The career of André Soltner is inextricably linked with Lutèce (1961–2004), the celebrated French restaurant in midtown Manhattan, for which Soltner was hired as chef at age twenty-seven by its original owner, André Surmain, and from which Soltner retired as chef and sole owner at age sixty-one in 1994. Located in a gray townhouse on East 50th Street, just west of Second Avenue, Lutèce was neither large nor imposing; it had fewer than a hundred seats spread out among four dining rooms. Yet it exemplified the height of French cuisine in New York from the 1960s through the 1980s and was considered by Julia Child, Mimi Sheraton, and others to be the greatest restaurant in America.
