La Crémaillère Finis

Bobbie Meyzen in 2002 – Photo courtesy of LoHud

La Crémaillère Finis: Barbara “Bobbie” Meyzen, co-owner of La Crémaillère in Banksville pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in White Plains Federal Court on March 5. Bobbie is free on a $250,000 bond. Her sentencing is scheduled for July 29. The single count of mail fraud carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Her husband and restaurant co-owner Robert Meyzen Jr. has closed the restaurant which had been operating under bankruptcy protection since April 2019 – ending a storied run that dates back to 1947. We go back to 2005 with Bobbie. What to say?

La Crémaillère’s legendary renown is national in scope. A perennial Top Ten in the Westchester/Hudson Valley, La Crémaillère was named one of America’s Most Beloved Restaurants by Town & Country, and was voted one of the 100 Most Romantic Restaurants in America by OpenTable diners in 2017. Last year LoHud called it “arguably the most important French restaurant to have ever opened in the suburbs.” In 2017, Vanity Fair said it was “Home to the Finest French Country Cooking on the East Coast.” By then Bobbie was already under investigation by the FBI for financial irregularities that started in 2015.

Identity theft, fraud and false statements

Bobbie was arrested on July 23, 2019 and pleaded not guilty to a long list of charges filed by The United States Attorney’s Office Southern District of New York. They included aggravated identity theft, wire and mail fraud, credit card fraud, two counts of making false statements and concealing a debtor’s property. Charges that cumulatively carry a maximum sentence of 90 years in prison. The news was reported far and wide by LoHud, Bloomberg News and Crain’s New York Business, among others. We had our final family meal there on December 26th, 2019. We emailed Bobbie our regards on January 2, commented on how festive the restaurant always looks around the holidays and praised the Sole with Brown Butter Sauce. She replied moments later, “Thank you for your kind words happy new year, and onward to the next…!”

When we moved to Armonk from Manhattan in 2001 we found our way to La Crémaillère for a romantic anniversary dinner. Over the years we heard it referred to as a restaurant for blue-haired ladies from Greenwich. That wasn’t the La Crémaillère we knew. La Crémaillère always drew a spirited crowd of well-heeled power-hitters. Some perhaps overly buttoned up. Others decidedly glamorous. In fact, La Crémaillère attracted the rich and famous over the years such as Tommy Hilfiger, Glenn Close, Tom Brokaw, Regis Philbin, Paul Shaffer, Billy Joel, Mick Jagger and Andrew Cuomo.La Crémaillère

We always liked to joke that you could feel the average net worth of the room plummet when we entered it. But we loved it. Diners in the more formal back room tended to speak in hushed tones – knowing everyone in the room was straining to hear each other’s conversations. But the front room was lively and conversation spilled freely from table to table. That’s where we liked to dine. And one table in the restaurant is famous for being the place Ryan O’Neal and Candice Bergen dined in the motion picture Oliver’s Story, the sequel to Love Story. The camera crew, the production assistants, and Ryan and Candice were long gone before the action at La Crémaillère turned to “rampant financial fraud,” in the words of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman, who filed the multiple fraud charges against Bobbie.

La Crémaillère’s story starts at the 1939 World’s Fair

The La Crémaillère saga began in 1939, when Robert Meyzen Sr. came to the U.S. from France with the French Pavilion at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair. It was a time when French cuisine was just being introduced New York City. Henri Soule, who ran the restaurant at the fair’s French Pavilion, later in 1941 opened the legendary Le Pavillon  on Fifth Avenue, across from the St. Regis Hotel. It was widely considered the best French restaurant in the country at its peak and defined French cooking in the States until his death in 1966. Robert Meyzen Sr. moved with Soule from the restaurant at the world’s fair and worked his way up at Le Pavillon. He then moved on to La Cote Basque and eventually opened New York City’s celebrated La Caravelle in 1960 with his business partner, Fred Decré. La Caravelle earned the highest ratings from food guidebooks, and the attention of many celebrities, such as Joseph Kennedy. Some of La Caravelle’s recipes, including champagne chicken, were later made in the Kennedy White House.

In 1961 Meyzen and Decré purchased La Crémaillère à la Campagne in the 1750’s farmhouse on Bedford Banksville Road from Antoine Gilly who had opened it in 1947. La Crémaillère became their country restaurant until they moved the business permanently to Bedford. There, Meyzen’s son, Robert Jr. learned every aspect of the business. “He did his homework in the wine cellar,” Bobbie once told us. “He shucked oysters and helped in the kitchen and as a busboy. Every holiday from school he was on duty and, in 1974, he joined the full-time staff.” In 1993, Robert Jr. and Bobbie bought the restaurant from his father and maintained its culinary reputation for the better part of three decades until they closed in March.

Forgery, rubber checks and Bobbie becomes a bank officer

Bobbie and Robert Meyzen

The list of allegations filed against Bobbie include modifying bank statements, turning negative balances to positive balances – in one month representing a swing of $59,000 – and removing references to bounced checks to support credit applications to at least nine lenders factors and financiers. According to the charges filed by the US Attorney, she created a false satisfaction of mortgage by forging the names of a notary and the restaurant’s second mortgagee. And then denied doing so when she was interviewed by Special Agents of the FBI. When a lender sniffed out Bobbie’s altered bank statements, she posed as one of the bank’s officers, by creating an email account in their name and falsely notified the lender that the statements were genuine. During the summer of 2017, about the same time that Vanity Fair was working on its homage article to La Crémaillère, Bobbie allegedly charged over $80,000 in restaurant expenses to a credit card on file from one of the restaurant’s customers. She later wrote two checks totaling $32,000 to partially reimburse the customer. Both bounced. She later denied knowing anything about either the unauthorized charges or the reimbursement checks.

When Meyzen Family Realty Associates LLC filed bankruptcy on La Crémaillère’s farmhouse and property in September 2018 it declared $2.8 million in assets and $1.45 million in liabilities. Seven months later the restaurant declared bankruptcy, listing $1.4 million in assets and more than $2 million in liabilities. Two days later, according to the US Attorney, Bobbie opened a bank account in her name and diverted more than $40,000 of the restaurant’s credit card receipts into it to pay restaurant expenses. She opened a second account in May, in the name of Honey Bee Farm, and diverted $20,000 of future credit card receipts into the account to make mortgage payments on the property and pay additional restaurant bills. That same month, she delivered false insurance documents, through her bankruptcy attorney, to the United States Trustee – and later falsely testified under oath that she was unaware that the insurance had been cancelled.

Westfaironline, a publisher of business newspapers, reported last July that a broker had lined up a potential buyer for $2.5 million for the restaurant and property. But the deal collapsed when, just days later, Bobbie was arrested. Martha Stewart, Mario Batali and Joseph Bastianich had already passed on the deal.

The weight of history on her shoulders…

Bobbie picks a winner

La Crémaillère has been a What To Do sponsor going back to 2006. When we showed Bobbie our first issue she said, “How fun! Of course we will advertise.” We were honored to have her support. Beginning in April, 2013 Bobbie sponsored a bi-annual sweepstakes with What To Do and over the years we have raffled off over three thousand dollars of gift certificates to local residents for meals there. (See photo right: “Bobbie picks a winner for What To Do“) “I always love introducing new people to our restaurant,” Bobbie told us.

Bobbie was not a social friend of ours – but we thought of her as a friend. She always made an appearance at our table when we had family dinners there. And she never failed to charm us with the skills she attained over three decades of greeting the rich and famous. I had long worried, after the financial collapse of 2008, that such a high-end restaurant might run into financial difficulties. When they did, and with the weight of La Crémaillère’s storied history on her shoulders, it appears that Bobbie made some bad choices that had no conceivable chance of working out. Some may see the sheer extent of her scheming as evidence that she had larceny in heart. Others may see her desperate maneuvers telling a tale of panic amid circumstances she was not equipped to deal with. It is hard for us to unwind the feelings we have had for Bobbie – but her actions were wrong and hurt a great many people so our sympathies must now pass to them.

Jean Paget’s wall murals at La Crémaillère