Before Jacques Orenstein sold Oklahoma City on Veal Orloff, he sold it dresses. Born Jacob Orenstein in West Virginia in 1918, he spent part of his youth in New Orleans, where the city’s Creole kitchens left a mark that would take four decades to surface. Orenstein earned his living on the road, representing women’s ready-to-wear lines across the region and at some point Frenchifying his first name; by 1953 he was a special representative for Carlye Fashions, a St. Louis-based women’s clothing brand known for upscale junior dresses and suits, and in 1955 newspaper advertisements in Oklahoma were billing him as the “renowned fashion expert” headlining a department-store fashion show. He had no professional food training then and never acquired any. What he had was a salesman’s instinct for what people wanted before they knew they wanted it.
The same 1955 advertising pages that carried his name also carried notices for the Redbud Restaurant & Tea Room in the Wileman Shopping Center, a retail strip at Northwest 50th Street and Shartel Avenue that later accounts would call simply the Shartel Shopping Center. The Redbud was a fixture of a particular mid-century institution: the ladies’ tea room, serving light lunches to a genteel clientele. Orenstein would remember it, decades later, as a place filled “with little old ladies with hats.”
In 1962, in his mid-forties and weary of the road, Orenstein abandoned the garment trade and bought the Redbud. The purchase looked like a modest career change into the lunch business. It wasn’t. Within a year he had jettisoned the tea-room concept and reopened the space at 5201 North Shartel as Jacques’ Internationale, a Continental restaurant of a kind Oklahoma City had never seen. The lights were dimmed. An accordion player glided from table to table. The menu ran to dishes like Veal Orloff — roasted veal layered with soubise and mushrooms under a blanket of Mornay sauce — in a city where such a thing bordered on the exotic.
“The fare in Oklahoma City in 1963 was fried chicken, chicken fried steak, and then came steak,” Orenstein recalled in a 1985 interview. “That was it. There just weren’t many restaurants and we introduced this kind of food — continental food.”
He was not entirely alone in this missionary work. Downtown, at almost the same moment, Frank Hightower had commissioned James Beard, who was known as the “Dean of American Cookery,” to convert The Cellar in the Hightower Building from a tea room into a modern French restaurant, and installed John Bennett, a young graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, as its first chef. Between them, The Cellar and Jacques’ Internationale introduced classic French and Continental cooking to a city that had gotten along without it — The Cellar with an East Coast pedigree, Jacques’ with the self-taught enthusiasm of a former dress salesman who credited his palate to New Orleans and, as his son Jon later put it, “learned from the chefs that worked for him through the years.”
Enthusiasm did not immediately pay the bills. Oklahoma City’s dining public, offered its first accordion-serenaded Continental menu, largely stuck to its fried chicken. So when a local television station came calling with the offer of a weekly cooking segment, Orenstein said yes without hesitation. “When you’re starving to death trying to get a restaurant off the ground — and we were really scratching because Oklahoma City wasn’t ready for us yet — I agreed to the show,” he said in that same 1985 interview. “You couldn’t buy that kind of publicity.”
The segment, “Cooking With Jacques,” ran on WKY-TV (Channel 4) — Oklahoma’s first television station, later KTVY and today KFOR. It made Orenstein a household face. Each week he demonstrated a Continental dish on camera: how to make it, what the finished plate should look like, and, pointedly, how to eat it, since much of his audience had never confronted the dish in question. The segment is best remembered as a feature of “Dannysday,” the daytime talk and variety program that broadcasting legend Danny Williams produced and hosted beginning in 1967, and on which a young Mary Hart would later serve as co-host. Orenstein’s television work, by his own count, ran seven and a half years, and it continued until 1971 — for roughly the entire life of the restaurant it was created to promote. The arrangement, a bargain struck out of desperation, became one of the great marketing coups in Oklahoma City restaurant history: a struggling restaurateur teaching an entire television market, week by week, to want what only his dining room served.
It worked. By the middle of the decade Jacques’ Internationale had become the city’s occasion restaurant — the top destination for anniversaries, courtships, and expense accounts. The restaurant’s advertising by 1967 carried the slogan “Where Dining Becomes an Experience,” and the experience extended past the plate: the room, the music, the tableside ceremony, and the drinks. In October 1967 the restaurant received a form of national recognition rare for an Oklahoma establishment when Gourmet magazine printed the recipe for its Velvet Hammer, the silky after-dinner cocktail of orange liqueur, crème de cacao, and cream. The restaurant also published “50 Famous Recipes from Jacque’s Internationale,” a souvenir booklet that pressed its greatest hits into home kitchens, notwithstanding the misplaced apostrophe on its cover.
Success bred expansion. In 1968 Orenstein opened a second restaurant, Jacques’ Sign of the Ram, in a new hotel on the grounds of Will Rogers World Airport — advertised at its opening as the Holiday Inn–Airport, though the property was remembered in later accounts as the Sheraton Inn, the flag it apparently flew for most of the restaurant’s run. The Sign of the Ram gave Orenstein a foothold in the hotel trade, cooking for travelers and conventioneers while the Shartel Avenue flagship held down the carriage trade in the city’s near-northwest neighborhoods.
Then, in 1971, the flagship ran aground on the most prosaic of hazards: real estate. Orenstein lost his lease at the Shartel Shopping Center, and no rescue materialized. The advertisements that spring were blunt (“Lost our lease—Selling out”), followed by auction notices announcing that all the restaurant’s equipment would be “sold out piece by piece—lot by lot.” After eight years, the dimmed lights at Northwest 50th and Shartel went dark for good. The television segment ended the same year. The tea room Orenstein had bought from the little old ladies in hats had lasted, in its Continental incarnation, from 1963 to 1971, and nothing ever occupied quite the same place in the city’s affections again.
Orenstein himself was far from finished. A newspaper advertisement he placed in 1972 doubled as a family Christmas letter and a statement of ambition: “It’s been ten years since we started in the restaurant business with Jacques’ Internationale. We have been Oklahoma City’s ambassador to St. Louis with Jacques Old World in the Sheraton Inn-Airport, and to Tucson with Jacques’ Sign of the Gaucho in the Sheraton Pueblo-Inn.” It was signed “Sincerely, Jacques, Babette, Lou & Jon” — Babette being his wife, and Jon the son who would become his business partner. The Sign of the Ram carried on at the airport hotel until 1974, and the brief multistate hotel-restaurant empire suggested by that advertisement marked the high-water line of the Jacques’ name.
Back home, Orenstein kept moving. In 1974 he led a group of investors in opening The French Revolution at Northwest Expressway and May Avenue, a restaurant built around French crêpes; it lasted until 1976. That year he pivoted again, this time away from restaurants altogether, organizing, with Jon, Creative Cookery — a gourmet cooking school, kitchenware shop, bakery, and delicatessen at 6500 North May Avenue that rode the crest of Oklahoma City’s oil-boom prosperity. Creative Cookery brought nationally known cooking teachers to town, and in 1980 it very nearly delivered the biggest name of all: 16 students had signed up to watch James Beard demonstrate the techniques of haute cuisine when Beard, ill in a San Francisco hospital, was forced to cancel. Business stayed strong until 1983, when the oil bust caught up with it; in 1985, at the end of its ninth year, father and son put Creative Cookery into liquidation, one more casualty of a sluggish local economy then entering its third year.
Orenstein was in his late sixties by then, and the interviews he gave carried the unguarded candor of a man with nothing left to sell. Asked to assess the dining scene he had spent 23 years cultivating, he did not flatter it. “We’ve got a lot of restaurants and 99 percent of them are lousy,” he said. “I hate to say it, but they are. They’re mediocre. They serve food. That’s all.” The old adversary, he conceded, had never really been beaten: “And it’s hard to reason with people who say, ‘What’s wrong with fried chicken?’”
He tried the restaurant business once more. In 1988, six months after opening Jacques’ Restaurant in the Spring Creek Shopping Center at 2801 Northwest 122nd Street, an effort to raise fresh capital failed and he closed the doors, announcing that he did not intend to operate a restaurant in the city again. He kept his word on restaurants, though not on retirement. By 1992 a local columnist was calling him “the Guru of Cuisine” and noting that he “just can’t stand retirement — although he’s tried it at least three times.” That June he was back in front of audiences doing cooking demonstrations to help sell home gas ranges; that fall he demonstrated alongside a younger generation of chefs — among them Kurt Fleischfresser of The Coach House — at a Nichols Hills kitchen tour benefiting hospice care. By 1994 he had devised one final format: cooking schools held in private homes, where three or four couples could gather in someone’s kitchen and have Jacques teach them Southwestern, Italian, or Hungarian cooking, for one evening or a weekly series. Thirty years after television had carried him into Oklahoma City’s living rooms, he was making house calls.
Jacques Orenstein died in Oklahoma City on June 17, 2000, after a short illness. He was 81. “He was always optimistic and upbeat,” Jon Orenstein said the next day. “He loved people and he loved being around people.” When the food editor of the Daily Oklahoman closed out the year 2000, she counted his death — alongside that of Johnnie Haynes of Johnnie’s Charcoal Broiler — as the loss of one of the two giants of the local food industry that year.
The restaurant itself had by then been closed for nearly three decades, but it refused to be forgotten. In 1999, when readers of the Daily Oklahoman were asked to name their favorite Oklahoma City restaurants of the previous half-century, Jacques’ Internationale made the list of the departed places people still missed. And on Valentine’s Day 2018, the Daily Oklahoman’s Dave Cathey published a list of eight long-gone Oklahoma City restaurants he would reopen for a single night if he could. There at No. 7, between The Cellar and Chez Vernon, sat Jacques’ Internationale — dimmed lights, gliding accordionist, Veal Orloff and all — 47 years after the lease ran out.
Veal Cordon Bleu
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Loading...In 1963, Jacques Orenstein — a self-taught cook who had spent years selling women's fashion on the road — converted a tea room at Northwest 50th and Shartel into Jacques' Internationale, the restaurant widely credited with introducing Continental cuisine to Oklahoma City. The lights were low, an accordionist drifted from table to table, and dishes most diners had never encountered arrived with a bit of ceremony; Orenstein spent years demonstrating them on local television so his audience would know not only how to make them but how to eat them. Orenstein's Veal Cordon Bleu is pure midcentury dinner-house cooking: pounded veal folded around smoked ham and Swiss cheese, sealed with the tines of a fork, coated in flour and egg, and fried gently in butter until golden. It asks little beyond patience at the stove and a generous hand with the butter.
Ingredients
- 12 veal cutlets (about 4 ounces each)
- Kosher salt and black pepper
- 12 thin slices smoked ham
- 12 thin slices Swiss cheese
- 3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more as needed
- 6 large eggs, beaten
- 1/2 to 1 pound unsalted butter, as needed for cooking
Instructions
Working with one cutlet at a time, place the veal between sheets of parchment paper or plastic wrap and pound gently to an even thinness. Cut each cutlet into 2 equal pieces and season lightly with salt and pepper.
Lay 1 slice of ham and 1 slice of cheese over one piece of each cutlet, trimming the filling so that it does not extend past the edges of the meat. Top with the matching piece of veal, press the edges together firmly, then crimp them with the tines of a fork to seal.
Place the flour in a wide, shallow dish and the beaten eggs in a second dish. Dredge each veal packet in flour, shaking off the excess, dip in the egg and let the excess drip away, then coat once more in flour.
In a large skillet over medium heat, melt enough butter to generously coat the bottom of the pan. Working in batches and adding more butter as needed, cook the veal, turning carefully so both sides brown evenly, until golden and cooked through, 10 to 15 minutes total. Serve hot.
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