Ze CAFE: Where the In Crowd Eats
by AMANDA FITZSIMONS
MONDAY DECEMBER 22, 2008
From WWD ISSUE 12/22/2008

Ze Cafe
Photo By Kyle Ericksen
LAUNCH SLIDESHOW 6 images

Zeze Flowers
Photo By John Aquino

At first glance, it’s a wonder the newly opened Ze CAFE gets any business at all. Not only is the French bistro tucked away on a sleepy side street in Manhattan’s East 50s, right near the East River, but there isn’t even a noticeable sign outside to attract the attention of passersby.

But Ze Café is doing just fine. The day it opened, the small eatery boasted 117 customers and it continues to attract a steady flow of diners for brunch, lunch and dinner.

This might have something to do with the fact that the brains behind the operation is Zezé, the mono-monikered florist who has built up a dedicated clientele during his nearly three decades in business. And those same die-hard fans of his arrangements, many of whom are nearby residents of River House and Sutton Place, are now showing their support for his edible fare.

“I bring the crowd with me,” admits the Brazilian-born Zezé, who counts Valentino and Deeda Blair among his cafe customers. He and his wife and business partner, Peggy O’Dea, still maintain his flower shop just around the corner from the restaurant. On a snowy winter’s day, it is filled with phlox, peonies, dusty-colored roses and the usual holiday trappings of tiny pine trees and wreaths, not to mention beautiful vases, porcelain flowers on iron stalks in terra-cotta pots, statuary and a huge stag.

It may seem an odd jump from flowers to flour, but Zezé has toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant for decades. “Owning a flower shop and a restaurant — it’s the same thing,” he says of his new hyphenate status. “Both are a labor of love.”

When he moved his floral business to a larger space two years ago, the old location proved the perfect opportunity for his new cafe. It also boosted the neighborhood, long starved for quality eateries, despite its wealthy residents. “We had nothing to eat here,” he says.

Zezé solved that problem by tapping husband-and-wife duo Roberto and Monica Bellissimo, both formerly of Le Cirque, to man the kitchen at his latest project. Roberto created a comprehensive menu that includes Franco-American standbys like quiche with arugula salad, coq au Riesling, short ribs and duck confit. “It’s very casual and very European,” explains the chef, whose other half whips up French pastries and made-to-order pies at an off-site location in Brooklyn.

Indeed, there is little about Ze Café, including the understated decor, to remind customers of its former identity. “Everyone says to put up more flowers,” says Zezé. “But it’s a recession.”

398 East 52nd Street; 212.758.1944

 

The Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program at Beth Israel Medical Center officially launched the second phase of research. The ribbon cutting ceremony commemorated the commencement of fact-gathering on the benefits of Integrative Therapies in reducing symptoms of PANIC (Pain, Anxiety, Nausea, Insomnia, Constipation and Exhaustion). Urban Zen Founder Donna Karan; Dr. Woodson Merrell, M. Anthony Fisher Director of Integrative Medicine at the Continuum Center for Health and Healing; Dr. Louis Harrison, Clinical Director, Continuum Cancer Centers of New York; Rodney Yee, Co-Director, Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program; Colleen Saidman Yee, Co-Director, Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program; and Dr. Jamie Naughright, Director, Urban Zen Integrative Therapists, were all on hand to celebrate this occasion.

The New York Times

October 30, 2008

In One Section of Beth Israel Hospital, Some Patients Are Saying ‘Om,’ Not ‘Ah’

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

Medical advances sometimes happen in strange ways. Someone finds a fungus in dirty lab dishes and — eureka! — penicillin is born. Now a premier Manhattan hospital is turning a cancer-treatment floor over to a world-famous fashion designer in the hope that serendipity, science and intuition will strike again.

A foundation run by Donna Karan, creator of the “seven easy pieces” philosophy of women’s wardrobes and founder of the much-imitated DKNY line of clothing, has donated $850,000 for a yearlong experiment combining Eastern and Western healing methods at Beth Israel Medical Center. Instead of just letting a celebrated donor adopt a hospital wing, renovate it and have her name embossed on a plaque, the Karan-Beth Israel project will have a celebrated donor turn a hospital into a testing ground for a trendy, medically controversial notion: that yoga, meditation and aromatherapy can enhance regimens of chemotherapy and radiation.

“While we are giving patients traditional medicine, we are not going to exclude patients’ values and beliefs,” said Dr. David Shulkin, the chief executive of Beth Israel, noting that a third of Americans seek alternative treatments. “To make care accessible to these third of Americans, we’re trying to embrace care that makes them more comfortable.”

On Wednesday, Dr. Shulkin, who had never done yoga before, joined Ms. Karan and about 60 Beth Israel employees on the floor of her late husband’s West Village art studio for an hour of yoga poses, finishing off with “om” and the recorded sound of bells.

“They didn’t teach us that in medical school,” Dr. Shulkin said afterward, still sitting barefoot on his black mat, swearing he had put his BlackBerry on “meditation mode” and had not checked it. Asked if the yoga had worked, he formed his answer carefully: “I think the personal touch and the personal attention to a patient absolutely works.”

The husband-and-wife team leading Wednesday’s session — Ms. Karan’s yoga masters, Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman Yee — will oversee the experiment. Fifteen yoga teachers will be sent to Beth Israel’s ninth-floor cancer ward starting in January to work with nonterminal patients, and nurses will be trained in relaxation techniques. Their salaries, as well as a cosmetic overhaul of the ward, are being paid for by Ms. Karan’s Urban Zen Foundation, created after her husband and business partner, Stephan Weiss, 62, died of lung cancer in 2001.

While other hospitals in New York and across the country have dabbled in yoga, the new Beth Israel project is broader, better financed and more integrated into the medical protocol, and because of Ms. Karan’s concern that it might be dismissed as touchy-feely nonsense, it includes a research component. Ms. Karan hopes to prove that the Urban Zen regime can reduce classic symptoms of cancer and its treatment, like pain, nausea and anxiety (thereby cutting hospital stays and costs) and serve as a model for replication elsewhere.

But Dr. Benjamin Kligler, the research director in integrative family medicine for the Beth Israel-affiliated Continuum Center for Health and Healing and the research project’s principal investigator, acknowledged that the experiment of yoga teachers and their interaction with patients did not lend itself to the random, double-blind placebo trials favored in the medical world.

“The truth is, from a very traditional research perspective, that’s a problem,” Dr. Kligler conceded, adding that it might be time for the medical establishment to consider a new research model for what he called “lifestyle interventions.”

Organizers are also wary of the halo effect: Will Ms. Karan’s fame taint the experiment? But they are cognizant of the value of stroking people with deep pockets and of celebrity branding: Someday the cancer ward’s plaque reading “Leo and Rachel Sussman Division of Hematology/Oncology” will be joined by one honoring Ms. Karan.

“You have your right-column energy and your left-column energy,” Ms. Karan said, suggesting that there is room for both.

She traces her commitment to integrative medicine to what she saw as the narrowly limited treatment of her husband, a sculptor, and of Lynn Kohlman, a photographer, model and DKNY fashion director who was still ravishing and dignified despite the staples in her head and mastectomy scars on her chest when she died of brain and breast cancer in September.

Ms. Karan longed for the help of a Marcus Welby, the kind of friendly, wise doctor who seemed possible only on television, and even then in a more innocent era. “Today everybody’s a specialist,” she lamented in an interview. “We’re only one person, even though we have a lot of parts, but everybody takes a piece of us.”

Despite all his high-tech medical treatment, her husband could not breathe, she recalled, until a yoga teacher taught him to “open his lungs.” “He went from ah-ah-ah,” she said, mimicking his gasping for breath, “to aaaaahh.”

“Everybody was dealing with his disease,” she said of the doctors. “Nobody was looking at him holistically as a patient. How do you treat the patient at the mind-body level? Not only the patient but the loved one?”

Ms. Kohlman apparently sensed her illness before her doctors did. Lying on the floor during a yoga session at a beach resort on Parrot Cay, a tiny Caribbean island, she began to shake. “You’re having kundalini rising,” Mr. Yee, the yoga master who is partnering with Ms. Karan at Beth Israel, yelled, running to her side. Ms. Kohlman, who wrote about the experience for Vogue, insisted, “I have brain cancer.”

She intensified her yoga. “She asked for it in the hospital,” said Ms. Karan, who practices yoga daily. “She needed it, she wanted it.

“This works,” Ms. Karan insisted. “Now we have to prove it in the clinical setting.”

To do that, she turned to Beth Israel because it is among the handful of hospitals nationwide with full-fledged integrative medicine departments. Beth Israel’s department is headed by Woodson Merrell, known as Woody, who rides a silver Vespa to his Upper East Side office and who made the obligatory pilgrimage to India in the 1960s. Beth Israel has experimented with integrating mainstream and alternative therapies for eight years, mainly through the Continuum Center, which employs 10 doctors. In the spring, integrative medicine was elevated to department status, just like surgery, orthopedics and the rest.

“A lot of other hospitals have integrative medicine, but it’s kind of stuck away in the basement,” said Dr. Merrell, who, not coincidentally, is Ms. Karan’s internist. “People like to think it’s not there.” Starting in November, the cancer ward will be renovated by Ms. Karan, the architect David Fratianne and Alex Stark, a feng shui master. The dull beige walls and green linoleum tile floors will be replaced with bamboo wallpaper and cork floors. Nooks and crannies now used for brown-bag lunches and naps and crammed with a desultory selection of dusty books will be turned into yoga, prayer and meditation retreats for patients, their families and nurses.

Urban Zen will cover the salaries of a patient “navigator,” a sort of cancer-ward concierge, and a yoga coordinator. The Yees and Dr. Merrell expect that about half the eligible patients will decline to participate. Those who do will find a flexible definition of yoga, with some who are very ill simply getting help to breathe from a yogi who will also manipulate their limbs, rub their feet or simply listen to them.

Last week, two yoga teachers in Karan-designed black T-shirts printed with white block letters saying, “The Unstoppable PATH/Patient Awareness Towards Healing,” approached several patients for an impromptu workout.

Looking like a radiantly healthy creature from another planet, one of the teachers, Shana Kuhn-Siegel, sidled up to the bedside of an emaciated 34-year-old patient, Natoya Harrison, who insisted on eating her meal of chicken and potatoes before embarking on yoga. Ms. Harrison, who was formerly obese, was hospitalized in a coma caused by complications of a gastric bypass performed elsewhere. What did she miss about life outside the hospital? Ms. Kuhn-Siegel asked. “Not being able to participate in sex, church,” Ms. Harrison said, adding, “I shouldn’t have said those two things together.”

“You can say whatever you want,” Ms. Kuhn-Siegel replied. She prompted the woman to talk about her 15-year-old son, and asked if she would like to close her eyes. “I thought you were going to ask me questions,” Ms. Harrison said nervously. “Why are you trying to put me to sleep? What’s your M.O.?”

Noticing the T-shirt, she perked up, asking: “Where can I get one of those?” Ms. Kuhn-Siegel promised to tell Ms. Karan that Ms. Harrison would like a shirt, and tried to capitalize on the connection.

“There’s a position I can put you in to relieve the pain in your abdomen,” she said. “It’s a position called ‘bound angle.’ ”

Ms. Harrison let Ms. Kuhn-Siegel manipulate her scrawny limbs, bending and straightening her knees, propping up her head. “How about a cup of green tea?” Ms. Kuhn-Siegel asked.

“Nope,” Ms. Harrison said. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

Ms. Kuhn-Siegel handed her a wastebasket and backed away.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 31, 2008
An article on Thursday about an experimental project at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan that combines Eastern and Western healing methods for cancer patients and is financed by the fashion designer Donna Karan misidentified the types of cancer that killed Lynn Kohlman, a photographer and model whom Ms. Karan cited as an inspiration for the project. She had brain and breast cancer, not brain and lung cancer.

Elle Decor STYLE

May 2005

By Michael Boodro

Whether it's a live/work space for a renowned artist or the play area of a five-year-old girl- and budding artist- in an apartment decked with antiques, design is as individual as DNA. Architects Christian Hubert and David Fratianne's vision of a house-cum-studio for painter David Salle comes to fruition in Brooklyn. In San Francisco, Andrew Fisher and Jeffry Weisman make room for childhood amid a father's choice collections. Jonathan Adler discovers a like-minded spirit in Jane Wagman and applies his whimsical patterns to her Upper East Aside place. Interior designer Sheila Bridges creates myriad mise-en-scenes, all elegant, in her Harlem home. Variations on the color purple define a Greenwich Village lair, courtesy of Alex Papchristidis. L.A. decorator Suzanne Rheinstein gives a classic New York Apartment the luxe treatment with silks, taffestas, and dressmaker details. Family heirlooms find new meaning at Anne-Marie Midy's Paris pied-a-terre. Need more inspiration? Then don't miss our picks of versatile furnishings that serve up function with style, in spaces both small and large.

David Salle has made a career of creating compelling and provocative wholes from disparate elements- small canvases inset within larger ones, grisaille images painted over colored ones, abstract elements jostling figures, romantic visions of the past colliding with the brutal present- and he's done nothing less in his new Brooklyn house. Indeed, it seems fitting that an artist who has achieved fame with his layering of images should find himself in a home/studio that is a cheek-by-jowl clash of a gracious pre-Civil War townhouse and a fin de siecle skylighted and heavily corniced brick building that once served as a Masonic lodge.

Salle's move from Lower Manhattan, where he had lived and worked in a Tribec loft for nearly two decades, was prompted by his desire for more space, a longing for something different, and the tantalizing possibility of owning his own building. But it was actually his assistant who discovered the conjoined structures while riding her bike in the neighborhood. "They had been abandoned years before, even by the squatters," Salle says. "The roof was open to the sky. It was too big for most individuals but too small for a developer."

With its corner location and exposures on three sides, however, the 10,000-square-foot space was ideal for an artist who wanted a vast studio for his oversize canvases, plus an office for his assistant, a basement-level gym and garage, and enough room left over that he and his girlfriend, writer Sarah French, could live on a scale that expanded the idea of domestic without quite distorting it.

And while renting a place nearby for the duration of the two-year renovation, Salle grew to love the burgeoning neighborhood, which is not far from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He compares is with the Greenwich Village of 30 years ago, when he first arrived in the city after attending the California Institute of the Arts. Here he can once again do his morning shopping by heading to the flower market, then the latteria, and finally to the butcher, the kind of old-fashioned emporia that's hard to find in a Manhattan increasingly dominated by chain stores. "And there's much more sky in Brooklyn," he says, "because there are so few tall buildings."

To begin transforming the derelict buildings, Salle turned to architects Christian Hubert and David Fratianne. Hubert had designed the artist's Tribeca loft in 1984. "I had a great time working with David then," says Hubert, "so I was eager to do so again." And he knew that Salle's preoccupation with detail would ensure results both beautiful and unpredictable. Though Salle considers himself a good client, he knows he can be an exacting one. "I have no compunction about changing something six or seven times," he admits.

While the layout largely dictated the use of the rooms- an expansive studio that runs the length of the first floor; the kitchen, library and double-height living and dining areas on the second floor; the master bedroom suite on the third; and an office/sitting room on the fourth- there were two major problems: no outdoor space and rooms upstairs that were, Hubert recalls, "dark and nasty." To remedy both, the architects cut away part of the roof of the brick building- "chopping out a piece for the terrace"- and on the townhouse designed a three-story extension under a new zinc-covered roof that curves down to form an exterior wall. That gave the upper floors more windows and created the spacious master bedroom, with the luxury of two outdoor areas, a terrace for sitting at one end and a tiny glass-encased bamboo garden on the other. Even the master bath has a small terrace.

Throughout the house are exquisite yet unconventional details- the stairwell with railings painted dusky orange, the surprise of a Francesco Clemente drawing against a decorative Dagobert Peche wallpaper, the vertical bricks of the living room fireplace surround, a wall covered with industrial felt in the library. In the baths, the woodwork evokes Japan; in the bedroom, high Italian Modernism. The library makes subtle allusions to Arts and Crafts simplicity, and in the kitchen and dining area, the limed-oak cabinetry and banquettes are reminiscent of French 40's style. Salle, a dedicated cook, is especially pleased with the kitchen and its slightly retro breakfast nook. "It's pretty much perfect," says Salle. "Sometimes I have to force myself to leave it."

Hubert, for his part, is happy because he feels that the place captures the artist's personality. "I like the complexity of it, the fact that from the outside it looks like two buildings, but it feels like one on the inside," he explains. "David's aesthetic is about juxtapositions, and I wanted to make an architectural analog to that. And because he was so involved, the house is very much a self-portrait." Salle, who is still tinkering- searching for the right light for the entrance hall, rethinking certain colors- adds, "I was a little concerned about how the neighborhood would react, but people stop me on the street all the time to tell me how much they like it."

"Stretching the Boundaries in Fort Greene"

by Deborah Kolben, Brooklyn Papers, October 6, 2003

A man in tennis whites making his way across Hanson Place in Fort Greene on a recent Saturday morning stoppped mid-block to peer up at something that had caught his eye.

"Look at that," he said as he placed his hands into a frame and peered through as if looking at modern art.

The object of note was not the monstrous brick-and-glass Atlantic Terminal going up just blocks away, but rather a four-story modern construction with a metallic outcropping looming in its shadow.

If the metallic roof and side didn't make the building noticeable enough, the fact that it was attached to an old red brick church certainly did.

These conjoined buildings at 81 Hanson Place and South Oxford Street belong to artist David Salle, who snatched them up several years ago and has been watching over the major renovations ever since.

Salle, an Oklahoma-born artist who has exhibited everywhere from the Guggenheim to the Whitney, will move into his quaint, 10,000-square-foot home and studio by the end of the year.

In addition to the architectural boldness of the structure- the contrast of the zinc protrusion with the old, brick building- also of note is that Salle was among the first artists to roll up canvas and head south to colonize a small neighborhood now known as TriBeCa.

Salle, 51, has since sold off his TriBeCa digs, according to his studio assistant, Mary Schwab, who said he was looking in Harlem and other parts of Brooklyn before he stumbled upon Hanson Place.

"He had been looking around other parts of Brooklyn but fell in love with Fort Greene," Schwab said, adding that it was not easy to find a space that met his requirements.

It also just so happened that Salle was friends with Harvey Lichtenstein, who was then president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and plans were already in the works for the new BAM cultural district, which will include thousands of square feet for artists (which is never bad for property values). Salle snatched up both buildings, which had been abandoned for decades, just as Fort Greene was embarking on its real estate boom.

Over the years the red-brick building had been used as everything from a Masonic Lodge to a school to a church. To create his new abode, Salle hired architect Christian Hubert, who had designed his TriBeCa loft back in 1984.

Hubert spent more than a year on the designs, which include the zinc-covered roof and side extension. While Salle wanted to add more space, the zoning for the area made it impossible. So instead Hubert came up with the metal outcropping that allowed him to "move space around".