Roger Fessaguet, who presided over the exalted kitchen of the elegant Manhattan restaurant La Caravelle in the 1960s and ’70s, when it attracted A-list celebrities with classic French cuisine and Parisian ambience, died on Wednesday in Damariscotta, Me. He was 82.
The cause was coronary artery disease, his lawyer, John J. Lynch, said. Mr. Fessaguet had been in a nursing home near his cottage on the Maine coast.
La Caravelle, on West 55th Street near Fifth Avenue, opened in September 1960 and was an immediate hit.
“Rarely has a restaurant opened to such an immediate public enthusiasm, and rarely has it been so thoroughly deserved,” the restaurant critic Craig Claiborne wrote in The New York Times.
In the French tradition, Mr. Fessaguet offered a different menu every day. Sampling one item, Mr. Claiborne raved about “the stuffed turbot, imported fresh from European waters but as sweet in flavor and as tender in texture as if it had been pulled within the hour from the waters off Long Island.”
He was just getting started. “The stuffing was Nantaise style — a mousse of sole, fresh cream, deftly mixed herbs such as rosemary, bay leaf and thyme, and a suggestion of shallots,” he continued.
Eight years later, Mr. Claiborne gave the restaurant four stars in “The New York Times Guide to Dining Out in New York,” calling it “the finest restaurant in New York on almost every count.”
In 1977, Gourmet magazine likened La Caravelle to “Paris, dressed in its holiday best and transported to New York.”
That was a time when French haute cuisine and the restaurants that served it were flying high. People with wallets fat enough flocked to Lutèce, Lespinasse and La Côte Basque, as well as La Caravelle. All of them have since closed — Lespinasse in 2003, the rest in 2004 — in part because of a general public shift toward lighter fare.
Mr. Fessaguet (pronounced FESS-a-guy) was the wizard behind La Caravalle’s success. He had sailed to New York from France in 1949, a 17-year-old high school dropout who had sold his clarinet and stamp collection to help pay for his passage by freighter. He found work at Le Pavillon in Manhattan, which Louis Vaudable, owner of Maxim’s in Paris, called the best restaurant in the world from 1951 to 1955. (It closed in 1971.)
It was a pair of maîtres d’hôtel at Le Pavillon, Fred Decré and Robert Meyzen, who started Le Caravelle, naming it after the type of three-sailed 15th-century ship used by Christopher Columbus. The name, they thought, conveyed a spirit of new possibilities.
They adorned the restaurant with lively murals of Paris parks and street scenes, installed scarlet banquettes and hired Mr. Fessaguet as executive chef. His creations included French classics like quenelles de brochet, roast duck and soufflés.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor dined there. So did Marlene Dietrich and Pablo Picasso. Salvador Dalí accidentally scratched a mural with his cane. Joseph P. Kennedy, father of President John F. Kennedy, often dined there several times a week. John Kennedy fancied the vichyssoise and chicken in Champagne sauce.
When Kennedy was elected president, he and his wife, Jacqueline, asked Mr. Fessaguet to recommend a French chef for the White House. Mr. Fessaguet and his partners suggested René Verdon, and tutored him in his own kitchen for two weeks on Kennedy culinary predilections. He later named the president’s favorite dish poularde maison blanche, White House chicken.
Mr. Fessaguet’s influence extended beyond his own restaurant. From 1969 to 1987, he was president of the Vatel Club, an organization of French chefs that conducted all of its business in the mother tongue. With flair, but with limited success, he pushed the United States government for years to allow more kitchen workers to emigrate from France. He started and edited Toques Blanches, a French culinary magazine published in the United States. He was festooned with honors, including being named chevalier, or knight, in the French Legion of Honor.
Mr. Fessaguet was meticulous in his professional pride. Interviewed by The Times in 1990, he recalled that in his early years in New York he would send his towering white chef’s hats back to France aboard French-line ships, to be washed, ironed and starched “by women who know exactly what to do.”
Roger André Fessaguet was born on Aug. 4, 1931, in Villefranche sur Saone, in France’s Beaujolais region. He long championed the region’s wines as long as they were served with foods with light sauces, like a simple sautéed chicken.
“You could not, for example, serve it with a venison stew, or something like that,” he said. “That would call for a much more powerful wine.”
His father, a lawyer, urged him to follow in his footsteps, or, failing that, to become an engineer. Rejecting both ideas, the young Mr. Fessaguet dropped out of school at 14.
He learned kitchen work in a series of harsh apprenticeships. In New York, an uncle who was chef at the Knickerbocker Club helped find him the job at Le Pavillon, from which Mr. Fessaguet took a leave, from 1952 to 1954, to serve with the Marines in the Mediterranean.
In 1967, he became an owner of Le Poulailler, a restaurant near the recently opened Lincoln Center. He and his partners sold it in 1981.
He became an owner of La Caravelle, along with Mr. Meyzen, in 1980, on his retirement from the kitchen. Mr. Meyzen sold his shares in 1984, and Mr. Fessaguet followed suit four years later. The succeeding owners closed La Caravelle on Valentine’s Day 2004.
Mr. Fessaguet’s first wife, Anne Marie Corre, died in 1985 after 26 years of marriage. His marriage to Miriam Showalter ended in divorce. No immediate family members survive.
Mr. Fessaguet was unusual among French chefs in that he abhorred cheese, which he said smelled bad and was not necessary for a fine meal. He was in agreement with his fellow chefs, however, when it came to customers who sent back dishes that he knew had been properly prepared.
“Ah, I would like to take such a customer by the neck,” he said.
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