User:Mollyharvey

George Lang is one of the most famous restaurateurs in America. Not only did he invent the profession of restaurant consulting (in 1970 he started the renowned George Lang Corporation), but also he was asked to write the entry for “Restaurant” in the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Born in Székesfehérvár, Hungary, only child of a Jewish tailor, Lang was destined for the concert stage. But his world suddenly collapsed: at nineteen he was incarcerated in a forced-labor camp, never to see his parents again. Miraculously (with the help of his rudimentary tailoring skills) he survived, only to find himself, after the liberation, undergoing torture and a trumped-up trial. Even his planned escape from Hungary in a hired hearse backfired, and he was forced to walk through minefields to reach the Austrian border.

After he landed in New York in 1946, his hard-won survival techniques served him well: a stint on the Arthur Godfrey show, an idyll at Tanglewood, a fill-in at Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe, before the momentous decision to switch from the fiddle to the kitchen, where a whole new world opened up. Soon Lang was managing a "wedding factory" on the Bowery, and then orchestrating banquets at the Waldorf for Khrushchev, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Grace.

The time was right. America was ready to be converted to the idea of food as entertainment, and George Lang was the man to spread the gospel. He took on The Four Seasons, he explored Indonesia and the Philippines to bring back exotic tastes for the 1964 World's Fair. He pioneered upscale restaurant complexes in shopping malls that were sprouting up all over. It was almost inevitable that he would invent a new profession, as the first restaurant consultant, he managed to create several hundred pleasure domes in more than two dozen countries. Finally, he resurrected two great landmarks: the Café des Artistes in New York City and Gundel in his native Hungary.

His autobiography, which was published in 1998, is entitled "Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen".

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980DE0DF163FF931A15757C0A96E958260