Le Time Capsule

On a recent evening at a tiny, 50-seat French bistro on East 60th Street a few paces from Bloomingdale's, business was slow, bordering on glacial. A quartet of old friends, evidently longtime habitués, were nursing a bottle of white Burgundy. They were in no hurry to inspect the menu. A couple of elderly ladies in enormous hats, seated nearby, were taking the dinner hour at an equally leisurely pace. Two inquiries from the restaurant's single waiter — a subtly imperious, silver-haired man in a tuxedo — elicited no order.

At the bar, a strongly built old man with an imposing bald head and firm jaw was perched on a stool. He wore a dark suit, French-cuff shirt, a tie, and a gray waistcoat festooned with many buttons. This was Robert Tréboux, since 1985 the proprietor of Le Veau d'Or. The set of his mouth was grim, but he was not dissatisfied with the pace of trade. A few seatings a night is fine with him.

"We're not pushing business," he said in a voice that still evokes the mountainous Savoie region of France, where he was born in 1924. "We're fine with our regulars. That's good enough for me. ‘Après moi, le déluge.'"

Mr. Tréboux can afford to be selective in his clientele. He owns the townhouse where Le Veau d'Or occupies the ground floor. He lives upstairs, making for a convenient commute to work. "I take a nap in the afternoon, I come down for dinner, then I close the place," he said. "To me, that's living. Going on vacation is not living. This is my life. I like to talk. I like people."

Seemingly forgotten by time — and Zagat, which occasionally neglects to list it — Le Veau d'Or was in its heyday the haunt of Orson Welles, Truman Capote, and Bobby Short. Princess Grace met Oleg Cassini there, and food critic Craig Claiborne called it the one restaurant he couldn't live without. Daniel Leader, who owns the well-known upstate bakery Bread Alone, remembers working as a morning cook there in 1976. "It was at its peak. We used to do 120 lunches every day. It was a frenzy."

In recent years, Le Veau d'Or has become more of a footnote — both in the New York restaurant universe, and, quite literally, in the entertaining new history of the gourmet food movement in America, "The United States of Arugula."Author David Camp wrote at the bottom of one page: "Le Veau d'Or is an extraordinary time warp of a restaurant, the last place in New York where you can still get uncompromised Escoffier cuisine and have your roast carved tableside by a man who worked directly under Soulé."

Soulé is Henri Soulé, the French restaurateur who introduced New York to haute French cuisine when he opened Le Pavillon at 5 E. 55th St. in October, 1941. Le Pavillon led to Le Côte Basque, La Caravelle, Le Périgord, and many other famed "Le" and "La" dining palaces. Robert Tréboux worked as a waiter in Le Pavillon for five years in the 1950s and has carried what he learned there through five decades and as many restaurants. They include La Rotisserie Francaise, a 52nd-Street eatery he owned, which unwittingly gave its name to Rotisserie Fantasy Baseball. Daniel Okrent, the journalist who created the imaginary baseball league, once lunched with his sports pals at the restaurant.

"In those days, when I came to this country, there were only a few major restaurants," Mr. Tréboux said. "There was ‘21,' the Colony, and Le Pavillon. That was a unique restaurant. Soulé was crazy by our standards, but now that I am in my 80s, I don't think he was that crazy. He was a very special man.

"The chefs transformed the restaurant business," he continued,"and they made it that the waiter has to go to the kitchen and get the plate and bring it. They don't work on the tables like we used to, carving chicken, preparing fishes. Nobody does it anymore."

They still do at Le Veau d'Or, along with a number of things that aren't done anymore, such as offering a table d'hôte menu, in which $28–$38 includes any appetizer, entrée, and dessert from a limited list of options. The kitchen also remains faithful to dinosaur-age dishes long out of fashion, such as coq au vin, cassoulét, and Beef Bourgonoine. Mr. Tréboux claims he has roughly the same menu as was offered when the restaurant opened in 1937, four years before Le Pavillon.

Also unchanged is the décor, with its red-leather banquettes, salmon-colored tablecloths, and mirror-backed bar — all the touches restaurant mogul Keith McNally has been stealing over the years. With the window curtains drawn — as they always are — if feels like a culinary cocoon, circa 1940s. "There is nothing different about the place," Mr. Leader confirmed. "It's like time stood still."

That is on purpose."We want to keep it what it is, which is what people want," Mr. Tréboux, who has met no trend he couldn't resist, said."They can go to other places that have the plate with the little bit of food in the middle. That's not what people want. They want food." Proof that Le Veau d'Or is the antithesis of celebrity chef culture rests in the fact that Mr. Tréboux and his daughter Cathy, who helps out at lunch, refused to disclose the identity of their chef of 18 years. "It's all about the recipes, not the chef,"Ms. Tréboux said.

Ms. Tréboux — who once also lived above the restaurant but now commutes from Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and family — is not happy when Zagat overlooks Le Veau d'Or, as it did last year. "What happens is people think my dad has passed away and we've closed."

Though Ms. Tréboux will not say whether she will eventually take over her father's business, there is no doubt the Le Veau d'Or will ply onion soup and escargot as long as the indomitable Robert Tréboux is around. "You couldn't live with my father if he didn't have this place," Ms. Tréboux said with a laugh. "He doesn't want a protégé, because he's too impatient to teach them. It's a club. It's not really a business. We're just here to entertain dad."