Art and soufflés for the leisure class on a student’s budget

The grass is always greener on the other side. SEAS kids wish they had applied to Columbia College, first-years wish they had no meal plan, sophomores wish they were first-years or upperclassmen, and Columbia students on tight Morningside Heights budgets wish they could live like Upper East Siders. While there’s no way to guarantee a sustainable “Gossip Girl” lifestyle, a trip to Howard Greenberg Gallery’s Jacques Henri Lartigue exhibit “A New Paradise,” followed by soufflés at Alain Ducasse’s new outpost Adour at the St. Regis Hotel, will only leave you $15 poorer while making you feel like having spent a million bucks.

Few people visit Suite 1406 of the Fuller Building on East 57th Street at Madison Avenue, the Howard Greenberg Gallery, without intending to purchase a piece of work. The Fuller Building is understandably home to some of New York’s higher-end galleries. Its art-deco design, black marble and gold mosaics, and ornate gold and copper wall reliefs are transporting. Entering the building and waiting for the elevator means traveling back to the Golden Twenties, to a time of unabashed opulence.

The gallery is small. It is only one room, a little bigger than a Hamilton classroom.

When I asked how the artists and pieces to be featured where chosen, one gallery assistant said, “Well, we’re a midcentury gallery that specializes in photography and photojournalism. And Howard’s been in business for 25 years, so he knows what he’s good at by now.” She gave me a packet listing the works for sale and their prices with accompanying thumbnail photographs. The sold pieces went for between $18,000-40,000. The ones still for sale in the gallery started at $15,000, so they must have been the bargain pieces.
Lartigue was an impressive French photographer. Born in 1894 to a wealthy family, he started taking pictures at age six.

Most of his photographs featured at the exhibit are pictures he took of his friends and family between the ages of 10 and 20. They show the carefree life of the leisure class running, racing wheeled soapboxes, doing cannonballs into swimming pools, and building kites. They show a child’s honesty and innocence that never seems to cross over into naivety.
The photographs he took in his teens focus more on fashionable Parisian women—as any hormonal teenage boy’s photographs probably would. “A Day at the Races” shows a woman in a floor-length white gown and matching parasol, while “Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Paris” depicts a woman covered head-to-toe in black mink fur, casually walking her dogs. Lartigue photographed what he had access to and became one of the biggest names in photography because of it.

Lartigue’s works show a life without worry in a time before the Great Depression and the world wars. They portray burgeoning science and technology—the car, the airplane, and even the development of modern art.

While Lartigue’s art was meant to imitate life, walking from East 57th and Madison to the St. Regis Hotel at 55th and Fifth will ensure that your life imitates Lartigue’s art depicting wealth and privilege. Alain Ducasse’s restaurant Adour is far more accessible now than it was just a few years ago. Instead of binding its visitors to a five-hour tasting menu, it allows for à la carte and dessert visits.

A dessert visit to Adour is something close to revelation—if you get the soufflé, that is. A soufflé can make or break the reputation of a pastry chef. The lightly crisped exterior gives way to a gooey, but not wet, center. The pillowy pastry at Adour changes with the seasons. I caught the tail-end of summer menu, so I was lucky enough to have an apricot soufflé that surprised me the same way small Disney figurines inside Wonder Balls used to shock me, except that the Adour surprise was a pleasant one. Five identical soufflés for my friends and me came out at once, gently jiggling but never collapsing. They were served with bitter almond yogurt sorbet that grounded the tart and tangy apricot of the dessert pillow. It was understated, luxurious, and expertly executed.

The borderline stuffy, traditional French interior of the St. Regis coupled with the rich taste and reputation of Adour’s soufflé can make one feel like a baron or baroness being served at a state dinner party—if only for an evening—and the richness of the dessert doesn’t break the bank. Midtown East may have cheap deals, but it is nonetheless rich with opportunity.