In Florent's loft

"Nostalgia isn't what it used to be."--Florent Morellet

Florent Morellet, he of the self-named, celebrated New York restaurant, had a loft on the 11th floor of a building on Lafayette Street just north of Spring Street.  It was deep in New York City’s Soho.  Soho, a part of lower Manhattan, like the Meatpacking District where Restaurant Florent thrived for 23 years, became a place transformed.  It went from a sparsely-inhabited, semi-industrial area of the city to a glamorous, expensive, highly-trafficked showplace.  I was lucky enough to live there in 1980 before all the metaphorical Botox had been injected into its visage.  Still, with its imposing cast-iron columned buildings, it has a dignity and elegance that can’t be disfigured by money or fame.  I loved going there even as I found it harder to recognize.  I still do.

I met Florent at a Gotham Writers Workshop I taught in 2008.  When the class was over, some of the students wanted to continue with me, and Florent offered his loft as a place where we could meet.  This was about as lucky as you can get as a writer or teacher.  He had a spacious room in his loft, overflowing with natural light from large windows everywhere, with a Downton-sized table where we would meet once a week from 11 to 1.  The class took place in the fall and spring.  It continued for three years. I never had a better teaching experience. 

I didn’t know Florent well at all when we started meeting at his loft.  But I did get to know him, class after class.   I can see him now, in shorts and T-shirt, sandals, wandering in from the other side of his loft with a cup of coffee, sleep still hovering about him. He had a husky voice, big smile.  He had strong opinions, and he wasn’t reluctant to express them.

He didn’t like France, the country of his birth.  He felt America, and New York in particular, was his true country of origin.  He was unabashedly gay.   Not only was he out of the closet, I don’t think he’d ever walked into it.  He knew everyone, but never acted as if he did.  He believed in justice, social and personal, and put his money where his mouth was.  1985, when he opened Restaurant Florent, the AIDS epidemic was raging.  There was a lot of fear in the air. He himself was HIV positive.  This was no secret.  In fact, the opposite.  He used to put his T-cell count, an indication of how his immune system was dealing with HIV, on the blackboard in his restaurant next to the day’s specials.  Where else have you heard of something like that? 

Florent in his restaurant of the same name

One of the reasons he let us meet in his loft was because he was interested in writing his memoir—or at least people told him he should.  To wit: the story of how this unknown guy from France could, with little more than gumption, guts and nuclear determination, open a restaurant in one of New York’s seediest neighborhoods only to have it become the place to go for the next twenty years or so. He wasn’t fazed by his fame or by his legacy.  “I hate nostalgia,” he would say again and again.  He meant it.  He never looked back. 

That’s why his memoir was doomed.  Ultimately he just wasn’t interested enough in writing that book.  He wasn’t a bad writer at all, especially when you consider his first language wasn’t English.  He wrote in his own voice, and that voice was without guile, straightforward and fearless—like the man himself.  But it became clear that he just wasn’t motivated to tell the story of his life. Besides, sometime during the three years we met at his loft, a documentary was released about this same story he was trying, so unenthusiastically, to write, “Florent: Queen of the Meat Market.” I went to its premiere. You can see the trailer below.

I want to tell you about the workshop itself, and the people who came and went, and the lovely time we had there. And I will. But this prologue is dedicated to Florent Morellet with a single-word title,

Gratitude.