AVENUE JULY | AUGUST 2021

She loves New York

ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO

461 Park Avenue at 57th Street, New York, NY 10022 Harrods, Brompton Road, London SW1X 7XL www.richard-james.com

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CONTENTS JULY–AUGUST 2021 VOL.44 NO.4

FEATURES 54

NEW YORK, JE T’AIME

In this special section, Avenue asks Marie-Monique Steckel, the president of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), along with a dozen prominent French and Francophone New Yorkers, to speak on what they love about their adopted city.

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LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FÉMINITÉ

ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANAÏS BOILEAU

As a new book illustrates, Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri is revolutionizing fashion, one feminist image at a time.

By Horacio Silva.

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SADDLE UP!

Mike Albo meets champion equestrienne Georgina Bloomberg for drinks and dish.

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LA CHANTEUSE Angélique Kidjo

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RETURN OF THE SOCIAL DEAD

Can Ghislaine Maxell get out of jail and back into High Society, like some wealthy pariahs before her, asks Lisa Marsh?

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VERNISSAGE Avenue’s insider preview of all that’s new and noteworthy.

BY HORACIO SILVA, NANCY KANE, AND BEN WIDDICOMBE

EURO STAR

Philippe Delgrange is the undisputed star of Le Bilboquet.

BY HEATHER HODSON

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FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE CUTTLEFISH

ACE OF CLUBS The Coral Casino Beach and Cabana Club photographed by Gray Malin.

The transcendent pleasures of dining at Le Bernardin.

BY REGGIE NADELSON

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AAAAHHH . . .

FRITES OUT!

Our short list of favorite French restaurants.

CULTURE 36

A roundup the not-to-miss art shows this summer in the city and on the East End– Jean-Michel Othoniel, Alma Allen, Tomashi Jackson, Robert Nava, and Henry Taylor.

BY HEATHER HODSON AND ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER

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ALCHEMY OF BEAUTY

BUY CURIOUS

Warning: these pages contain fashion items that may be harmful to your wallet.

LIVING BEACH, PLEASE

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THE ROARING HAMPTONS

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Even F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn’t have imagined the parties planned for the East End of Long Island this summer.

BY HORACIO SILVA

THE GLAM SQUAD

NOTORIOUS NEW YORKERS

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was considered destined for the Élysée Palace until his undoing in New York City.

BY NANCY KANE

BY ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER

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90

The sometimes arcane art of hitting the sand in the East End.

BY AMBROSE MCGAFFNEY

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ON THE AVE.

Garden parties galore kick off the summer social season.

BY NANCY KANE

Books on photography, travel, and lifestyle for your coffee table this summer.

BY HEATHER HODSON AND CATHERINE TALESE

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JUST YOUR TYPE The books you’ll be slipping in your beach bag.

BY CLAIRE GIBSON, HEATHER

LEGEND IN ITS OWN LUNCHTIME New York’s Le Veau d’Or.

COVER: Illustration by Petra Eriksson 8

HODSON, AND MARK LIBATIQUE

Visit our website at avenuemagazine.com

CORAL CASINO BEACH AND CABANA CLUB PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRAY MALIN FROM GRAY MALIN: THE ESSENTIAL COLLECTION; RESTAURANT LE VEAU D’OR PHOTOGRAPHY BY LAUREN LANCASTER

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AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2021

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BASED ON THE MEMOIRS OF

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I

Independence s there anything more beautiful than the old red, white, and blue? From the iconic French drapeau to Old Glory herself, the colors speak of inspiration, optimism, and belief in the best of our compatriots. And with the national holidays of July 4 and Bastille Day falling just ten days apart, they are also both enduringly tied to summer. That’s why, in partnership with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), we have devoted this issue to a French-American theme, summed up by one of the many values we both share: Independence.

New York is a city uniquely tied to France. The Statue of Liberty— the very symbol of our metropolis—was itself a gift from the French people, and serves as an inspiration for every generation to live up to its highest ideals.

In these pages, you’ll meet a dozen leading lights from the Frenchspeaking world (including not just France, but also Belgium, Togo, and Benin) who call New York home. We celebrate the rich history of French restaurants in our city, and even give ourselves over to the sublimely guilty pleasure of French luxury shopping.

In addition to our coverage of all things French, we preview a Hamptons summer season that is set to be one for the record books, and check in with a slew of Avenue friends, including artists Tomashi Jackson and Jean-Michel Othoniel.

We suggest you pair this issue with your favorite glass of chilled French rosé, and—à votre santé!

Warmly, BEN WIDDICOMBE

Editor-in-Chief 10

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Ben Widdicombe CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Courtney Gooch REGGIE NADELSON (From The Sublime to the Cuttlefish, page 22) is an author, journalist, filmmaker, and foodie who was born and raised in downtown Manhattan, where she still lives today. She writes the 212 column for the New York Times and has also written columns for The Guardian, The Independent, and The Financial Times. Her most recent book, Marvelous Manhattan (Artisan Books), is a testament to her love of New York and its special, one-of-a-kind places. In this issue, Avenue publishes her essay on Le Bernardin. “There’s nothing so exciting as seeing all the restaurants reopen,” she tells Avenue. “It is wonderful feeling the city breathe and stretch again. As my mother loved to say time and time again, life would not be much worth living without New York City.” Nadelson recently wrote and produced a documentary about Ella Fitzgerald titled Ella: Just One of Those Things.

DEPUTY & MANAGING EDITOR

Angela M.H. Schuster FEATURES DIRECTOR

Heather Hodson PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR

Catherine G. Talese PRODUCTION DIRECTOR

Jessica Lee STYLE EDITOR

SYED YAQEEN (New York, Je T’aime, page 54) was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where at age 15 he got his first taste of photography when he saw a show in the Alliance Française de Dhaka. Since moving to New York in 1995 he has photographed fashion and luxury events, as well as editorial portraits. For this issue he photographed MarieMonique Steckel, the president of the French Institute Alliance Française. “She was charming and very accommodating,” he says. “I could see her endearment for Paris, as she lit up when we talked about her collection of miniature Eiffel Towers in her office.”

ELAINE SCIOLINO (New York, Je T’aime, page 54) is a contributing writer and the former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, and the author of The Only Street in Paris and The Seine: The River That Made Paris (W. W. Norton). Now based in Paris, she lived in New York for many years. “New York is the city where I came of age,” she says. “I moved here soon after I turned 21 with two suitcases and no savings to work as a $138.25 a week researcher for Newsweek. I went to graduate school here, fell in love for the first time here, and saved enough money as a foreign correspondent to buy a loft in SoHo. Alas, I sold it. I love Paris, of course, where I have lived since 2002. But New York flashes bigness and energy in bright neon. I even walk and talk faster here.”

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DIGITAL FASHION EDITOR

Aria Darcella ART ASSISTANT

Daniela G. Maldonado LONDON EDITOR

Catherine St Germans CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Liesl Schillinger, Katrina Brooker, Gigi Mortimer, Tracy Bross CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Richard Kern, Landon Nordeman, Rainer Hosch, Johnny Miller, Martin Vallin, Nick Mele © 2021 by Cohen Media Publications LLC AVENUE MAGAZINE 750 LEXINGTON AVENUE 16TH FLOOR NEW YORK, NY 10022 EDITORIAL@AVENUEMAGAZINE.COM

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REGGIE NADELSON BY NINA WESTERVELT, MIKE ALBO BY ALISON LEVIN, SYED YAQEEN BY COREY MATTHEWS, ELAINE SCIOLINO BY GABRIELA SCIOLINO PLUMP

MIKE ALBO (Saddle Up!, page 72) is a writer and performer, as well as the author of the novels Hornito: My Lie Life (Harper Perennial) and The Underminer: Or, the Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life (Bloomsbury USA).

For this issue, he interviewed Georgina Bloomberg. “For the daughter of a politician, Georgina wasn’t a cautious media-trained robot,” he says. “She was completely up-front about her life—from being a single mom, to the gender inequities of horse shows, to her philanthropy, which included picking up the check for our lunch.”

Horacio Silva

AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2021

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orget the infinity pool, the ten-car garage, the infrared sauna, and even the outdoor screening room. This summer’s must-have accessory for the Hamptons elite is a panic room.

“Safe rooms” have been around for thousands of years, from Roman villas and medieval castle keeps to priest holes.

Their growing popularity on the East End is the result of a number of factors, from growing wealth in the area (which in recent years has soared from merely stratospheric to almost galactic heights), to an increase in gang activity on Long Island, and most recently a local politics dustup about whether to “save” or “defund” the police.

Last summer, a 24-count indictment was brought against eight members of the MS-13 gang, including multiple racketeering offenses in connection with six murders. This went down in Central Islip, which at just under an hour away from Southampton is too close for many residents’ comfort. Charlie McArdle, president of

“THE MOST IMPORTANT THING PEOPLE WANT IN A SAFE ROOM IS THAT ONCE YOU CLOSE THE DOOR,

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Mike Peters

the Eastern Long Island Police Conference and who also owns a private security company in the Hamptons, said there were gang arrests in Montauk and the North Fork in recent years, as well. “They’re everywhere,” he says.

He knows of several larger Hamptons homes outfitted with safe rooms, and that they are not for the hoi polloi. The cost of installing one starts at $50,000, and can run as high as half a million, depending on add-ons such as a backup generator, supplies storage, and of course bulletproof electronic doors.

Mike Peters, CEO of Ultimate Bunker (tag line: “America’s Best! Underground Bunkers”) adds that you also need to budget for air conditioning and bathrooms. “Those are almost always a must-have. And everyone is always concerned about communication. A cell phone booster is needed to get cell phone service or installation of a landline,” he says. “Communication with the outside world is key.”

It’s not unusual to find four-inch-thick steel doors with ten-gauge carbon steel inner plates and secure bolts around the perimeter. Electronic key guards are de rigueur to prevent lock manipulation. And safe rooms are meant to be secret, so blending into the rest of the house is also important, he points out: “Matching the Sheetrock, lighting, and flooring is important to the high-end customer.”

Larger panic rooms can also do double duty as a wine cellar or a home theater—a guest invited for a screening would never guess the doors are blast-resistant. Others opt for a safe room behind a fireplace or a bookcase, where a hidden switch in a book or on the mantelpiece opens up the hideaway. These are often outfitted with flatscreen TVs, comfortable furniture, and bedding, and stocked with food and even booze because who knows how long you will be in there.

“The most important thing people want in a safe room is that once you close the door, you’re bulletproof and people proof,” says Peters.

In Southampton, “Save the Police: Village in Crisis” signs have sprung up on lawns all over town, symbols of a contentious divide between the mayor and the police department. Mayor Jesse Warren commissioned a controversial outside investigation into his own force, even as the Southampton Village Police Benevolent Association hit him with a vote of no confidence last fall.

Though he has denied it, many residents fear the mayor is looking to disband or reduce the Village police, leaving the Town police to handle local crime. Some residents report their pro-police yard signs being burned or defaced, adding to a backdrop of tension McArdle says is increasing demand for private security solutions.

One Hamptons couple told Avenue they have a panic room to which not even their children have been given the code. “We had been robbed in the past, so we built our house with a safe room off our bedroom,” the homeowner says, adding: “Home invasions usually happen at night.” Ingeniously, this safe room is located over the garage and equipped with a chute, so they can slide down to their car for a quick getaway. Fortunately, they have yet to use it.—nancy kane JULY—AUGUST 2021 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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VERNISSAGE

Board Certified

T

he pandemic hasn’t been easy on New Yorkers, which nobody knows better than Dr. Samantha Boardman. The self-described “positive psychiatrist” recently returned to her practice at Madison and 76th, after a year of treating patients over video and phone calls.

“Nothing beats in person,” she told Avenue earlier this summer. “Zoom can be distracting—people don’t love to look at themselves.”

Dr. Boardman has been in the public eye, one way or another, for decades. In the 1990s, she and her sister, Serena (now a top Sotheby’s realtor), were much admired on the social and fashion circuits. She holds degrees from Harvard University (cum laude, thank you very much) and Cornell University Medical College. And in 2005 she married Aby Rosen, the real estate titan and leading art collector. It hardly seems fair that on top of all that, she is a fabulous writer as well.

“This was five years in the making,” she says of her debut book, Everyday Vitality: Turning Stress into Strength, out August 10 from Penguin Life. “The takeaway is, positive mental health comes from your [interpersonal] connections, and your ability to contribute to something and challenge yourself.”

The book’s 22 fluid chapters contain practical advice for combating ennui and languishing, without ever descending into navel-gazing.

“There’s lots of overpromising in the wellness-industrial complex of, you know—you can just download happiness or buy a crystal that is going to transform your life and diminish your stress. And I’m troubled by that,” she says. “You can’t ‘eat-pray-love’ yourself into well-being.”

The book also examines the feelings of ambivalence many people are expressing about coming back out of their shell following a year of lockdown.

“To people who are feeling avoidant and scared to get back out there, I would say: Pick and choose carefully, and spend time with the people whom you know you can have meaningful conversations and positive interactions with.

Avoidance is a response that in the short term

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might make you feel better, but in the long term we know it is not a way to handle something.”

Dr. Boardman credits the shift in her approach, to focus on positivity, to a former patient who fired her in 2011. “She said to me, ‘Dr. Boardman, all we ever do is talk about everything that’s wrong with me—we never talk about anything else.’ And that ended up sending me back to medical school.”

And the fruit of that, at least partly, is this book. Did she ever reach out to the patient who fired her, to say how much that changed her life?

“I tried—I couldn’t find her,” she says, chuckling. “At the time, that experience really stung.

But it really made me rethink what I thought I knew—some of the best challenges can turn out to be transformational. I’m extremely grateful to her. I have a friend who says, ‘Whenever you have an experience with someone when you feel diminished in a way, send them flowers.’ I think there’s something very nice in that.”

—ben widdicombe

I

Ball Player

t’s a wonder Maye Musk ever goes out. For the silver-haired entrepreneur, model, nutrition expert, and mother of Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, small talk at society events inevitably involves attempts to curry her son’s favor and a subject off-limits to many New York women: her age.

“Most people just ask me how I look so healthy and have so much energy for a woman of 73,” the red-carpet habitué said good-naturedly over email from her vacation in an undisclosed location. “I tell them it’s because I eat well, following science and common sense, not trendy and fad diets,” she said.

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Musk will put her earnest proselytizing to good use when she is honored alongside jewelry designer Simone I. Smith at the Angel Ball Summer Gala in Southampton on August 20. Hosted

by Denise Rich and her daughters Daniella Rich Kilstock and Ilona Rich Schachter, it’s the first time the renowned cancer charity event is being held out east. (Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation for Cancer Research, named for Denise’s late daughter, Gabrielle Rich Aouad, has raised around $38 million since being founded in 1996.)

“This is special, a fundraiser for scientists who do cancer research,” said Musk, adding that the funding for the research work on her two master of science degrees were from scholarships. “Most of us have been touched by cancer in our families, and we need to find a cure.”

And if that means going the extra yard then so be it. As her recent appearance on Saturday Night Live attests, she shares her son’s boundless sense of adventure. Can we expect a duet with Mary J. Blige, who, along with Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch, is a dinner cochair? “I’m always game for anything,” Musk said. “If someone wants to hear a really bad singer, that’s fine with me. We can’t be great at everything.”—horacio silva

Typo Personality

“I

am an appellate lawyer and persnickety dude. As a hobby, I correct typos in the Times, which no longer employs copy editors and consequently has tons of typos.”

That’s the characteristically concise bio offered by Twitter user @nyttypos, an anonymous account that delights in antagonizing the New York Times, as well as many of its journalists by name. In thousands of broadsides aimed at the so-called Paper of Record, sometimes dozens a day, he corrects mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and grammar for an audience of more than 23,000 followers.

No detail is too picayune to call out, from an improperly italicized quotation mark to a missing comma. “Gibberish” is a word he frequently uses to describe the paper’s tweets.

Speaking over the phone from a cell number with a Pennsylvania area code, the government lawyer in his mid-30s (whose identity Avenue has agreed not to disclose) said he relies on a 2015 copy of the paper’s internal style guide to make his corrections.

“Sometimes they’ll tell me, ‘Well, you’re relying on this old style guide,’ and that ‘we've changed and we view the CDC as a singular and not as a plural as we used to,’ ” he said. “And then I correct people over that.”

One reporter who is sometimes a target, and who seems to enjoy sparring with the account on Twitter, is business section media columnist Ben Smith.

“I’ve always appreciated people on the internet helping make the work better,” Smith told Avenue in a deadpan e-mail. “So, of course I appreciate it.”

Not everyone feels so kindly about the criticism, however. “Occasionally, people do make comments on Twitter complaining about my tone,” Mr. Persnickety said. “They’ll say, ‘You're complaining about the placement of an apostrophe during a pandemic!’ ” One culture desk reporter was especially aggrieved by a correction to a tweet about the Academy Awards. “The next morning, I see this notification that she says that she was having a bad day. And she theorizes maybe I knew that, be-

cause I looked up her Twitter and read her tweet, and so I shouldn’t have” piled on, he said, adding that he remained unmoved. “I mean, if they’re having a bad day, I don’t think that I’m going to ruin their bad day because I’ve mentioned that there’s a typo in their article.”

Being a government attorney, and not tethered to billable client hours as he would be in private practice, is perhaps what allows him to scrutinize the Times in such detail. But what do his friends and family think about his unusual hobby?

“I think that, knowing me, it doesn’t seem to surprise them,” he said. “Nobody really has anything negative to say about the whole thing other than, you know, suggestions that I ought to be nicer.”

To which his response is “No.” Asked what other career he might have considered had he not been a lawyer, he said that he had always wanted to write films. This might surprise people who imagine that he is desperate to be a copy editor.

“No, I wouldn’t like that,” he said. “It seems a little insignificant to just copy edit.”—BW JULY—AUGUST 2021 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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VERNISSAGE

RED HAUTE Le Bilboquet on the Upper East Side.

After half a century in New York, and almost four decades at the helm of Le Bilboquet, Philippe Delgrange remains its undisputed king, writes Heather Hodson

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“W

e have incredi bl e c u s to m e rs —w i t ho ut them I would be dead. Finished,” says Philippe Delgrange one recent morning on the telephone from his eatery, Le Bilboquet in Manhattan, the rich sounds of laughter and chatter in the background. “When we closed everything down with the pandemic, I said, it is possible that this is the end. This is really bad. But we survived.” The pandemic underestimated his clients. “They were eating outside in the

winter—in New York! I said to myself, ’ow can you stay outside, freezing? But New Yorkers are a different kind of breed. They are really tough cookies.”

Delgrange is the owner-proprietor of “Bilbo,” as it is known to the lucky few, the fabled French bistro in uptown Manhattan popular among film stars, fashion power players, and those who, in a previous era, would have been called “the Four Hundred.” It is a clubby, glamorous crowd among whom Delgrange holds considerable clout, because scoring a table at this bastion of Franco-American civility is très difficile. In a world this rarefied, wearing the wrong pair of shoes can be fatal. Delgrange has trenchant views on

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LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES Philippe Delgrange with friends in 80s New York.

sartorial matters. “When you dress, you automatically take a step up,” he says. “If people come to my restaurant well dressed, it’s a form of respect, to the place and the workers.”

At 68, the leonine Delgrange is arguably the most elegantly dressed Frenchman in New York. “I dress every day,” he tells me. “I don’t wear a tie—I’ve paid my dues—but I always wear a great pair of slacks, and a shirt, white or blue.”

For a man with a deep and nostalgic respect for the nuances of the good life, the recent trend toward casual dressing is, frankly, pas bon. “People stopped dressing when the pandemic came, the only place people really dress is Palm Beach,” he says, sounding both crestfallen and indignant.

“I think it’s sad. Mostly for a woman. A woman wants to dress up! She doesn’t want to feel lonely, 20

“We have one thing you don’t have anywhere else—the people! People are full of life here!”

Philippe Delgrange

with everyone looking at ’er.” He sighs. “Everything is acceptable now. For me, where I’m from, what I’ve learned in my lifetime, it’s very hard for me to accept that.”

Delgrange arrived in New York from Cambrai in France at the age of 18, and after a stint working in a perfume factory began his apprenticeship as a restaurateur at the Atrium Club, Regine, and later Le Relais. His front row seat at the nexus of ’70s gastronomy and glamour informed his understanding that in New York, unlike France, dining is a pageant. By the mid ’80s he was ready to launch himself, opening Le Bilboquet on East 63rd Street, a 20-seat boîte that quickly drew the fashionable Upper East Side crowd. Such was its success he transferred Bilbo to the 120-seater East 60th Street location (Ron Perelman, Eric Clapton and Steven Witkoff are investors). Delgrange is now the owner of all Le Bilboquets, including in Sag Harbor and the newly opened Palm Beach iteration. “It was an explosion!” he says of the opening.

“I could not believe the number of clients of mine [from New York] living in Palm Beach.”

What Le Bilboquet embodies is a combination of traditional French comfort food uplifted by modern New York tastes. “In New York, we are more aware about food than Europeans,” he states with pride. “There is a big difference in fine dining. New York is a city of creation. The Europeans—whatever they crave, it’s been there forever.

In New York—we move on.” But food aside, what Delgrange understands is that his people want to keep things the same; they want the happiness that comes from being at the center of a familiar, clubby world that, like haute couture, still prizes beauty and old-school etiquette. “Don’t try to change! People, they love their own place. It’s important to go back to the past. I think of who was here before.”

If his clientele are fiercely loyal to this ebullient, magnetic Frenchman, the sentiment is returned in more than equal measure. “The clientele are everything,” he declares. “I always have the parents, the grandparents, and the children [in the restaurant]. If you don’t take care of the grandparents and the grandchildren, you have no business. Because the grandchildren—they remember a place because grandpa used to eat there, so they will come.”

Talking about New York makes him emotional.

“People are waiting for this to be over. A lot of my friends are really suffering,” he laments of the pandemic. “We have been through a very difficult time, and this is a time we have to stick together.” Think of Europe, he says: people there are desperate to come to New York. “My in-laws, they’re so depressed, they are stuck in France.

They cannot wait for the borders to open. If they open up Europe, you’re going to have a big wave coming to New York.” At the thought of all those elegant Europeans taking a flight path direct to the city, he cheers up. “[We say to them] oxygen is coming to you! A big bowl of oxygen! They will say, “Thank you, thank you!” They’ll be in heaven here! Because we have one thing you don’t have anywhere else—the people! People are full of life here!” He gives a whoop. “Oh, you’re not going to believe it. It’s going to be an explosion!”

COURTESY OF LE BILBOUQUET

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FRANC AND FEARLESS Maguy Le Coze and Eric Ripert, co-owners of Le Bernardin, in New York. Opposite: Le Bernardin’s main dining room.

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“I

Reggie Nadelson on the transcendent pleasures of dining want more of those langousat Le Bernardin tines.” This is my cousin Caite, and we’re just finishing lunch at Le Bernardin. It is the best restaurant in New York, possibly the world; the French La Liste has consistently rated it in the top slot or at number two since it opened in 1986.

And who knows better than the French?

The langoustines were sublime, warm and lightly cooked in a dashi broth, not so much poured as gently drizzled into the bowls, with exquisite finesse, from a little jug by one of the endlessly attentive staff.

Caite and I have come into the restaurant on a grimy, dank winter’s day, escaping from 51st Street, in the middle of the busiest part of the city, where the traffic is crazy and the noise cacophonous—trucks honking, people yelling, office workers dripping hot sauce onto tacos from food trucks. Inside Le Bernardin is a different world. The French have a word for it: dépaysement. It means, literally, “out of the country,” but the real sense of it means to be away, in another world, free of the quotidian.

Almost as soon as we are seated, a bowl of salmon rillettes and glasses of La Caravelle arrive at our table. As we sip our Champagne, waiters dance around, bringing the tray of bread—baby baguettes, dense dark pumpernickel slices, fennel and tomato rolls, walnut and raisin bread, all seemingly just out of the oven. The butter is soft and sweet, and when we help ourselves and our knives leave a tiny mark on the surface, the pot of butter is replaced with another one, the surface smooth: no dented butter for us, not at Le Bernardin.

This is dining on a grand scale. It belongs to the timeless New York of the dazzling skyline and the dry martini, the mythic city of the spectacular, of George Gershwin and Duke Ellington, of Jackie Kennedy, of Fred Astaire dancing in the dark in Central Park, of Hamilton on Broadway.

The glorious dining room is outfitted with orchids in glass holders and lavishly comfortable tables and chairs, a plush carpet, an immense painting of the sea, and exquisite service. Le Bernardin is elegant—palatial, even—but never pompous or grandiose or intimidating. Sleek, stylish, swanky, sexy, it all works because the food and wine are, simply put, beautiful—but without that “touch me not” quality. This is food to relish, to savor.

My most profoundly cosmopolitan friend, the journalist Vladimir Pozner, who is all at once

MAGUY LE COZE AND ERIC RIPERT: DANIEL KRIEGER/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

From the Sublime to the Cuttlefish

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DANIEL KRIEGER/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

THIS IS DINING ON A GRAND SCALE. IT BELONGS TO THE TIMELESS NEW YORK

OF THE DAZZLING SKYLINE AND THE DRY MARTINI.

Russian, French, and American, who has been everywhere and is a real connoisseur of food and wine, tells me, “Le Bernardin…say it slowly, say it again, savor it, let it roll off the tip of your tongue.

For my money, this is the best restaurant in New York: The service is impeccable, the atmosphere breathes class, and the food is simple and therefore unbelievably difficult to master. It is always perfect, bursting with flavor.”

Le Bernardin’s roots are in Paris, where, in 1972, Gilbert Le Coze and his sister, Maguy Le Coze, started a restaurant called Les Moines de St. Bernardin. In 1986, soon after they got a third Michelin star in Paris, they moved to New York and opened Le Bernardin. Just eight years later, when he was only forty-nine, Gilbert Le Coze suddenly died of a heart attack. Éric Ripert, who already worked at the restaurant, replaced Gilbert as chef and has worked with Maguy ever since.

As Caite and I have our lunch, Ripert passes through the dining room, greeting guests. He is charming, handsome, blue-eyed, perfectly French,

and quite tall, but not at all intimidating. I met with him once in Le Bernardin’s kitchen when I was writing a book about Balthazar, the downtown brasserie, and we sat drinking Coke Zero and talking about food. A pal of the late Anthony Bourdain’s, Ripert has often been on television, and he is exactly the right French chef for Americans because he is startlingly unpretentious.

(Ripert told me that, left to himself, he’d eat simple brasserie food every night, perhaps steak-frites.)

The lack of pomposity makes Le Bernardin a true New York restaurant of the best kind. There is no headwaiter looking you up and down when you arrive. There is never a sense that other guests are treated better than you. And, of course, the food is wonderful, and there’s a staggering wine list.

When I was a kid and my parents were going out to dinner big-time, that meant eating French.

And not just at a bistro in the Theater District (all of which seemed to be called Pierre au Tunnel or something like it) or a joint in the Village with

maybe coq au vin and a smoky candle on the table. For my parents, to celebrate was to go to Le Chambertin, La Caravelle, La Grenouille, La Côte Basque, or, the most revered of all in its day, Le Pavillon. When my mother and father went out on the town, they dressed up, she in her black chiffon dress and satin pumps from Delman. The maître d’ at Le Pavillon must have figured my ma was somebody, a star, a society babe, because he treated her beautifully. She basked in it all.

That’s how I feel going to Le Bernardin. By the time Caite and I have finished the rillettes and moved on to those langoustines, we are not just eating but sighing.

The staff is formal, impeccable, but also warm and charming, a very hard act to accomplish. The more we eat and sigh and laugh, the happier they all seem, and there are plenty of them, waiters and managers and sommeliers. There is something luxurious about the fact that as soon as you’ve used your crisp white linen napkin once, it’s whisked away and replaced.

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Of the dishes, most of which are seafood, my favorite is the scallops, sheer and sumptuous as silk in a ginger and lemongrass broth. And the sautéed sepia “ribbons,” cuttlefish with a saffron mussel broth. Then there is barely cooked Faroe Islands salmon; a seductive pink orange, this is salmon from another planet, as sensuous a dish as I’ve ever had.

We’ve had two glasses of Champagne, and now the handsome young sommelier in black with his silver tastevin (tasting cup) suggests a glass of white Burgundy. We’ve passed hour two.

Bring on the Burgundy.

And then comes dessert. For Caite, there is a hazelnut sphere covered in real gold leaf, with Frangelico mousse and praline ice cream. For me, a sort of Mont Blanc made of a chestnut crémeux.

Also, a pear sorbet nestled in a perfect meringue shell. And finally, a waiter brings what seems to be a pale brown eggshell with its top removed. “Put your spoon in, but don’t mix it; just dig down into the layers and eat it,” he cautions. Following his advice, we spoon up milk chocolate pot de crème, caramel foam, maple syrup. “What do you call this?” I ask Ripert. “What does it look like?” he asks with only the faintest French amusement.

“An egg?”

“We call it the egg,” he replies.

And so, on to the espresso and the mignar dises, the little sweets to go with it—a pear pâte de fruits, a coconut macaroon, something blissful in chocolate.

After three hours, Caite and I tumble laughing into the street as if we were in a 1930s comedy about the New York high life.

“You think, I’m here? Me? Oh my God.” This is my cousin as we leave Le Bernardin. “This is a wow restaurant, this is something, this is”—she adds with a French flourish—“sensationnel.”

From the book Marvelous Manhattan, by Reggie Nadelson; Copyright © 2021. Reprinted by arrangement with Artisan Books to be published in Avenue. All rights reserved.

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BENJAMIN AUGER/PARIS MATCH VIA GETTY IMAGES

UN CERTAIN REGARD Le Bernardin founders Maguy Le Coze and her brother, Gilbert, in 1979.

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Aaaahhh…

Frites Out!

DOLLY FAIBYSHEV/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

Now that New Yorkers can once again savor their beloved restaurants at full capacity, Heather Hodson and Angela M.H. Schuster round up a short list of some favorite French menu venues

UPTOWN

OOH LA LA! A Moulin Rouge-themed 40th birthday dinner for Julie Macklowe at La Goulue in December 2017.

CAFÉ LUXEMBOURG 200 West 70th Street cafeluxembourg.com (212) 873-7411

This Upper West Side bistro, which opened in 1983, was the second dining establishment opened by Lynn Wagenknecht and “wasband” and friend Keith McNally, cofounders of the wildly popular Odeon, which has remained in Wagenknecht’s hands since the two parted company in 1994.

Café Luxembourg has a faithful following of patrons seeking out its French bistro staples of steak tartare, moules frites, and croque monsieur, which have been complemented by comfort-food sides such as mac and cheese.

In addition to Odeon, which has become a Manhattan institution of sorts—being the birthplace of the Sex and the City signature Cosmo and the cover star of Jay McInerney’s 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City—Wagenknecht’s French portfolio includes the charming Café Cluny on West 12th Street, which opened in 2006.

DANIEL 60 East 65th Street danielnyc.com (212) 288-0033

No list of French restaurants in New York, indeed America, would be complete without Daniel, the Michelin-starred flagship of restaurateur Daniel Boulud, who has no fewer than ten Gotham establishments. At the age of 13, the New York–based French chef was an apprentice cook in one of the great restaurants in his native Lyon, receiving training in both the ancient culinary art of French cuisine, and the local, Lyonnaise methods. Possibly no one has more knowledge at his fingertips of la grande cuisine than Boulud.

At Daniel, the lucky few sit in a modern yet majestic dining room framed by old-world colonnades, dining on gastronomic creations that verge on ambrosia. Best dishes: wood-roasted pigeon and suckling pig.

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FETE ACCOMPLI Below right: the joys of French food; bottom: Flavia and Charles Masson at Flavia’s “A Touch of Pink” birthday celebration at LaxGrenouille on January 22, 2010 in New York City.

LA GOULUE 29 East 61st Street lagouluerestaurant.com 212-988-8169

When La Goulue, the clubby French bistro on the Upper East Side, was ejected from its Madison Avenue premises in 2009 after more than a quarter century, cries of anguish could be heard throughout the doorman buildings of Park Avenue. Mon dieu!

Where would we all eat now? In 2019, its owner, Jean Denoyer, a Parisian restaurateur who now has no less than five Manhattan eateries, finally reopened this bulwark of Franco-American civility just four blocks from the original. Temporarily shuttered due to the pandemic, La Goulue has opened its doors once again, and everything is reassuringly the same: the façade is the color of faded tobacco, the matchbooks are frog green; the interior is redolent of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting (Denoyer had cannily saved the wood paneling from the original location); executive chef Antoine Camin presides over the kitchen; the crowd is cosmopolitan, and the Bordeaux is flowing. Best dish: steak au poivre, done the way only La Goulue can. Entre nous: The fabled cheese soufflé is now only served at lunch.

LE VEAU D’OR 129 East 60th Street (212) 838-8133

When New York was the city of That Touch of Mink and men dressed like Cary Grant, Le Veau d’Or was the place to go. It opened in 1937 at the dawn of the golden age of French restaurants in New York, with authentic French food and staff, and from the beginning was frequented by the likes of 26

Ernest Hemingway, Marlene Dietrich, Oleg Cassini, and Grace Kelly. Customers had charge accounts, jacketed waiters would wheel around dessert carts to the French banquettes, and it was just fabulous—until the public’s taste moved on from old-school French cuisine. Nonetheless, Catherine Treboux, the daughter of longtime owner Robert Treboux, carried on heroically until 2011. Now, the Frenchette owners Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, veterans of the Keith McNally empire, are reviving the grand old duchess of the French dining scene, and hopes are riding high that it will once more become a bastion of La Belle France.

MIDTOWN CHEZ NAPOLEON 365 West 50th Street cheznapoleon.com (212) 265-6980

Enter this cozy, beloved, familyrun boîte in the Theater District and you are on French territory: Napoleon’s portrait is on the wall, noses are buried in the day’s Le Figaro, tablecloths are white, and the cuisine is old-school and sublime. In the 60 years since the 44-seater first served sailors from the French Line ships docked at the Hudson, it has barely changed,

which is how the loyal clientele like it, returning again and again for the canard a l’orange and bouillabaisse cooked by the Piaf-sized matriarch Elyane Bruno in the minuscule kitchen. Along with her son and co-owner, William Welles (a silent presence behind the bar, dressed in full goth), Madame Bruno has ensured that this enclave of traditional French cooking remains alive in New York. Vive la France!

Best dish: escargots de Bourgogne broiled in garlic butter (infused with an original 1908 absinthe recipe with a liver-ruining alcohol content of 78 percent). Entre nous: Ask for a bottle of the house-made vinaigrette to take home with you.

LA GRENOUILLE 3 East 52nd Street, la-grenouille.com (212) 752-1495

Founded in 1962 by Henri Soulé apprentice Charles Masson, Sr., and his wife, Gisèle, La Grenouille is the last of the famed New York haute cuisine restaurants opened in the 1950s and ’60s to survive, having deftly outlasted such formidable rivals as Lespinasse, Lutèce, and Soulé’s own La Côte Basque—all of which had shuttered by 2004.

Since 2014, the establishment has been operated under the watchful eye of Philippe Masson, grandson of its founder, and head chef, Jean Christophe Guiony.

LE VEAU D’OR: LAUREN LANCASTER; LA GRENOUILLE: AMBER DE VOS/ PATRICK MCMULLAN/GETTY IMAGES

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“Must orders” here include Dover sole in Dijon hollandaise and La Grenouille’s classic whitefish quenelles. Upstairs, a spectacular three-tiered skylight room with a grand fireplace, which is available for private parties, is dedicated to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who, during the 1940s, wrote part of the Le Petit Prince in that very room, which, at the time, was the home of noted French painter Bernard Lamotte.

JEAN-GEORGES 1 Central Park West jean-georges.com (212) 299-3900

BEAUTY AND THE BISTRO Inside the one and only Balthazar.

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Considered the crown jewel in Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s portfolio of 14 New York restaurants—with 42 and counting worldwide—this eponymous twoMichelin-starred eatery, which opened in 1997, showcases the Strasbourg-born, Paul Bocuse– trained chef’s signature cuisine,

which is built upon the intense flavors of seasonal farm-fresh produce rather than on the heavy cream and meat stocks of traditional French cuisine, with added influences from Asia. Highly sought dishes at the light-filled restaurant overlooking Central Park include tuna tartare with avocado and ginger marinade, seared scallops with caper-raisin sauce, and, during the summer months only, crunchy soft-shell crabs with a sugar-snap remoulade and pea salt—and, of course, the molten chocolate molten cake is not to be missed. For readers summering in the Hamptons, a bit of the Jean-Georges experience can be enjoyed at Topping Rose House, a historic property in Bridgehampton, which the chef took over from Tom Colicchio in 2016. As of this writing, rumor has it that Jean-Georges will be offering his culinary excellence at Sunset Beach, the uber-fashionable

boutique hotel and evening spot on Shelter Island, which had been renovated and relaunched by André Balazs in 1997. Make way for the gastronomies of the East End. TOUT VA BIEN 311 West 51st Street (212) 265-0190

Having opened its doors in 1948, Tout Va Bien is the oldest French bistro remaining in the Theater District and as such is populated largely by longtime patron expats and thespians—and will be eagerly welcoming them back this summer.

It is known to be a favorite of actress Angela Lansbury, who has been spied there on more than one occasion. The cozy ground-floor establishment, which today is under the stewardship of third-generation owners Michael and Cyril Touchard, has built a formidable reputation on such staples as escargots, saucisson en croûte, steak au poivre, moules

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frites, and a marvelously decadent crème brûlée. In 2013, les frères Touchard ventured out of their Midtown neighborhood, opening Le Baratin, a casual French bistro in the West Village.

DOWNTOWN AMÉLIE WINE BAR 22 West 8th Street ameliewinebar.com (212) 533-2962

An evening spent in this chic sliver of a wine bar feels like a portal to Saint-Tropez, such is the ebullient atmosphere. The crowd of young Euros and Upper East Side kids come for the sleek décor, the cool soundtrack, and the generous pour. The two Frenchmen behind the concept are Samie Dida and Germain Michel, who know a thing or two about their wine–the latter is a certified sommelier from the Court of Master Sommeliers and has his own biodynamic winery in the Languedoc region, along with a label with the gnomic sounding name of Cassette. If you prefer uptown, head to its sister bar, La Petite Amélie, which occupies an even slimmer premises on Amsterdam Avenue. Entre nous: Do try the cuvée from Michel’s Languedoc winery.

MICHAEL GRIMM, COURTESY OF BALTHAZAR; FELIX: JOCHEN TACK/DAS FOTOARCHIV/ALAMY

BALTHAZAR 80 Spring Street balthazarny.com (212) 965-1414

Since bursting on the New York food scene with the opening of the cocktail-centered Odeon and the French brasserie Pastis in the early 1980s, British-born restauranteur Keith McNally has his pulse on what’s next in the city that never sleeps. And his current portfolio of eateries, including Balthazar, which reopened in late March after a yearlong pandemic-related slumber, shows he is still at the top of his game. With a charming 102 seats for outdoor dining, the famed brasserie is once again attracting the beautiful people who have clamored for its comfort food comestibles, including its bubbly Gruyère-topped French onion soup gratinée—voted among the best in the city—which head chef Shane McBride serves up at a rate of 15 gallons a day. Not to be missed is the herbaceous steak tartare on crusty bread from Balthazar’s boulangerie just next door and all manner of freshly sourced raw bar

CAFE SOCIETY The French expat favorite Félix.

favorites. McNally’s Meatpacking favorite Pastis is also more than worth a meal, having reopened amid great fanfare on Gansevoort Street—a stone’s throw from its original location—after a five-year hiatus in June 2019.

FÉLIX 340 West Broadway felixnyc.com (212) 431-0021

“It’s a must—every French person in New York meets here. and the energy is amazing,” says Alexandre Assouline, the publishing scion, of this fashionable downtown watering hole, where the floorto-ceiling windows open up on to the sidewalk and the menu is surprisingly good. It’s also the best place to watch a French soccer game. Best dish: moules frites. Entre nous: It’s always packed, so book if you can.

FRENCHETTE 241 West Broadway frenchettenyc.com (212) 334-3883

Hailed as the new Odeon, getting a reservation at this sleek French bistro is virtually impossible.

The creation of Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson (both were opening chefs at Balthazar), so they know a thing or two about creating scene-based French bistros.

Frenchette definitely has all the ingredients: sleek Art Deco interior with oversize red banquettes, delicious food, beautiful people, and a wine list that is something of a talking point (their big thing is natural wines without sulfites, so the grapes are a little obscure).

Nasr and Hanson’s next big project is to revive the much loved Le Veau d’Or (see in the Uptown section). Obscure fact: The eatery takes its name from a David Johansen song which has the first line, “You call that love in French, but it’s just Frenchette.”

“Every French person in New York meets here, and the energy is amazing.”

Alexandre Assouline

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There is no better place to sink a couple of bottles of Brouilly at lunchtime [than Lucien].

L’ATELIER DE JOËL ROBUCHON 85 Tenth Avenue latelier-newyork.com (212) 488-8885

The humble potato was anything but in the hands of the late Poitiersborn Joël Robuchon, who, in 1981, conjured his signature purée de pomme out of but four simple ingredients—potatoes, milk, butter, and salt—the luscious ambrosia quickly earning him three Michelin stars at his first restaurant, Jamin in Paris. The dish has remained a must order at his two-Michelinstarred, 34-seat New York outpost, one of more than a dozen namesake open-kitchen, counterseating establishments worldwide.

(As of this writing, the Miami outpost had reopened with New York slated to follow suit this fall.)

Robuchon, who counted Gordon Ramsay and Eric Ripert among his protégés, once remarked during a preparation of the pommes, “I owe everything to these mashed potatoes.”

A disciple of Pierre Gagnaire in London and Gérard Vié of Les Trois Marches in Versailles, chef Nicolas (“Nico”) Abello made his mark at Daniel before opening the boutique 28-seat L’Appart in the spring of 2016. Located in Le District, the French marketplace in Battery Park City, the Michelinstarred open-kitchen eatery offers seasonal tasting menus served in a manner evocative of an intimate dinner party, with each dish paired with an exquisite tipple from its wine list, replete with Champagne and classified Bordeaux. L’Appart is notable for its haut caviar service and mouthwatering mains, including Dover sole.

LUCIEN 14 First Avenue luciennyc.com (212) 260-6481

A favorite of the French diaspora, there is no better place to sink a 30

couple of bottles of Brouilly at lunchtime. The creation of the late, lauded Lucien Bahaj, who moved from France to New York in time to cut his teeth at Indochine during the ’80s restaurant-as-cool-club scene, Lucien became the Frenchstyle bistro for the art crowd in the aughties. Now run by his son Zac, it has retained its feel of a cultural salon, where zine editors cross paths with art and fashion people and the doors stay open until 12 a.m. Best dish: the steak frites, hands down.

RAOUL’S 180 Prince Street raouls.com (212) 966-3518

One of the last great old-school neighborhood restaurants downtown, Raoul’s was near mythical back in the day. Opened in 1975 by brothers Serge and Guy Raoul, it became a magnet for artists and drag queens, bohemians and degenerate bankers, and in the

’80s, its heyday, the banquettes lining the narrow front room would be packed, people might dance on the saloon-like mahogany bar, and drink (and drugs) might be imbibed. Karim Raoul, son of Serge, is now the proprietor, and in its new, more respectable iteration it still feels like Raoul’s, only the food is better. The steak au poivre is one of the best in the city, and the burger (we know, it isn’t French, but it must be mentioned) is arguably the best on the Eastern seaboard. As for the crowd, now that the pandemic is over, Raoul’s devotees old and new are beating a path to its door. “People are giving me handshakes and tearing up,” Corwin Kilvert, the dapper manager, tells Avenue. “What a powerful thing, what a powerful place.” Entre nous: Only 12 burgers are made each evening and they can only be eaten at the bar. Best table: The corner banquette by the door is best positioned for people watching.

HIGH STEAKS Lucien, the beloved French restaurant in the East Village. Opposite page: nothing tastes as good as a steak and a glass of vin rouge.

LUCIEN: ROBERT K. CHIN/ALAMY; FRENCHETTE: MELANIE DUNEA, COURTESY OF FRENCHETTE

L’APPART 225 Liberty Street lappartnyc.com (212) 981-8577

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Graphic Content Warning: The following pages contain must-have items that may be harmful to one’s wallet

Chanel 11.12 handbag. $7,500; chanel.com

Aura Fine Gems “Romy” yellow diamond ring. $10,400; aurafinegems.com 32

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Cartier “Clash de Cartier” rose gold necklace. $60,000; cartier.com

Bhansali gold and pavé diamond link earrings. $3,510; bergdorfgoodman.com

Gabriela Hearst “Matrona” coat. $19,900; gabrielahearst.com

Christian Louboutin “Lagoadonna” suede wedge sandals. $945; matchesfashion.com

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BUY CURIOUS

Dior “CD Icon” signet ring. $560; dior.com

You Know He Wants It! When fashion is the only thing on his mind

Burberry marine-sketch print cotton trench coat. $3,550; burberry.com

Manolo Blahnik “Campcho” calf leather lace-up boot. $1,195; manoloblahnik.com

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Loro Piana “Seaside Walk” espadrilles. $850; loropiana.com

Montblanc 1858 Geosphere. $6,100; montblanc.com

Paul Smith trucker jacket. $1,775; paulsmith.com

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JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL, CLAIRE DORN; INSTALLATION VIEW, THOMAS GARNIER, BOTH COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND PERROTIN, © JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL/ADAGP, PARIS & ARS, NEW YORK, 2021

JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL, CLAIRE DORN; INSTALLATION VIEW, THOMAS GARNIER, BOTH COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND PERROTIN, © JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL/ADAGP, PARIS & ARS, NEW YORK, 2021

FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH Jean-Michel Othoniel’s magical water sculpture The Beautiful Dances (2015) at the Château de Versailles is the first original work to be added to the historic property’s André LeNôtre-designed gardens in 350 years. Opposite: the artist with his 2020 canvas, La Rose du Louvre, which was acquired by the Parisian museum last year.

Alchemy of Beauty Art is everywhere you look this summer. Angela M.H. Schuster rounds up some of the best on view both in the city and on Long Island’s East End

JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL: WILD ROSEBUDS Perrotin 130 Orchard Street Through August 13

“F

or me, beauty is something that brings you to another level of contemplation, and fills you with a profound sense of joy,” says Jean-Michel Othoniel. Chatting with Avenue from his Paris atelier, the French conceptual artist has been putting the final touches on a suite of new flower-inspired paintings and decadently beautiful works in blown glass, which were unveiled at the Perrotin gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in June.

Blown glass sculptures in particular, he explains, are the product of a violent creation process where the material is often “wounded” in the creation of his work, which he sees as a “metaphor for the beauty and sadness that exist within human experience as well as nature.”

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For the past three decades, Othoniel has been experimenting with his alchemical wonders, initially executing intimately scaled works, which, in time, led to a host of monumental commissions that have graced the grounds of Versailles, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, and, later this year, the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. All the while, he has pursued an obsession with flowers and their infinite symbolic associations. “Flowers allow us to explore our concerns with ephemerality and permanence, life and death, figure and ground, form and color.”

In recent years, the artist has found himself in high demand by luxury brands, including Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Chanel, which have tapped him to collaborate on a host of projects. Such collaborations, he says, have been a natural outgrowth of the personal relationships he has built with those who collect his oeuvre. It was Bernard Arnault and his daughter, Delphine, for instance, who invited him to create the iconic J’Adore bottle for Dior, and starchitect Peter Marino, who commissioned a suite of important works for 38

Chanel’s flagship stores around the globe.

For the New York exhibition, Othoniel is presenting ten paintings and seven sculptures in mirrored glass inspired by the chrysanthemum flower, or kiku in Japanese, a symbol of joy, pleasure, and eternity. The sculptures represent a continuation of artist’s “infinite knots” series, which he embarked on a decade ago in collaboration with Mexican mathematician Aubin Arroyo. Each of the resulting glass constructions is “based on a mathematical theory used to calculate the infinities of reflections contained within one sphere of mirrors.”

Gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin says of Othoniel’s work, “It is monumental yet delicate, baroque yet minimal, poetic yet political. His contemplative forms, like oxymorons, have the power to reconcile opposites. With a capacity to harmonize people with their environment, his art invites viewers to inhabit his world through reflection and motion.”

The exhibition runs through August 13. A retrospective of Othoniel’s work will open at the Petit Palais in Paris in September.

BOUTON ROSE, ©JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL, TANGUY BEURDELEY; KIKU–AYAMEIRO, ©JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL, CLAIRE DORN, BOTH COURTESY OF OTHONIEL STUDIO AND PERROTIN, © JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL/ADAGP, PARIS & ARS, NEW YORK, 2021

CULTURE

“Flowers allow us to explore our concerns with ephemerality and permanence, life and death, figure and ground, form and color.”

Jean-Michel Othoniel

BLOOMERS Bouton Rose, a 2020 ink and gold leaf on canvas, and opposite: KikuAyameiro (Iris color) (2020), a sculpture in mirrored glass and stainless steel.

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BOUTON ROSE, ©JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL, TANGUY BEURDELEY; KIKU–AYAMEIRO, ©JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL, CLAIRE DORN, BOTH COURTESY OF OTHONIEL STUDIO AND PERROTIN, © JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL/ADAGP, PARIS & ARS, NEW YORK, 2021

ALMA ALLEN ↑ Kasmin Sculpture Garden 509 West 27th Street Kasmin Gallery 514 West 28th Street Through August 13

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his summer, visitors to the High Line are being treated to trio of large-scale outdoor works in bronze by American sculptor Alma Allen, presented by the Kasmin Sculpture Garden amid a “rewilded” urban meadow on the rooftop of its West 27th Street space. The exhibition continues with more than two dozen “small bronze talismans,” some studies for larger commissions by the artist, who casts and finishes sculptures at his on-site bronze foundry at his studio in the hills of Tepoztlán, Mexico.

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INSTALLATION VIEW, © ALMA ALLEN, CHRISTOPHER STACH/COURTESY OF KASMIN GALLERY; ALMA ALLEN, PIA RIVEROLA

CULTURE

INSTALLATION VIEW, © ALMA ALLEN, CHRISTOPHER STACH/COURTESY OF KASMIN GALLERY; ALMA ALLEN, PIA RIVEROLA

BRONZE AGE Alma Allen with a monumental bronze at his studio in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Opposite: the artist's rooftop installation at Kasmin Sculpture Garden in Chelsea.

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TOMASHI JACKSON: THE LAND CLAIM →

I

Parrish Art Museum 279 Montauk Highway Water Mill July 11–November 7

t had been a whirlwind year for Tomashi Jackson, coming off the 2019 Whitney Biennial with a six-week ARCAthens residency, followed by a solo show at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, followed by commitments to produce a grounds-encompassing show at the Parrish Art Museum, when the pandemic hit. “Fortunately, I'm feeling over the moon with gratitude right now, with all of the generous artistic and intellectual support I have received during this crazy time,” the artist tells Avenue, speaking from her studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, she has been wrapping up her presentation at the Parrish Art Museum— postponed from 2020—as well as preparing for a fall exhibition at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she is a fellow.

Her multilayered narratives tackle the fraught subjects of race and identity—the relationship between political systems and cultural conceptions of personhood—and how the past continues to impact the present, with contemporary policies heavily influenced by the backlash to “great society” policies. A case in point, she says, is Brown v.

Board of Education and how its legacy of resource deprivation persists at the intersection of tech policy and civil rights. If anything, the pandemic 42

brought into stark relief the disparities between the haves and the have-nots when it comes access to education and the necessary tools for remote learning.

Yet, for the Houston-born artist, who lives and works in Cambridge and New York City, her visually stunning work is anything but one-sided; her compositions exploring all facets of the deeply complex stories they tell.

For the PAM project, Jackson has developed a new body of work based on deep archival research that includes large-scale paintings, site-specific drawings, and an outdoor sound installation. Its collective focus: the historic and contemporary lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families on Long Island’s East End, and how issues of housing, transportation, livelihood, migration, and agriculture have linked them.

Tomashi Jackson: The Land Claim is presented as part of the museum’s Platform series, which, according to exhibition organizer Corinne Erni, offers “an annual invitation to an artist to consider the entire museum as a site for works that transcend disciplinary boundaries, encouraging new ways to experience art, architecture, landscape, and community.”

Jackson is represented in New York by the Tilton Gallery.

IS ANYBODY GONNA BE SAVED?, © TOMASHI JACKSON, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND TILTON GALLERY, NY; TOMASHI JACKSON, CHRISTOPHER GREGORY/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

HER STORY Below: Tomashi Jackson's 2020 mixed media work Is Anybody Gonna Be Saved (Red and Black), includes Pentelic marble dust, soil from an Ohio Underground Railroad site, and American electoral ephemera. Opposite: the artist in her Brooklyn studio.

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“His images of fantastical beasts exude a playful candidness that defies the pretensions of high art and invites viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods.”

PLAYTIME From top: an installation view of Robert Nava's Pace show in Palm Beach this past winter and Lightning Keeper, Kiss of Death, a 2020 acrylic and grease pencil on canvas.

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INSTALLATION VIEW, COURTESY OF PACE GALLERY; LIGHTNING KEEPER, KISS OF DEATH, © ROBERT NAVA, HEIDI BOHNENKAMP/COURTESY PACE GALLERY

Marc Glimcher

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ROBERT NAVA ←

UNTITLED, © HENRY TAYLOR, KEN ADLARD/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH

Pace 68 Park Place East Hampton August 12—29

GAME DAY Untitled, a 2018 acrylic on canvas by Los Angeles–based artist Henry Taylor.

“R

obert Nava’s work reveals a new contemporary mythology with his chimeric beasts, part children’s fantasy, part expressionistic composition, exploiting the intersection of the playful and the threatening,” says Pace president and CEO Marc Glimcher.

This summer, his gallery is presenting a solo exhibition featuring new paintings and drawings by

the Brooklyn-based artist, who recently joined the Pace roster in its East Hampton space.

Often created to the vitalizing beat of deep house music, Glimcher explains Nava’s large-scale paintings “conjure a realm awash in magic and possibility, where beings are always seemingly on the verge of transmogrification. His images of fantastical beasts exude a playful candidness that defies the pretensions of high art and invites viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods.”

HENRY TAYLOR ↑ Hauser & Wirth 9 Main Street Southampton July 1–August 1

F

or his first solo exhibition in the Hamptons space, Los Angeles–based artist Henry Taylor is presenting a focused selection of recent paintings and sculptures, including many created during his residency and show at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Among the highlights is a suite of paintings from his Jockey and Caddy series, including Untitled, an acrylic on canvas from 2018.

“The works on view reflect Taylor’s interest in the full breadth of the human condition, and the social movements and political structures that have shaped it,” says Iwan Wirth, adding that his highly personal visual vocabulary is rooted in depictions of the people and communities closest to him, layered with broader cultural references.

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CULTURE

La Vie en Rose All hail Hotel Du Cap-Eden-Roc, queen of the French Riviera

“On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald of the Hotel du Cap in his 1934 novel, Tender is the Night. From the moment the Belle Epoque mansion—originally built by the then editor of Le Figaro newspaper, Hippolyte de Villemessant, as a retreat for wornout writers—opened its doors in 1889 as a hotel under the ownership of Antoine Sella, it has been a symbol of French glamour and a magnet for the artists, film stars, politicians, and society figures of the day. Ernest Hemingway visited, as did Rudolph Valentino, Isadora Duncan, Ella Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, the Kennedys, Robert Evans, Taylor and Burton, John and Yoko, Serge and Jane, Mick, Kate, and Cate. Picasso swam in the iconic pool dug into the cliffside, and drew nudes in the hotel guest book; Orson Welles hung out at the waterfront cabana of Hollywood studio executive Darryl Zanuck with film star Jean Howard; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor languished poolside while on honeymoon; François-Henri Pinault and Salma Hayek partied here with Sean “Diddy” Combs and the English socialite Daphne Guinness. Everybody who is anybody has stayed at the du Cap, from the Jazz Age to our digital times. This lavishly illustrated book tells the story of its first 150 years, with never-before-seen photographs of guests and an introduction by Graydon Carter.

It’s a fitting tribute to the most seductive hotel of the French Riviera, and arguably, of the world.

—heather hodson 46

BARBARA MULLEN AND MARIE-HÉLÈNE ARNAUD, PHOTOGRAPHY BY GEORGES DAMBIER

Hotel Du Cap Eden Roc: A Timeless Legend on the French Riviera by Alexandra Campbell and Graydon Carter (Flammarion, $85)

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POOLSIDE VIEW, PHOTOGRAPHY BY SLIM AARONS; CECIL BEATON, ARCHIVES HDCER; AMFAR, HOTEL DU CAP-EDEN-ROC; MARLENE DIETRICH, ARCHIVES HDCER

COME ON IN, THE WATER’S LOVELY Clockwise, from right: Slim Aarons captures the hotel's iconic pool in the summer of 1976; Cecil Beaton and his sister, Nancy, who stayed in 1929; guests at the 2016 amfAR (The Foundation for Aids Research) gala enjoy the hotel’s garden; Marlene Dietrich in 1933, with the hotel’s beach houses in the background.

Opposite: Marie-Hélène Arnaud, the “face of Chanel” in the ’50s, with a friend aboard a Riva in 1957.

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Snappy Dressers A tribute to the legendary Bill Cunningham and his ever-present camera

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Bill Cunningham Was There: Spring Flings + Summer Soirées by John Kurdewan and Steven Stolman; photographs

by Bill Cunningham (Rizzoli, $40)

“Child,” Bill Cunningham said in his sprightly Boston accent, “you have to treat everyone equally.”

Whether photographing fashion shows in Paris from the front row, or guests at the Met Gala, or an anonymous but undeniably chic New Yorker out and about whose personal style happened to catch his eye, the late photographer Bill Cunningham documented the beautiful people and scenes he discovered everywhere he looked.

Bill Cunningham Was There collects images from the columns Evening Hours and On the Streets he produced each week for the Sunday New York Times’s Style section. Evening Hours was a chronicle of notables of the New York social scene, while On the Street montaged emerging trends spied along his favorite stretch of Fifth Avenue, outside a fashion show, or in any nook of the city to which he famously rode his bicycle between events. For four decades, until well into his eighties, the puckish Cunningham and his camera seemed to be omnipresent.

Within this book are many of his fastidiously crafted columns, including an ensemble of 19 women wearing oversize white shirts while attending the Paris spring/summer collections 2012, or an outrageous rush of orange gowns and ties worn by guests at the annual Spring Garden Party for Fellows at the Frick Collection, featuring Frederic Leighton’s 1895 painting Flaming June, in 2015. Also here are photographs from his seasonal trips to enclaves of the East Coast social circuit such as Newport, Saratoga, Millbrook, and Long Island.

Personal tributes by John Kurdewan, Cunningham’s devoted technical and production artist at the New York Times, and Steven Stolman, a writer and designer, recall their working relationship and friendships in the decades they shared. That Bill Cunningham touched so many hearts and spirits is what makes this a lovely, noisy, boisterous memento of the ongoing party that is New York.—catherine talese

BILL CUNNINGHAM, PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVEN STOLMAN; THE JAZZ AGE LAWN PARTY, BILL CUNNINGHAM

PARTY ON Bill Cunningham and his camera; right: guests photographed by Cunningham at the Jazz Age Lawn Party on Governors Island, an event the photographer rarely missed.

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Bird’s Eye Hue A photographer’s point of view extends from the ground into the air

Gray Malin: The Essential Collection (Abrams, $40)

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRAY MALIN

The fine art and travel photographer Gray Malin is best known for his aerial photographs, great swooping dolly shots of the candy-striped beach loungers of Saint Tropez or the green and blue handkerchief of Central Park on a hazy summer day. Gray Malin: The Essential Collection (Abrams, $40) celebrates the first decade of his work, taking readers across the world to areas both remote and urban, and providing a big dose of escapism along the way.

—heather hodson

THE VIEW UP HERE Above: multicolored sun shades on an East Hampton beach, photographed by Gray Malin, and (top) his shot of Central Park looking south.

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Bold Comfort Farm

PEONIES FROM HEAVEN A selection of peonies grown at Clove Brook Farm; below: Serendipity, a fabric

by Sister Parish, covers a banquet table decorated with dahlias.

The ceramicist Christopher Spitzmiller on animal husbandry and other matters

“I firmly believe each of us has a garden within us, and it’s our own job to tend to it, nurture it, and let it flourish,” writes the New York artisan Christopher Spitzmiller in his enchanting book about his homestead in Millbrook. Beginning in spring, it fits within the tradition of the Farmer’s Almanac, the chapters following the seasons and including planting schedules, seasonal recipes, advice on animal husbandry, personal anecdotes, and the encouragement of a wise, guiding authorial hand in how to sustain an abundant farm.

As a celebrated ceramicist, Christopher Spitzmiller’s lamps, tableware, mirrors, and accessories draw upon the American interior design tradition, including that of friends and mentors Albert Hadley, Mario Buatta, and Bunny Williams, whose work and influence he proudly honors. As a gentleman farmer, his art and craft are deeply connected to nature. Gourd-like shapes, designs in faux bois, and green spruce and blue hydrangea glazes are all found in his pottery, as well as his own signature marble pattern.

The book is both practical—there is a detailed guide to purveyors and other resources in the 50

back—and inspirational, urging the reader to experiment in the garden and home, with suggestions on seed saving, drying flowers, and seasonal gifts, as well as hosting and business practices.

The accompanying photography by Gemma and Andrew Ingalls is fresh, vibrant, and richly instructive.—catherine talese

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GEMMA & ANDREW INGALLS

A Year at Clove Brook Farm

by Christopher Spitzmiller (Rizzoli, $45)

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The City That Finally Sleeps by photographer Mark Seliger (Brilliant Press, $60)

As the city went into lockdown, we experienced it as we’d never seen it before: at work, but empty. Mark Seliger, the celebrated portrait photographer, captured the iconic views and the formerly bustling but now silent streets in the silvery tones of a silent movie. The spirit of New York comes through in the theater marquees (“Be Well”; “We'll be back soon”) and in his portraits of the first responders.

The City That Finally Sleeps is a tribute to a time that changed the city and those of us living here.—catherine talese PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK SELIGER; WATERLINE SQUARE, SCOTT FRANCES / PERMISSION GRANTED BY GID MANAGEMENT; VIDANTA LOS CABOS, PERMISSION GRANTED BY HAKKASAN GROUP

All proceeds from the sale of this book will support New York Cares in their Covid-19 relief efforts SILENT NIGHT Washington Square Park photographed by Mark Seliger during the pandemic.

The Glossy Posse Glam coffee table books on architecture and photography

Drama: David Rockwell

by Bruce Mau and Sam Lubell (Phaidon, $59.95)

HIGH CONCEPT Above: architect and designer David Rockwell’s The Circulation Ribbon at Nexus, the Waterline Club; right: his Vidanta Los Cabos in Baja California Sur, Mexico.

David Rockwell’s 2021 Oscars set design—his third—did what he does best, conjuring the glamour and theater of the early Academy Awards for a pandemic-era ceremony. The New York architect and designer’s childhood was defined by theater, with a mother who was a vaudeville dancer and choreographer, and who would cast her son in local repertory productions. Rockwell’s diverse works, spanning hotels and restaurants, museums and Tony-award winning set designs, all reference his concept of performance, and in this book, chapters are devoted to the six fundamental theatrical concepts: Audience, Ensemble, Worlds, Story, Journey, and Impermanence. With contributions from the museum director and curator Thelma Golden, the architect Daniel Libeskind, and Oscar-winning production designer Adam Stockhausen, among others, this is a vivid exploration of Rockwell’s dazzling projects and philosophy.—heather hodson JULY—AUGUST 2021 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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Fiction

Books to slip in your beach bag this summer

THE PLOT

by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon Books)

How far would a writer go to have the perfect plot? This is the question Jean Hanff Korelitz, whose bestselling You Should Have Known was adapted by HBO as The Undoing, explores in her latest novel, The Plot.

After riding the wave of critical acclaim that followed his first novel, Jacob Finch Bonner is stuck teaching in a mediocre MFA program. Unmoored and unmotivated, Jake spends his days encouraging new talent, including one particularly arrogant student, Evan Parker, who claims during their first meeting that the novel he’s working on is “a sure thing.”

Jake tries to disabuse Evan of his fantasies of grandeur, then Evan tells him the plot. When Jake discovers years later that his former student is deceased, he decides he has no choice but to write the story down.

What follows is a heart-stopping tale of greed, ambition, and murder.

Upon publication of the novel, Jake is thrust into the spotlight, and inundated with fame and money, just as Evan predicted. But when a mysterious accusation comes to light—that the entire novel was stolen—Jake must decide how far he’ll go to protect his newfound glory. Book clubs take note: The Plot is a sure thing. claire gibson UNDER THE WAVE AT WAIMEA

by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

“We all have a wave in our life,” the literary legend Paul Theroux told NPR recently. “We have more than one wave: unemployment, divorce, hard times. That’s a wave.

And you learn to surf that wave to shore.” In his terrific new novel, the protagonist, a 62-year-old big wave surfer and high school dropout called Joe Sharkey, is thrown the biggest wave of his life when he 52

runs over a man on a dark road one night while driving drunk. Sucked into the undertow of this accident, Sharkey begins a struggle with his own mortality, at one point nearly drowning at the break where he enjoyed his greatest surfing triumph. Theroux—who has written dozens of novels, including The Mosquito Coast, and almost as many nonfiction books, including The Great Railway Bazaar—has made his home on the North Shore of Oahu for the past 30 years, and has a subtle understanding of surfing and its subculture. His portrait of an aging Hawaiian man coming undone is superb, but the most hypnotic passages of all are those on surfing and its transportive power. heather hodson

SECOND PLACE

by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

“It’s a cabin in the woods, straight out of a horror story!” That’s the main thrust of Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Second Place, which offers a captivating, careful study on what it means to live, create art, and voyeuristically peer into the lives of others, while they do the same in return. The story begins when a woman searching for an ineffable something late in life invites a famous male artist to visit her coastal home and use her small, glass-enclosed cabin as his studio.

Written as a partly confessional

letter to a friend, Jeffers, the novel chronicles what happens next.

The artist, “L,” arrives with Brett, a stunning and opinionated young woman, and their presence upends the narrator’s quiet existence, sending her on a path toward personal catastrophe. In sentence after insightful sentence, Cusk draws us into the mind and heart of a lost soul, whose life is loosely held together, but on the verge of falling apart. What unfolds is a shimmering tale of hope, beauty, and suspense—a rumination on the terror of being, and the seductive lecherousness of the male gaze. claire gibson

THE OTHER BLACK GIRL

by Zakiya Dalila Harris (Simon & Schuster)

In Harris’s page-turning debut novel, The Other Black Girl, readers are thrust into the cutthroat world of New York publishing through the eyes of Nella Rogers, whose career is on the rise, despite her frustration that she remains the only Black employee of Wagner Books. That is, until Hazel, a Harlem-born woman with ombré locks, moves into the cubical beside hers. Charming, self-effacing, and productive, Hazel rises quickly in the estimation of the company, leaving Nella feeling adrift and confused. Hazel offers Nella hair care tips and the occasional knowing glance at a white colleague’s tone-deaf joke.

But when Nella’s career takes a sudden, uncomfortable downturn— when notes are stuffed in her desk telling her to leave wagner, she begins to suspect something more nefarious about her new colleague.

Harris’s thought-provoking thriller explores the microaggressions, slights, and dismissals that Black women often face in their careers. While exposing privilege and racism, the novel also deftly pulls readers toward its chilling climax. You’ll be guessing right to the last page. claire gibson

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THE GREAT MISTAKE: A NOVEL

by Jonathan Lee (Knopf)

This fictionalized story about Andrew Haswell Green, the real-life city planner known as “the Father of Greater New York,” begins and ends with his murder in broad daylight on Park Avenue on a Friday the 13th. The son of a Massachusetts farmer, Green had become a towering figure in New York government and society by the turn of the 20th century. His shooting death at the age of 83 rocked America, with the New York World newspaper remarking at the time: “He loved New York as Dante loved Florence.” Jonathan Lee, author of the 2014 novel High Dive, gives events surrounding his death the whodunit treatment, taking us on a detective's chase around the city, with a narrative voice that blends biography and fiction.

Along the way, he reintroduces us to the best-known New York City institutions associated with Green’s civic legacy, including Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Bronx Zoo, and many others. mark libatique

Nonfiction

THE PREMONITION: A PANDEMIC STORY

by Michael Lewis (W.W. Norton)

Few writers can turn esoteric issues into real-life thrillers quite

like Michael Lewis. With his latest offering, the author of The Big Short and Liar’s Poker takes the reader behind the scenes of America’s handling of the pandemic, revealing how a disparate group of medical visionaries (he calls them “superheroes”) courageously fought to save the country from catastrophe. The story pits this group of biochemists, policy wonks, and renegade local government officials against the combined supervillainy of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention incompetence, federal dysfunction, and White House indifference. While we know how that turned out, Lewis’s method of stripping away abstruse details of epidemiology to focus on the characters involved makes a compulsively readable tale. Scenes such as the one in which Charity Dean, the intrepid assistant director of the California Department of Public Health, performs an autopsy in a morgue parking lot with a pair of shears while men in Hazmat suits hover in fear will surely be destined for the big screen. heather hodson

GATECRASHER

by Ben Widdicombe (Simon & Schuster)

What can one say about a memoir that’s written by your magazine’s editor-in-chief? To start with, the paperback edition of Gatecrasher, by Ben Widdicombe, is undoubtedly cheaper than the hardcover was last year. So that’s a plus. Also, it’s lighter and easier to stick in a bag for the beach, which is definitely the right place to enjoy this dishy recounting of his decades both as a tabloid celebrity gossip columnist, and later, a social writer for the New York Times. One might also have to acknowledge, mainly because he’s going to read this before it gets printed, that the book contains several entertaining behind-the-scenes anecdotes from events ranging from the Oscars

to the Met Gala, is satisfyingly rude about rich people, and even, occasionally, competently written.

Otherwise, take your chances with it. ambrose mcgaffney

own knowledge of his tastes. “It’s a hard and lonely thing to coauthor a book about the wonders of world travel when your writing partner, that very traveler, is no longer traveling that world,” she states in the introduction. What she has produced is more precious time in the company of Anthony Bourdain, and for that we thank her. heather hodson

WORLD TRAVEL: AN IRREVERENT GUIDE

by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever (Ecco)

Television personality, renegade chef, globetrotter, social activist, chain-smoker, confessor, philosopher: Anthony Bourdain contained multitudes. Before he became famous as the host of the Food Network’s A Cook’s Tour and CNN’s Parts Unknown, Bourdain slogged it out as a cook for two decades in high-end Manhattan restaurants, places of intense pressure and combustible tempers where, after a particularly grueling ten hours searing strip steaks, a knife fight might break out, and drink and drugs could be rampant.

He sent a no-holds-barred account of this semi-criminal subculture to The New Yorker on spec, written in his instantly recognizable and thrillingly profane prose. From that followed a best-selling memoir (Kitchen Confidential, published in 2000), culinary books, crime novels, and a meteoric career as a television host.

Bourdain was a charismatic presence with a restless, inquiring mind and the emotional impact of his global culinary adventures, as he interviewed ordinary people and bore witness to their dreams and struggles, took viewers by surprise. At the time of his death by suicide in June 2018, his career was in orbit. Next would have been a world travel guide with his longtime assistant, Laurie Woolever, and after his death, with the blessing of his estate, she carried on writing it. The result, World Travel, covers 43 countries and includes Bourdain’s recommendations for restaurants, hotels, and other favorite spots, fleshed out with essays by his friends and family and Woolever’s

THE COMPLETE MEMOIRS

by Pablo Neruda (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

“The southern rain is patient and keeps falling endlessly from the gray sky,” the literary, diplomatic, and political giant Pablo Neruda writes at the beginning his masterpiece memoir. The note of deep stillness it sounds is a far cry from the cosmopolitan world the Chilean poet would eventually help shape. From there, he kicks off his account of a life in which silent meditation lived hand in hand with relentless personal upheaval and movement.

First published in 1974, the year following his death, and now released with newly discovered material, this expanded version of his memoirs gives color to the tumultuous story of his life, as he morphed from political leader to international exile to returning hero who would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 “for a poetry that, with the action of an elemental force, brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams.”

In his memoirs, Neruda shares himself through the language of someone who spent a life thinking in poetry. From chapter to chapter, he grounds the episodes that shaped him in the intimate recollection of unforgettable people, hidden spaces, new flavors, and secret conversations. This is the revelatory self-portrait of a man whose contemporary, Gabriel García Márquez, another legend of Latin literature, once called “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” mark libatique

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NEW YORK, JE T’AIME The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), headquartered in an elegant townhouse on East 60th Street, is New York’s premier French cultural institution. In this special section, Avenue asks its president, Marie-Monique Steckel, as well as a dozen prominent French and Francophone New Yorkers, to speak on what they love about their adopted city.

Photograph by Syed Yaqeen

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MARIE-MONIQUE STECKEL

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HEADQUARTERS, COURTESY OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE

“THE PANDEMIC… GAVE US TIME TO DREAM, AND WE ARE DREAMING AS BIG AS WE CAN.”

he first time Marie-Monique Steckel met an American was August 25, 1944, the day Paris was liberated after four years of Nazi occupation. She was five years old, and a neighbor brought her to the Place de la Bastille to witness the arrival of Allied forces as they marched in triumph through the city. A GI smiled and handed her an orange.

“I had never seen an orange before,” she recalls. “And that chance encounter with that young American soldier became a wonderful memory.”

Nearly eight decades later, Steckel is still reveling in the encounters she has with Americans.

As president of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) since 2004, she has worked to create a deep cultural relationship between France and New York.

“I grew up on an island the Île Saint-Louis—in the heart of Paris at the edge of the Pont Marie,” she says. “Bridges were a part of my daily routine—and I didn’t know it at the time, but my life was to build bridges between France and the United States.”

For more than a century, FIAF has worked to promote the traditions, values, and language of France. Its headquarters, in a 1920s Beaux Arts building on East 60th Street, is a powerful magnet for anyone who wants to learn French, soak up French culture, celebrate young artists, or meet leading French and Francophone thinkers, cinema directors, authors, and celebrities.

Ballet star Benjamin Millepied (aka Mr. Natalie Portman) showed off his first choreography here.

Actress Isabelle Adjani and dancer Germaine Acogny have performed in FIAF’s avant-garde interdisciplinary Crossing the Line festival, and the World Nomads project has celebrated artists from Francophone countries, including Haiti, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco.

Before Covid, FIAF was presenting 250 cultural events and welcoming more than 100,000 visitors a year. Scholars and amateurs alike accessed its French multimedia library, the largest in the United States.

But the pandemic froze most of FIAF’s activities and initiatives. Annual revenues of $12 million—raised from language center tuitions, memberships, events, and donations—plunged significantly in 2020, and FIAF was forced to shed about 30 percent of its staff.

“The pandemic has forced many New Yorkers to live under a bell jar,” says Steckel.

But the same spirit that drove her to plunge into the dark (and polluted!) waters of the Seine for a swim when she was six years old motivates her today. “I was taking risks then, and I take risks now,” she says.

As an undergraduate at Sciences Po in Paris, Steckel looked eastward to the Soviet Union as the subject of her studies. But when her father, a French historian of Roman epigraphs, was given a visiting post at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, she spent a year at Yale, where she met an American law student who would later become her husband. She joined FIAF after a series of jobs in marketing, including as director of

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MARIE-MONIQUE STECKEL PHOTOGRAPH BY SYED YAQEEN

MADAME PRESIDENT Marie-Monique Steckel has presided over the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) since 2004; opposite: the organization’s elegant Beaux Arts headquarters on East 60th Street.

communications for a new party created by an upand-coming politician and later French president, Jacques Chirac.

In 2004 she commenced a years-long, $20 million project to transform FIAF’s outdated headquarters into a state-of-the art center with the addition of Le Skyroom, a 1,600-square-foot multipurpose atrium.

And FIAF’s renovated Florence Gould Hall has become a prominent venue for international cinema, theater, music, and dance.

“To be sure, 2020 was a challenge which pushed us to pivot online and reimagine all of our activities,” she says. “The pandemic has given us an expanded view of our mission. It gave us time to dream, and we are dreaming as big as we can.”

Among the dreams are new online platforms and film projects, as well as outdoor concerts and theater performances. “ ‘Everything outdoors’ is my motto; how we use the city in a new and more human way is my challenge,” she says.

FIAF is discussing with Lincoln Center ways to use its spaces together, and hopes to present a performance of Molière’s Tartuffe in Prospect

Park next spring. And it will continue to rely on the army of native French speakers who provide FIAF’s “up-close and personal” language instruction. “Human contact with teachers is our secret to success,” she says. “It’s the importance of partage—the sharing—with students. You can’t get that online or through apps.”

And of course, the other element in this recipe for success is the city itself. “There is a freedom of ideas that is unique to New York,” Steckel says.

“Here, the bigger the dream, the more success you have. Theatre, dance, art—it is always such a joy to be part of what is happening in New York. New York will enjoy a renaissance, and FIAF will be a major part of it.”

Bastille Day at FIAF was traditionally a grand event closed 60th Street between Lexington and Fifth and attracted as many as 40,000 visitors.

This year it will be more subdued and smaller— perhaps only half as big.

“Maybe you can celebrate liberation from the pandemic by handing out oranges,” I suggest.

“Exactement!” says Steckel “Exactement!”

—Elaine Sciolino JULY—AUGUST 2021 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO

Singer

“I CAN TRAVEL AROUND THE WORLD TO WONDERFUL VENUES, BUT WHEN I COME BACK TO NEW YORK, THERE’S A FESTIVAL RIGHT

OUTSIDE MY DOORSTEP.” ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO

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ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO, ROBBY KLEIN/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES FOR THE RECORDING ACADEMY

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hat I love about Central Park, it’s available to people and there’s music,” says A n gé l i q u e K i d jo , the celebrated Beninborn singer, who moved to New York City from France in 1997. She and her husband, the French producer and musician Jean Hébrail, love to spend afternoons there together, enjoying the sights and sounds. “We watch the children discover new types of music and projects. There, you have the ability to do that,” she says.

But it’s not just the park she cherishes about New York City—it’s also the culture, shopping, and food.

“I can travel around the world to wonderful venues, but when I come back to New York, there’s a festival right outside my doorstep,” says the Park Slope resident. “I put my shoes on and boom, there I go. You can find everything in New York, you just have to know where to go.”

That could mean an afternoon of shopping in SoHo, on Fifth Avenue, or her favorite district, between 10th and 23rd Streets. “I like the fact that the boutiques are smaller and have different types of choices,” she says.

For dinner, she enjoys Indochine across from the Public Theater on Lafayette Street or grabbing a slice at Grimaldi’s at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. “It’s so fresh. I’ve tried so many times to bring it back home and eat it, and it’s not the same because there are no chemicals in it.”

Kidjo says her French-African roots also give her a feeling of kinship with the tradition of social activism in New York City. Her newest song, “Dignity,” speaks of the youth in Africa who are fighting for their rights. “What they want is no violence,” she says, drawing a connection with the peaceful protestors who took to the streets of New York last summer, marching for dignity and respect. With Nigerian singer Yemi Alade, the two penned the song’s powerful lyrics about hope for humanity and equality. “Everything that I sing about is for that change, that’s what keeps me going,” she says.—Delaina Dixon

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MAÏLYS VRANKEN

“NOW I CAN BRAG IN FRANCE ABOUT THAT:

I AM A NEW YORKER.” MARC LEVY

President and CEO, Vranken Pommery America

MAÏLYS VRANKEN, ARIA ISADORA/BFA; MARC LEVY, SEBASTIEN MICKE/PARIS MATCH/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES

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ew York is a lively and seductive city,” Maïlys Vranken tells Avenue. “It has that je ne sais quoi, as we say in French”— that certain something.

She first visited the city at age 15, and after an internship at 21, vowed to return. A marriage and two children later, she got the chance in 2012, when she became the president and CEO of Vranken Pommery America, the storied Champagne house with vineyards in Europe, and now Napa Valley.

The company name is also synonymous with arts patronage (since the days of the formidable Madame Pommery, widow of the founder, and the first woman in France to receive a state funeral), a tradition Vranken has continued in America. For the past eight years it has sponsored the Armory Show, and since 2019 has funded the Pommery Prize, which splits $20,000 between a selected artist and their exhibiting gallery.

It’s no surprise, then, that Vranken is a devotee of New York cultural institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. But she also loves that it lives up to its name as the city that never sleeps.

“There’s always something to do every night,” she says, unlike in France, where things are usually quiet on Sundays. “That’s absolutely not the case in New York. You are able, if you want, to get out and go to a restaurant.”

Her favorite thing to do when out and about?

Hearing live music. “I love jazz. I want to go to a jazz club again,” she says. “I think it will be the first thing I would do after the pandemic.”

—Aria Darcella

MARC LEVY

Author

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n his roughly 12 years of living in New York, author Marc Levy has witnessed the city go through several history-making moments, from presidential elections to now a pandemic.

It hasn’t shaken his faith in the city.

“New York can rebound from everything.

I mean everything,” he says. “And I’ve been through [Hurricane] Sandy.”

Levy has written more than 20 books— including 2012’s If Only it Were True, which was adapted into the Reese Witherspoon film Just Like Heaven—many of which are set in the United States. But to him, New York stands apart by virtue of its diversity.

“The perception and what you learn from living there on a daily basis are quite different,” he says. “For the first two years I was reluctant

to say, ‘I’m a New Yorker.’ But now I can brag in France about that: I am a New Yorker.”

Levy, who is originally from Paris, and his family settled in the West Village in 2008, after years of splitting time between New York and London. And he’s already gotten a taste of the city’s reopening— earlier this year, he took his son, a die-hard Rangers fan, to a game at Madison Square Garden.

But there’s a different sort of garden he’s yearning to get back to: Union Square’s farmers’ market.

“Packed, like in the old times,” he specifies. “You were grabbing an apple and you were picking your vegetables without feeling you were contaminating everything...that’s the whole thing about going to a real market: you have this very essential relationship with food. Of course my French origin is talking, but still.”—Aria Darcella JULY—AUGUST 2021 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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Equity entrepreneur

FABRICE GRINDA

“Super angel” investor

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wenty years ago, most tech entrepreneurs would head to Silicon Valley to be where the action was. Fabrice Grinda went against the grain and set up shop in New York, which he found more stimulating. Turns out, he was ahead

of the curve.

“I was one of the few tech investors in New York, and now I’m one of many,” he tells Avenue.

“I’m seeing more and more opportunities in New York than ever before, so that comparative disadvantage 20 years ago has actually disappeared.”

Grinda, one of the top angel investors in the world, has backed more than 650 companies globally, including Uber, Farfetch, and Alibaba.

Born in the Paris suburb of BoulogneBillancourt, Grinda graduated from Princeton

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and moved to New York in 1996. After consulting at McKinsey & Company, he founded several companies before finally launching FJ Labs, a venture fund and startup studio.

For someone always on the hunt for the next big thing, it comes as no surprise that Grinda identifies “curiosity” as his defining trait. Luckily, the city keeps him on his toes. “It’s the center of the universe in terms of the highest density of extremely smart, ambitious people with access to anything that might strike your fancy,” he says.

In his downtime, Grinda enjoys events like virtual reality installations, or nights at Brooklyn’s nightclub/performance venue House of Yes. “The beauty of New York is that new things keep coming up all the time,” he explains. “It’s an ever-renewing slew of offerings in every category.”

—Aria Darcella

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Togolese-born New York media entrepreneur who was educated in Paris, London, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his first act was as founder of Trace, a hip-hop magazine, in the 1990s. Its success introduced him to contacts including the former Citigroup and Time Warner honcho Dick Parsons. Today, Grunitzky is CEO of the Equity Alliance, whose mission is to expand venture capital access to women and people of color, which he cofounded with Parsons and fellow business titans Ronald S. Lauder, Kenneth and Ben Lerer, and Eric Zinterhofer, among others.

No wonder the meteoric career of this onetime freelance journalist has been published as a case study by the Harvard Business Review.

“New York is the one city that you can come into as an immigrant, with the hope it will be the land of opportunity, and where people don’t necessarily care about your country of origin,” Grunitzky told Avenue. “If you’re really good at

FABRICE GRINDA, AARON RICHTER/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; CLAUDE GRUNITZKY, SUZANNE DECHILLO/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

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what you do, and you work very hard and you’re very astute, New York is a place where things can accelerate really quickly.”

For a taste of home, he visits the African restaurants of Harlem. And to speak the languages of Togo, he heads to Times Square, where pre-pandemic many of his countrymen were employed selling Broadway tickets.

Grunitzky himself survived a bout with Covid, and his hope for the post-pandemic city is that it will once again become affordable for the creative class.

“I just hope the conversations will not necessarily always be about real estate, but be a bit more about creativity and rebuilding the city based on new values,” he says, adding that those values are baked into the Equity Alliance.

“I came to New York as a penniless immigrant who was really able to do all these things as a young man with the support of these great institutions and these wonderful people believed in me. And now, I see myself as a conduit to helping the next generation of really talented entrepreneurs.”—Ben Widdicombe

MATTHIAS DANDOIS

BMX Athlete

MATTHIAS DANDOIS, COURTESY OF MATTHIAS DANDOIS

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or someone who has made his career on a bicycle, New York City’s shutdown provided a unique opportunity. “It was crazy,” says Matthias Dandois, an eight-time BMX flatland world champion. “I had New York literally for myself...like in Vanilla Sky, when [Tom Cruise] is by himself in Times Square—it was exactly the same.”

In flatland, unlike other forms of BMX that include ramps and jumps, riders come up with creative, freestyle tricks and choreography on a completely level surface. The sport has taken the Paris native across the globe. He only recently settled in New York, where he has several French friends, a few years ago.

“Moving to New York City was kind of a brain opener because something different is happening every day,” he says. “Especially riding BMX in the street, you [always] meet someone different, interesting, crazy.”

Dandois (who has had the “I ♥ NY” logo mixed with “BMX” tattooed on his inner wrist for about

20 years) is a resident of TriBeCa, and enjoys lower Manhattan features like Battery Park and the volleyball courts along the Hudson River. But if there’s one thing he and his girlfriend—model Constance Jablonski, another French expat who has called New York home for 12 years—

particularly enjoy, it’s stand-up comedy.

“We spend a lot of time at the comedy club,” he says with a smile. “Right now it’s closed. But I can’t wait for it to open and come back. Hearing those guys cracking jokes...we will need that.”

—Aria Darcella JULY—AUGUST 2021 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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Chef

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ew York’s restaurant scene is notoriously competitive, but Laëtitia Rouabah, the executive chef at Benoit—the American flagship of chef and restaurateur Alain Ducasse—isn’t one to back down from a challenge.

The city is “always moving, always new restaurants, always new things coming out,” she says. “If you’re a restaurant like Benoit, you need to be creative more and more, and always finding the new thing that will make a difference. Why will our guests want to come to Benoit? Now we are doing this, and next month we are doing another thing.”

When the city slowed during lockdown,

Benoit was obliged to focus on delivery, and the menu was adjusted to only feature its classic and most popular dishes.

Rouabah has spent much of her career working under Ducasse. She has held top positions at several of his French restaurants, and even helped open his eatery at The Dorchester, in London, before moving to New York in 2016.

She has since been bowled over by the city’s diversity. Not just in its citizens (“there are many people mixed all together, it’s perfect”) and its culinary scene (“there is a restaurant every two meters”), but also by its geography.

“New York is a huge city,” she says. “You can go to the sea, and the day after can go to the snow. Everything is really, really close.”—Aria Darcella

LAËTITIA ROUABAH, PIERRE MONETTA COURTESY OF BENOIT NYC

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ARIANE DAGUIN, SARAH WILMER; EMMANUEL PERROTIN IN JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL’S EXHIBITION “DARK MATTERS”, PERROTIN NEW YORK, 2018. PHOTOGRAPHER: GUILLAUME ZICCARELLI, COURTESY OF OTHONIEL STUDIO AND PERROTIN. ©JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL / ADAGP, PARIS & ARS, NEW YORK, 2021

ARIANE DAGUIN

Chef, D’Artagnan Foods founder

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ack when nightlife in the city was in full swing, French friends of Ariane Daguin were in for a treat.

The chef and founder of D’Artagnan Foods is a fan of speakeasies, and bar hopping is one of her favorite things to do with visitors.

“I rent a car with a driver. If possible, a stretch limo, because they’ve never seen that in France,” she says. “It’s fun because you have to have the password, or know the secret passage before you arrive...that’s something they can do in New York that they cannot do anywhere in the world.”

Of course, Daguin, a native of Gascony, has had decades to get to know the city intimately, since she first arrived in 1979 to attend Columbia University. She took some time to adjust.

“I couldn’t find good chicken, I couldn’t find good cheese,” she says of the city’s food options at the time. “It was the very beginning of the Union Square [farmers’] market, where people were very enthusiastic, but their goods were not really up to snuff, which has changed a lot.

“Today it’s pretty amazing how you go to any cheese maker at the farmers market in New York, which are several now, and they are amazing,” she says. “It’s as good as in Europe.”

It wasn’t just food products that have grown— she has also watched the entire restaurant scene evolve. French restaurants modernized their menus; chefs began embracing the limelight; bartenders became mixologists; and diners started religiously following food critics to keep up. “It was like all of a sudden people discovered that food is not just something to survive.”

But one major difference remains. “In France we have no ‘snacks.’ We have a goûter,” she explains. “So when you come here, you’re surprised because people are snacking all day long.”

—Aria Darcella

EMMANUEL PERROTIN

Gallerist

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here is a certain energy and excitement here that can’t be matched anywhere else, and that is especially true for the Lower East Side,” says Emmanuel Perrotin, who opened his first New York gallery on the Upper East Side in 2013, only to move down to Orchard Street four years later.

“As in Paris, I love that you can find bits of history just by walking around the streets of New York. My gallery is a prime example. It is in a beautiful three-story building that used to be a Beckenstein fabric factory. I actually kept the original signage because it is part of the building’s history and it has a special charm.”

With galleries in Paris, Hong King, Seoul, Tokyo, and Shanghai, Perrotin has built formidable reputations for the artists he represents, including Takashi Murakami, Maurizio Cattelan, Sophie Calle, Xavier Veilhan, Daniel Arsham, Jean-Michel Othoniel, and JR, just to name a few.

“At the moment, I am excited about so many projects—among them the debut of JR’s documentary film, Paper & Glue, at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. The Paris-born artist works with local communities to create large-scale public

murals that capture underrepresented stories.

Later this summer, we will be presenting a recent project that he carried out at a maximum-security prison in Tehachapi, California. He is such a fantastic artist, who continually inspires me and challenges my perspective.

“Whenever I get free time away from the gallery, which is not often, I love walking around the city, especially to visit other galleries. This is one of the only cities in the US where you can be a pedestrian without looking out of place. There is a stereotype that New Yorkers are not friendly, but I have found that within each neighborhood there is a strong sense of community.”

And, if there has been a silver lining in the surreal times we have all been through in the city, he says, it is the Paris-style proliferation of outdoor dining options. “Outdoor patios have appeared everywhere. Let’s hope we keep them.”

As for how he defines luxury, Perrotin says, the most important aspect is to have time. “This past year, we had much more time, and we had the responsibility to make good use of it. It is also important to be daring. When we dare, we are often wrong. When we don’t dare, we are always wrong. Luxury is all about taking risks.”

—ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER JULY—AUGUST 2021 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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Designer, Maison Atia

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something normal for French people. Now there’s a Le Bilboquet in Miami, they’re everywhere, but it wasn’t the case when we were growing up. It was just your neighborhood French restaurant where everyone knew everyone, and everyone spoke French.”

The designer cofounded Maison Atia in 2017 with her fellow Franco–New Yorker, Gustave Maisonrouge. In addition to their signature coats, the duo’s vision for animal-friendly luxury has led to partnerships, including one with the Baccarat Hotel on West 53rd street, crafting faux versions of its previously fur-covered salon armchairs.

“In the last 20 years, yes, I’ve seen lots of change,” Mendel says of the city. “But there’s still great food, there’s still great people, there’s still a lot of culture compared to other cities in the USA, and I don’t think there’s anything else like it.”

—Aria Darcella

JEAN RENO

Actor

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hat I missed is the movement of the people. Before the pandemic, people were all over New York moving and doing things, and during the pandemic everything stopped,” says the actor Jean Reno over the phone in his instantly recognizable, ursine baritone.

“The entire world became a ghost town, like the Rolling Stones song. I’m happy now because I see restaurants opening again and I see life going to the street.”

Though Reno has been to New York many times over the course of his career, he didn’t make the move permanent until 14 years ago. It

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CHLOÉ MENDEL, DAVID LESLIE ANTHONY; JEAN RENO, LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE 2016 TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL

CHLOÉ MENDEL

aux fur label Maison Atia recently added another fake feather to its cap: the cruelty-free line is now completely sustainable. “Last year we were about 60 to 70 percent [wastefree], and this year we finally reached our goal with 100 percent,” explains designer Chloé Mendel.

Fashion is in her blood: she is a sixth-generation member of the family behind J. Mendel, the celeb-friendly brand currently helmed by her father, Gilles.

Though Mendel is a first-generation American, fond memories of family dinners at Upper East Side mainstays like Le Bilboquet and La Goulue have defined her experience of New York’s French community.

“We would go every Friday night,” she said, noting that her father knew the owner. “This is

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was entirely for personal reasons: it’s where his now wife, Zofia Borucka Moreno, lived.

“I was working all over America—Los Angeles, Dallas, Texas, and New York. I had been traveling for many, many, many years,” he explains. “And then I met my wife here while I was shooting The Pink Panther with Steve Martin. So, it led me to live here.”

Being all over the place is something of a recurring theme in Reno’s life story.

Born Juan Moreno y Herrera-Jiménez in Morocco to Spanish parents, Reno moved to France when he was 17. After a short stint in the French army (required for citizenship) he became an actor, using a Frenchified version of his name.

He eventually started nabbing international roles, including in blockbusters like Godzilla and Mission: Impossible, as well as cult favorites like Léon: The Professional. While the Hollywood machine has labeled him “French” ever since, he doesn’t consider himself to be.

“I live in the world. I don’t consider myself French, Spanish, or American, you know? That doesn’t interest me,” he says. “I work as an actor in French, Spanish, Italian, and English, so I have a connection with all the cultures, I think.”

One thing the pandemic didn’t change for Reno was work. He and his family were in Spain for part of 2020 while he was filming—although his job now includes getting Covid tests three times a week.

Despite his busy career—he has a Spanish TV show airing later this year, and two other projects currently in production—his thoughts never stray too far from home. “[Whenever] I’m away, far from New York, I like to think that I’ll be back one day,” he says.

“Here I have the impression that everything is possible. It is a city that gives you that hope,” he adds. “New York gives you strength and magic—some magic impression in your mind every morning.”—Aria Darcella

ALEXANDRE ASSOULINE

ALEXANDRE ASSOULINE, EMILIA BRANDÃO

Publisher

“I

love the contagious energy of New York City. It makes you so much more open-minded, as it’s a wonderful hub of so many incredible cultures,” says second-generation luxury publisher Alexandre “Alex” Assouline. “One is not only exposed to a variety of backgrounds, but also to many different influences from around the world—whether it be in the art realm, cuisine, fashion…the list goes on.”

The Paris-born second son of Prosper and Martine Assouline, who moved to Manhattan along with his parents 14 years ago, has since

forged his own path within the family firm.

Starting out as a graphic designer, he soon took on the role of digital and marketing director, and now serves as global vice president for the publishing house. In addition to being charged with expanding business development—overseeing an umbrella of key departments, including marketing, communications, wholesale, retail, logistics, and digital development—Alex inaugurated a curated library service, in which he closely works with Assouline clients to visualize, design, and curate bespoke libraries.

“When it comes to the books we publish, it is all about luxury, which, for me, is all about rep-

resenting culture as an essential element of true and unparalleled style.”

Off hours, he can be found enjoying a cocktail at Odeon, steak frites at Lucien, or taking in a game of le football at Félix in SoHo. “Every French person in New York meets here, and the energy is amazing,” he says.

“As we move into the new normal in the months ahead, I’m very excited to be able to reconnect with my past relationships and see how businesses and people have evolved or learned from this past year. Personally, I have re-shifted my priorities, and I think it really helped my own growth.”—ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER JULY—AUGUST 2021 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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AT LEFT, XIE CHAOYU PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIA HETTA, DIOR FALL–WINTER 2019–2020 HAUTE COUTURE, FIRST PUBLISHED IN DIOR MAGAZINE, WINTER 2019; AT RIGHT, CANDELA CAPITÁN PHOTOGRAPHY BY COCO CAPITÁN, DIOR SPRING–SUMMER 2019 READY-TO-WEAR, FIRST PUBLISHED IN DIOR MAGAZINE, SPRING 2019

AS A NEW BOOK ILLUSTR ATES, DIOR’S MARIA GR AZIA CHIURI IS REVOLUTIONIZING FASHION ONE FEMINIST IMAGE AT A TIME

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J’ADORING! Her Dior: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s New Voice includes photographs by fashion-world darlings Coco Capitán, this page, and Julia Hetta, opposite.

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AT LEFT, SELENA FORREST PHOTOGRAPHY BY ZOË GHERTNER, DIOR FALL–WINTER 2017–2018 READY-TO-WEAR, FIRST PUBLISHED IN I-D, FALL 2017; AT RIGHT, OKAY KAYA PHOTOGRAPHY BY NAN GOLDIN, DIOR SPRING–SUMMER 2017 READY-TO-WEAR,FIRST PUBLISHED IN DIOR MAGAZINE, SPRING 2017

M

aria Grazia Chiuri, who became the first female creative director of the house of Dior in 2016, wears her feminism on her sleeve—and, in the case of her debut collection, famously splashes it on T-shirts, with stirring messages sampled from the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

It’s a stance that extends to collaborations with pioneering artists such as Judy Chicago, Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, and Mickalene Thomas, and clothing collections inspired by the likes of Jacqueline Lamba and Leonora Carrington.

It is also palpable in Her Dior: Maria Grazia Chiuri’s New Voice (Rizzoli; $95), an anthology featuring 33 women photographers whom she has worked with over the years, including a pantheon of greats (Sarah Moon, Nan Goldin, Brigitte Lacombe) and relative newcomers such as Coco Capitán, Zoë Ghertner, and Harley Weir—previewed here in Avenue.

An homage to female creativity, diversity, and the enduring codes of the venerable house, this collection of portraits and interior shots, many of them previously shot for the label’s namesake magazine, offers a window into the complex theatre of female personae and reclaims the female gaze.

CLOSE COMFORT In images by Nan Goldin, this page, and Zoë Ghertner, opposite, Chiuri proposes a photographic intimacy that is never cloying.

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“Women dressing women, looking at them, taking their portraits, talking about them,” Chiuri explains in a Q&A interview in the book. “The naturalness of this ‘female conversation’ ” is what I want to celebrate.”

Like many a fashion show, the wildly incongruent images by this “creative sorority,” as the designer refers to her unalike collaborators, pose more questions than they answer. But Chiuri wouldn’t have it any other way. Her idée fixe—femininity, and where it intersects with the culture and society at large—is many things, reworked like so much toile in the atelier, but never obvious or one-note. “It is not one idea, but a multitude of ideas on femininity,” Chiuri says, adding that the label offers her a laboratory for bringing her polyphonic vision to life. “It is the ideal terrain for defining the two-way relationship between fashion and feminism in the broadest sense.”

—horacio silva 70

OPEN-DIOR POLICY Diversity, celebrated in photos by Katerina Jebb, above, and Sarah Moon, opposite, courses through the pages of Her Dior, left.

ABOVE, SETSUKO KLOSSOWSKA DE ROLA PHOTOGRAPHY BY KATERINA JEBB, DIOR FALL–WINTER 2018 HAUTE COUTURE, FIRST PUBLISHED IN DIOR MAGAZINE, WINTER 2018; AT RIGHT, YUE NING PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARAH MOON, DIOR SPRING–SUMMER 2019 HAUTE COUTURE, FIRST PUBLISHED IN DIOR MAGAZINE, SUMMER 2019

CULTURE

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Saddle Up! 72

STORMS MEDIA GROUP/ALAMY

I

’m waiting outside a neighborhood restaurant on the Upper West Side for Georgina Bloomberg. Officially Pfizered, it will be my first indoor dining experience in a year, and I am having it with an heir to a $59 billion fortune.

Rushing down the street, she approaches with a strong-thighed power gait. “I’m so sorry I’m late. It’s because I live around the corner. It’s that typical New York thing—if we met downtown, I would be early.” She asks the host if we can dine in the back room, mindful that I get a good recording. We sit between plexiglass partitions at a table. No one else is there.

She’s in the city just for a little bit before heading back down to Wellington, Florida (her tertiary home), to pack her things, her son, and her horses, and return north to her apartment here, but mainly to the house in North Salem and its barn and facilities. The horse show circuit is planning a full post-Covid comeback, and Bloomberg is a champion jumper.

She orders a black bean soup, chopped salad with shrimp, and a skinny margarita, which thrills me because now I can order a chardonnay and not feel judged. It’s been a long lockdown.

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GUTTER CREDITS TKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK;

IN A RESTAURANT AROUND THE CORNER FROM HER UPTOWN APARTMENT, AHEAD OF THE HAMPTON CLASSIC HORSE SHOW, CHAMPION EQUESTRIENNE GEORGINA BLOOMBERG MET MIKE ALBO FOR DRINKS AND DISH

GUTTER CREDITS TKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK;

HI HO, PAOLA! Bloomberg and her trusty steed, Paola 233, placed second at the 2018 Longines Global Champions Tour stop in Miami Beach.

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contact. Not just any contact, but the “meet me for martinis and let’s gossip” kind. And who better for that than the impeccable, boldface Ms. Bloomberg?

The excuse to gossip—I mean, do journalism—is the Hampton Classic horse show, which returns in late August after having been canceled in 2020 for the first time in its nearly 50-year history. Bloomberg, who is on the Classic’s board, has already proven herself as a jumper—garnering top prizes, and appearing on the covers of fancy horse mags like Equestrian Living and Noëlle Floyd. Her philanthropic work continues unabated—including The Rider’s Closet, a venture she started 15 years ago, at age 23, to provide riding clothing to competitors in need (it’s an expensive sport, natch). Her young adult novels, including her debut The A Circuit, have been out for a couple years. Even the chatter about her having a child, unmarried, with her then-boyfriend-now-just-

friend Argentine show jumper Ramiro Quintana, has died down. Her son Jasper is seven now.

There is a new photo book by Jim Dratfield coming out—Her Horse—about the relationship between girls and horses for which she wrote the foreword. The publicist asked that I mention her sponsorship with TechnoGym—a pricey line of home gym equipment she uses (when she isn’t squeezing a Pilates ball between her legs to strengthen the muscles needed to grip a saddle); she likes the Kinesis machine because “it’s very important for a horse jumper to be fit all over”).

But Bloomberg didn’t really push any of that on me.

I was told initially not to ask about her father, or to talk about her accidents (she has fractured her back twice, exacerbated by reconstructive surgery for a curvature of the spine), but she didn’t hold back. She recovered from the surgery doped up on painkillers for three months, bingeing Toddlers & Tiaras (“It’s amazing, I’m totally

GEORGINA BLOOMBERG PHOTOGRAPHY BY SHAWNA SIMMONS-WHITTY/SAS EQUINE PHOTOGRAPHY; STYLING: SHAWNA SIMMONS-WHITTY; MAKEUP AND HAIR: GINA SIMONE. WHITE SILK TOP BY NOUVELLE PALM BEACH, EARRINGS BY FAB FINDS BY SARAH.

She asks the waiter to bring a container so she can save half her soup. “Don’t judge me. I’ve become my mother. We had this conversation at dinner last night about taking food home. My boyfriend [investment adviser Justin Waterman] has two half sisters. Their dad, who passed away a couple years ago, used to never let anybody in the family take food home because apparently it was very tacky. My mother—her father was in the Royal Air Force, so they were moving around a lot and they had no money. If somebody put something in front of you, you’re lucky to have it and you eat it. There’s no such thing as leaving food on your plate.”

“Totally!” I manage to reply between sips.

“I speak fast and I am repetitive” she warns.

“Whenever I am interviewed, they’re like, can you slow down?”

I have been stuck inside for a year. My Zoompale skin hungers for the vitamin D of human AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2021

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WENN RIGHTS LTD/ALAMY

NEIGH SAYER Bloomberg with the handsome Quibelle in Wellington, Florida. Above right: The equestrienne poses with her father, former mayor Michael Bloomberg, and son, Jasper, in Bridgehampton in 2018.

addicted.”) And as proud as she is of her father’s political work, she can’t forget how he announced his run for mayor the day she graduated from high school. “I was like: ‘that one day?’ ” she says with a sigh.

She does talk fast. Maybe she was also desperate for a lunch and some dish like we all had in the before-times? (Heiresses—they’re just like us!)

Unlike older sister Emma, who secretly got divorced from first husband Christopher Frissora and then married Jeremiah Kittredge just last February, Georgina isn’t media shy—she’s Wikipediable, with a healthy Instagram. She can be seen frolicking with her boyfriend on vacation in the Dominican Republic, and, like most proud moms, delights in posting her son’s pony riding achievements. With a face that a beauty blog would classify as a perfect circle, she is photogenic and petite, but exudes strength in person. In a kidnap thriller, she would do a roundhouse kick, break down the door, and escape way before Liam Neeson ever arrived.

But—oh yes—we’re here to talk about the Hampton Classic. (Waiter? Another chardonnay, please.)

B

loomberg has been a competitive rider since she was four years old. The athletic sport (and it is athletic, she will remind you) became her world.

No matter how she tried to pursue other things—fashion design at Parsons; photography and painting at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study—it kept calling her back.

That may be because, unlike subjective pursuits such as art, no one can say Daddy bought her jumping trophies. Bloomberg explains that horse shows consist of two divisions: hunters and

jumpers. Hunters is focused on technique, scored by judges much like figure skating. Jumpers is essentially a race. “It’s just purely competition. If you clear the jump and you’re the fastest, you’re going to win. Nobody can say, ‘Oh, she won because the judge liked her.’”

Jumping is also one of the few mixed-gender sports out there. Bloomberg could compete against a muscular six-foot man, or a younger woman in her twenties (she is 38). But, she stresses, what matters is the match between horse and rider, and the rider’s dedication to that connection. Unlike the racing world, horse jumping takes months of preparation with the animal.

“You’re getting to know them at home, you’re not just jumping on and going.”

Sure, money can buy the time at the barn, but, like figure skating, talent has no class. “I think of the top riders right now, and none of them come from money,” she says.

Bloomberg has put in her time. As a teenager, dating and relationships came mostly from the horse circuit. “I was just like, stay away from the New York City type of guy,” she says. In her twenties, she saw friends settling down, families starting. When the baby itch hit, she chose to have a child without the wedding ring and prenup. “I am, in my opinion, a single mom, but I’m very grateful that Jasper knows who his dad is, and that he’s a friend of mine. When I was pregnant, when Jasper was younger, I envied all my friends who were happily married. Now I have friends who are going through these horrible custody battles where they won’t speak to each other.”

She wants more kids. But that comes with a sacrifice. Unsurprisingly, there is gender disparity in the horse show world. There may be a special connection between girls and horses, but at the top level, females fall away. “There’s never been a female Olympic gold medalist” in the sport, she says.

That’s because jumping is one of the few sports where riders peak later in life, in their thirties and forties. For women, the choice of family or sport becomes stark.

“You have to face a life decision as to whether you want to have children and have a family, or whether you want to pursue this. When I look at the top, and I see the time they put in, and the sacrifices they make and what their family situation is, what their lifestyle is—I don’t want to be them.

I want to have their level of success, but I know what it takes to have their level of success, and I don’t want to do that. I’ve seen what it takes, and men get let off easy that way.”

Still, she isn’t ready to give up on competing.

“To me, when I go to barn, it’s not for pleasure.

It’s because I’m preparing for the next competition. I’m supercompetitive. Don’t play me in Scattergories.”

The check comes. I make a feeble gesture to pay (later, my re-creation of this moment with friends will become comedy gold), but Bloomberg immediately pulls out her card. We walk out, her holding her black bean soup and rushing over to her son’s class at the American Museum of Natural History, me putting on my mask and taking the A train downtown, believing, once more, that the city is fun again.

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R ET U R N O F T H E

SOCIAL DEAD GHISL AINE MAXWELL, LIKE MANY WEALTHY PARIAHS BEFORE HER, IS L AYING OU T A DETAILED STR ATEGY FOR GET TING OU T OF JAIL AND BACK IN TO HIGH SOCIET Y. LIS A MARSH ASKS, COULD SHE P OSSIBLY PULL IT OFF? ILLUSTRATIONS BY MICHELLE KONDRICH

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S

itting in her cramped isolation cell in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, it is possible to imagine Ghislaine Maxwell’s mind is elsewhere.

She’s not thinking about the unforgiving prison lights, which are kept on around the clock, because correction officers fear she is at risk of committing suicide. She’s not thinking about the inedible jailhouse food, which has caused her weight to plummet; the mice and other vermin that notoriously infest the East Building in which she is held; or even the stench from leaking toilets on the floor above.

No, she is dreaming of a life outside jail, back in some luxurious quarter of Manhattan. And perhaps even—this would be ultimate—returning to the sophisticated social circles where she once rubbed shoulders with princes and presidents.

Because, as we know from her attorney’s multiple filings, each one laying out more detailed conditions under which the onetime socialite might be granted bail and be sprung from prison, Ghislaine Maxwell has a comeback plan.

Like so much about her, it is stunningly audacious. The question is, could she possibly pull it off?

The former lover and longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in July 2020 on multiple charges related to the trafficking and sexual abuse of women and young girls. She was shocked—shocked—by the accusations, denying culpability in statements and pleading not guilty to each of the charges.

At the original arraignment, her attorneys proposed she be released on bail and held under house arrest in a luxury Manhattan hotel. This comes after she was apprehended at her home in New Hampshire after evading the FBI for weeks, with

passports from three countries in her possession and $20 million in assets linked to her. That offer was denied because she was deemed a flight risk.

In December, her second application for bail came with more offers—home confinement at a friend’s New York City residence enforced by electronic monitoring. Her close ties to the United States, including husband, tech CEO Scott Borgerson, would keep her there, her lawyers argued. And she would foot the bill for private security guards to monitor her whereabouts. Denied.

March brought a third request for bail with the offer of a $28.5 million bail package put up by herself, her husband, and various wealthy associates. Under this plan, she would also renounce her British and French citizenships, and move most of her and her husband’s assets into an account monitored by a retired federal judge. Denied.

April’s appeal of her third request came because her lawyer said guards in her Brooklyn jail were keeping her awake at night to ensure she does not commit suicide. She appeared with an unexplained bruise under her left eye and was reticent to explain how she got it. She reportedly told lawyers the bruise could be from shielding her eyes from the cell’s bright lights. Also denied.

While plotting her next bail offer and awaiting her trial, chances are good she’s also formulating how she will reclaim her reputation and status as the mysterious socialite who was welcomed to dinners and events up and down Park Avenue.

It’s probably not unlike the future Epstein envisioned for himself after he pleaded guilty in Florida state court to two felony prostitution charges in 2008 and served a 13-month sentence. While he served his time at the Palm Beach County Stockade, instead of the usual state prison, he received all kinds of extra services, like a cushy work-release program where he was able to use his own driver to be taken to his office and appointments.

Given that treatment, it’s not surprising he expected to be welcomed back into his social circles.

“No one really knew that much about Epstein’s legal troubles in Florida,” says Frederick Anderson, a fashion designer, who is extremely NYC–Palm Beach social. “Even in Palm Beach. He had a lot of friends and they kept it very quiet.”

Epstein even had meetings to strategize his return to social acceptance. R. Couri Hay, a seasoned society publicist, prepared a multistep road map that would refresh and restore Epstein’s reputation. Although Epstein never hired the adviser, the plan included a stint in rehab for sex addition; spiritual counseling from a rabbi; committing to Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates’s Giving Pledge to donate the bulk of his wealth to good causes; and, of course, a splashy sit-down interview with a sympathetic journalist.

In the context of other former social pariahs, who did their time and were then welcomed back into New York society, it didn’t seem like such a crazy idea.

Martha Stewart went to jail in 2004 for lying to the Feds and emerged to lead her company to financial comeback. It doesn’t matter that she’s now nearly 80—she’s as hot as ever especially with the cannabis cred she gained from her party show, Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party.

Michael Milken’s run as a real-life Gordon Gekko ended in 1989 when he pleaded guilty to securities and reporting violations; he went to prison in 1990, and his name became internationally synonymous with financial wrongdoing. Upon his release, receiving a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer proved to be a lemon he turned into lemonade. Now he is regarded as a leading philanthropist, having raised tens of millions for medical research, and is a Hamptons mainstay with his foundation’s annual fundraiser.

“I DID ALWAY S THINK IT WEIRD

THAT SHE WAS THE GO-TO GIRL

IF YOU WANTED TICKETS TO

VICTORIA’S SECRET SHOWS.”

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T H EY ’R E

BAAAACK! In 2004, Martha Stewart received a five-month jail sentence and $30,000 fine for insider trading.

She survived the media firestorm and came out more famous than ever.

“PEOPLE LIKE COLORFUL, FL AWED, AND ROGUISH, AND WILL EVEN ACCEPT A LITTLE BIT OF DISHONEST Y, SOCIALLY.” EUAN RELLIE

Michael Milken became known as the “junk bond king” and in 1989 was indicted on 98 counts of fraud and racketeering. Diagnosed with prostate cancer the very month after his release from prison in 1993, he was inspired to devote his life to medical philanthropy. In 2014, George Washington University renamed its public health school after him, and he received a presidential pardon in 2020.

Disgraced restaurateur Josh Woodward made the gossip columns this spring for being out with his wife and friends in Palm Beach, following jail time for secretly dosing his pregnant ex-mistress with an abortion-inducing drug. Grotesque crimes don’t prevent anyone from getting a table on Worth Avenue, apparently.

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the statuesque New York City social fixer who became a senior advisor to former First Lady Melania Trump, spectacularly torched the relationship in a 2020 tell-all. Melania was so angry that she sicced the Department of Justice onto her ex-pal, alleging she violated a nondisclosure agreement; the lawsuit was later dropped by the Biden administration. But the public break served its purpose, with Wolkoff distancing herself from the controversies of the Trump era, and returning relatively unscathed to Manhattan.

A. Alfred Taubman, a convicted price fixer between Christie’s and Sotheby’s, served jail time in 2002. He also doubled down on philanthropy as a way back into society’s good graces, donating enormous sums to the University of Michigan, Brown University, Harvard University, Lawrence Technological University, and the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.

Should Maxwell emerge from this legal trouble unscathed, is it possible she could return to the cocktail circuit around which she once swanned?

She does have a long history and vast social network, which could work to her advantage.

“Ghislaine always had a bit of mystery about her,” says Euan Rellie, investment banker, English ex-pat, man-about-town and host of many dinners, who ran in the same social circles as Maxwell. “In the old days, people liked that, that her dad [media mogul Robert Maxwell] was faintly disreputable. People like colorful, flawed, and roguish, and will even accept a little bit of dishonesty, socially.

“Her father’s death was so tragic [the elder Maxwell died under mysterious circumstances in 1991]. We all felt sorry for her. She was always popping in and popping out,” says Anderson.

“My friends would get excited when ‘Ghislaine’s in town’ and she’d come to dinner.”

There was an unsavory undercurrent to her interactions, Anderson admits, which was a red flag for him. “She was always trying to get her friends to apply for passports from that island they had [Little Saint James in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which was owned by Epstein]. If they had enough citizens, they could claim it was a territory,” he explains. “I did always think it weird that she was the go-to girl if you wanted tickets to Victoria’s Secret shows.”

It would be a hard sell, “for her to come back,” Anderson theorizes. “There would have to be an anchor—someone to stand up for her. She would

have to confess or do something spectacular and repent.” He added, “The way she’s complaining about things in jail—she has no way back,” as it smacks of entitlement, not contrition.

“America, and New York especially, is a very forgiving place, with generosity and openness,” Rellie explains. “I think what Maxwell has [allegedly] done are things that won’t easily be forgiven. I think the #MeToo movement is causing a serious long-term social realignment…. Anyone taking advantage of young women is a social crime, and it’s cast in a very different light today.”

He added, “We all know financiers who have skirted close to the law. One financial crime can be forgiven. But we won’t accept predatory behavior—that’s my thinking.”

Calls seeking comment to Bobbi Sternheim, Maxwell’s attorney, were not returned.

Even as Maxwell’s return to Upper East Side society seems unlikely, others who have recently had their reputations singed for various (noncriminal) reasons are quietly slipping back onto the circuit.

One prominent example is Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who spilled secrets about her disastrous working relationship with the Trump White House in her book Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady. When the book first appeared, many wondered if such a detailed kiss-and-tell would be social suicide, or a lifeline from Washington’s “swamp” back to New York.

“She told way too many secrets,” Anderson says, “because with these people, mum’s always the word.” But, he added, “Stephanie is solid. She’s not a criminal and she has plenty of friends. There are no hurt feelings with her. She will ease her way back in.”

For a certain inmate currently moldering inside the MDC in Sunset Park, such a controlled social reentry must seem like a shining road map. Add that to the plan.

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LIVING

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BEACH, PLEASE

HITTING THE SAND IS SIMPLE IN MANY PLACES, BUT WOULD YOU BE SHOCKED TO LEARN IT’S NOT SO EASY IN THE HAMPTONS? NANCY KANE EXPLAINS THE ARCANE AND EXPENSIVE ART OF BEACHGOING IN THE EAST END

MONTAUK CLIFFS BY DOUG YOUNG; HAMPTON BEACH BY ERIC STRIFFLER

N

o shirt, no shoes, no cell phone service: welcome to another summer on the shore of some of America’s most expensive real estate. The Hamptons’ famous dunes and walkways are undeniably beautiful, but like so much else in this billionaires’ playground, they also present some challenges. Just like the idiosyncratic collection of villages, hamlets, and historic towns (some dating to the 1600s) they border, each local beach has its own distinct personality and rules.

Parking permits are the reason visiting a Hamptons beach can be complicated and pricey.

Police are ever ready to hand out fines to violators, and navigating which beaches are “town” and which are “village” can confuse even a local.

This year, a Southampton Village summer visitor pass will run you a cool $500 for the season— up $50 since last year. The Town of Southampton ($400 for summer visitors) governs township beaches from Westhampton to Sagaponack, including Sag Harbor, while the Village handles eleven beaches along Gin Lane, Meadow Lane, and Dune Road. Proof of year-round residency will get you a pass for free, so this year, with an influx of New Yorkers taking refuge on the East End, the demand is especially high. Day passes are available at some, but not all, at around $50, and hotels and bed-and-breakfasts will often keep a stock to offer guests. There may be a parking spot if you look hard enough (try Saint Andrew’s Dune Church or Road D Beach), and it often pays to ask a local or ride a bike.

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TIDE PODS Families enjoy a day by the water in Southampton.

There’s a go o d re a s on Co op ers B each (268 Meadow Lane) often lands on lists of the country’s best beaches. The ample parking lot fills up fast (daily passes are available) as crowds flock to this expansive beachfront with vigilant lifeguards. Chairs and umbrellas are available to rent, showers and restrooms add to the convenience, plus—big local news! —a new cell phone tower will now keep you bathed in electromagnetic radiation in addition to those solar rays. The Coopers Beach Café, which will text you when your order is ready, serves elevated snack bar fare like mango smoothies and lobster rolls. Or try the “Katie”— fried bologna and cheese— rumored to be named after the favorite sandwich of chef Katie Lee (formerly Mrs. Billy Joel.)

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quieter: Cryder, Little Plains, Halsey Neck, and Wyandanch, for example, are all excellent spots to bring a blanket and people watch.

If you’re looking for an even more secluded place to take a snack or a book, try the horsey hamlet of Bridgehampton. Ocean Road Beach (1251 Ocean Road) is often uncrowded. Bordering Water Mill, W. Scott Cameron Beach (435 Dune Road), also known as Flying Point, features an overlook for views of the bay and a beach volleyball court. The bay meets the ocean here, offering many options for swimming, and while there is no concession stand, a food truck is usually on hand selling snacks, drinks, and ice cream, and even rents out chairs and umbrellas. It’s also managed by the Surfrider Foundation, which monitors water quality and keeps the sand clean of debris.

HAMPTONS AERIAL BY ERIC STRIFFLER; BICYCLE: FRANK HEUER/LAIF/REDUX

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EAST HAMPTON

EAST HAMPTON’S EGYPT BEACH BY DOUG YOUNG; NAVY BEACH RESTAURANT, MONTAUK: FRANK HEUER/LAIF/REDUX; NADINE HOMANN BY ERIC STRIFFLER

East Hampton regulates the beaches from Wainscott to Montauk and permits (Town or Village) are required here as well. Permits for nonresidents went on sale on February 1 and were sold out in nine days—a record, even for the busy Hamptons.

At Main Beach (104 Ocean Avenue), a recently restored, towering pavilion greets beachgoers.

And a new group is running the snack bar, after (local scandal alert!) last year’s Chowder Bowl suffered problems with waste and an attendant pack of raccoons. The center of the Hamptons scene, this is where sunbathers flock to see and be seen, and perhaps catch a glimpse of local celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick with their kids. Lifeguards keep watchful eyes on bathers here as well as Georgica Beach (219 Lily Pond Lane) and Two Mile Hollow Beach (50 Two Mile Hollow Road). Georgica offers seclusion and charm, and is off the beaten path—unless, like Steven Spielberg or Martha Stewart, you live on Georgica Pond. Nearby Lily Pond is perfect for a picnic, but be warned that Two Mile Hollow has only 40 parking spaces, so show up early.

DINER SHORE Clockwise from top: Strolling on Egypt Beach in East Hampton; East Hampton–based interior designer Nadine Homann driving near the Maidstone Club; and patrons enjoying food at Navy Beach restaurant in Montauk.

MONTAUK “The End,” as Montauk is known, offers miles of pristine shores. Surfers are attracted by its famous swells, like at popular Ditch Plains Beach (Ditch Plains Road). Soft sand and a dramatic overlook cliff make sunbathing a treat as well (with surfers providing added eye candy). A snack shack offers healthy salads, wraps, and soft drinks, and the lifeguard training that takes place here makes it perhaps the safest spot for venturing into the deep. Even further out on East Lake Drive is Gin Beach, an idyllic spot that overlooks Block Island Sound, with a jetty for strolling and watching the boats go in and out of Montauk Harbor. What could be more perfect than that?

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THE ROARING HAMPTONS

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PATRICK MCMULLAN/GETTY IMAGES

EVEN F. SCOTT FITZGERALD COULDN’T HAVE IMAGINED THE NUMBER OR SCALE OF THE PARTIES PLANNED FOR THE EAST END THIS SUMMER. NANCY KANE PREVIEWS A HAMPTONS SEASON SET TO BE THE WILDEST IN LIVING MEMORY

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M

ay we freshen your glass of bubbly? The champagne industry lost $1.2 billion in sales last year, according to one trade group, but it may just recoup all that and more this season in the Hamptons. Making up for temps perdu, the best of the East End’s restaurants, bars, and more are back this summer, braced for the onslaught of a hungry and thirsty mob.

Local shortages of rosé and chlorine (homeowners have demanded their pools open, pronto) are just two bizarrely related bellwethers of a season that threatens to be the liveliest since the roaring 1920s, when The Great Gatsby first made Long Island mansions internationally synonymous with sophisticated party hopping.

“Over the year, people bought more sake and tequila and played ‘at-home bartender,’ ” said

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Luis Marin, manager of Wainscott Main Wine & Spirits. “Now, we’re feeling like things are about to explode. People are now replenishing their liquor cabinets with big purchases. Rosé is really selling fast.”

John Kowalenko of Art of Eating said he can’t keep up with the inquiries at his catering and events company.

“People want to get together this summer.

[They are] people-contact-deprived and are all confident it is now fine to meet, have weddings, events with music, family gatherings again,” he said. “Clients are going all all-out with menus, rentals, lighting, and décor. Hold on to your hats if you are in business in the Hamptons and East End this summer. ” “There is so much hunger for culture—Zoom is no substitute—that we want to bring together people who love the arts, architecture, literature,

ERIC STRIFFLER

LIVING

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SUNSET BEACH, ERIC STRIFFLER; RACHEL ZOE EVENT, EUGENE GOLOGURSKY/GETTY IMAGES FOR RACHEL ZOE

FIESTA FOREVER Previous page: a prepandemic White Party in Southampton.

Clockwise from right: A party for the Rachel Zoe Collection at Moby’s in East Hampton in 2019; the in-crowd at Sunset Beach on Shelter Island; Hampton Clambake does beach catering in style.

history, and the sharing of ideas,” said historian Dr. Amanda Foreman, who is organizing a series of events to benefit House of SpeakEasy, a citybased nonprofit whose bookmobile program brings literature to underserved communities.

The first of these, “Golden Age: The Genius of Architect Grosvenor Atterbury,” paired Martha Stewart with architect critic Paul Goldberger (author of DUMBO) and Peter Pennoyer (author of The Architecture of Grosvenor Atterbury) at an intimate gathering underwritten by Bridgehampton Polo creator David Walentas, and held at his restored, Atterbury-designed home. The final event in the series will be held at the end of August at the Bellport bayfront home of Boykin Curry.

Some occasions that were canceled last year are being restaged in innovative ways. One delayed 50th birthday, for example is being billed as “50+1.” In-demand party planners such as Hamptons Aristocrat got clever, too, with a new series of signature bonfires (a pop-up outdoor party for any number of people with food, permits, and clean-up all provided), partnering with Hamptons home brand Serena & Lily, among others.

“Clients are back with a vengeance,” said cofounder Lexi Ritsch. “They are leaning more toward home events: outside, intimate, but sparing no expense. Big gatherings have given way to more intimate affairs, but they want a special experience. They want their guests to remember the event, they are not taking entertaining for granted anymore.”

Hosts and hostesses are choosing “quality over quantity” and not skimping on add-ons such as a lobster and rosé cart, pizza trucks, and party jugs of specialty cocktails (Salty Chihuahua, anyone?), all self-served so as to minimize physical contact.

Attractive bell jars, or small cloches over individual hors d’oeuvres, are other accessories being incorporated to keep people from double-dipping at the platter.

“Buffets are a thing of the past,” said Hamptons Aristocrat cofounder Louisa Young. “But bento boxes are in demand.” Her company also pivoted this year to open a cookshop in Westhampton, offering homemade packaged foods and even a sheet pan dinner for order and pick up.

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EAT, PLAY, LOAF From left: brunch at the Montauk Beach House; “one,” a concept store founded by Julianna Teeple in the former Elie Tahari space in East Hampton; shaded loungers on the beach at Duryea’s Orient Point; a pineapple margarita from Rita Cantina.

B

ut honestly, there’s so much to do, when will you even find the time to eat?

Guild Hall has deftly shifted performances to the John Drew Backyard Theater with a full slate of shows such as Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story with Michael Urie and Ryan Spahn, and A Conversation with Laurie Anderson and Julian Schnabel, both in July. Meanwhile, the Parrish Art Museum’s beloved annual Midsummer Party (this year is the 50th anniversary celebration) is on for August. The Southampton Hospital will raise money this year with a luncheon in honor of Charlotte Moss and her new book, Flowers, at the Maidstone Club in East Hampton.

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Tickets are $10,000 a table, which includes signed copies of the book. The Hampton Classic will also be going ahead after a year off, attracting equestrian stars like Georgina Bloomberg (who sits on its board and will tell you all about it on page 72.)

Many other staples are also returning after 2020’s enforced hiatus, like the popular Bastille Day celebration at Demarchelier Bistro on the North Fork, polo in Bridgehampton, and Michael Milken’s annual cancer research benefit, to be held this year at the Parrish Art Museum in August.

For those who can’t take their yacht to Capri this year, a sail to Shelter Island might be a diverting alternative. With Yacht Hampton, captain Joe Ialacci splashes onto the scene with a multimillion-dollar collection of luxury boats. The self-proclaimed “Willy Wonka of water toys,” his fleet features top-of-the-line jet skis, hydrofoil hoverboards (he calls them “levitating magic carpets”) electric surfboards, floating islands, and even a battery-powered porpoise that pulls you through the water, which, he promises, “is like swimming with the dolphins.”

Otherwise, head to popular Duryea’s in Orient Point or Montauk. The Orient Point outpost will now cater to the madding crowd with an outdoor tiki bar so guests can imbibe while they wait. Tropic Ocean Airways will take you from midtown Manhattan and can land on a tarmac or

directly on the water, right next to your yacht, in 45 minutes.

Montauk’s iconic dive bar, the Sloppy Tuna, has become Bounce Beach Montauk—an outpost of the Flatiron club, offering après-beach meals by chef Sean Olnowich. (Locally sourced coriander-crusted yellowfin tuna certainly doesn’t sound “sloppy.”) If you by chance forget a bathing suit, swimwear brand Solid & Striped’s takeout stand has you covered. (Or uncovered, depending on your personal style, but please use the restrooms for changing.)

For a chi-chi-ier dining experience, La Fin has opened in the former Swallow East space.

The French-inspired kitchen and lounge offers all-day dining overlooking Montauk Harbor with a St. Bart’s vibe. At Gurney’s, chic party planner Jung Lee is curating experiential fun in the Bungalows by the Sea. Adding her flair to the décor, Lee has curated a bar menu of cocktails (many of which have edible flowers) as well as the perfect picnic to enjoy on the beach.

In Westhampton, private club Dune Deck has added more programming to keep members happy: bonfires, clambakes, and lunches on the beach and a deck bar where you down a frozen shot of Casamigos and then throw the empty glass down the deck, aiming at a bell target. Ding ding, take that, Covid!

MONTAUK BEACH HOUSE, GIADA PAOLONI; JULIANNA TEEPLE, COURTESY OF ONE

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DURYEA’S ORIENT BEACH, DOUG YOUNG COURTESY OF WORDHAMPTON; RITA CANTINA, ERIC STRIFFLER

Returning regulars will appreciate getting a table once again at T Bar Southampton, the eastern outpost of Tony Fortuna’s top-rated steak restaurant, which is equally renowned for its food and hospitality. Union Sushi & Steak in Southampton is also back, not only with its eponymous best-selling dishes, but also its cult-favorite Australian lamb chops.

Over in the charming and underrated Springs, chef Eric Miller brings his passion for Mexican food to Rita Cantina. An extensive tequila bar will make you forget all about last year. In Amagansett, the former Cyril’s Fish House turns into Morty’s Oyster Stand. The coastal cuisine will center on East Coast oyster and raw bar delights and every Tuesday will play host to a comedy-meets-trivia night.

In East Hampton, hotspot Moby’s is back with new chef Kyle Koenig. Formerly of Tom Colicchio’s Craft, his kitchen will also supply a market open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner alongside fun grab-and-go items. And family-friendly Clubhouse is expanding their retro bar menu to go along with their bowling alley and will bring back the club scene with a series of live acts (Bon Jovi has previously graced the outdoor stage) and DJs. Another sign of the times: The former Elie Tahari store in the epicenter of the village of East Hampton opens as “one”—an open-ended

space for brand, artist, and artisan pop-ups. “We strive to be a platform for sensory-led discovery, one that focuses on categories that are optimally shopped in real life, incorporating all five senses,” founder Julianna Teeple told Avenue.

Other shops and specialty markets are springing up like dandelions on an otherwise perfectly manicured lawn: In Southampton, a sweet little gourmet shop called Hen of the Woods has taken over half of beloved Italian restaurant La Parmigiana. And right next store, another gourmet specialty market, Wishbone Farms, will offer sustainable, “farm-to-fridge” goods daily. Think hand-crafted selections in vegan, dairy free, gluten-free, and nut-free categories—perfect for home barbecues, beach picnics, and drum circles.

Beloved purveyor Popup Bagels will deliver subscription packages of schmear and bagels made with a special blend of flours to create a lighter but crisper bite that will soak up the booze from the night before. And honestly, who wouldn’t want to join a bagel club?

Southampton Social Club is building a deck for 500 people (cementing its reputation as the liveliest club around) providing all-new cabanas for its loyal throngs. Reservations came pouring in, and they’re hoping a “silent disco” will placate the neighbors.

What do you get when you put an offshore

aquaculture pioneer together with the folks behind Sen and K Pasa in Sag Harbor? An ethical seafood restaurant, Manna, which will open at the beloved Lobster Inn in Southampton. It doesn’t get better than waterfront dining with menu items from an adjacent sustainable commercial fish farm.

In Sag Harbor, Lulu’s Kitchen and Bar brings on Philippe Corbet, a French-trained chef with several years of experience in Michelin-star rated restaurants.

All this partying will require some balance as well. SoulCycle in Bridgehampton will partner with Sunflow so you can take a beach chair home with you (with the purchase of certain packages) after you sweat off the alcohol. At the Montauk Beach House, Onda, Naomi Watts’s all-natural beauty brand, will pop up by the pool. Holistic wellness center Organic Edge offers a “Summer Reset” Package, combining cryotherapy, colonics, and infrared sauna.

Hair guru Paul LaBrecque has opened a pop-up in East Hampton and is running the spa at the newly managed Rams Head Inn in Shelter island. And legendary colorist Louis Licari opens a pop-up in Water Mill. “The phone is ringing off the hook. The girls of summer are booking their highlight appointments, they finally have parties to attend,” he says.

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NOTORIOUS NEW YORKERS

Dominique Strauss-Kahn had been all but anointed as the successor of French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

But all that changed, writes Ambrose McGaffney, after an encounter in a Manhattan hotel room

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leafy neighborhood of old money and the kind of place where cartoonists might depict snooty poodles turning up their noses at lesser canines.

Despite an upholstered upbringing as the son of a lawyer, whose practice took the family to Morocco and Monaco, DSK (as he became universally known) was a student communist, setting him on course for a successful career in the Socialist Party.

Pictures of a young DSK show a thickly built man with a fashion sense that could only be described as bureaucratic. Yet he was blessed with a smile that could make an otherwise ordinary face handsome, his charisma was legendary, and he absolutely killed it with the ladies. Starting with a first marriage at the age of 18, he had four wives, countless affairs, and children on both sides of the blanket. Along the way, one French newspaper would forgivingly dub him “le grand séducteur”— the Great Seducer. The women who alleged he abused them, however, would probably phrase it differently.

DSK’s political rise in the 1980s and ’90s included stints as a mayor and a member of parliament, as well as senior positions in the French

DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN: MICHEL CLEMENT/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Half the Way with DSK

T

he “great man theory,” as college undergraduates of a bygone era used to be taught, holds that history’s most important moments and institutions are shaped by heroic figures who show up at exactly the right time, and impose their will indelibly upon events. In this view, Western civilization is a relay race run by white men, with the baton being passed from Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar, and so on down the line to George Washington, Winston Churchill, and et cetera.

Long discredited, the theory is at least interesting in that it suggests the racetrack of glory also has a gutter alongside, ready to collect those who stumble. One man’s seemingly assured road to the White House takes a wrong turn on a Chappaquiddick bridge, for example, or a king falls in love infelicitously and is forced into exile.

For another striver, once seen as an all but inevitable president of the French Republic, his path to the Élysée Palace ended in a New York hotel room.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was born in 1949 in the affluent Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, a

OUI, MINISTER On the way up as France’s junior minister in charge of economics, finances, and industry in 1992.

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SARKOZY AND STRAUSS-KAHN: ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; STRAUSS-KAHN COURTROOM: ANDREW GOMBERT-POOL/GETTY IMAGES

cabinet, including minister for economics, finances, and industry. But it was in 2007 when he burst onto the world stage as managing director of the International Monetary Fund, one of the most influential positions in global financial policy.

Ironically, he was put forward for the position by then president Nicolas Sarkozy, an ideological adversary and member of the rival UMP party. At the time, many believed Sarkozy was bumping DSK into the IMF to get rid of the man who was considered to be his most plausible competition for the presidency.

Nonetheless, DSK thrived in the role. His Wikipedia page (which reads like it has been carefully combed by a public relations team) lists some of the plaudits he received as being like “Metternich with a BlackBerry,” “effective and skillful,” and a “sagacious leader.”

Such hot air may have inflated his head to the point where he floated through the corridors, but it didn’t keep his fly up. A married subordinate claimed she was coerced into an affair, and although she was later fired, the pliant IMF board cleared him of the most serious charges (including harassment and abuse of power) and kept him in the role.

Even those patsies, however, couldn’t look past what happened next.

EVEN FOR THE SEXUALLY LIBERAL FRENCH, THIS BEHAVIOR

WAS TOO MUCH. RISE AND FALL With then president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2010, a would-be Brutus to his Caesar. Below: Just a year later, he was humbled in a New York City courtroom.

I

n the spring of 2011, DSK checked into suite 2806 of the Sofitel Hotel in Midtown. What is not in contention is that on May 14, he had a sexual encounter with a hotel chambermaid, Nafissatou Diallo. Hours later, he was removed by Port Authority police from the first-class section of an Air France flight just minutes before it was to take off from JFK, bound for Paris. And he resigned from the IMF four days later, on May 18.

Beyond that, everything is in dispute.

Diallo, who had DSK’s DNA on her, claimed she had been sexually assaulted; he said the encounter was consensual. In the ensuing media circus—with the disgraced former IMF chief being transferred first to a Harlem police cell, and later to house arrest in a Tribeca townhouse—Diallo and DSK sued each other, with the New York Post taking his side and positioning the whole thing as a shakedown .

The case against him spectacularly collapsed in August, when prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss all charges, citing inconsistencies in Diallo’s story. One of DSK’s lawyers, Ben Brafman, told reporters outside the State Supreme Court in lower Manhattan immediately afterward: “You can engage in inappropriate behavior, perhaps, but that is much different than a crime.”

Diallo’s many supporters called the decision a travesty, and the two quietly settled a civil suit for an amount French media later reported to be $1.5 million.

In the wake of the case, several other unsavory accusations were made against the fallen titan, including that he attended sex parties with prostitutes, and one attempted rape. French authorities charged him with “aggravated pimping” relating to an incident at the Hotel Carlton in Lille, but he was acquitted. (He admitted taking part in group

sex, but denied knowing his partners were on the clock at the time.)

Even for the sexually liberal French, however, this behavior was too much. Widely expected to successfully challenge Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential election, DSK instead went into the political wilderness.

“By all accounts he was considered pretty much a shoo-in for top job in the country, given how unpopular Sarkozy was at the time,” wrote The Local, an English-language French news outlet. It noted a newspaper opinion poll which found “79 percent of the public believe DSK would have made a better president than François Hollande,” who was elected instead.

If DSK has shed any tears over his fate, at least he can dry them with the wads of cash he has made since being forcibly diverted into the private sector. In the last decade he has consulted for the Serbian and South Sudanese governments, flirted with investment banking, and serves on the board of the Russian Regional Development Bank, a subsidiary of Rosneft, a powerful state oil company.

If he picked up any Russian during his days as a student communist, no doubt it has come in handy.

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ON THE

Nicky Hilton Rothschild and Fernando Garcia

CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVA

Jodie Turner-Smith

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Brooke Shields, Alek Wek, and Karlie Kloss

6/17/21 2:30 PM

GUTTER CREDITS TKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK;

PHOTOS BY BFA

The New York Botanical Garden held its annual Spring Gala to celebrate KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature. Guests sipped Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame, from bottles created in collaboration with Yayoi Kusama.

Susan and George Matelich

PHOTOS BY GUTTER BFA CREDITS TKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK;

Jennifer Creel and Alexandra Lind Rose

Lili Buffett, Zach Weiss, and Hannah Burch

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Kit Keenan, Lilah Ramzi, Cynthia Rowley, and Pieper James

Ezra J. William, Tina Leung, and Prabal Gurung

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Gillian Hearst and Krista Corl

Barbara Scott, Margo Ressa, Robin Bell-Stevens, and Kathleen Tait

PARTY CENTRAL

Guests donned their biggest hats and brightest frocks for the Central Park Conservancy’s annual Frederick Law Olmsted Awards Luncheon. Meanwhile, top chefs have been taking turns headlining the organization’s Starlight Dinners.

PHOTOS BY BFA

First Lastname First Lastname Betsy Smith andand Michael Bloomberg

Michele Brazil and Darice Fadeyi

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Lauren Santo Domingo

Muffie Potter Aston, Eric Javits, Gillian Miniter, and Di Mondo

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Elyse and Michael Newhouse

Katy Knox and Dena Schechter

PHOTOS BY BFA

Martha Stewart

Dinah Decker, Jacob Perkins, Molly Miller, and Leda Strong

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Catherine Foster and Adam Weinberg

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Lynn Yaeger

Anna Ruzhnikov, Joanna Pollack, and Joanna Gong

GOING ONCE

Sotheby’s previewed the summer Luxury Week sales with an intimate dinner at its Upper East Side headquarters.

PHOTOS BY BFA

Gucci Westman and Laura Harris

Jessica Joffe

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Edward Barsamian and Valerie Macaulay

Amy Sall

6/17/21 2:30 PM

You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat Gary R. DePersia Licensed A s sociate Real Es t ate Broker m 516.380.0538 | gdp@corcor an.com

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Outside 3,000 sq ft of limestone patio fans out from the rear of the home, framing the heated Gunite pool that looks out to the 120’ dock with water and electric that could accommodate a 50 ft boat, jet skis, paddle boards and canoes. Amenities include public water, full house audio that extends outside to the dock, 2 car heated garage, a Crestron controlled environment, a full house generator and a separate waterside patio for intimate gatherings. Bridgehampton and its pristine ocean beaches are just down the road to the south while Sag Harbor Village with its tony restaurants, chic shops and numerous marinas is literally around the corner to the north. Now is the time to preview this unique waterfront offering to be in for Summer 2021 and every other season to come. Exclusive. $10.95M WEB# 877222 Real estate agents affiliated with The Corcoran Group are independent contractors and are not employees of The Corcoran Group. Equal Housing Opportunity. The Corcoran Group is a licensed real estate broker located at 660 Madison Ave, NY, NY 10065. All listing phone numbers indicate listing agent direct line unless otherwise noted.

All information furnished regarding property for sale or rent or regarding financing is from sources deemed reliable, but Corcoran makes no warranty or representation as to the accuracy thereof. All property information is presented subject to errors, omissions, price changes, changed property conditions, and withdrawal of the property from the market, without notice. All dimensions provided are approximate. To obtain exact dimensions, Corcoran advises you to hire a qualified architect or engineer.

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