I NEVER was fortunate enough to dine at the once venerable New York City restaurant, Lutèce, known in the words of a famous food critic as “impressively elegant and conspicuously expensive.” But I heard of it before it closed in 2004 after more than 40 years of operation.

Earlier this week, I picked up an old edition of the once-great, now-defunct magazine Gourmet and found in it a well-written and interesting article about André Soltner, the famous chef of Lutèce for 33 years, whom honestly I had never heard of before. He was apparently the reason why Lutèce was known far and wide.

I found this particular copy of the magazine on a residential curb with a stack of other Gourmet’s a few months ago. They were all from the magazine’s literary golden days in the early 90’s. I carried as many as I could lift in my arms home and I pick them up occasionally for the recipes, beautiful photographs and articles about amazing places I will never see.

Mr. Soltner was born in Alsace and was the son of a cabinetmaker. He decided to become a chef as a young man, trained in some of the most demanding kitchens in Europe and eventually ended up in New York with his wife. He was hired to make Lutèce a great French restaurant, with mostly classic recipes, and by all accounts he did.

Mr. Soltner said something in this article from more than 30 years ago that was especially impressive to me. He said no one becomes a truly great chef simply by mastering technique. There has to be an element of love or intense appreciation for those for whom one cooks. He also said something else memorable: he didn’t like the cult of the celebrity chef (even though he would become one). In this hedonistic age, chefs become gods and restaurants, temples. “I’m just a cook,” he said.

There was an appealing humility to this statement, given his great success. Cooking is not the most important thing in the world — and yet it’s important. I thought of that diminishing sphere of rigorous, backbreaking excellence known as French cuisine and could not help but admire his hard work in one of the most difficult fields and in a world of highly civilized, unapologetic refinement. To be a great restaurant chef, one needs the gifts of both a military commander and an inspired artist. He apparently took off from work, I later learned, only four extra days during his entire tenure at Lutèce, until he woke up one morning and realized he was ruining his wife’s life — and he sold the place for $3 million. It only declined from there.

I decided to find out whatever became of this interesting man and looked him up on the Internet. As fate would have it, Soltner died in Charlottesville, Virginia on January 18, just two days before I read about him. He had lived to the age of 93.

There is nothing more to say, but that I was destined by this strange coincidence to add a few words to his elegies.

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