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Luke Barr - Ritz and Escoffier, The Hotelier, The Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class

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Ritz and Escoffier, The Hotelier, The Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class: summary, description and annotation

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In a tale replete with scandal and opulence, Luke Barr, author of the New York Times bestselling Provence, 1970, transports readers to turn-of-the-century London and Paris to discover how celebrated hotelier Csar Ritz and famed chef Auguste Escoffier joined forces at the Savoy Hotel to spawn the modern luxury hotel and restaurant, where women and American Jews mingled with British high society, signaling a new social order and the rise of the middle class.In early August 1889, Csar Ritz, a Swiss hotelier highly regarded for his exquisite taste, found himself at the Savoy Hotel in London. He had come at the request of Richard DOyly Carte, the financier of Gilbert & Sullivans comic operas, who had modernized theater and was now looking to create the worlds best hotel. DOyly Carte soon seduced Ritz to move to London with his team, which included Auguste Escoffier, the chef de cuisine known for his elevated, original dishes. The result was a hotel and restaurant like no one had ever experienced, run in often mysterious and always extravagant ways--which created quite a scandal once exposed. Barr deftly re-creates the thrilling Belle Epoque era just before World War I, when British aristocracy was at its peak, women began dining out unaccompanied by men, and American nouveaux riches and gauche industrialists convened in London to show off their wealth. In their collaboration at the still celebrated Savoy Hotel, where they welcomed loyal and sometimes salacious clients, such as Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt, Escoffier created the modern kitchen brigade and codified French cuisine for the ages in his seminal Le Guide culinaire, which remains in print today, and Ritz, whose name continues to grace the finest hotels across the world, created the worlds first luxury hotel. The pair also ruffled more than a few feathers in the process. Fine dining would never be the same--or more intriguing.

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ALSO BY LUKE BARR Provence 1970 Copyright 2018 by Luke Barr All rights - photo 1
ALSO BY LUKE BARR

Provence, 1970

Copyright 2018 by Luke Barr All rights reserved Published in the United States - photo 2

Copyright 2018 by Luke Barr

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

crownpublishing.com

clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Barr, Luke, author.

Title: Ritz & Escoffier : the hotelier, the chef, and the rise of the leisure class / Luke Barr.

Other titles: Ritz and Escoffier

Description: First edition. | New York : Clarkson Potter/Publishers, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017015344 | ISBN 9780804186292 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780804186308 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ritz, Csar, 18501918. | Escoffier, A. (Auguste), 18461935. | Savoy Hotel (London, England)History. | Hospitality industrySocial aspectsHistory19th century. | Hospitality industrySocial aspectsHistory20th century. | Leisure class.

Classification: LCC TX910.5.R5 B37 2018 | DDC 647.94092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015344

ISBN9780804186292

Ebook ISBN9780804186308

Cover design by Jennifer Wang

v5.2

ep

For Yumi 1 THE HOTELIER and the IMPRESARIO In early August 1889 Csar Ritz - photo 3

For Yumi

1 THE HOTELIER and the IMPRESARIO In early August 1889 Csar Ritz left Cannes - photo 4
1
THE HOTELIER and the IMPRESARIO

In early August 1889, Csar Ritz left Cannes on an overnight train, the 8:43 p.m. bound for Calais. He was en route to London, ensconced in a private cabin, traveling alone.

He wore a suit with a high-collared shirt, a tie and waistcoat, and a bowler hat. As usual, he was dressed impeccably, a white carnation in his lapel, his moustache carefully waxed. Ritz was a young man, but his hairline had begun to recede above his high brow and intelligent, watchful eyes. He looked around the compact cabin: it was wood-paneled, with brass coat hooks, a mirror, and a number of storage compartments for his personal items. (His trunk had been taken by a porter when he boarded the train.) Now Ritz hung his jacket in the small closet and placed his hat on the rack. The weather was hot, and he was glad to be traveling at night.

Ritz loved to travel, the thrill and speed of it, the trains rushing toward the future. The Calais-Mediterranean Express train he was on now, for example, had launched a few years earlier, in 1886, and was state of the art, with a restaurant car and onboard lavatories, precluding the need for rest stops at stations along the way. The train ran slowly along the French Riviera, stopping at resort towns like Menton and Monte Carlo before speeding north through Lyon and Paris and on to the English Channel. From there, Ritz would board a ferry and then another train, to London. The trip would take a full night and day.

It was remarkably fast, Ritz thought. The express trains were transforming European travel and, especially, the towns along the Mediterranean. The English had been coming to the Cte dAzur for a century already, traveling by carriage and on boats. Rail lines had made the trip far easier. There were numerous competing train companies using the tracksthe long-established Marseilles-to-Nice service along the coast dated back to the 1860s, which was when the Cannes station had been built, a small white building with a roof covering both tracks. But the express trains heralded a new era, bringing throngs of visitors from all over Europe. This was good for Ritz: he was in the hotel business.

Why was he going to London, anyway? He hated London. Well, hed never been to London, actually, but he hated the idea of it: the gloom, the fog, the dour English propriety and cool reserve. The mediocre food. He was Continental, in every sense of the word. His business was pleasure. Ritz was a hotel man, welcoming guests with well-practiced charm at his two small properties, one in Cannes, the Htel de Provence, the other in Baden-Baden, Germany, the Hotel Minerva, where he also ran the Restaurant de la Conversation.

He was thirty-nine years old and had been working in the business his whole lifein Lucerne, Paris, and Vienna; in San Remo, Monte Carlo, and Trouville; all over Europe, following the glamorous trail of vacationing aristocrats and wealthy tourists as they took their cures and baths and sought mountain air in the summer and Mediterranean sun in winter. They were an international tribe, increasingly mobilethe Orient Express, with its luxurious sleeping cars, had just launched the first nonstop train between Paris and Constantinopleand Ritz had cultivated a following among them. The dapper young Swiss hotelier was effortlessly multilingual (if heavily accented), and never forgot a name or a face. Not only that, he also took careful note of his clients whims and desires: who preferred what for breakfast, who required a carafe of water on his bedside table at night.

Ritz was also a showman, an orchestrator of evening entertainments and gala dinners. Indeed, it was because of one such grand dinner that he now found himself, however reluctantly, on the train to London.

It had been almost a year ago, that dinner, at Ritzs recently opened restaurant in Baden-Baden. The Restaurant de la Conversation was already the talk of the town. He had advertised both the hotel and restaurant extensively, printing lavish brochures, and installed electric lights above the terrace, twinkling in the branches of the plants and trees. He was soon attracting a glamorous crowd. (Kaiser Wilhelm I, the German emperor, had eaten dinner there, and Ritz had made sure everyone knew it.) Baden-Baden was a summer resort, a place people came to for the casinos and the racetrack, and of course for the hot-spring bathsbaden is German for bathand it was a town where, in the evening, elaborate dinner parties were held. So when Prince Radziwill, a leading member of the Kaisers circle and Berlin society, told Ritz that he wanted to host a dinner that would be rememberedsomething original, he saidand that cost was not a concern, Ritz seized the opportunity.

This was the sort of challenge Ritz loved: to create a spectacle. And all the better to do so with an unlimited budget. This would be more than a dinner; it would be an event. He landed upon a simple, summery idea: to bring the outside in. He covered the entire floor of the restaurant with grass, and the walls with roses, hundreds and hundreds of them. He placed potted trees among the tables and brought a stone fountain and pool into the restaurant and filled it with exotic goldfish. At the center of this theatrical indoor woodland scene was an enormous fern. Ritz had seen it at one of the local horticultural gardens and managed to rent it for the night. (That alone had cost a small fortune.) Then he built a table around the towering plant and covered that with yet more flowers. (Ritz was a great believer in flowersvast, extravagant quantities of them. He sometimes thought he was singlehandedly keeping the local florists in business.)

He hired an orchestra, designed the menu, and then basked in the delight of the prince and his guests. The scene was magical, transporting the diners into a kind of

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