It’s Time to Bid Adieu to La Grenouille

Lunching at the restaurant in 1978. Photo: Susan Wood/Getty Images

Having survived a rocky recent history — stopping and starting, the pandemic and the return, the exit of one brother and the ascendance of the other — La Grenouille’s management has announced the restaurant will close. In a letter posted to Instagram, Philippe Masson, son of founders Charles and Gisèle Masson, said that the doors would close at 3 East 52nd Street this week, and while news reports during previous precarious moments indicated La G. might move elsewhere, Masson’s note suggests it likely will not. “Philippe,” Masson wrote in the third person, “is moving on to explore new terrain and pursue other dreams.”

To its devoted fans, La Grenouille was one of the last holdouts of mid-century sophistication. It was founded in 1962 by the Massons, and for decades hosted the Chanel-suited society set, old and young alike. (Liz Lange, the maternity designer and a niece of ’80s corporate raider Saul Steinberg, wrote on Instagram that she spent “all my childhood celebrations” there.) Not long after I joined New York Magazine, I helped to organize a story that brought the new guard of New York’s social scene to meet the old guard; La Grenouille was the obvious place. The restaurant was generational in that way. “I’ve been coming here since I was in my 30s, two to three times a month, always with friends,” Joan Sbarro, a regular, told us at the time. “There used to be a woman who was 93 years old, and she would sit in the same seat that I love to sit in and have two martinis for lunch. I like to say we’ve earned those lunches, as women.”

I went back when La Grenouille reopened after another period of dormancy in January (something to do with Con Ed or the Department of Buildings, depending on whom you asked), and the writing seemed to be on the wall. No one could quite pin down the state of affairs on the building’s potential sale — its last known agents at Cushfield & Wakeman are no longer involved, a company spokesperson confirmed — and the restaurant’s Carolingian Era was well in its past, with dinners punctuated nightly by jazz standards in the key of Philippe. It was still a thrill to order a soufflé at the beginning of a meal, and the menu had a few highlights, but the flowers are not what they were when Philippe’s brother Charles ran the show. Most of the charm was in the warm glow of one of New York’s loveliest, most historic, rooms. La Grenouille may have opened and closed over the years, but it hadn’t budged from 52nd Street since Robert Wagner was in the mayor’s office. Adieu seems too gentle a word, but what else is there to say?

This post was updated after Cushfield & Wakeman confirmed they are no longer handling the potential sale of the building.