Six decades after its birth as an elegant refuge for Manhattan’s elite, the Midtown restaurant says ‘adieu’ this week.
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La Grenouille, the last survivor of an elegant corps of French restaurants that arrived in New York in the 1960s and helped secure the city’s reputation for sophisticated dining, will close this week. Its current owner and operator, Philippe Masson, “is moving on to explore new terrain and pursue other dreams,” according to a notice posted Wednesday on the restaurant’s Instagram account.
It was 1962 when Mr. Masson’s parents, Charles and Gisèle Masson, opened the doors of a three-story carriage house on East 52nd Street outfitted with crimson banquettes, mirrored walls, oil paintings, bursts of flowers and small shaded tabletop lamps by which diners would read the blotter-size menu of such established standards as pike quenelles, potage Saint-Germain and soufflés whose life spans were measured in minutes.
Well into the 1980s, La Grenouille built and kept its status as one of a small number of watering holes where Salvador Dalí, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Truman Capote, Sidney Poitier, Henry Kissinger and other rare fauna of the Manhattan savanna would bask in a glow the color of old Champagne that poured down from recesses in the ceiling.
Like La Caravelle, La Cygne and other Le and La restaurants that opened in the 1960s, La Grenouille lost some of its appeal for the fashionable set as the age of New York society gave way to the age of social networks. A bitter family struggle did not help. When Mr. Masson forced his younger brother, Charles Masson Jr., out in 2014, many customers who had been tended as carefully as the restaurant’s enormous sprays of flowers decamped to Majorelle, a new restaurant Charles oversaw.
For many years, La Grenouille held on to its reputation for romantic charm of the very old school. Sam Sifton, in a three-star review in The New York Times in 2009, described a meal on a night when snow was falling in Midtown: “This made the soft, glittering light of the brocaded interior seem all the more inviting, the flowers towering out of the corners all the more welcoming, the sheer elegance of the place all the more arresting, important, rare.”
That cloistered ambience is one reason Philippe’s decision, a few years ago, to sing “Fly Me to the Moon” and other lounge-act chestnuts from a small dais in the back of the dining room struck many old-timers as incongruous. Mr. Masson seemed energized by his second career for a while.
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