C6 FRANÇOIS HAERINGER, 91 Introduced Washington to a fresh approach to French cuisine by Matt Schudel
François Haeringer, a chef who made an art of French country cooking and whose Great Falls restaurant, L’Auberge Chez Fran- çois, was a beloved culinary desti- nation, died June 3 at Reston Hospital Center of complications from a fall. He was 91 and worked in the kitchen of his restaurant until Tuesday. When Mr. Haeringer opened
his first restaurant, Chez Fran- çois, near the White House in 1954, he introduced Washington to a fresh approach to French cui- sine. He emphasized the rustic flavors of his native Alsatian re- gion of France, with fish, steaks, patés, stews and roasts. “It was the French restaurant
that made French food acces- sible,” Washington restaurateur Mark Furstenberg said Saturday. “Chez François came to represent in this city that French food could be simple and straightforward.” When Mr. Haeringer moved his
restaurant to the Virginia sub- urbs in 1976, he created an au- berge, or country inn, in the man- ner he remembered from his youth. He steadfastly rejected cu- linary fads, preferring to produce
the simple but hearty food he learned to cook during his long apprenticeship in France. He kept a close eye on his restaurant, often slicing the beef himself, ad- justing the seasoning of sauces and moving tables and chairs. His unbending standards
made L’Auberge Chez François a popular and critical success, with readers of Washingtonian maga- zine naming it one of the region’s best restaurants 25 years in a row.
A LOCAL LIFE: WILLIAM E. CROSS, 93 Made some of the clearest cider in Maryland by Matt Schudel
Bill Cross made his first batch of cider in the early 1930s, not long after his family bought a Ger- mantown landmark called the Ci- der Barrel. Through the decades, as the lonely outpost in rural Montgomery County became sur- rounded by houses and highways, two things remained the same: the Cider Barrel and Mr. Cross himself. The one-of-a-kind roadside at- traction was built in 1925 by busi-
nessman Andrew Baker as a place to sell cider from his apple trees. The giant barrel, built of wooden staves and once described in The Washington Post as a “15-foot- high cooper’s masterpiece in red, white and blue,” was one of the few businesses along the then- remote stretch of Rockville Pike. In earlier times, Baker had made hard cider and brandy, but Prohibition forced him into a new line of libations, which he ad- vertised in a sign painted on the side of the Cider Barrel: We bow before the Volstead Act
And serve it to you sweet Tis better far than old and hard This glorious temperance treat Mr. Cross was a teenager when his family bought the Cider Barrel in 1930. Almost every autumn for the next 72 years, he would run apples through a press to make a pure, clear cider that he sold one gallon at a time. His mother and aunt ran a res-
taurant next door for several years, and in 1953 Mr. Cross opened a mobile home court, the first in the county. Even though he made his living as a civil engineer
with the Navy, everyone thought of him as the cider man of Ger- mantown. “My expertise of over 60 years
started in grammar school,” he told The Post in 2003, one year af- ter he sold his last gallon of cider. He said he had a secret recipe drawn from “common sense and my taste” that he wouldn’t divulge to anyone. “I have too much pride in what
I put out there to have people come in and ruin it,” he told The Post.
When the 93-year-old Mr. Cross died April 16 of renal failure at a hospice in Boynton Beach, Fla., his recipe was thought to have died with him. But there are still some people around who worked with him and know how he mixed his matchless cider. “Bill certainly wanted you to
believe he had a secret formula,” said Jean Phillips, who worked with Mr. Cross in 1995 and 1996. The only secret, Phillips said,
was finding the right blend of sweet and sour apples to make a tart, tasty cider. During cider sea- son, which ran from mid-Septem- ber to Thanksgiving Day, Mr. Cross purchased about 1,000 bushels of apples a week. When different varieties ripened, he would slightly alter his recipe. One thing that never changed, however, was that the cider had no additives of any kind. After pressing the apples in a series of metal rollers, Mr. Cross poured the juice through a filter containing diatomaceous earth, then stored the fresh cider in re- frigerated milk tanks. At the peak of the season, the Cider Barrel sold 2,200 gallons a week, as well as fresh apples and apple butter.
JOHN W. DOUGLAS, 88 Lawyer coordinated March on Washington by Timothy R. Smith
John W. Douglas, 88, a lawyer who helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and was in- volved in the release of prisoners after the Bay of Pigs invasion, died June 2 at the Grand Oaks assisted living facility in the Dis- trict. He had complica- tions from a stroke. Appointed by President
John F. Kennedy in 1963, Mr. Douglas was assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil division, which represents federal employees, includ- ing members of Congress and the Cabinet, in legal disputes. He became the Ken- nedy administration’s point man for the August 1963 March on Washington. He worked closely with march leaders and had a White House mandate to keep the demonstration peaceable. “Douglas’s team assisted the march planners in thinking through the day’s details, down to the adequacy of toilet facilities on the Mall,” Seattle lawyer Drew D. Hansen wrote in “The Dream: Mar- tin Luther King Jr. and the Speech that Inspired a Nation” (2003), a book on King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered Aug. 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial.
John Douglas worked at Justice.
Mr. Douglas “shares historic credit for the orderliness and smoothness and joy of that day,” Victor S. Navasky wrote in “Ken- nedy Justice” (1971), his history of Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Depart- ment. Mr. Douglas had made a name for himself in Kennedy circles in late 1962, when he helped negotiate the release of prisoners held by Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The previous year, the CIA had sponsored an ill-fat- ed attempt to overthrow Castro. More than 1,500 anti-communist Cuban exiles went ashore at the Bay of Pigs, on Cuba’s southern underbelly. The exiles were roundly de- feated in three days, and
most were taken prisoner. Mr. Douglas was part of a four- man committee, including future attorney general Nicholas Katzen- bach, that eventually negotiated a $53 million food-and-medicine swap for 1,113 prisoners. John Woolman Douglas was born Aug. 15, 1921, in Philadelphia. He graduated from Princeton Uni- versity in 1943 and served in the Navy during World War II. He received a law degree from
Yale University in 1948. After law school, Mr. Douglas attended Ox- ford University as a Rhodes scholar and received a postgraduate degree
in politics, philosophy and eco- nomics. He worked briefly for the Wash-
ington law firm Covington & Burl- ing, where he specialized in civil lit- igation. In 1951 and 1952, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harold H. Burton. After his clerkship, he returned to Covington. Mr. Douglas resigned from the
Justice Department in 1966 to work on the unsuccessful re-elec- tion campaign of his father, Sen. Paul Douglas (D-Ill.). In 1968, he be- came a strategist for the presi- dential campaign of Kennedy (D- N.Y.). Afterward, he returned to Covington & Burling and in 1974 and 1975 was president of the D.C. Bar. In 1989, Mr. Douglas became an
election observer in Namibia, which was separating from South Africa. He was an official observer of the 1994 election of Nelson Man- dela as president of South Africa. Politics was his first love, fol- lowed closely by music, said his daughter, Kate Douglas Torrey of Chapel Hill, N.C. He was an accom- plished pianist and had composed songs while at Princeton. He married Mary St. John in 1945. She died in 2007. In addition to his daughter, sur- vivors include a son, Peter Douglas of New York; a brother; a half sis- ter; four grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
smitht@washpost.com RAFAEL CRISOSTOMO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Bill Cross, left, and his partner Gene Bollinger in front of the Cider Barrel in Germantown in 2003.
Before he switched to plastic containers, Mr. Cross shone a bright light through a glass jug of cider to accentuate its clarity. Ac- cording to his lawyer, Arthur Brisker, a state inspector once pronounced it the clearest cider in the state. William Eugene Cross was born
Oct. 11, 1916, in Blue Ridge, Ga., and moved to Montgomery Coun- ty as a child. His father died at an early age, forcing young Bill to grow up fast and accept the re- sponsibilities of an adult. He graduated from Rockville High School and later from Mars Hill College in North Carolina before embarking on an engineering ca- reer that took him to naval instal- lations all over the world. In 1941, he married Eleanor Nicholson, and they settled in Bethesda. She died in 2000, and the couple had no children. Mr. Cross retired from the Navy in 1973 and devoted his life to run- ning the Cider Barrel and mobile home court in his small, unchang- ing corner of the county. He often drove his Corvette in local pa- rades as a way of advertising his cider.
When a local historical society showed interest in preserving the Cider Barrel, he began to grum- ble, complaining about the “hys- terical society.” Nonetheless, ac- cording to a study by Susan So- derberg, Germantown Historical Society president, the Cider Bar- rel was designated a county his- toric site in 1989 as “a unique example of novelty architecture.” In 2002, Mr. Cross sold the land surrounding the Cider Barrel to a developer for $7 million and do- nated the entire sum for schol- arships. He moved to Delray Beach, Fla., two years later. Last year, when the county planning commission proposed that the Cider Barrel be moved, Mr. Cross had his lawyer fire off a stern letter warning that the bar- rel could not be rebuilt if it were dismantled and that it should be preserved as an official historic landmark.
If a bit forlorn, the Cider Barrel remains standing to this day, a re- minder of a sweeter and slower time — and one man’s lifelong pursuit of the perfect glass of ci- der.
schudelm@washpost.com
As chef David Becker looks on, François Haeringer, oversees the cooking at L’Auberge Chez François in Great Falls. Mr. Haeringer opened his first restaurant near the White House in 1954.
1999 FILE PHOTO BY DAYNA SMITH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
carves filets from tenderloins with the peremptory single- mindedness of a star surgeon.” In a Washington Post video re- corded last month, Mr. Haeringer extended the military metaphor. “They say in France, discipline
makes the army,” he said. “And I am the general.” For years, Mr. Haeringer man-
aged the restaurant with his three sons, and his wife kept the books. He seldom drew attention to the famous names who dined at his restaurant — or to his own. Even as chefs increasingly be- came recognizable celebrities, Mr. Haeringer preferred to stay in the kitchen. “He was proud of what he did,” his son Jacques said. “He didn’t want to be a star.” His sons sometimes chafed at
Mr. Haeringer managed the
restaurant like a small military operation, requiring that each of his employees greet him person- ally every day. “Directing a staff of 85, he mo- bilizes the salad crew and dis- patches the pastry chefs with the tyranny of Gen. George Patton or- chestrating tank columns toward battle with the Nazis,” Edward J. Cody wrote in the Washington Post Magazine in 1996. “He
their father’s Old World manner, but his authority was absolute. “We agreed to disagree on a lot
of stuff, although he always had the final word,” Jacques Haer- inger said. “Who am I going to ar- gue with in the kitchen now?” François Robert Haeringer was
born Jan. 6, 1919, in Obernai, France, in the Alsace near the German border. He began cook- ing at 16 in local restaurants and later apprenticed at the Plaza
Athenee hotel in Paris. “Years ago, when I was a little
boy, you had no television, you had nothing,” he told The Post in 1987. “So what do you think [the French] did? They ate. They made love and ate. That’s all.” While serving in the French
army during World War II, Mr. Haeringer was captured by Ger- man forces and sent to work as a prisoner-chef at the Four Seasons hotel in Munich. His son said he was briefly sent to the Dachau prison camp for trying to smug- gle Frenchmen out of Germany. After the war, some French loy- alists who knew of Mr. Haer- inger’s work in a German hotel considered him a collaborator, and he was narrowly rescued from a firing squad by a cousin. Mr. Haeringer came to Wash-
ington in 1947 to work at restau- rants with an uncle and a brother. He spent more than a year cook- ing at a hotel in the fishing town of Ketchikan, Alaska, before re- turning to Washington in 1950. He worked at the Three Muske- teers restaurant on Connecticut Avenue NW before buying it in 1954 and naming it Chez Fran- çois. Mr. Haeringer’s sons, Jacques of Great Falls and Paul of Potomac Falls, will continue to
run L’Auberge Chez François in the style their father established. A third son, Robert Haeringer of Arlington, left the restaurant last year.
Other survivors include Mr.
Haeringer’s wife of 62 years, Ma- rie-Antoinette Clare Haeringer of Great Falls; and four grandchil- dren.
When Mr. Haeringer sat down to a meal, he preferred simple fare, such as a steak and french fries. For a snack, his son Jacques said, he liked — of all things — Spam and a Budweiser. His formula for a successful
restaurant was equally unpreten- tious.
“Listen, when people go to the
restaurant, what do they want?” he said in 1996. “A good time. A nice atmosphere. A good meal. It’s simple.”
schudelm@washpost.com
on
washingtonpost.com
Local chef François Haeringer
View a video of the L’Auberge owner talking about his philosophies at
washingtonpost.com/obituaries.
S
KLMNO OBITUARIES
SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010
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