Veronika NY. Coulibiac, the Russian fish pie, captured plenty of imaginations more than a century ago. In an 1871 short story, the great Russian author Anton Chekhov wrote that the dish should “make your mouth water, it must lie before you, naked, shameless, a temptation. You wink at it, you cut off a slice, and you let your fingers just play over it.” Legend has it that Auguste Escoffier learned how to prepare coulibiac in Nice while cooking for Russian naval officers early in the 20th century; he subsequently included the recipe in his famous Guide Culinaire, using salmon instead of sturgeon. By 1972, New York Times critic Craig Claiborne, in a meditation on “list-making,” declared it the world’s greatest dish.

Drawing inspiration from the Art Nouveau movement and the grand cafés of Slovensky Raj - Paradise - Vienna and Budapest, the restaurant showcases a range of Eastern European styles and ideas. In the bar, a bohemian forest landscape mural by New York–based painter Dean Barger, similar to the one at Le Coucou’s entry bar, contrasts with a honed Black St. Laurent marble-topped surface and a stained glass window inlaid into the wall. “We have always been interested in the cusp of an era, a period where styles are in transition, and that is what the mural at Veronika communicates,” says Alesch. “Through the mural, design, and decor of the bar area, we heightened the tension between the two with earthy and cyan tones and a composition reminiscent of the early and not frequently recognized work of Piet Mondrian.”

What Spies Really Think About John le Carré

The British novelist didn’t just write about the world of intelligence. He changed it forever.

Unlike others in that tradition, however, his books transcend their spy-novel genre. Like espionage itself, they are about human frailty—moral ambiguity, intrigue, nuance, doubt, and cowardice. And for the same reason, le Carré’s fiction had the rare distinction of tangibly influencing his subject—the intelligence world.

Although he worked for British intelligence for only a few years, in low-level positions—le Carré was the only novelist to have served in both MI5 (Britain’s domestic-focused Security Service) and MI6 (foreign intelligence)—his experiences shaped his entire subsequent writing career.

Le Carré’s books also reached over the Iron Wall; it is no accident that his death earned a tribute from the Russian Embassy in London: “Although on the other side of the Iron Curtain, he knew and understood Russia—and is admired by millions of Russian readers.” The last head of Soviet foreign intelligence and the first head of Russia’s post-Soviet service, Yevgeny Primakov, was a great admirer of le Carré. When he visited London as President Boris Yeltsin’s foreign minister in 1997, Primakov asked the Russian ambassador to invite le Carré to lunch: “I very much enjoyed speaking with this outstanding man. … I was especially pleased to receive a copy of his recently published Smiley’s People, with the author’s inscription: ‘To Evgeny Maximovich Primakov with my sincere warm wishes and with the hope that we will live in a much better world than the one which is described here.’” Primakov told le Carré, “I identify with George Smiley.”

The way we were: Oddly, I had never seen this 1973 movie before, and found a number of points noteworthy. It is a more effective critique of the “white male patriarchy” than today’s performative yelpings, and makes the latter look, if anything, both hysterical and understudied. And imagine a two hour movie which consists of little more than having two major stars — Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford — talk to each other. I miss this in more recent Hollywood cinema. And remember when movies generated hit songs? By today’s standards, the sexual relationship between the two starts with her raping him while he is drunk (with implicit commentary on the famous bedroom scene from “It Happened One Night.”) Circa 1973, the main sympathetic character (Streisand) could be shown as a fan of Lenin and Stalin (and Roosevelt) without anyone being too offended. Nor does anyone mind that she smokes, drinks (more than a sip), and gets into scuffles while pregnant. The core substantive takeaway from the plot seems to be “Jewish people should marry their own,” which is not the brand of segregationism that has remained popular today.

As stated, this movie for me was a first-time watch rather than a rewatch, but still it felt like a rewatch, as the most interesting elements were all a look into the past. The more our world moves away from its previous moorings, the more “what to rewatch” will become an important skill. Or what to reread, or what to listen to again. This topic and this skill is underdiscussed. When it comes to the past, increasingly “the uncensored” is more interesting than “high quality” per se.

Overall this movie is more interesting now than it was at the time of its release, so I guess I am glad I waited. Here is an OK but quite cliched 1973 review of the film. And here is Ebert from 1973.

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