Café Lutécia of Philadelphia - An informed tribute

This is a short essay where I, a diner who eats out often and who has lived in 3 continents, tries to explain why Café Lutécia is objectively unusual and special for our times.

The essay is divided into sections, and I summarize them below. Readers who do not want to read in order, or wish to skim, can use the section links to jump to specific content.

Café Lutécia and I talks about my association with the restaurant.

Café Lutécia then, but why? explains why our relationship has had such depth. The explanation is based on 3 reasons, each its own subsection of this part:

• The unique atmosphere
  

• The remarkable people who operate the place.
  

• The creativity

Café Lutécia in the mind's eye summarizes the restaurant from the perspective of our times.

Café Lutécia and I

I am embarrassingly well qualified to write about Café Lutécia. I lived three blocks from it when it opened 30 years ago, and because of certain quirks of fate, stayed almost the entire duration of those decades within reasonable walking distance. Even as options for meals multiplied in downtown Philadelphia, I was a constant presence at the café. Indeed, by my estimate, I have eaten there well over three thousand times.

My affinity for the place is a source of jokes among my friends. One of them, a professor at Penn, was walking by the café with a relative when she began to recount my devotion to it, and pointed through the glass window at my favorite table, where, of course, she found me seated right then.

These friends all agree it is a great place. But still, they ask me: what is it that makes me go there so very often? Is it a force of habit? A lack of imagination or adventurousness? Or some quirk about myself that I am deliberately cultivating? And the answer I provide is the same: when the time comes to choose a restaurant, all those choices, new and old, trendy or not, alternatives that I have indeed sampled, run through my mind. And yearly, weekly, daily, in weather fair or foul, in that mental tournament of choices, Café Lutécia wins and wins again, because each time it beats afresh the competition of equally accessible, equally affordable places.

Café Lutécia then, but why?

But why does it win? As mentioned above, I break the answer down into three parts: , the atmosphere, the people (especially the owners: Valerie and Jon Blum), and their creativity with food.

The atmosphere One of the main ingredients of the ambience is the south-eastern view and large glass windows, so that the interior of the café is always drenched with natural light during its usual daytime hours. Thankfully, the owners have not given in to the modern vision of providing outlets for laptops that have turned cafés into libraries around the world (and each person within an island unto themselves). At all times, even when there are not too many people, a diner participates in a shared experience that is not restricted to food. I have seen people read newspapers and books, but no one burrows into their personal rabbit holes the way those who worship in front of digital altar lights do.

Everyone who dines there ends up looking at the world outside: the bus that stops at the corner, the pedestrians and the pets, the traffic that ebbs and flows in the wide intersection through the windows. These windows admit view but strip accompanying sound, and replace it with the clink of cutlery, the creak of chairs, the chopping on cutting boards, and the hum of conversation. Above it all, are the floating French songs that are never too loud, and the view of a large, signed picture of a stylishly smiling Yves Montand.

The remarkable people There is little turnover in the waitstaff. Some servers have worked there for years. They are affable, friendly, relaxed, and genuine. They talk with you in the same way you would talk with a friend who you had bumped into on the street. There is an unforced sincerity to the smiles, and the warmth does not gratingly switch on right when the tip is to be provided. Conversations at tables, or even the occasional reverie, is never disturbed by intrusive inquiries, and plates are never quickly whisked away as soon as you finish. In other words, the All-American code of service in restaurants does not apply. Both daughters, who I have seen grown from 'toddlerdom' to motherhood, have served there, and even now, it is not unusual to see their childhood close friends pitch in their efforts.

The two central figures in the café, Valerie and Jon, are remarkable individuals in different ways. At 4 AM each morning Jon gets up to makes fresh pastries (my favorite is his banana-Nutella turnovers), assorted muffins, and his famous chocolate-croissant bread pudding. He makes the coffee too, and does the heavy lifting of provisions and their procurement. In decades of interacting with him, I have not experienced a single day when he is not his consistently affable self, even when he was undergoing treatment for a serious illness.

Valerie, his wife and the chef, is the heart of the café. She had almost completed her medical training in France when she found the daily experience of dealing with sick children difficult to handle and took a break. She went to Israel, where she met Jon in a Kibbutz.

The rest(aurant) as they say, is (Café Lutécia’s) history.

Valerie’s battles with health are even more critical. She has cystic fibrosis, and only one lung. Because of her ailment and weakened immune system, she suffers from many recurrent infections. In the recent past, it was the benefit of a new drug and gene therapy that helped with a decline in her pulmonary function. This past year has been especially tough for the couple, with the scare of infection, and various serious ailments, Valerie's recent serious injury, and the death of a close member of the family.

What amazes me is this: through such physical tribulations, the quality of the café has remained astonishingly constant. This constancy comes with a cost. There have been many times when I have seen Valerie working full hours, her pack of antibiotics in a backpack, feeding the catheter port embedded in her chest. She has had so many setbacks, major and minor, but every dish a customer orders is freshly prepared by her and her alone, from ingredients personally selected and vetted for quality.

The creativity of the food. A descriptive run down of the many favorite items would take too long. Most who keep track of such things know that their tomato bisque is the best in the city (don’t just take my word for it: Craig Le Ban thinks so too). They know as well that the Croque Madame beats the ‘dripping-in Bechamel’ versions served in some of the more 'fancy' restaurants, and they are well aware of the secret of the "mother" vinegar that was imported from France and has been used in her family for over a hundred years. Then there is the deeply satisfying lamb and lentil soup, the duck sandwich with a fried egg on top, the New England clam chowder, the best lemonade in the world, and my wife’s favorite soup: curried green lentil with coconut milk.

Let me however make the main point of this section by way of judicious illustration. I select three of my favorite sandwiches (that are not the weekend specials but for decades part of the everyday menu) and try to describe the little twists of imagination that have gone into their making.

All of these sandwiches are served on Milano style rolls. The Gaulois has melted brie and salami and lettuce as its base. But it adds in two unusual items: sun dried tomatoes, and pecans. The pecans accentuate the texture of the salami, and the sun dried tomatoes add an unexpected sweet tartness that makes the sandwich one of the best I have ever had. The Alesia sandwich has Serrano ham and lettuce, but instead of brie, Valerie uses mozzarella, and heated, the ham and cheese blend to create a pleasant chewy texture. That in turn is topped with olives and basil, thus imparting a very distinctive Mediterranean flourish that complements the base. And the journey towards the Mediterranean is completed in the Provencal sandwich, which features tomatoes and lettuce and hard-boiled egg and olives and the piece de-resistance – anchovies, whose fishy, umami taste rises above the other ingredients to give the sandwich its unusual and essential edge. This creativity (often simple, sometimes elaborate, always large in effect) underlies virtually everything the place serves up, as I discuss further below.

What is truly extraordinary to me is how innovative and fresh the energies of Valerie and Jon have remained. After so many years, with so many tribulations, they could have coasted, and served the same food, at the same times. But creative surprises abound at the café. There were the Tuesday evenings of pinxtos and tapas and entrees they unveiled just a few years ago, where one could find elaborate treasures like small paella pans, and quail eggs, and beef tongue in sauce Gribiche and braised oxtails in piquillo pepper Armagnac sauce (and about twenty other utterly new items). There are new sandwiches unveiled almost monthly for the weekend brunch specials. There is the “Burnt Basque cheesecake” that Valerie suddenly unearthed a few weeks ago (so good was it that it was by far the best cheesecake I have ever tasted). Behind every one of the offerings is fresh energy, and fresh thought.

Café Lutécia in the mind's eye

We often offer such tributes to people and places after their permanent absence. Part of my hope in writing this was to rectify such a practice for a place that is an extension of my life. Café Lutécia is a living treasure of a kind that is anachronistic. We have a traditional mom-and-pop shop, serving French food, run by a multi-ethnic, multi-racial family, a key member of whom is an immigrant. Could there possibly be a better living rebuke to the Trumpian view of this country?

To not be able to go there, even now, in contemporary times of confinement, is rather like not being able to carry on a conversation with a close friend. There are few experiences I miss more than being there: not just the sensory encounters, but also the comfortable silences that come from true intimacy, and I am comforted only by the promise of resumption, and the hope of good health for all who make the place what it is.