Jan Mitchell, Who Put the ü Back in Lüchow’s, Dies at 96
By WILLIAM GRIMES NOV. 30, 2009
Jan Mitchell, a restaurateur and art collector who resuscitated the venerable New York restaurants Lüchow’s and Longchamps, and who built an important collection of pre-Columbian gold that he gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 96 and also had homes in Palm Beach, Fla., and Southampton, N.Y.
The death was confirmed by his son David.
It was in 1950 that Mr. Mitchell came to the rescue of Lüchow’s, a temple of Teutonic cuisine, which had fallen on hard times after the death of its founder, August Lüchow, in 1923. The restaurant, founded in 1882, had once played host to the musical elite of the German-speaking world, who were delighted to find Würzburger beer and boiled beef with horseradish sauce at 110-112 East 14th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues, only a few steps from Steinway Hall and the Academy of Music.
Under the ownership of August Lüchow’s nephew, however, the restaurant declined. Mr. Mitchell made it his mission to restore the place to its former glory. He reinstated classic German dishes that had been dropped from the menu and revived the weeklong bock beer and venison festivals that had brightened the restaurant’s calendar.
Not least, he put the umlaut back on top of the “u,” which Lüchow had dropped in 1917 in response to anti-German sentiment during World War I. The absence of the umlaut had led many new customers to believe that the place was a Chinese restaurant. Mr. Mitchell, tired of explaining that no egg rolls were served in the Nibelungen Room, put the two dots back where they belonged in 1952.
Leonard Jan Mitchell was born on April 22, 1913, in Libau (now Liepaja), Latvia, which was then part of the Russian empire. While serving on a merchant marine vessel, Mr. Mitchell jumped ship in Baltimore and headed for New York.
Despite knowing almost no English, he found work as a waiter at the Hotel Grand Concourse in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium (Yankee players nicknamed him the Swede), and at the Waldorf-Astoria.
In 1942, with $25,000 in borrowed money, Mr. Mitchell bought the Olmsted restaurant in Washington. It prospered, and he set his sights on Lüchow’s, with which he had fallen in love after eating there early in his New York years.
At Longchamps Restaurant in 1967, from left, Chef John van Hooff is introduced by former owner Jan Mitchell to new owners Irving Riese and Murray Riese.
He later bought Longchamps, a once-esteemed but faltering midpriced chain of 10 Manhattan restaurants, and two other struggling restaurants: Charles French Restaurant, in Greenwich Village, and the Riverboat, in the Empire State Building. After turning the restaurants around, he sold them all to the Riese organization in 1967.
He sold Lüchow’s in the 1970s. It may be that the initial excitement of owning it had paled. Mimi Sheraton, a restaurant critic for The New York Times, visited the restaurant in 1976 and found its food “dreary.” It remained at the 14th Street location until a fire in 1985 led to a move uptown to Broadway and 50th; it lost its umlaut once again and finally closed in 1986; the original site was bought 10 years later by New York University and is now a dormitory.
Mr. Mitchell produced two cookbooks from his ventures, “Lüchow’s German Cookbook” (1962), with an introduction and illustrations by Ludwig Bemelmans, and “Cooking à la Longchamps” (1964).
In 1960 Mr. Mitchell married Ellin Hobbins, an actress and art dealer. She died in 1993. In addition to his son David, of Manhattan, he is survived by two other sons, Alexander and Oliver, also of Manhattan, and 13 grandchildren.
Once out of the restaurant business, Mr. Mitchell turned to philanthropic work and art collecting. He and his wife were founding members of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and Mr. Mitchell supported numerous other charities in Israel.
He bought paintings but threw most of his energy into pre-Columbian gold, amassing a collection of artifacts from all the pre-Columbian gold-working areas.
In 1993 the Metropolitan Museum, of which Mr. Mitchell was a trustee, presented an exhibition of his objects in a gallery whose renovation he financed and that the museum renamed the Jan Mitchell Treasury. Philippe de Montebello, the Met’s director, called it “our little El Dorado.”
Mr. Mitchell told The Times that his interest in the field dated from early childhood. “When I was 5 and had learned how to read, my father gave me a gold coin,” he said.
Amanda S. Stevenson 
