Of course, on the opposite side I felt it when I would go to the produce markets in Paris—the equivalent of Hunt’s Point in the Bronx—to buy food for the restaurant, and the sellers didn’t respect me because I was not one of them. They would actually not answer me. I would try to buy at the wholesale market, and they would ignore me. I was not from their class. I was a bourgeois. And finally they would just give me the worst case of salad.
Eventually I had to close the restaurant because I was losing money. I hated Paris then, and I still don’t like it much. I love the provinces; they’re so friendly. But the culture of Paris is the culture of complaining! Typically, you’ll say “Oh, it’s a wonderful day today.” And the Parisian says, “Oh, you’ll see; we’re going to pay for it!” But New York is very positive, gung-ho.
NM: When was the moment in New York when you said, “I want to open a restaurant here?”
FM: I’ve loved America since I was a kid. I did a “grand tour” with my parents when I was 14, in 1967. We drove from New York, all over New England, to Montreal for the World’s Fair, to Chicago, Detroit, Louisiana, across Texas, the Grand Canyon, California. And I came back to live here in ’73. I worked for a year in a restaurant in San Francisco. That’s when I decided to go to Paris and open a restaurant. It was a mistake… I realized that I was made for America. So I moved to New York, and I knew I wanted to become American; it was my calling. I started working in a restaurant in SoHo called La Gamelle—managing the place. It later became Lucky Strike. And I got good lessons there. The owner was a Franco-Algerian guy who taught me a lot about the basics. This guy really came to America with nothing. It was interesting that I learned from an Algerian, a real immigrant, not a princess.
NM: What are some of the things that he taught you that have stuck by you for all these years?
FM: He was very hard on people, very tough. But I learned about the basic bistro menu with classics that we improved. Good food at a good value. You can have the hottest restaurant, but you have to maintain a balance.
NM: You’ve seen a lot of people walk through these doors over the years. How has the profile changed? How about the people who come to Florent every week, every night?
FM: People come once a month, every six months… they have their first date here and then come every year. They’re on vacation here for two weeks, and during that two weeks they come here like five times. There are multiple layers of regulars. This guy who has a pied à terre for weekends, he’s here every weekend.
NM: How about those late-night, four-in-the-morning people?
FM: Ha! As people age…well, their timing changes; they’re getting married, and they used to come at 4 in the morning and now they come at 6:30 at night with their kids—we have a children’s menu, too. It’s very cute. I’ve always made it so that we are available to everybody, because we’re open 24 hours, and I think our clientele is the broadest that you can find in this country. Because we still get some meatpackers, families with children, club kids, the drag queens…. All, all, all people.
Late afternoon and early evening, it takes some people 10 minutes to get in the door with their packages, some old people with their nurse—you know, we’ve had some that almost died here! One guy always came in with his wife, then she passed away, and for the last eight or nine years he kept coming here, sometimes at midnight. He’d come in, he’d fall asleep on the banquette, two times he collapsed here and we had to call EMS. There were points where we had to call his family and say, “It’s getting out of hand. He needs home care.”
We’d bring him back home. He knew he could always come here, and he did… in his PJs and his coat! We took care of him and one of the busboys would call a cab to take him a block away. That’s what we do.
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