Brunch With Mother on Sunday? Try the ‘Sole Bonne Femme’

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Brunch at the Carlyle generally runs $59 a person. This Sunday, though, in honor of Mother’s Day, the management is offering a four-course meal for $95 with special entrees like “Sauteed Dover Sole Bonne Femme” and “Grilled Asparagus with a Fricassee of Fresh Morels and Fava Beans.” By yesterday afternoon, the dining room had Mother’s Day reservations for more than 200 people, with a handful of those calling ahead to reserve bottles of rose Champagne.

The Carlyle, where children eat half-price this Sunday, is one of several high-end restaurants – including Cafe Boulud, 57 at the Four Seasons Hotel, and Chanterelle – offering Mother’s Day spreads far more extravagant than burnt toast served bedside.

Fancy feasts are only one of the ways families are marking the increasingly expensive celebration that is Mother’s Day.

“It has to do with what people value, what they find rewarding, and how they communicate it in this culture,” a Manhattan psychologist, Dennis Tirch, said. “As there’s more access to resources, there are higher expectations.” Mr. Tirch is the education director at the American Institute of Cognitive Therapy on East 57th Street in Manhattan.

Custom-made gifts for moms, featuring names, photographs, or drawings by their offspring, are particularly popular this season, an East Side mother, Lyss Stern, said. “It’s personalized, yet it’s something that you, as a mother, want to wear because it’s stylish-and it’s fabulous as well,” she said. “It’s all about finer goods and finer things for Mother’s Day.”

Last year, she received a Planet Jill silver-and-pearl necklace and an Anya Hindmarch tote bag. Both gifts featured photo images of her son, Jackson, now 2. This year she’s hoping for a camel-colored leather Birkin bag by the French designer, Hermes.

Ms. Stern, 32, the founder of Divalysscious Moms, which plans cocktail parties, shopping gatherings and other events for New York-area mothers, said that parenting is a full-time job, and that the holiday is an occasion for mothers to decompress. “Mother’s Day is about being spoiled,” she said.” It’s having brunch at one of the city’s great hotels or restaurants. It’s about being pampered and being taken care of.”

The accessory company Judith Leiber, for example, offers the Children’s Art Bag. Clients can submit children’s drawings to be replicated on a handbag covered with Austrian crystals. The personalized purses cost $3,995 to $7,995. The company’s creative director, Frank Zambrelli, called the art bags “the ultimate expression of Mother’s Day.” “It takes children’s art, which might end up on the refrigerator or in a keepsakes box not to be looked at for 10 or 20 years, and turns it into a luxury handbag,” he said.

Since the product was introduced in advance of Mother’s Day 2004, about 75 Children’s Art Bags been sold, a company spokeswoman said.

One of the first was commissioned for a Judith Leiber customer, Caryn Cohen, 40, and was designed by her two young children. “A lot of moms I know like carrying a piece of their children around with them,” she said. ” Some people have lockets, and these bags are an extension of that.”

The bag elicits a “big response” from friends and onlookers, according to Mrs. Cohen. “People are constantly asking what it is, where I got it, and if the same thing can be done for them,” she said.

Spa packages have become increasingly common Mother’s Day gifts. The “Euphoria Massage” is a top-seller this year at Paul Labrecque salon and spa, according to an assistant manager, Jessica Steinman. The 45-minute treatment, which includes two massage therapists working simultaneously on a client, costs $225. In the days and weeks leading up to Mother’s Day, dozens of husbands come in looking to purchase Mother’s Day gifts for their wives, according to Ms. Steinman. “They mainly ask for advice,” she said. “They don’t know what services they should buy, or how much to spend. They get overwhelmed.”

On Sunday, Paul Labrecque will be full of mothers celebrating Mother’s Day, Ms. Steinman said.”We’re going to see a lot of women getting multiple services,” she said. “They’ll go from getting a massage to getting a facial to getting their hair done.”

Public relations executive Shari Misher Stenzler, 36, won’t be at the spa this weekend. The Midtown mother of two toddlers will be with her family at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. Ms. Stenzler, who founded an Upper East Side activity center, Kidville, said while she’d rather receive a crayon drawing that any luxury item, she’s noticed Manhattanites spending increasingly more on Mother’s Day gifts. “A lot of women are having children later in life,” she said. “When they do, they often have more disposable income, and their tastes are a bit more sophisticated. We’re seeing the bar being raised.”

Mother’s Day is experiencing the same price escalation that has parents pushing their children around in $900 Bugaboo strollers, said an artist and mother of two, Leah Singer. “It’s unfortunate that it’s being treated like any other holiday, when you’re supposed to go out and spend a lot of money on the ‘it’ item,” she said. “I don’t know what kind of lesson that’s sending – that sentiment costs. I don’t think the message is the best one.”

The drift toward big-ticket Mother’s Day gifts seems futile to Ms. Singer, a 43-year-old TriBeCa resident. “I think the small homemade gift from a child, old-fashioned and naive as it may sound, is still the thing that touches a mother most.”


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