Mr. Morellet described her change of heart as “the best outcome, short of me staying.”
But can she really run a restaurant?
For the past 13 years, Ms. Lucas has been kicking back at home (she currently lives in Seekonk, Mass.) while the monthly checks rolled in from Mr. Morellet. (The single-story building has been in her family since 1955; Ms. Lucas herself acquired the deed in 1995.)
Now, she doesn’t even have those few thousands to work with.
Calls to the restaurant and to Ms. Lucas’ Massachusetts home went unanswered; a number of workers were inside the location, polishing its various chrome fixtures, on Tuesday, the day of the restaurant’s supposed reopening. “Tomorrow,” one man clarified.
Ms. Lucas would be well advised not to expect the dense crowds that turned out for Mr. Morellet’s final hoorah to return for the grand reopening. Many patrons scoffed at the notion when asked over the weekend, though a few confessed some curiosity about the new incarnation.
“I’ll check it out—but it’s never going to be the same,” said Franklin Bonafe, a 36-year-old Burberry salesman who’s been coming to Florent since the early 1990s. (“I had my first date here,” he said.)
Like countless others crammed inside the diner on Saturday afternoon, Mr. Bonafe and a friend had come to pay their last respects. “I hope they don’t do anything too drastic to the place,” he said. “They’re probably going to change something.”
Some suspect that Ms. Lucas may have bigger surprises in store.
“It’s very weird—unless she’s pulling a rabbit out of her hat,” said Faith Hope Consolo, chairwoman of retail leasing for Prudential Douglas Elliman, who has brokered and marketed a number of spaces in the surrounding neighborhood. “I never assume, even when we represent the No. 1 luxury guy in the world, that there isn’t a more beautiful girl, a better tenant—you know, there’s always that element of surprise.”
It’s possible that keeping the diner open is only a temporary fix while Ms. Lucas continues to search for a tenant she’s more comfortable with.
When asked whether Lansco was finished with Ms. Lucas’ listing, her broker, Mr. Cohen, was noncommittal: “That I can’t say.”
With reporting by Em Whitney
cshott@observer.com
