Ritz and Escoffier: The Hotelier, The Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class

by Luke Barr Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki

Overview

In a tale replete with scandal and opulence, Luke Barr, author of the New York Times bestselling Provence, 1970, transports listeners to turn-of-the-century London to discover how celebrated hotelier César Ritz and famed chef Auguste Escoffier joined forces at the Savoy Hotel to spawn the modern luxury hotel and restaurant, where women and American Jews mingled with British high society, signaling a new social order and the rise of the middle class.

In early August 1889, César Ritz, a Swiss hotelier highly regarded for his exquisite taste, found himself at the Savoy Hotel in London. He had come at the request of Richard D'Oyly Carte, the financier of Gilbert & Sullivan's comic operas, who had modernized theater and was now looking to create the world's best hotel. D'Oyly Carte soon seduced Ritz to move to London with his team, which included Auguste Escoffier, the chef de cuisine known for his elevated, original dishes. The result was a hotel and restaurant like no one had ever experienced, run in often mysterious and always extravagant ways—which created quite a scandal once exposed.

Barr deftly re-creates the thrilling Belle Epoque era just before World War I, when British aristocracy was at its peak, women began dining out unaccompanied by men, and American nouveaux riches and gauche industrialists convened in London to show off their wealth. In their collaboration at the still celebrated Savoy Hotel, where they welcomed loyal and sometimes salacious clients, such as Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt, Escoffier created the modern kitchen brigade and codified French cuisine for the ages in his seminal Le Guide culinaire, which remains in print today, and Ritz, whose name continues to grace the finest hotels across the world, created the world's first luxury hotel. The pair also ruffled more than a few feathers in the process. Fine dining would never be the same—or more intriguing.

Editorial Reviews

MAY 2018 - AudioFile

Narrator Stefan Rudnicki’s confident delivery and deep voice enrich this account of the two men who rose from humble beginnings to become the last word on elegance and good taste at the turn of the last century. The intertwined stories of César Ritz, a Swiss hotelier, and Auguste Escoffier, the original French chef, reflect not only the men’s hard work and incredible ability to anticipate their clients’ every need but also the influence of the nouveaux riches on European upper-class social norms. Much of this dual biography takes place at the London Savoy, where the pair both made their names and weathered scandal. Rudnicki easily handles the many European accents, while adding spark to the men’s strong personalities. Get ready to put on the Ritz! C.B.L. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

01/29/2018
In this entertaining culinary history, Barr (Provence, 1970) narrates the lives of the two men responsible for democratizing high-end dining at the turn of the 20th century. In 1889, Richard D’Oyly Carte, an impresario known for his work with Gilbert and Sullivan, opened the Savoy Hotel in central London. The Savoy was intended to fill a new niche: luxury available to anyone who could pay for it, as opposed to being confined to the aristocracy. To this end, D’Oyly Carte hired César Ritz, a fashionable hotelier, and the renowned chef Georges Auguste Escoffier. Barr follows Ritz and Escoffier through the years of their professional partnership, during which the Savoy redefined both hotel service and French cuisine (Escoffier established a new kitchen ethos: “respect for the chef, respect for the ingredients, respect for the artistry of cooking”). Financial scandals (D’Oyly Carte kept from the shareholders the high salaries paid to his staff) and personal squabbles lend drama to the narrative, and nearly every celebrity of the era plays at least a bit part. Barr’s prose is lively and his sourcing impeccable, even if he takes liberties in ascribing thoughts and feelings to his characters. Barr offers a thoroughly enjoyable look into a defining moment of culinary history. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

Notable Press & Accolades: 

Best Cookbooks and Food Books of 2018 —Huffington Post
Best of 2018: Non-Fiction —The Los Angeles Public Library

"Ritz and Escoffier, Luke Barr’s entertaining narrative history, reads like a novel…Mr. Barr has done a fine job evoking fin-de-siecle London and the characters of the two odd men who played such a pivotal role in that exhilarating time.” -Wall Street Journal
 
“In this winningly-told story, Luke Barr explores the advent of the luxe life through the saga of hotelier Cesar Ritz and chef Auguste Escoffier, whose partnership brought us not only the adjective ‘ritzy,’ itself no small testament, but also such once-novel phenomena as hotel rooms with their own bathrooms, and innovative dishes like peach Melba. It’s a charming tale of success, scandal, and redemption—complete with an unexpected villain. Warning: It will make you hungry, and a little nostalgic for bygone times.”—Erik Larson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wake and Devil in the White City
 
"When you eat a Peach Melba, or drink a Grand Marnier, you have these men to thank; they coined the names, then popularised the concoctions. Ritz himself became not merely a byword for luxury but the actual word for it." -The Economist
 
“Barr’s prose is lively and his sourcing impeccable...a thoroughly enjoyable look into a defining moment of culinary history.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“Bar...vividly captures the moment when Ritz and Escoffier conceptualized and created a new type of luxury establishment in which the aristocracy, the nouveau riche, and the beau monde mingled freely and easily. Barr’s highly enjoyable and well-researched book carries the reader into the intimate heart of Ritz and Escoffier’s philosophy.” -Library Journal
 
“The book is as much a celebration of luxury as it is the tale of two scrappy, high-achieving men, and Barr intertwines their biographies with the lush social environs they created […] It’s difficult not to drool on the pages at the thought of foie gras, truffles, Escoffier’s legendary Pêches Melba (named for the famed Australian soprano Nellie Melba), or timbales of crayfish mousse. The book goes down light as an aperitif, and lays down the work of crafting luxurious dreams in spare, workmanlike prose.” -The Village Voice
 
“[A] lively, gossipy account . . . not just a fluidly structured dual biography, but a provocative history of a turning point in the evolving hotel and restaurant industry.”  —Booklist
 
“Was César Ritz the first ‘influencer,’ as goes the sobriquet these days? A merchant of dreams during the final gasp of the Victorian age, he was not only the sirer of a new cosmopolitanism, as depicted in a saucy just-out double-biography Ritz & Escoffier: The Hotelier, The Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class, but also the harbinger of something we almost take for granted now: hotels as ‘lifestyle’ and food as pop culture.” -Toronto Star
 
“If ever a book should be picked up and produced for ‘Masterpiece Theatre,’ this is it. In the meantime, readers can feast on this delightfully written, entertaining book.” -The Florida Times-Union   

“Luke Barr’s delightful and engrossing book is a gripping story of rags to riches to scandal and back, and also a trenchant study of how our materialistic society formulated the idea of luxury. It’s written with wit and charm, seducing the reader just as deftly as its subjects once seduced international society.”
—Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winning author of Far and Away and Far from the Tree


“So very much of what is exciting in food and hospitality today, started with Ritz and Escoffier.  They were modern for their time; they are modern for ours.  Barr’s book is fascinating from beginning to end.”—Dorie Greenspan, James Beard Award-winning author of Dorie’s Cookies and Baking Chez Moi
 
"Luke Barr tells the remarkable story of how César Ritz built a world-class hospitality empire, and his esteemed chef Escoffier, took fine dining to new heights. Ritz & Escoffier is an entertaining account of how they adapted to–and even changed–social customs, helping the world modernize, and leaving behind an impressive legacy.”—David Lebovitz, New York Times bestselling author of L'appart and My Paris Kitchen
 
“Such a fabulous couple of characters and such glamorous, dicey cosmopolitan milieux that Luke Barr depicts with such verve and lucidity. Ritz & Escoffier is a case study of the birth of branded luxury that reads like a dark, delicious urban spinoff prequel to Downton Abbey.”—Kurt Andersen, New York Times bestselling author of You Can’t Spell America Without Me and Fantasyland
 
“A thrilling story of how an outsider—a Swiss peasant—instructed 19th century aristocrats, celebrities, politicians, and plutocrats how to live and, in doing so, single-handedly defined modern luxury. Luke Barr’s incandescent narrative is as smooth and seductive as the service at the Ritz."
—Kate Betts, author of My Paris Dream
 
“Ritz & Escoffier is a vividly engaging piece of social history about two humbly-born visionaries: one a great hotelier, and one a great chef, and the temples of luxury they fashioned first at the Savoy Hotel in Belle Epoque London and then at the Paris Ritz. Filled with intriguing details and fascinating (and sometimes unsavory) characters, Luke Barr has re-created a certain time and place with the deftest of touches.” —Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy and The Fame Lunches

MAY 2018 - AudioFile

Narrator Stefan Rudnicki’s confident delivery and deep voice enrich this account of the two men who rose from humble beginnings to become the last word on elegance and good taste at the turn of the last century. The intertwined stories of César Ritz, a Swiss hotelier, and Auguste Escoffier, the original French chef, reflect not only the men’s hard work and incredible ability to anticipate their clients’ every need but also the influence of the nouveaux riches on European upper-class social norms. Much of this dual biography takes place at the London Savoy, where the pair both made their names and weathered scandal. Rudnicki easily handles the many European accents, while adding spark to the men’s strong personalities. Get ready to put on the Ritz! C.B.L. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Review

2017-12-24
A new perspective on the rise of the leisure class.In his latest book, former Travel + Leisure features editor Barr (Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste, 2013) dives into the many aspects of the restaurant industry during the belle epoque era that laid the groundwork for today's fine-dining experience. The author focuses on the unlikely union of two entrepreneurs: Swiss hotelier César Ritz (1850-1918) and French chef Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935). The two men shared an insatiable appetite for culinary success, but it wasn't just the food they were concerned about. By working together to bring the now-renowned Savoy Hotel to its current glory, Ritz and Escoffier introduced epicurean principles to a general public that had no point of reference to understand such lifestyles. "The nouveaux riches had arrived," writes Barr, "but until now, there had never been anywhere for them to go to announce their arrival. They had rarely been invited to the exclusive dinner parties or private clubs of high society. But now there was the Savoy. The restaurant may have served the most refined, daring, and sometimes shockingly expensive food in the world, but it was not exclusive….The Savoy offered a new and democratic kind of luxury, and cooking was very much at the center of it." In this process, Ritz and Escoffier created a whole new breed of city dwellers dedicated to "a life of pleasure, a theater of luxury." The two would later go on to create the Hotel Ritz in Paris. As in his previous book, it's clear that Barr has done extensive research to master his topic, and the book serves as an expansive resource for those interested in learning more about the turn-of-the-century leisure class. However, the never-ending name-dropping becomes distracting and tiresome. The story would have benefited from more social and cultural analysis and fewer fabulous cameos.A well-researched, glitzy, and flawed history of conspicuous consumption.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171850302
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/03/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

The Hotelier and the Impresario

In early August 1889, César Ritz left Cannes on an overnight train, the 8:43 p.m. bound for Calais. He was en route to London, ensconced in a private cabin, traveling alone.

He wore a suit with a high-collared shirt, a tie and waistcoat, and a bowler hat. As usual, he was dressed impeccably, a white carnation in his lapel, his moustache carefully waxed. Ritz was a young man, but his hairline had begun to recede above his high brow and intelligent, watchful eyes. He looked around the compact cabin: it was wood-paneled, with brass coat hooks, a mirror, and a number of storage compartments for his personal items. (His trunk had been taken by a porter when he boarded the train.) Now Ritz hung his jacket in the small closet and placed his hat on the rack. The weather was hot, and he was glad to be traveling at night.

Ritz loved to travel, the thrill and speed of it, the trains rushing toward the future. The Calais-Mediterranean Express train he was on now, for example, had launched a few years earlier, in 1886, and was state of the art, with a restaurant car and onboard lavatories, precluding the need for rest stops at stations along the way. The train ran slowly along the French Riviera, stopping at resort towns like Menton and Monte Carlo before speeding north through Lyon and Paris and on to the English Channel. From there, Ritz would board a ferry and then another train, to London. The trip would take a full night and day.

It was remarkably fast, Ritz thought. The express trains were transforming European travel and, especially, the towns along the Mediterranean. The English had been coming to the Côte d’Azur for a century already, traveling by carriage and on boats. Rail lines had made the trip far easier. There were numerous competing train companies using the tracks--the long-established Marseilles-to-Nice service along the coast dated back to the 1860s, which was when the Cannes station had been built, a small white building with a roof covering both tracks. But the express trains heralded a new era, bringing throngs of visitors from all over Europe. This was good for Ritz: he was in the hotel business.

Why was he going to London, anyway? He hated London. Well, he’d never been to London, actually, but he hated the idea of it: the gloom, the fog, the dour English propriety and cool reserve. The mediocre food. He was Continental, in every sense of the word. His business was pleasure. Ritz was a hotel man, welcoming guests with well-practiced charm at his two small properties, one in Cannes, the Hotel de Provence, the other in Baden-Baden, Germany, the Hotel Minerva, where he also ran the Restaurant de la Conversation.

He was thirty-nine years old and had been working in the business his whole life--in Lucerne, Paris, and Vienna; in San Remo, Monte Carlo, and Trouville; all over Europe, following the glamorous trail of vacationing aristocrats and wealthy tourists as they took their cures and baths and sought mountain air in the summer and Mediterranean sun in winter. They were an international tribe, increasingly mobile--the Orient Express, with its luxurious sleeping cars, had just launched the first nonstop train between Paris and Constantinople--and Ritz had cultivated a following among them. The dapper young Swiss hotelier was effortlessly multilingual (if heavily accented), and never forgot a name or a face. Not only that, he also made careful note of his clients’ whims and desires: who preferred what for breakfast, who required a carafe of water on his bedside table at night.

Ritz was also a showman, an orchestrator of evening entertainments and gala dinners. Indeed, it was because of one such grand dinner that he now found himself, however reluctantly, on the train to London.

It had been almost a year ago, that dinner, at Ritz’s recently opened restaurant in Baden-Baden. The Restaurant de la Conversation was already the talk of the town. He had advertised both the hotel and restaurant extensively, printing lavish brochures, and installed electric lights above the terrace, twinkling in the branches of the plants and trees. He was soon attracting a glamorous crowd. (Kaiser Wilhelm I, the German emperor, had eaten dinner there, and Ritz had made sure everyone knew it.) Baden-Baden was a summer resort, a place people came to for the casinos and the racetrack, and of course for the hot-spring baths--baden is German for “bath”--and it was a town where, in the evening, elaborate dinner parties were held. So when Prince Radziwill, a leading member of the Kaiser’s circle and Berlin society, told Ritz that he wanted to host a dinner that would be remembered--“something original,” he said--and that cost was not a concern, Ritz seized the opportunity.

This was the sort of challenge Ritz loved: to create a spectacle. And all the better to do so with an unlimited budget. This would be more than a dinner; it would be an event. He landed upon a simple, summery idea: to bring the outside in. He covered the entire floor of the restaurant with grass, and the walls with roses, hundreds and hundreds of them. He placed potted trees among the tables and brought a stone fountain and pool into the restaurant and filled it with exotic goldfish. At the center of this theatrical indoor woodland scene was an enormous fern. Ritz had seen it at one of the local horticultural gardens and managed to rent it for the night. (That alone had cost a small fortune.) Then he built a table around the towering plant and covered that with yet more flowers. (Ritz was a great believer in flowers--vast, extravagant quantities of them. He sometimes thought he was singlehandedly keeping the local florists in business.)

He hired an orchestra, designed the menu, and then basked in the delight of the prince and his guests. The scene was magical, transporting the diners into a kind of Midsummer Night’s Dream stage-set fantasy, and the evening, despite all the logistical hurdles, was a stunning success.

It was just after dinner when Ritz was approached by an Englishman named Richard D’Oyly Carte. “This is the sort of thing,” D’Oyly Carte said, his arm sweeping across the room, “I’d like to do at my new hotel in London.”

D’Oyly Carte was a few years older than Ritz, in his mid-forties, a short, wiry, frenetic man with a full beard and piercing brown eyes that seemed to have an orange tint. He owned the Savoy Theatre on the Strand in London--this was “Theatreland,” they called it, a raucous stretch of the Embankment that was the center of bohemian London’s nightlife. D’Oyly Carte was now building a large luxury hotel next door to his theater, also called the Savoy, one that he said would be the best in the world.

D’Oyly Carte had made his fortune producing Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas, hugely popular entertainments that included The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, in the 1870s and ’80s. The hotel was a long-held dream of his: a place for theatergoers to eat dinner and, if they were from out of town, stay the night. D’Oyly Carte had traveled widely and was convinced that London was ready for a truly modern hotel.

The two men had met before, two years earlier, in Monte Carlo. D’Oyly Carte had stayed at the Grand, which Ritz was then managing, and had been effusive in his praise: “There is not a hotel in London,” he proclaimed, “where you can get a decent meal . . . much less one where you can dine like a god, as one does here.”

He went on to tell Ritz when they spoke in Monte Carlo that London desperately needed a good hotel with a good restaurant. Or, better yet, a great hotel with a great restaurant. Yes, what London needed was a man like Ritz. “You’d make money hand over fist,” D’Oyly Carte said. “Hand over fist!” There were plenty of large hotels in London (the Langham, the Westminster Palace), but their food and service were mediocre. Unsophisticated. And as for the leading restaurants, they were banal. Stolid chophouses mostly, along with a few decent French restaurants, such as the Café Royal and Kettner’s, both favored by the literary set. Still, there was nothing that could compare to the glamorous atmospherics and sophisticated cooking on the Continent.

Now, amid the trees and ferns and roses at the Restaurant de la Conversation, surrounded by German, French, and English high society, the orchestra playing, everyone drinking, Prince Radziwill holding court at the center of the room, D’Oyly Carte was no longer making idle small talk about the hotel business. He was offering Ritz a job: come to London, he said. See it for yourself. The Savoy was going to change everything. And he needed a man like Ritz to manage the hotel and restaurant.

Ritz had only smiled. London? No one even ate in restaurants there, at least not the aristocratic types he served in Provence and Baden-Baden. The English elites were tradition-bound, in Ritz’s experience. They all ate at their private clubs, or entertained at home, either in town or at their country estates. Why would they come to a hotel for dinner?

And furthermore: Ritz had only just gone into business for himself, independently, taking charge of the restaurant in Baden-Baden and the nearby Hotel Minerva, and opening his hotel in Cannes. Not to mention he was newly married, just last year: his young wife, Marie, awaited his return from Baden-Baden even as they spoke. His plate was full. He had to say no.

D’Oyly Carte understood completely. But . . . and now a new idea formed. Why not come to London for the grand opening, just for a short visit--a week or two? Ritz could survey the operation and offer advice. His knowledge and expertise would be invaluable, said D’Oyly Carte. He would be a consultant, his very presence at the Savoy conferring legitimacy and guaranteeing its success. In fact, if Ritz agreed, D’Oyly Carte would announce to the press that the renowned César Ritz was overseeing the debut of the restaurant. And for this, D’Oyly Carte would be willing to pay a significant sum: £350.

He looked at Ritz in his keen, assessing way. It was a baldly mercenary offer, a form of prostitution, really: Ritz’s reputation in exchange for cash. Still, £350 was a lot of money, the equivalent of a decent annual salary.

“He wants the clientele I can give him,” Ritz told Marie when he arrived at home in Cannes--the guests he had courted and served over the years both there and in Baden-Baden, and before that in Monte Carlo and Lucerne, relationships he’d nurtured for years. First and foremost, “the Marlborough House set--Lord Rosebery, Lord and Lady Elcho, Lord and Lady Gosford, Lord and Lady de Grey, the Sassoons.” They were members of London’s social, political, and business elite: the Prince of Wales’s inner circle, named for his residence on Pall Mall. Not far from Buckingham Palace, Marlborough House was a grand London mansion and had been home to Queen Victoria’s eldest son and heir to the throne since the 1860s. The prince was a man of great appetites and good taste, and he traveled often. He was Ritz’s most important client.

But it wasn’t only English aristocrats who favored Ritz’s hotels and who D’Oyly Carte hoped would come to the Savoy: there were “the Roman Princes, Rudini, the Crispis, the Rospigliosis, the Radziwills, and so forth,” Ritz continued--all the great royal families of the Continent. “And the best of the theater and opera crowd--Patti, the de Reszkes, Coquelin, Bernhardt; the Grand Dukes, and the smart Parisian crowd--the Castellanes, the Breteuils, the Sagans.” And, of course, the European and American financiers: “He wants the Vanderbilts and Morgans, he wants the Rothschilds.”

There was nothing that gave Ritz more pleasure than contemplating this list of his most illustrious, glamorous guests--the prestige, money, and honor their names represented, prestige that had now attached itself in some way to his own name. And for a man who’d grown up herding cows and goats in the Swiss Alps, that was saying something.

Ritz was known in this rarified world. Respected. He had made something of himself. Ritz had been serving the Prince and Princess of Wales since the early 1880s; the royal couple had come to the Hotel de Provence with their five children the previous year over Easter, and had addressed him as a friend. They had stayed for two weeks, their royal patronage a most valuable endorsement of Ritz’s new venture: where the prince went, others invariably followed. And the prince was loyal.

Now D’Oyly Carte was hoping for a similar result in London, and hoping Ritz could help. If the prince and his friends were to embrace the Savoy, that alone would justify the cost of paying Ritz an exorbitant fee to attend the opening.

“He wants to make his hotel the hotel de luxe of London and of the world,” Ritz told Marie.

“And he thinks your name alone can do it?” Marie asked.

“He says I am one of the titans of the hotel and restaurant world,” Ritz said, laughing. “And he’s right in thinking that my name now has a certain value. It will attract the crowd he wants--but it won’t keep them. He hasn’t the least idea how much work and care, how much imagination and effort, go into the proper running of a hotel.”

Still, he was flattered--and curious. And so here he was on the train to London. The Savoy Hotel was opening the following Tuesday, August 6, 1889. Ritz would be there in his dark suit, a flower in his lapel, a temporary figurehead, a symbol of the Continental style and luxury the Savoy promised. Would it deliver? He felt a twinge of unease at the risk he’d taken on--the risk to his own reputation. Would it be tarnished if the Savoy failed to live up to expectations? Ritz didn’t think so. He was his own man, with his own hotel. And this visit to London would also be an excellent opportunity to remind some of his many longtime English customers about his new, independent ventures in Cannes and Baden-Baden.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Ritz and Escoffier"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Luke Barr.
Excerpted by permission of Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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