Anthony Bourdain once called Le Veau d’Or, New York’s longest-running French bistro, “a restaurant that time forgot.” The restaurant arrived on the Upper East Side in 1937, from the same family behind Benoit Paris. It quickly became a New York society favorite and A-list haunt—Orson Welles preferred the corner booth by the bar, while Audrey Hepburn and former presidents’ names and numbers were frequently penned in the reservation book. For decades, bon vivants folded themselves into red banquets and drifted, for the night, to a bygone era.

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While time may have forgotten—and incidentally, institutionalized—Le Veau d’Or, Frenchette’s Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson did not. Beginning in 2012, they periodically rang owner Catherine Tréboux (whose father, Robert Tréboux, ran the restaurant from 1985 until his death in 2012) for seven years, resolute in their efforts to purchase, renovate and reopen the iconic restaurant. In 2019, Tréboux finally conceded and closed the restaurant to solidify the sale.

While Nasr and Hanson hoped to restore the tired kitchen, worn floors and other aging details of the historic bistro and open within a year, the coronavirus pandemic stymied their efforts, and Le Veau ended up under construction for another five years.

On July 16, 2024—12 years after Nasr and Hanson first began their mission to take over Le Veau d’Or—“The Golden Calf” finally reopened its doors.

I entered the........

© Observer