Just as there are no places like La Côte Basque.” La Côte Basque was a Manhattan restaurant—expensive, traditional, formal, and French. It opened on Fifty-Fifth Street in the 1950s and quickly became one of those restaurants where the map of tables in the dining room could function as a simulacrum for the map of social hierarchies among the diners seated at them. The treasured tables were the chilliest ones, by the door, where everyone could be seen. The dining room in the back was more comfortable, but it was social Siberia. For a certain slice of New York society in the 1960s and ’70s, La
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