Starting in 1986, Lemaire—named after Thomas Jefferson’s White House maître d’ and head chef, Etienne Lemaire, who is said to have introduced America to the idea of cooking with wine—became a Southern standard-bearer for fine dining: elegant, expensive, award-winning. It had, not surprisingly, an older clientele.
About a year ago, after a six-month renovation, the new Lemaire was unveiled. Structurally, the space is unchanged, but everything else related to the restaurant has been modernized—the décor, the furnishings, the menu, all aimed at making the restaurant more contemporary and appealing to somewhat younger customers—while at the same time taking pains to maintain tradition. “Demographically,” says Eubanks, “we want to cast a wider net,” making Lemaire more accessible to “a variety of people on a variety of budgets looking for a variety of experiences.”
It would be hard to argue with that strategy, especially given the difficult economic environment for restaurants over the last two years. The Jefferson has smartly added a new cocktail lounge, a warm and inviting space where I recently spent a few easy hours with friends enjoying some new “hand-crafted” cocktails. Both the lounge and restaurant have adopted the alligator as a whimsical logo, as if to reinforce the idea that the new Lemaire is more casual and carefree than its predecessor. The alligator logo—a nod to the reptiles that once lived in marble ponds surrounding the lobby’s statue of TJ—can be seen on the bar stool upholstery and on the ties of the waitstaff.
The one constant over this transition is Executive Chef Walter Bundy, a Richmond native who has led the restaurant for nearly a decade. On a hot summer day, Bundy meets me at the hotel, wearing his white chef jacket and dark pinstripe pants that he says were de rigueur in Napa Valley, where in the late 1990s he did a stint with Thomas Keller at the vaunted French Laundry. An easygoing and candid man, and a graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, Bundy is quick to dispel any misconceptions about cooking as a glamorous occupation, noting the long working hours and pressure of turning out great dishes night after night. He mentions that Eric Ripert, the executive chef and co-owner of Le Bernadin in New York City, dined in Lemaire in early June—he was in Virginia to film some segments for his TV show Avec Eric—and that a few years back he prepared a tasting dinner for 150 people at the restaurant, one of whom was Daniel Boulud. As pressure goes, it doesn’t get much bigger than cooking for such luminaries. Still, Bundy says it’s “rewarding.”
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