2 weeks ago
10
Food|André Soltner, Famed Chef at New York’s Lutèce, Dies at 92
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/dining/andre-soltner-dead.html
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
Customers returned again and again for his impeccable French dishes at a restaurant that one food critic said “set the gold standard.”
Jan. 18, 2025, 6:19 p.m. ET
André Soltner, a chef whose reverence for classic French cooking and the homey specialties of his native Alsace helped make Lutèce, in Midtown Manhattan, one of the most celebrated restaurants in the United States, died on Saturday morning in Charlottesville, Va. He was 92.
His death, in a hospital. was confirmed by the lawyer Glenn W. Dopf, a close friend.
Mr. Soltner took his place behind the stove at Lutèce on Feb. 16, 1961, the restaurant’s opening day, and stayed there for 33 years. As a partner in the restaurant and eventually the sole owner, he delivered haute-cuisine standards in an intimate setting that became an extension of his own personality.
Lutèce was like a gilded bistro. Simone, Mr. Soltner’s wife, greeted visitors and processed the checks. When not laboring in the kitchen, Mr. Soltner stopped by the tables in the dining room to chat briefly with patrons and help them navigate the menu. Regulars left it to him to choose. When the last guests had left at night, the Soltners retired to their fourth-floor apartment above the restaurant on East 50th Street.
At a time when fresh ingredients could be hard to obtain, Mr. Soltner insisted on having Dover sole, Scottish salmon and Mediterranean rouget flown in overnight. He struck deals with farmers to supply shallots and girolle mushrooms. Impeccable ingredients, flawless technique and a modern-minded approach to French style put Lutèce in a class by itself and sent critics scrambling for superlatives.
In 2008, when the food critic Gael Greene named the most influential restaurants of the previous 40 years in New York, Lutèce led the list. It “set the gold standard for what a French restaurant should be in America,” she wrote in New York magazine. On a previous occasion, she had written that Mr. Soltner was “the best French chef in New York, the rare merger of classical training, technical wizardry, dedication and creative zest.”
Mr. Soltner always resisted such accolades. “Basically I am a cook,” he told Nation’s Restaurant News in 1987. “We are not stars. It’s nice to be recognized, but let’s draw the line.”
