I’ve spent New Year’s Eve on the Champs Elysees and toasted in the New Year with Veuve Clicquot high above the city at The Rainbow Room, but none compared to the thrill of my first New Year’s Eve of 1958 when dressed in my PJs I dined on cheese Fondue and sipped pink champagne at Chez Edelstein, of West Hempstead.

It was the height of sophistication for a 3-year-old me to dunk pieces of crusty bread into bubbling, hot cheese fondue from a gleaming copper fondue pot at the unheard-of hour of 11 p.m.

As we ate, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadian Orchestra played in the background on the Living Room Emerson TV. My parents clinked their saucer-shaped champagne coupes filled with Vintage N.Y. Finger Lakes Taylor pink champagne while my brother and I sipped from little shot glasses of the adult beverage, the bubble tickling my nose.
Guy Lombardo’s New Year extravaganza, advertised as the epitome of “high-bred good taste,” was telecast “live from the famous Waldorf Astoria Hotel located on fashionable Park Avenue, where New York’s glamorous high society would bid a farewell to the year and a noisy welcome to the next.”

For one night only, I too would be a part of “those who know life’s more sophisticated pleasures.”