Hinting at what fine dining might look like post-coronavirus lockdown, chef Alain Ducasse’s famed Paris bistro, Allard, has reportedly installed new state-of-the-art, $56,000, “anti-COVID décor.”
According to Paris-based food writer Alexander Lobrano, the eatery that opened in 1932 has been outfitted with ducts, high-tech air filters and fans created to “ensure an air quality on par with that of a hospital operating room.”
But Lobrano writes for Graydon Carter’s Air Mail that when he first arrived at a friends-and-family lunch to mark the restaurant’s reopening, and the host said he could remove his mask and go in, “Suddenly, I stalled. The idea of removing the thick black cotton mask with a round plastic filter plug that I’ve been wearing in public since March 15 brought on a reeling social panic I hadn’t known since I arrived for a pool party at Calvin Klein’s villa on Fire Island on a Fourth of July weekend in the early ‘80s.” (Apparently at that bash, guests checked their clothes upon arrival.)
Either way, Allard’s purported anti-coronavirus decor was created with some top medical and architectural pros, and Ducasse apparently owns the patent on the new system that could come to other restaurants.
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