If cooking, at its highest levels, is an intuitive, almost musical art, then so is putting together a great restaurant. No one knows this better than the great Michelin-decorated chef and restaurateur Alain Ducasse, whose much-anticipated New York debut, eight years ago, was an extravagant, tin-eared flop. The first Ducasse venture, Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, opened a year before 9/11, at more or less the precise time New Yorkers lost their collective taste for Continental haute cuisine. The walls were covered with paint-splattered tubas, among other assorted Eurotrash frippery, and dinner was attended by all sorts of bizarre rituals. Women were given stools on which to place their handbags, certain dishes (the squab, I recall) came with a choice of little knives presented in a leather case, and patrons were even offered a choice of pens with which to sign their outrageously inflated check. Ducasse eventually tried adjusting to local tastes on the fly, but it was too late; before the doors ever opened, the joint was doomed.
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