This is the restaurant where the late Julia Child was introduced to French cooking and had, as she tells it in “My Life in France,’’ “the most exciting meal of my life.’’ But before and since her revelatory meal on Nov. 3, 1948, many luminaries visited this dining room. A framed, signed photograph of Child is just one amid a gallery’s worth of diplomats, dignitaries, actors, singers, and sports stars that festoon La Couronne’s walls. There are smoky, sultry portraits of Grace Kelly, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren; there are debonair, seductive glances immortalized in shots of Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne.
Owner Darwin Cauvin, a slender pixie-ish woman in a canary yellow dress, scampers around the restaurant in Jimmy Choo heels. Her daughter, Prudence, often follows. They dash up and down the stairs, checking on guests in the restaurant’s six handsome dining rooms with dark wood paneling and chairs, and medieval tapestries. Heady aromas of roasting meat and simmering butter drift through every room.
Cauvin, who is quick to provide intel on star guests (Salvador Dali was “very afraid of planes,’’ she says), clasps her hands when she discovers a visitor from Boston. “Oooohh, like Julia!’’ she chirps.
Child’s famous meal has been reproduced countless times. It was even specially featured in 2009 when “Julie & Julia,’’ starring Meryl Streep, was released. Cauvin guarantees little has changed in the kitchen as far as classic technique is concerned. To be sure, the legendary sole meuniere and fromage blanc that triggered the budding French chef’s epiphany are constants. But Cauvin says the chefs change up the menu more than they used to. “When the same people are coming in,’’ she explains, “they don’t always want the same thing.’’
