A 10-course send-off to L'Espalier's former home

Chef Frank McClelland delivered a toast during the final dinner at L'Espalier's Gloucester Street location. (Globe Photo/Wiqan Ang)

Long known as a place to get engaged, L'Espalier sees about one proposal a month. That means upward of 300 marriages have been launched in the Gloucester Street townhouse occupied by the restaurant for the last 26 years. Presumably, many of them have outlasted its run. Saturday was L'Espalier's last night in the cramped, romantic digs. Marriages, ultimately, may be easier to maintain and update than a cranky 1880s building full of drafts, short on kitchen space, and long on lines for the bathroom.

The French-by-way-of-New England restaurant (or is it the other way around?) is moving into the Mandarin Oriental hotel, a space that is several blocks and a world away. On Saturday evening, patrons gathered to take in the modern digs, along with glasses of champagne and passed hors d'oeuvres, before heading over for one last dinner at the townhouse.

Entering the not-quite-finished new restaurant, we are greeted by vertical expanses of glass and horizontal stretches of dark wood. The Boston Mandarin Oriental is less fortunate with its view than the New York branch. From Asiate, L'Espalier's Manhattan correlative, one gets a stunning eyeful of Central Park and the city skyline. L'Espalier offers a close-up of Lord & Taylor and miniature human dramas: man mastering eReader while perched precariously on planter, woman freeing shoe from wad of gum.

Inside the restaurant, all is harmonious: two singers collaborating with a keyboardist, melon shooters with basil seeds and shavings of Parmesan. Men with long, gray ponytails wear suits and sit in nooks, talking real estate. "We got 595 for it. Last week 595 was good." Women in cocktail dresses thread through glass passages, O-mouthed and looking up at the clear walls. These will eventually be lined with bottles of wine, but for now one finds oneself face to face with people on the other side, inadvertently engaging in a mime's mirror act.

L'Espalier's future home pulls a similar trick. It mimics the townhouse with separate, smaller dining spaces romantically named - the Library, the Crystal Room. But of course the two restaurants look nothing alike, even in making the same gestures.

If some sentimental diners are accepting these changes grudgingly, the chefs must be running toward them, arms open wide, ready to proffer big, sloppy kisses. The old kitchen is the size of a glorified, applianced hallway. The new one yawns, bright with stainless steel and good lighting. It offers the promise of volume and efficiency. Platters of waiting hors d'oeuvres are dwarfed by the counters they rest on, tiny like fields viewed from a plane.

But enough with newness for now. It's time to head back to the old townhouse for the meal. L'Espalier is shuttling people from Boylston to Gloucester in limos that must drive several blocks in the wrong direction, then double back. It's about the journey. Two blond women in asymmetrical, ruffled dresses - one coral, the other turquoise - head for the exit, flitting like butterflies through the room and past its black-clad denizens. One carries a heart-shaped evening bag embellished with hundreds of tiny crystals, hinged on the side to open wide.

Who comes to L'Espalier's last night before moving, on Labor Day weekend? A crowd slightly less business-y than one sometimes sees: Brahmins and new money, types arty and architectural, an elegant woman with white hair who is tanned and athletic as a 20-something, couples who have been coming to the restaurant for years. "Did you get engaged here?" someone asks a husband and wife. They have to think a bit to remember: no, not here. The woman says, "It won't be the same."

There's a party switching back and forth from English to something that sounds Slavic, two soberly suited men seated with a woman and her costarring decolletage, and a ruddy man who looks like a P.G. Wodehouse character. Then there are the late arrivals: a round table of women with nearly identical blond 'dos and their mustached companions. They look fresh off a yacht, or more likely in from LA. They talk advertising till a waiter approaches. "It's our last evening in this space," he's heard explaining a few moments later. "Oh, really?" they say.

Whether at L'Espalier by happenstance or out of fondness, everyone is here to eat. The menu is a 10-course countdown to the end, with wine pairings. They will send us off, and they will send us off full and tipsy. (And, at $285 a head, poorer than when we arrived.)

It begins with more champagne, of course, and an oyster resting on onion-truffle flan, topped with caviar (American). Then the butter-poached lobster that is a L'Espalier signature, served with summery sweet corn and more caviar (French). And the next course, marlin with chili and pineapple foam and still more caviar (German), after which things begin to blur: There is foie gras with cocoa vinaigrette, duck, the tenderest beef tenderloin, poached in Port. A man in the corner is tilting his bowl up toward his face to get the last drops of beef shin and mushroom consomme the servers poured on the tenderloin tableside. We sample a '98 Burgundy from Savigny, then a '98 Bordeaux from St.-Julien. Servers never lose track of who is drinking fizzy, who is drinking still, though when asked for more information about a sauvignon blanc paired with the foie gras, one simply offers this enlightenment: "It's sweet." Serving everyone at once in a delicate minuet, the bread people circling left as the wine people go right and plates are swept away and delivered, may occasionally interfere with the finer points of wine service.

The ornate old rooms are festooned with gold and silver helium balloons, bumping the ceilings with ribbons dangling. Chef Frank McClelland makes a speech, and everyone smiles wide as he talks: "To new beginnings," he toasts, one theme of the night; the menu is titled "Old Friends and New Beginnings." It could be subtitled "The End of an Era."

Maitre d' and fromager Louis Risoli materializes: his turn. He's been here since the beginning, when, he says, you could barely get your hands on a decent French cheese, much less one from the US. Now look! We're about to eat two from Vermont and one from Oregon. But first, as benediction, we must sing the Cheese Song, set to the tune of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."

Lyrics are handed out, and by now everyone is more than willing. "Mozzarella provolone Parmesan ricotta, once that you have tasted it you'll want to eat a lot-a, to cook it all you have to do is throw it in a pot-a, mozzarella provolone Parmesan ricotta." Dum-diddle-iddle-iddle dum-diddle-eye. Repeat, double-time.

The servers are taking pictures of one another in the stairwell. There is dessert, very chocolate-y, more champagne. A final toast, a final wait for the restroom, and everyone stumbles out into the night. McClelland stands on the sidewalk with his son, who is wearing a red-and-white seersucker jacket and bears a strong resemblance to his father. A bystander holds one of the balloons by its ribbon, a last souvenir from the old restaurant waiting to be let go.

Devra First can be reached at dfirst@globe.com.