Tournedos Rossini, a French Classic, as Deluxe Comfort Food ANDRÉ SOLTNER handed me a spoon. The chef wanted me to taste a sauce that had just simmered to its shiny peak on the stove. It was the kind of sauce - fragrant with layers of veal stock, Madeira, butter, chopped truffles and a trace of the foie gras that had sautéed in the pan moments before - that a hungry New Yorker might have licked from a plate during the glory days of Lutèce, the basilica where Mr. Soltner spread the gospel of classic French cooking for 34 years. Here on a bright Monday morning in a kitchen at the International Culinary Center, in SoHo, where Mr. Soltner is the dean of classic studies, he was resurrecting a recipe that had been a mainstay of French restaurants in America for decades, but which gradually vanished from view as nouvelle cuisine took hold and chefs began dreaming of becoming tattooed creators of new things instead of dutiful interpreters of old things. The dish was tournedos Rossini. Think of it as part of a lost generation of classics: traditional dishes that, as I recently discovered, tenaciously live on in the memories of many chefs and on some of their menus, even if tradition is sometimes restyled for 21st-century tastes. Lobster Newburg, beef Wellington, vol au vent, soufflés: mention these war horses to those same tattooed auteurs and you just might hear them purr like rock guitarists swooning over the dark majesty of a scratchy old Delta blues recording. But if you want a phrase that summons all the voluptuous pleasure of haute cuisine in its heyday, "tournedos Rossini" does the trick. As a culinary undertaking, they are simultaneously simple and sybaritic. Toast two buttered spheres of bread. Top them with warm-from-the-pan filets mignons. Crown them with a slice of hot foie gras. Then anoint these little monuments of luxury with a sliced truffle or two and a small waterfall of the aforementioned sauce. For me, a drop of that sauce was enough to bring back a rush of memories. When I was a child in the 1970s and my father was making his way (with blinding speed) up the corporate ladder, he got into the habit of taking our family out for fancy dinners. In those days, French and fancy were synonymous, so as I sat in some Gallic sanctuary with an unpronounceable name, tugging at my necktie and struggling not to kick my brother and sister under the table, I would order the same thing again and again: "The tornadoes, please." Did I know I was mangling the pronunciation? It's TOR-neh-dose or TOR-neh-doe. Did I know that either Marie-Antoine Carême or Auguste Escoffier, the Jedi knights of haute cuisine, had (by varying, hard-to-verify accounts) devised this dish in the 19th century as a tribute to the opera composer Gioachino Rossini? Or that Rossini himself may have had a hand in it? Did I even know what I was eating? I doubt it. All I knew is that they had a cool name and were wildly delicious. As an adult, all I knew is that I didn't see my beloved "tornadoes" much anymore, and I missed them. I called some French chefs and found that they felt the same. So much so that a few have kept tournedos Rossini around as if they were a childhood memento. Eric Ripert presides over an exquisite fish-centric menu at Le Bernardin, but he has so much nostalgic fondness for tournedos Rossini that he'll sneak them into his lineup now and then as a holiday special. "I like to play with classics," he said. "Last year I said, "Let's put it on the menu," and we sold a lot of it. I had to take it off because we were selling too much. Just as American cooks, lured by the siren song of sense memory, find themselves tinkering with comfort-food stalwarts like meatloaf or mac and cheese, the French dukes of the kitchen can't resist going back to this elevated-yet-earthy delight. "We're doing comfort food," said Philippe Bertineau, the chef at Benoit, a French brasserie hatched by Alain Ducasse on West 55th Street. And tournedos Rossini is comfort food deluxe. Even though the dish is $56 a plate (hey, foie gras and truffles are expensive), Benoit might get a dozen diners asking for it even when it appears as a lunch special. The restaurant tends to offer the dish during the year-end holidays and the winterlong truffle season that ends in mid-March. "I thought people would be scared by the price," Mr. Bertineau said. It's rich, and it's an indulgence. Didier Pawlicki serves a $34 toast-free version of tournedos Rossini at La Sirène, his B.Y.O.B. bistro on Broome Street. He first offered them as a special about four years ago. But like Mr. Ripert and Mr. Bertineau, he soon discovered that customers craved them on a regular basis, even if he did have to offer instructions in how to eat them. "I explained on the menu, in my Franglish, that you have to eat the foie gras and the meat together," he said. The combination of the foie gras and the meat is quite brilliant. Or consider the notorious burger at Daniel Boulud's DB Bistro Moderne. After more than a decade on the New York scene, it's practically a stop on guided tours of the city, and it's made of sirloin, braised short ribs, foie gras and truffles. Sound familiar? "The DB burger was based on the tournedos Rossini - voilà," Mr. Boulud said. My idea was to take the iconically popular American burger and to do a French play on it. I've been playing with classics all my life, basically, and tournedos Rossini always has a connotation of grandeur and luxury. And whether it's pot au feu or sole Veronique, the past seems to act as a culinary tractor beam. "What's amazing is that classic dishes will bring back your customers," said Mr. Boulud, an expert at giving old standbys a fresh spin at Bar Boulud and DBGB Kitchen and Bar. Because people have memories of food, people remember much more a classic dish than a very creative dish which they couldn't even put together.