested. I have a restaurant.” They said, “Keep your restaurant.” I said, “What do you want from me exactly?” They said, “We want you to be in Japan three months a year….” This was around 1990, and they said, “But the rest of time you can stay with your Lutèce in New York—it's yours, not ours, and that's basically our deal.”

  I said, “Let me think about it,” and I came home and told Simone because my wife was always with me in business, and I said to myself, “What will I do in Japan for three months?” I was thinking maybe I meet a Japanese girl and I wind up getting divorced. I called them back and said, “Forget it.”

  We decided to sell the restaurant in 1994 because it's a very tough walk, you know? We started to get a little tired, especially for my wife; she was very much involved. And the owner of Ark Restaurants came once for dinner, and he told me that he might be interested in buying Lutèce—and Ark was a big company; they had something like thirty restaurants—and asked me if I would sell. And I said, “Well, everything is for sale,” and I was sixty-three years old then, and I said to my wife, “What do you think?” We knew we had to stop one day.

  Ark bought the restaurant, not the building. I still own the building. I gave Ark a fifteen-year lease, but after nine years, they couldn't make it go and closed in 2004. They couldn't make it, I think, because it was a very personal restaurant. It was Lutèce, but it was André Soltner. It was not personal anymore. People think with a restaurant you make millions, but to make money in a restaurant is not an easy thing. You have to be there. You have to watch it and control it, and they didn't have that. So they didn't make money. A restaurant has to be profitable. If you don't make money, you
go under, and it's not the money you put in your pocket, but to pay your suppliers right away and keep your staff. You can tell them, “You're part of the family,” but that works for six months, so they also have to find their advantage, so you have to pay them a little more and things like that. To make money in a restaurant, you have to be there, and you have to watch everything.…

  And whatever happens, be humble. If somebody is successful and they get a big head, it disappoints me very much. You know, André Surmain, we are still friends—he'll be ninety soon—but he was a bit of a snob, so when I wanted to bring him down to reality, I always said, “André, we are soup merchants, don't forget that. We are not ambassadors. We make soup, and we sell soup.” And that's very important, especially now, in an era where chefs are very recognized and they are suddenly stars, celebrities, but it should not go to your head. Stay humble!

  And be serious, and when I say serious, I mean disciplined and not to think that you come to America and America is waiting for you. America is not waiting for you. Put that in your head. You have to earn it—otherwise you don't make it—and it's not easy. In Europe, we think America is the land of opportunity, and it is, but it doesn't come by itself. 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.

  In Europe, when you say you are an immigrant, it means you are maybe a little lower than all the others and I don't want to be nice to you, but I must say that here you don't have that feeling. If you don't speak English the way you should, nobody looks at you. Everybody thinks it is normal, and that's really what I like the most here. You don't have any complex to be an immigrant. In France, I remember the Italians or Spanish people, they were accepted too, but they were a little not the same level, really. But here it isn't so, and that is really the nice part here. I really feel at home here, I really do.

  In the past, we went back to France normally every two years, and for many years now we've had a house in the Catskills, which I like very much because the Catskills looks a little like Vosges, from where I come, the same type of mountains. So we have a house there at Hunter Mountain, and there are at least ten other chefs who also have houses. So on Sundays we cook and eat together. Restaurant people are like circus people because we are in a business where we have a little odder hours than others. We try out our new recipes and things like that. We do our own cider, and we ski. We have our annual chef's ski race that we've been doing for more than thirty years…. But these days my wife and I go on a lot of cruises. I go as the guest chef. We go once a year; some years two or three times. Recently we went on a cruise and the son of Nikita Khrushchev was the guest speaker for politics, Sergei Khrushchev. I was for cooking. He was for politics. We've gone on over thirty-four cruises….

  My fondest memory is that I'm happily married almost fifty years now and that we're still together. We had success, but it didn't go to our heads. No children, though. That's my disappointment. C'est la vie. You know, you cannot change some things.

  He came from an affluent Cuban family. When he was fourteen years old he went with his father from Cuba to Spain, leaving behind his older brother and his mother, who stayed to look after her father, and spent eighteen months in Spain before coming to Miami alone to live with his aunt and uncle. He went on to become the producer/husband of singer Gloria Estefan, one of the top-selling artists of all time, with more than one hundred million albums sold and seven Grammy Awards to her credit. She emigratedfrom Cuba with her mother when she was two years old and settled in Miami, where she and Emilio later met. Today, Emilio is a nineteentime Grammy Award–winning producer, songwriter, and founder of Estefan Enterprises, which encompasses everything from music publishing, television, film production, and artist management to hotels, restaurants, and real estate. “I would advise others to have respect for a country that gives you an opportunity,” he said. “It doesn't matter where you come from; we all cry for this country.”

  I was born in Cuba in a town called Santiago de Cuba, which is all the way on the other side of the island from Havana. When I was a kid, Castro took power, and the whole thing I remember in the house was conversations about being in a Communist country because they were taking everything away, and that made the whole difference for me. I mean, even when I was ten years old I heard my mom and my dad talking through the doors. My mom was crying, saying if I was going to stay in a Communist country, what will happen when I reach military age, which was fifteen, and I was eleven years old then, and I remember that I cried all night.

  In the morning I told my mom, “I have to leave Cuba.”

  And she said, “Well, how are you going to leave Cuba? We'll probably never see you again.”

  Then when I was fourteen, I said, “I want to leave with my dad.” Because he was talking of leaving.

  She said, “Well, you know something, I'm gonna let you do it because I feel [pauses] don't do it for me, do it for you. I think it's a great thing that you'll be able to live and realize the American Dream and live in a free country.”

  So I made the decision to leave when I was eleven years old, but I left when I was fourteen.

  The life there when I was a kid—it was a country that was converted to a Communist country, so people lived in fear. They were arresting a lot of people. I remember when Castro changed the money into Cuban dollars. I never met Castro, although he used to live really close to my house. He went to the same school as me when he was a kid. The same school in Santiago. He was born in Santiago de Cuba.

  I remember one day they [Castro's men] came to my house, and they went to my mom and my dad's room, and he used to have a safe inside the room. They took him to open the safe, and he got nervous, and they took the [whole] family to the patio with machine guns. They thought that we were hiding something, that my father was hiding dollars, especially dollars, because they were looking for dollars. Then they used some dynamite and blew the whole safe—and to me all those elements are what convinced me to make the decision to leave Cuba. And not only me—I didn't want the rest of my family to live in a country like that.

  My father used to own a factory, a clothing factory. We were not really millionaires, but we were well off. And my father was a poker player, a professional poker player. He won the lottery twenty-seven times in his life! He was a very lucky guy. And he was always up and down; sometimes he was filthy with money, and sometimes he was totally broke. He played at the hotels. He used to play at all the casinos in Cuba. I mean, he loved to play. Sort of like [in] the movie Havana. My mom took care of the home, took care of us. I had one older brother.

  To me, the decision to come to America was not about money. I always looked at the United States as a place that represented freedom, that you have the right to free expression, have the right to any dream. But to me, more than anything else as a kid, I was afraid to live in a Communist country, and I saw what my mom and my dad were going through and my whole family.

  When we used to have dinner or lunch, we had to talk quietly because they were afraid somebody was listening to them. So my whole motivation was really fear—fear that I should live in a country where I am afraid to talk or have my opinion. I saw everything that was happening with my family, and then my aunt was arrested because her son escaped to an embassy when he was around twenty-one. They came the next day to her house and said that she probably knew that he was escaping from Cuba. And she said, “I didn't know that.”

  She really didn't know! They put her in jail for almost fifteen years just to punish her. Fifteen years in jail! She served the time, then she came to Miami, and then she died. I mean, it was amazing. And so being a kid and seeing all these elements and the pain that I saw with my family, I said, “I have to leave.” Even though it was the hardest decision I made in my whole life because I realized I may never see my mom or my brother again for the rest of my life.

  The day I left, I r
emember when it was time to say good-bye to my grandfather and the rest of my family, I knew I was never going to see them again. But at the same time I remember going to the airport and holding my mom and my brother and then getting onto the plane to go to Spain. We went to Spain because that was the only way out. At the time, there was no direct flight to the States. And my mom was of Spanish descent, so they gave us a visa to Spain.

  I cried all the way from Cuba to Spain. My dad and I flew to Madrid.

  We got to Madrid at night, and when we got out of the plane and we started walking, I remember feeling cold and how the cold weather was so different for me. I remember it was late at night at the airport and the airport was empty. But I saw two priests at the end of a corridor, and I was crying, and my dad told me, “Everything will be OK. Just take your time. Things will get better for the family.”

  We were almost homeless in Spain. When we came they helped us, but we had to go and eat in a church because we didn't have enough money to eat in a restaurant or to buy food. My father couldn't take any money out of the country. When you leave Cuba, you're not allowed to take anything—not even one penny. You can take just what you're wearing and that's it. So some relatives and friends in Miami sent us money to help us, and my dad and I found a small apartment. We had left behind my older brother and mom and her father, my grandfather.

  The idea was that my dad and I were going to go to the United States and bring my mother and my brother later. My mother said, “I don't want to leave until my father passes away,” because her father was still alive. He was too old. He didn't want to leave home, leave Cuba. Later on, after we got to Miami, I told her, “Listen, you did what you have to do, but my dad and me—we need you here.” It was a hard decision because my older brother was at the military age, so he couldn't leave.