LITTLE ROCK — Joel Taylor, the mustachioed Renaissance man who helped found an elegant Swiss-French restaurant that towered over downtown Little Rock for a decade, died Monday of complications from acute renal failure at UAMS Medical Center.
In 1974, Taylor, an international consultant with First National Bank, examined blueprints of the new FNB building at Capitol and Broadway with his co-worker Steve Plunkett. They wondered aloud what would occupy the skyscraper's top floor. Plunkett recalled Taylor asking: "'Do you think Little Rock is ready for a fine European restaurant?'"
They decided it was. Taylor called a chef he'd known in Geneva and asked Jacques Tritten if he would be interested in running such a place.
The answer was yes.
About one year later, Tritten, his wife Suzanne and a staff including 15 Europeans opened Jacques and Suzanne, the first haute cuisine restaurant in Little Rock. Its staff went on to create more than 12 restaurants in central Arkansas - including Graffiti's, 1620, Cafe Prego, and Gypsy's Grill.
Mary Dee Taylor said her husband helped select the staff, the house wine and had a hand in creating the menu before leaving the restaurant's management in 1976.
Taylor, an only child, was born Feb. 16, 1922, in Rector in Drew County. His mother moved him to Little Rock when he was 12, where he graduated from Catholic High School in 1941. He flew a P-38 in Alaska's Aleutian Islands toward the end of World War II. Taylor's wife said: "He really was a patriot who didn't wear his flag on his sleeve but carried it very strongly in his heart."
In the early 1950s, Taylor worked in Munich, Germany, for Radio Liberty, a federally funded anti-communist radio program. He did his "damnedest to undo the whole Sovietconcept," Mary Dee Taylor said.
With his first wife, Joan Smith, Taylor also lived in Austria, Spain, London and Geneva, where he graduated with a European equivalent of a master's degree from an international management school in the late 1950s. The couple had three children.
His ceaseless travel wearied Smith and the couple divorced - Mary Dee Taylor wasn't sure when. Taylor "made no bones about the fact that he wasn't a very good father because he was gone so much," his wife said.
In 1991, Taylor married Mary Dee Terry and a year later again delivered Europeans to Little Rock; this time 23 Russians who helped airlift 90 tons of computers and medical equipment back to Moscow for child victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. From 1990 to 1993, Taylor did marketing work in Moscow, where he learned some Russian to accompany his partial Spanish, solid French and fluent German.
Plunkett said his friend was an "extremely kind person and would give you the shirt off his back." Or, in Taylor's case, the three-piece, British cut, dark pinstriped suit he often wore.
Plunkett also recalled Taylor as a "very opinionated and very intense person" who "squinched his eyes up to really hone in on what you were saying and make sure he didn't miss a point."
Nor did he miss a chance to discuss religion, even if he himself didn't espouse one.
Taylor's wife recalled that while he was working as a marketer in Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s, he knew a Sudanese imam, or Muslim prayer leader, who once asked him: "Do you have a religion?" Joel replied "Oh, I'm a devout agnostic." The imam furrowed his brow and said "Ah, do you have a pope?"
Taylor, who earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Harvard University, replied "Well yes, it's [British philosopher] Bertrand Russell."
Arkansas, Pages 12 on 09/04/2008