The Cult of Paris's Caviar Kaspia Restaurant
This intimate spot in Paris's eighth arrondissement has made the humble baked potato–albeit topped with spoonfuls of caviar–the favorite fuel of the fashionable set, including Beyoncé and Valentino Garavani—for nearly 90 years
THERE'S A SCENE in Anna Karenina in which Oblonsky, Anna's brother and irrepressible man about town, bounds into his favorite Moscow restaurant accompanied by his compatriot, the more earthbound Levin, who is fresh from his country estate. Levin is in awe of the "restrained radiance" that immediately takes over his friend's entire being; he watches Oblonsky direct "the Tartar waiters," greet acquaintances "joyously" and help himself to "a preliminary appetizer of fish and vodka." When he finally takes a seat amid the "fuss and bustle, the surroundings of bronzes, mirrors, gaslights," he orders a bottle of champagne. Tolstoy may have published his novel's first installment in 1875, but that particular scene—or one awfully close to it—is still reenacted countless times a day (and night), six days a week at Caviar Kaspia, the quixotically chic restaurant in Paris's eighth arrondissement on the Place de la Madeleine.
First opened in 1927 by Russian émigré Arcady Fixon and situated in its current spot since 1953, the restaurant retains the prerevolutionary sensibilities—and impressive artifacts—of its founder. Carafes of house vodka are iced down in silver buckets at the tables next to quaint bowls of pickles, while the crystal implement Tsar Nicholas II used to seal his correspondence is displayed in a glass case alongside impressive 19th-century Russian silver and porcelain. Waiters—flawless, though not, perhaps, Tartars—wordlessly replace even slightly warm flutes of champagne and in one deft motion spoon and smear clarified butter from Limoges pots onto blini.
By the time the meal comes to a close with tiny fraises des bois and de rigueur glasses of cherry- flavored vodka, it's hard not to imagine Oblonksy waving for the bill across the room. But Caviar Kaspia's old-world elegance attracts a decidedly more contemporary clientele: Jay Z and Beyoncé (who ducked in for dinner à deux during a tour stop); style icons and young swans including Ines de la Fressange, Carine Roitfield, Sofia Coppola and Charlotte Gainsbourg ; and designers Tom Ford, Diane von Furstenberg, Alexander Wang, Olivier Rousteing, Haider Ackermann and Giambattista Valli, who created a commemorative Kaspia caviar tin ringed with an illustration of his signature pearls.
Those bold-faced names combine with local literati, the occasional politician, gallerists and late-night theater- and operagoers to create one of Paris's most perpetually interesting mixes in an intimate wood-paneled space that often feels more like a private club than a restaurant. "You have the best of the Paris beau monde," says longtime regular and American Vogue veteran André Leon Talley. He compares Kaspia to Manhattan's legendary haunt Elaine's in its '60s and '70s heyday, "when it was the hangout of the great intellectuals and writers" and exuberant table-hopping was the norm. The late designer Yves Saint Laurent, lover of all things Russian, was a dinner regular; his muse Betty Catroux still drops in. Tods CEO Diego Della Valle is known for his intimate dinners there, as is the designer Valentino Garavani, who most recently hosted a table in February following his namesake brand's fashion show. Carlos Souza, Garavani's longtime publicist and close friend, calls it the "Paris fashion cantina," while others refer to it as the Kaviar Kafeteria. Even on the quietest of nights, there is that sense of inherent camaraderie that comes from knowing you are in the right place.
"Because it is on the second floor, you cannot see inside from the street, and you have to go through the ground-floor shop, so it seems like a secret," says Kaspia CEO Ramon Mac-Crohon, a Madrid-born marketing expert who has run the company since 2011. There's also the luxuriously straightforward menu (seven choices of caviar, smoked fish and foie gras, a handful of salads and soups). "It's high-end gastronomy without being stuffy or stuck-up," he adds. Last orders are taken at the accommodating hour of 1 a.m., while behind the enfilade of three small dining rooms is a fourth space where the chicly attired guests can smoke without having to trek downstairs and stand on the street. (An oft-pinched Kaspia memento was the restaurant's signature turquoise ashtray in the shape of a minaret, which Mac-Crohon has recently reissued.)
The menu of choice, all agree, is the crab salad (king crab and crayfish simply dressed in a balsamic vinaigrette on a bed of lettuce) followed by a twice-baked potato topped with caviar, accompanied by crème fraîche and a mother-of-pearl spoon. The fashion-world regulars "think they are eating healthily and mindfully," Talley says, but they also like to see and be seen. "All the big editors love going to find out who is at whose table, what design house is going to pick up the tab." To be sure, the tabs can be considerable—if the baked potato is crowned with beluga, for example, it will set you back 335 euros, or about $460—but relative bargains can also be had. The "Vladivostock potato," topped with salmon roe, goes for a comparatively modest 29 euros, while a plate of smoked Scottish salmon is the same price.
No matter what's on the plate, the restaurant itself serves as a rite of passage—an initiation into the cosseted world of modern-day Oblonskys. When screenwriter and Louisiana native Robert Harling had his first success with 1989's Steel Magnolias, "I was still just a country bumpkin," he says. After the movie's release, he attended the Royal Premier in London with Prince Charles and Princess Diana, opened the Berlin International Film Festival and, on a last stop in Paris, was taken to Caviar Kaspia by the film's director, Herbert Ross, and his then-wife, Lee Radziwill. "I'd never seen anything like it—dinner there was the perfect closure." My own first outing took place in 1992 at a lunch with Talley and John Galliano, just after the latter's game-changing fashion show. When I asked another friend, who was then a Paris-based editor, where the two of us should take fashion's newest star, she didn't miss a beat: "There is only Caviar Kaspia."
More than two decades on from that memorable lunch (borscht and lots of caviar), little has changed. Stelio Conforti, the Italian manager who has been at Kaspia for the last 30 years, still greets regulars by name—and will remember where even the most decidedly non-bold-faced diner last sat. Mac-Crohon, who early in his tenure established Kaspia brands of vodka (Polish), champagne (by Duval-Leroy) and white wine (a Sancerre from Joseph Mellot), also made additions to the menu, including king crab from the Bering Sea and velvety jamón bellota from his native Spain. But he has been almost fanatically careful in his updates to a space that another frequent diner compares to "your grandparents' living room." A subtle brown stripe was added to the black-and-gold banquettes to better complement the boiserie panels, for example; a new mosaic (mimicking the caviar tins) along the stair hall looked so at home that most customers assumed it had been lurking behind mirrored panels all along. "I won't be calling Philippe Starck," he says, adding that Kaspia "is not a trendy place. By nature, those go out of fashion. I just want to retain the cozy and intemporal feel."
If the atmosphere has remained constant over the decades, it is Kaspia's star menu item that has undergone the most dramatic change. When Fixon and the Petrossian brothers arrived in Paris to introduce caviar to the Occidental world during les Années Folles (as the French termed the 1920s), sturgeon were almost ridiculously plentiful. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, poaching and overfishing in the Caspian Sea cut a large chunk of the supply. Since 1997, the U.N. and other organizations have orchestrated a series of bans on caviar's export; as recently as December, Russia and the other countries bordering the Caspian Sea again agreed to stop fishing sturgeon for up to five years. The years of uncertainty, scarcity and wildly varying quality led to the formation of a sophisticated aquaculture industry and now, like other high-end purveyors, Caviar Kaspia's offerings are exclusively farm-raised. The finest roes remain beluga, osetra and sevruga, from the three species of sturgeon most prized in the wild. But as farming has gotten more sophisticated, other high-quality varieties have been introduced. The two that have made the cut on the Kaspia menu are Imperial Baeri, which is farmed in France and Bulgaria and has a grain somewhere between an osetra and sevruga, and white sturgeon, which is farmed in Italy and comes from a species called the Acipenser transmontanus.
Instead of being a setback to the restaurant, the industry crisis has actually had positive effects. Not only are some of the new varieties more affordable, there is also better quality control. "Caviar Master" Valerie Maia, the on-staff procurer for Caviar Kaspia since 1998, says, "With farm-raised caviar, we have the opportunity to select our own tins, as opposed to wild caviar, which used to arrive in a big batch." These days, Maia is much like a sommelier, going from farmer to farmer checking for the color and shine of the grain, the firmness and, of course, the taste.
Mac-Crohon may be vigilant about the Kaspia history and reputation, but he is keen to expand the brand in the United States and beyond. The restaurant is now owned by a holding company with a board of directors that still includes a Fixon family member, but the Kaspia Group also now owns La Maison de la Truffe, centered on truffles (there are currently two in Paris, including one on the Place de la Madeleine, but there are plans to expand those as well), along with a high-end bistro called Kwint in Belgium, and even an upscale eatery at Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport. In 2012, a sort of pop-up version of Caviar Kaspia opened for a year in the lobby of Miami high-fashion boutique The Webster. These days Mac-Crohon has his sights on Manhattan's Upper East Side, perhaps opening an outpost by the beginning of 2015.
While some Manhattan regulars at the Place de la Madeleine will welcome a more convenient outpost, it might prove impossible to replicate the combination of French chic and Tsarist-era Russian luxe that imbues a sense of insulation and, occasionally, abandon in its clientele. Sometimes the table-hopping and impromptu carryings-on among certain patrons get so crazy that it becomes like "dinner theater," says Mac-Crohon. But it's an unwritten rule that no one dare document the show. Though there is a photograph of Betty Catroux rather impressively doing a split on the carpeted floor with Tom Ford at her side, evidence of such shenanigans is rare. It's like Vegas, says Mac-Crohon. "What happens in Caviar Kaspia stays in Caviar Kaspia."
