The True Story of the La Côte Basque Restaurant

Before there was Ralph Lauren's Polo Bar in Manhattan (good luck trying to get in), there was La Côte Basque: The go-to restaurant for New York society, where the company one kept was more important than the food one ordered.

The restaurant is back in the news as Feud: Capote vs. The Swans airs, tracing the social downfall of American novelist Truman Capote after he published an excerpt titled "La Côte Basque, 1965" from his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers. The story, named for the famed restaurant, begins with a character named Lady Ina Coolbirth (an alias for Slim Keith) unleashing society gossip to a writer named J.P. Jones (a.k.a.Capote) over lunch at La Côte Basque.

In the early scenes of the FX drama, Babe Paley (Naomi Watts) greets C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny) with delicate kisses on each cheek—both women keeping their sunglasses on to protect their eyes from the flashing bulbs going off from the paparazzi camped outside. "We don't want to go in quite yet," Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) says to his taxi driver as he waits patiently inside a taxi, watching the encounter. "Timing is everything."

The show's depiction of the restaurant is far from inaccurate. La Côte Basque was the watering hole—church, some may argue—for society's most powerful and influential names with camera lens pointed and ready to fire for the moment one stepped foot under the signature green awning. In the series and in real life, the famed restaurant is the setting of where spicy gossip and sharp insults are shared between the foremothers of "Ladies who Lunch."

Restaurateur Henri Soulé opened La Côte Basque in the late 1950s on 60 West 55th street. (As a note, Soulé is also responsible for La Pavillion and is credited for coining the term "Siberia" ascribed to the worst seats in a setting.)

In 1979, legendary French chef Jean-Jacques Rachou bought the restaurant from Soulé. This was no random acquisition: Rachou's culinary CV was stacked with high-profile stints. He was an apprentice at the Hôtel Régina where he learned classic French cooking by August Escoffier (credited for updating traditional French cuisine in the early 20th century); a cook at La Mamounia Hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco, and Lisbon to open the Hotel Ritz; worked at the Colony restaurant on Madison Avenue; and opened his own first restaurant, Le Lavandou, on East 61st Street in 1975.

The interiors of La Côte Basque transported diners to an elegant oasis in the South of France. Red banquets were set against yellow walls, and a French seaside mural illustrated the backdrop of the restaurant. Rachou was known for his sharp attention to detail and spent over $2,000 each week on beautifully cut flowers, and more than $3,000 on fresh linens.

In 1972, John Fairchild, the powerhouse editor of WWD from 1960 to 1996 and social chronicler, named La Côte Basque as one of the "last bastions of grand lux dining in New York."

The restaurant was a watering hole for the who's who of New York Society, including the Swans—Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest, Pamela Harriman, Gloria Guinness, Ann Woodward, Marella Agnelli. Fairchild would send his photographers to buzzy society restaurants including La Côte Basque for content. On the pages of WWD in 1962, the Duchess of Windsor was photographed alongside Guest in a Dior suit outside of the restaurant. Jackie Kennedy, Nan Kempner, and Frank Sinatra were also patrons of the restaurant.

Rachou led the restaurant for 45 years, until its closure on March 7, 2004.

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