Ritz and Escoffier

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 be

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