Au revoir, tableside serenades

Ile de France, where fine food comes in a quirky wrapper, is closing.

By JODIE TILLMAN, Times Staff Writer
Published October 28, 2007

Florida has changed, says Gaetan Gessat, owner of Ile de France in Hudson. After 25 years here, the crooning gourmet is leaving for Oklahoma.
	[Stephen J. Coddington | Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [Stephen J. Coddington | Times] Every dish on the menu is flavored with a dash of kitsch. The restaurant's final seating is Wednesday.

HUDSON - Here is Gaetan Gessat, king of the Old Dixie Highway castle for only a few more nights:

"Could I have this dance, for the rest of my life?" he sings into a microphone, moving backward between a dining table and his flambe cart. "Would you be my partner every night? When we're together, it feels so right."

He closes his eyes and chops the air with one hand. "Could I have this dance for the rest of. My. Liiiiiife?" He slicks back his long gray locks and grins as the music fades away.

A soft round of applause from diners, who had been smiling and locking eyes with Gessat or smiling and staring hard at their bread baskets. Not missing a beat, Gessat moves on to a French version of the song before launching into another task: Preparing a filet mignon in a creamy green peppercorn sauce flambeed with cognac.

Part fussy chef, part modern-day Maurice Chevalier, Gessat has spent the past 25 years channeling his quirkiness and charisma into his Ile de France restaurant, located in the tiny stone castle just off U.S. Highway 19.

Where else do you find a photograph of President Bush sharing wall space with French travel posters and a framed painting of a unicorn? Or fake spiders dangling from the ceiling over diners' bouillabaisse? Or a former Belgian cabaret singer now keeping a quiet beat over the kitchen stove?

On Wednesday, though, Gessat is pulling the curtain on this enterprise. His reasons range from fist-pounding specifics - Insurance! Property taxes! High power bills! - to a vague, melancholy feeling that he no longer belongs here.

"I used to love Florida. Love it!" said Gessat, 60. "It is not the same place anymore. Before it was neighborly. Now it's become more like a big city where nobody knows anybody."

That Ile de France never quite fit in was what once drew a crowd of regulars who loved the authentic French cooking, the mix of curios and old china and kitsch, the contrast between a place where an exuberant, long-haired Frenchman sings To All the Girls I've Loved Before and more conventional dining and entertainment offerings on the nearby highway. But business started declining around late 2001 and never picked back up.

Lawrence Seigel, a Hudson ophthalmologist and longtime Ile de France customer, recalled going one recent evening when he was one of only a few diners. Gessat came by his table and said, sadly, "Do I still cook good?"

"I got tears in my eyes," said Seigel, "and I was, like, dying inside.

"It's very rare that you see someone with the courage to be themselves, to truly be unique. It's truly the end of an era that will never be duplicated."

* * *

No surprise that Gessat didn't end up here in a traditional way. He grew up in an orphanage in Nice, France. Ran away at 13. Worked in restaurants in Italy and France. Joined the French Foreign Legion for five years, and served in turbulent Algiers.

"We were trying to keep ourselves alive," he said. "Trying not to get shot by a sniper."

He moved to Belgium and met his future Ile de France partners: Michele, who became his wife, and Gerard Rofare, a cabaret singer who arrived in Hudson to help out after the Gessats were injured in a car accident - and never left.

"He's like my brother," Gessat said.

Hudson became home in 1980, when Gessat, his wife and in-laws found it while touring the Gulf Coast. They liked the ocean breezes and the prices, and, ready for a big change, they decided to stay.

They bought a shuttered restaurant on Old Dixie Highway and transformed it into Ile de France, complete with a stone-castle front and gargoyles. Entrees are relatively expensive - around $30 for some dishes - but people came, sometimes 135 people a night.

The restaurant was open most nights and, on some weekends, well into the early morning hours. Bon Appetit magazine wrote a feature on it. Tableside crooning by Gessat or Rofare became part of the experience.

The wait could last hours sometimes, and Seigel recalls feeling comfortable enough one busy evening to fetch a bottle of wine, fill up his own bread basket and take his order to the kitchen.

The photographs on a kitchen wall tell all about those days: younger, dark-haired versions of Gessat and Rofare belting out tunes near the dining room piano, hamming it up with patrons.

"Good memories," said Michele, the quiet and efficient force who coordinated the orders and the cooking, and ruled over a corner kitchen office the way her husband ruled the dining room.

But many of their best customers, they say, moved away. Population growth shifted to Trinity and central Pasco, and in Gessat's view, things took a turn for the worse. Homeless people in the Winn-Dixie parking lot hassle him for money. Shady transactions go down near his business.

"I see in my parking lot, drug dealing!" said Gessat, thwacking pieces of filet mignon one afternoon before opening. "They deal through the window. Boom, boom, boom!"

These days, Rofare rarely leaves the kitchen to sing. Earlier this year, Gessat cut the number of days the restaurant was open. As much as he loved the restaurant, he said, this could not continue.

"It's a little bit too late now," he said. "I've been thinking and thinking and I made my decision."

* * *

A friend in Oklahoma told them about some property for sale. It's wide open country, not far from the Texas town of - you won't believe it - Paris. They can take the 10 horses they now keep on their Shady Hills property. "I'm going to raise a cow," Gessat declared. "My friend and I want to do meat. If I decide to do a restaurant there, I'd have my own meat."

Rofare will come, too. The Gessats are his family. And Michele says simply: "I like the quiet."

Would they ever come back? Gessat does not know. He thinks of an old post office he used to love in Hudson. Wood floors and swinging doors, he said, "like in the cowboy movies I used to watch." That got torn down. He figures whoever buys his property at auction will do the same to his castle.

"One day they will knock it down," he said. "It's going to happen one day." He sighed and kept cutting meat.

* * *

A recent Thursday evening. Word has spread that Ile de France is closing, and some of his longtime customers are showing up. In its final days, Ile de France is starting to have some of the bustle of earlier days.

He stands between the tables of two couples - Niles and Cherry Kinnunen of New Port Richey and Jo and Jim McVey of Hudson - to flambeau their filet mignon. He invites them to visit once he, Michele and Gerard get settled out West. He hopes they'll e-mail him.

"This is what I will miss," he tells them, pointing at another table. "I know them 25 years, you 25, you 15. But I got to do what I got to do."

The flames shoot up, and the king of the Old Dixie Highway castle is laughing again.

Times researcher Shirl Kennedy contributed to this report. Jodie Tillman can be reached at jtillman@sptimes.com or 727 869-6247.

If you go

Halloween buffet

Ile de France closes Wednesday with a Halloween buffet. Cost is $23.95 per person. Call (727) 863-7994 for reservations. The address is 13911 Old Dixie Highway in Hudson.

[Last modified October 27, 2007, 21:04:43]