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Restaurant Review: the Palm Beach Daily News
By M.M. CLOUTIER | April 11, 2010
Three decades ago this month, a river of well-dressed Palm Beach epicures and trendsetters flowed to the second floor of Worth Avenue’s Esplanade, now known as 150 Worth.
Anticipation and buzz had been mounting about the grand opening of a new restaurant there, a place rumored to take the island’s fine-dining scene to new heights.
Then Café L’Europe opened its doors.
Champagne corks popped all night.
They’re still popping as owners Norbert and Lidia Goldner celebrate the 30th anniversary of Café L’Europe, which has spent the last half of its life at the corner of South County Road and Brazilian Avenue.
Few restaurants in town have thrived so long under the same ownership — many of them, including Petite Marmite and Nando’s, are gone.
Café L’Europe has done so while garnering awards and “best of” accolades by restaurant reviewers and food service industry peers.
Then there are the memories.
Like the night Jackie Onassis stopped by for dinner and patrons froze in awe, forked bites of Dover sole half way to their mouths.
Like the day the Goldners and their team surprised a longtime customer in the hospital with a candlelit dinner.
Gone are the days of waiters in black-tie — although many of those waiters are still on the floor — but Café L’Europe remains a fine-dining icon.
The ambience is often described as “stunning” and “extraordinary” and loyalists tell the uninitiated the restaurant is well-heeled but not off-putting, polished but not stiff, and gastronomically innovative without abdicating its ever-popular wiener schnitzel and apple pancakes.
“From the moment Café L’Europe opened, I was impressed,” said Robert Gordon, the former longtime bailli of the Palm Beach Chaîne des Rôtisseurs. “When I first met Norbert and Lidia, they went out of their way to make sure everything was perfect. That remains true and it’s not because of me. They do that for everyone.”
Mary Hornsby, vice president of The Lawrence Group, the Palm Beach architectural firm that designed Café L’Europe’s former and current locations, also has been dining at Café L’Europe since it opened.
“Whether you’re a stranger or a long-time customer, you’re treated to the same high level of hospitality,” she said. “To me, that says it all.”
Another decades-long Café L’Europe customer and friend of the Goldners, Dr. Richard Lynn, a Palm Beach surgeon, said, “I can’t say enough about Norbert and Lidia. One anecdote says a lot: When I was president of Temple Emanu-El (from 1984 to 1992), we were about to cook a Seder dinner in the new social hall we built and suddenly the stoves didn’t work. I thought, ‘There’s only one person who can help me out at this point — Norbert.’ It was a busy night at Café L’Europe, but he came and he fixed it. I brought him out of the kitchen and everyone clapped.”
Café L’Europe first opened its doors April 7, 1980.
The Goldners, who married in 1972, were ready to take on Palm Beach.
Norbert was then a partner in Café L’Europe in Sarasota, armed with a notable hospitality and culinary career in Europe, hospitality studies at Cornell University and his lauded leadership at New York’s Upper East Side restaurant Sign of the Dove.
Lidia, then traveling the globe as a flight attendant with Pan Am Airways, was a food and wine connoisseur.
Last week, both of them reflected on Café L’Europe’s 30th birthday.
“Just as the day we opened, we want everything to be 150 percent right with everyone who walks in the door,” said Norbert. “You can eat out anywhere so how you’re treated is important. No special request should be turned down. The one thing I don’t want to hear in my restaurant is ‘no.’ At the same time, we have always evaluated, revised and improved. You have to adapt and be open to change.”
Lidia said, “Every night is a different set of people you haven’t seen. You look at the reservation book and there’s a story behind every name—what you remember about each person, what to ask them, what they like. We have met so many nice people — worked hard and made a lot of people happy.
Café L’Europe milestones
Since Café L’Europe opened, its milestones have included:
■ 1985: The restaurant opens the island’s first champagne and
caviar bar, but the pivotal moment came when Bruce Strickland joins the team
as maître d’. Now dining-room manager, Strickland has been an effervescent
front-of-the-house dynamo and linchpin who pays attention to every detail.
■ 1992: With a dozen successful years in their wake, Norbert and
Lidia Goldner received the ‘Palm Beach Daily News’ Business Leadership Award.
■ 1995: New Year’s Day, after 15 years in its Worth Avenue
location, Café L’Europe opens its present home.
■ 1999: In addition to winning Nation’s Restaurant News’
peer-driven Fine Dining Hall of Fame Award, Café L’Europe launches its now
legendary annual Academy Award-night Oscar party and its Halloween-eve
Yelloween shindig.
■ 2000: Pastry Chef Stephanie Steliga, whose confections have
been known to defy gravity, joins Café L’Europe.
■ 2005: Nationwide peers’ votes clinch a coveted Restaurants &
Institutions magazine Ivy Award recognizing Café L’Europe’s leadership in
the food service business.
■ 2009: ‘Palm Beach Post’ reviewer Charles Passy bestows top
marks on Café L’Europe and several “Hungry” awards on the restaurant,
including one for Best Established Restaurant.
■ April 8, 2010: Norbert Goldner says of Café L’Europe, “You can
say, ‘I’m doing my best,’ but is that best the best you can do? Everyone at
the Olympics is good, but in each event, only one athlete wins gold.”
Restaurant Review from the Palm Beach Post
By Charles Passy | Dining | July 22, 2009
At heart, Palm Beach is as much a state of mind as a physical destination. The island itself is little more than a narrow strip of land with lots of expensive homes. But the ideal the island represents — big-city sophistication and tropical splendor joined hand in hand — is something unique. Think New York’s East Side with palm trees.
Or think Café L’Europe.
This 29-year-old culinary stalwart is a perfect representation of what Palm Beach should be, but rarely is. Too many restaurateurs come to the island — or to the extended Palm Beach market — thinking it’s all about the money, so they play up the high prices and white-glove formality. Some also assume money means Old Money, so they stick with a menu lost in a fuddy-duddy continental haze. Others go the opposite route and think money means New Money, so they push innovation for innovation’s sake.
Café L’Europe, run by the husband-and-wife team of Norbert (he’s the chef) and Lidia (she’s front of the house) Goldner, toes a smart middle line. With its French doors, mirrored surfaces and piano bar area, it oozes a well-heeled vibe, but not in an off-putting, aristocratic way. Similarly, service is exceptionally polished, but never the least bit stiff.
And the food? Intelligent and delicious all at once (and relatively price-conscious if you take advantage of summer specials, including a nearly 30 percent discount on most nights of the week). German-born chef Norbert, who cut his teeth working in a famed New York East Side restaurant (Sign of the Dove) long ago, knows how to pay homage to the moneyed Old World: His menu includes a whole array of caviars (Iranian osetra goes for $230 an ounce), plus a “Classics” section with such familiar items as a Wiener schnitzel ($40.25) and spaghetti Bolognese ($36.25).
But the menu has an edge, too: Seasonal ingredients come into play, as in a salad with grilled California nectarines ($15.75). So do dishes built around striking flavor combinations or exotic ingredients — say, a Senegalese-inspired chilled soup (part of a $14.75 quartet of chilled soups) or a crème brulée with a hint of orange and ginger (part of an $11.75 trio of crème brulées). The result is that for a nearly three-decade-old restaurant, Café L’Europe feels surprisingly young.
That same balance of tradition and innovation is reflected in the voluminous wine list, which marries New and Old World wines with a fair degree of aplomb. If you feel intimidated by the book-length list, just talk to an always knowledgeable staffer: When I expressed a desire for a light red in the $50-$70 range, I was given a choice between an Oregon pinot noir or a Burgundy. I went with the latter, a $60 bottle (from Domaine Ramonet) that was just what I wanted — mildly dry, food-friendly and easy on the palate.
With appetizers, the aforementioned nectarine salad and quartet of chilled soups, both currently in rotation as summer specials, are certainly good ways to go. The salad is just what a contemporary warm-weather salad should be — a light and lively hodgepodge of tastes and textures, with a hint of bitterness from the red endive, some creaminess and saltiness from the feta cheese and some summery sweetness from those grilled nectarines (my only nit is that the fruit was a bit soft to the bite). As for the soups, they were like variations on the theme of refreshment, with offerings that included a red pepper and fennel combination and cantaloupe honeydew.
But starters needn’t be light: Perhaps the biggest winner of one visit was a special of pork belly confit ($14.75), a dish that took a suddenly trendy old-school meat offering and gave it accents both old-fashioned (a pairing of pickled red cabbage) and strikingly modern (a sauce of honey and raspberry vinegar).
Entrees hew somewhat more in a traditional direction, but this is still tradition done right: A special of Dover sole meuniere may be an extravagance at $48.75, but it’s everything you want in the dish, with the fish cooked to moist, relatively firm perfection and the brown butter sauce bringing out the fish’s mild flavor rather than overwhelming it. But it’s hard to pick that over the Wiener schnitzel, especially when it’s prepared Holstein-style with a fried egg on top. Like the fish, the veal is prepared with finesse — not overly breaded, not overly greasy. And when it’s served with spatzle, that Old World delight of a noodle-like dumpling, you’ve got Europe on a plate.
And what about dessert? Again, Café L’Europe likes to have fun with samplers, so your best bet may be that crème brulée trio or a truly decadent quartet of mini desserts ($14) that include a pint-size baked Alaska that’s irresistibly cute. But if there’s one dessert that speaks to what Café L’Europe represents, it’s something much, much simpler — an $11.75 offering of slices of pink grapefruit that have been caramelized and displayed in a colorful circle. The dish is your morning fruit turned into a tart-sweet ending to your meal.
Well, it’s not quite the true ending. At Café L’Europe, there’s always a surprise or two in store. One of my meals ended with a gratis offering of mini cookies dramatically presented in a small ice sculpture. Another concluded with my overhearing a conversation between a well-known Palm Beacher and the excellent in-house pianist (David Crohan) talking jazz, swing and the good old days.
But those days never seem so far away at Café L’Europe, which remains a testament to a certain style that refuses to go out of fashion, a sun-splashed blending of new and old, New York and Europe. Call it Palm Beach, now and forever.
R E V I E W
Café L’Europe
FOOD: A
SERVICE: A+
ADDRESS: 331 S. County Road, Palm Beach
TELEPHONE: (561) 655-4020
WEB SITE: cafeleurope.com
PRICE RANGE: Expensive
HOURS: Lunch: Noon to 3 p.m., Tuesday to Friday. Dinner: 6 to 10 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday
CREDIT CARDS: MC, V,
AmEx
RESERVATIONS: yes
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS:
yes
WHAT THE GRADES
MEAN:
A — Excellent
B — Good
C — Average
D — Poor
F — Don’t bother |
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