Читать книгу Inside the California Food Revolution - Joyce Goldstein - Страница 10
Оглавление2
One Revolution, Two Ways
Northern versus Southern California
You can always tell the difference between a San Franciscan and a person from LA because the San Franciscan cares about what’s on the plate and the LA person cares who’s sitting next to them.
—Restaurant publicist Andrew Freeman
In my many years of living and working in the Bay Area, I looked forward to slipping away to sample the food in Los Angeles and see what my colleagues were up to. On one trip, I was dazzled by a visit to Chinois on Main, with its dramatic open kitchen, fanciful dining room, and glorious wall of orchids. Wolfgang Puck’s Asian fusion food—the famous tempura tuna sashimi that remained raw in the center after deep-frying, the rich Shanghai curried lobster—was bold and original.
On the same trip I luxuriated in the gorgeously restored 1928 art deco building in downtown LA that housed Mauro Vincenti’s Rex. The glamour was backed up by a serious menu that offered the first alta cucina—Italian high cuisine—on the West Coast. Rex’s chef, Filippo Costa, had brought many dishes with him from celebrity chef Gualtiero Marchese’s eponymous restaurant in Milan, where he had trained before being hired to work in California. I had the chilled lobster with a purée of red peppers and the veal medallions in Vernaccia. While the flavors were familiar, the presentation of the food was modern and elegant. It proved to me that Italian cuisine did not always have to be rustic.
Northern California restaurants did not have such high-style design concepts. Nostalgia and tradition were our vernacular. We had better ingredients to cook with, but our plate presentations remained simple and direct. LA gave me a respite from the rustic and a glimpse into an exciting new dining culture.
•
As far back as the 1850s, critics have suggested that Northern and Southern California be divided into two states to reflect the regions’ political and cultural differences. The chasm was particularly broad in the sixties and seventies, when Californians elected the charismatic and conservative Ronald Reagan in 1967 followed in 1975 by the liberal Jerry Brown, who was derided by Republicans as “the granola governor, appealing to flakes and nuts.” Reagan came out of Tinseltown, Jerry Brown from UC Berkeley. The Hollywood/homespun dichotomy prevailed in California cuisine as well.
In Northern California, in the formative years of the new cuisine, politics was on the plate. People took their food seriously. Using fresh, local, “politically correct” produce and artisanal products and having a philosophy behind the food were of primary importance. Restaurant publicist Andrew Freeman, comparing dining in Los Angeles and San Francisco, said, “When people dine out in Los Angeles there’s a chance that there’s something else going on in their evening, and that dining out is a part of the experience. In San Francisco dining out is the experience.”
In Southern California, the film and music industries dominated, so glitz and appearance determined which places were popular. Diners wanted restaurants to be showy and to confer social status. Because the quality of the food did not determine success, LA restaurateurs cared less about getting their hands on the best raw materials and were slower to join the crusade for better ingredients. While fine-dining restaurants in Northern California tended to be traditional in format and based on the classic flavors of the Mediterranean, Southern California restaurants offered a broader array of ethnic flavors and were more concerned with style and innovation.
The North: Food as Politics
In Northern California, the cooking of the 1960s grew out of the counterculture. Barbara Haimes, an instructor at San Francisco City College Hotel and Restaurant School, observed that at the time, “the people who had an understanding of food’s place in culture were part of the hippie movement and the communal farms, going back to the land and eating together. You had the beginnings of the food collectives, the co-ops, health food, organics, and recycling. Thinking of food in a political way came out of the 1960s, and coming into a kitchen was desirable as opposed to being just a job.”
Rachel Carson’s authoritative 1962 book Silent Spring alerted the public to the dangers of pesticides in food. In 1971, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet awakened Americans to the costs of industrial meat production, urging people to do what was best for the earth as well as themselves. In the face of these warnings about the despoiling of the land and water, people were eager to be “part of the solution.” Many eco-conscious eaters became vegetarians, and many farmers switched to organic practices. Progressives and intellectuals promoted ethically raised “natural” foods and rebelled against big business and mass-produced convenience foods, which had become ubiquitous following World War II.
A university town like Berkeley served as a perfect locus for a new kind of cooking—adventurous and fresh. Berkeley’s constantly changing population of professors and students, many of whom had traveled or come from abroad, contributed to a vibrant environment for the exchange of culinary ideas. This community nurtured the shops that made up the Gourmet Ghetto, which included the first Peet’s Coffee in 1966 and the Cheese Board Collective in 1967. “The first week I got to Berkeley,” said restaurant critic Sherry Virbila, “I met some anthropology graduate students who made what I thought were incredible dinners. It seemed like an incredible dinner when somebody didn’t use a packaged mix to make spaghetti sauce or use that little seasoning mix for the salad dressings. You asked yourself, ‘What is the point of all this convenience food when it’s so easy to make it from scratch and it tastes so much better?’”
The person who brought change from the home into the restaurant arena was Alice Waters. “There always has to be a catalyst,” said wine writer Gerald Asher, “someone who starts things off, and Alice Waters got things started up here. She [had] a political interest in food. Tying [it to] politics had a lot to do with getting the thing going.” What followed was an active crusade to promote the cultivation of local ingredients, preferably grown without pesticides (organic certification would come a few years down the road, with organic practices codified in 1979 by the California Organic Food Act). Not only was there a high regard for natural foods and ingredients per se, but to be morally and politically correct many restaurants later put a statement on the menu that said, “We serve organic or sustainable food whenever possible.”
According to Los Angeles Times writer Russ Parsons, “There’s a certain reverence that goes with Northern California, a conservatism, which is a funny thing to say about Northern California. When you go to Chez Panisse, you need to bow at the knee when you approach. Chez Panisse comes out of the 1970s—what’s political is personal, what’s personal is political.”
ALICE WATERS
Chez Panisse Restaurant and Café, Berkeley
Alice Waters founded Chez Panisse, an influential, world-famous restaurant that has been running successfully for forty years. She is not a chef and doesn’t claim to be one, but rather works closely on menu concept with the chefs she hires. She has an impeccable palate, and if you pay attention when she critiques your cooking, you will learn about balance and flavor.
I worked for Alice as chef of Chez Panisse Café for three years and came to know her predilections and passions well. Though not the most practical person I’ve ever met, she is a visionary. Her genius is that she inspires people to help her realize her dreams, and those dreams are big ones. Underneath a whispery voice and flirty manner lies a will of steel. She has stayed on message for forty years, driven not by money but by an unflagging commitment to make better food available to all. In 1996, for the restaurant’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Alice created the Chez Panisse Foundation, whose mission is to teach, nurture, and empower young people. The goal of “cultivating a new generation” led to the development of the Edible Schoolyard Project at a nearby school, which includes a garden and teaching kitchen. Alice serves as a public policy advocate at the national level for school lunch reform and universal access to healthy organic foods. In 1997 she received the Humanitarian of the Year award from the James Beard Foundation.
“The big movement that we’re all a part of is local, organic, sustainable, and seasonal. I don’t think anything touches a buffalo mozzarella like I’ve had in Naples, but I’m not going to bring in buffalo mozzarella from Italy even if I think it’s better. Our goal should be to try to produce our own versions of these things. We’ve succeeded in a gigantic way in terms of bread; I think we have in this country the best bread on the planet. And we have some of the great wines of the world. The olive oil is getting really good. It’s just that we haven’t had three hundred years to perfect them—we’ve got work to do.”
The few exceptions to sourcing local products, according to Alice, “have to do with friendships—that’s the bottom line for me.” One example of this is her tie to Chino Farms, a small specialty produce grower in San Diego County. Founded by Japanese immigrants Junzo Chino and Hatsuyo Noda in 1969, the farm is now run by their children, headed by Tom Chino. Alice buys from them because of the extraordinarily high quality and variety of their produce, but also because of her personal connection with them. “We are bound to them. We have such admiration for the way they work with their interns, the way they stay small at their stands, the artisanal way they make mochi every New Year. It’s an inspiration to me to see them doing their thing against the tide of industrial farming.
“I think California cooking is a philosophy and a way of living your life. It isn’t just about the food. It’s about all the values of the culture—the artist and production, the terroir, the rituals of the table. That’s the beauty of being around for forty years. You can see that we have succeeded in a certain way. It’s beautiful to see this next generation of kids—they’re completely committed, they’re going to do it right, [whereas] the French and the Italians, they’re having a hard time holding on to their hats and hoes these days.” (Ironically, although in the early days many California cuisine chefs looked to Europe for inspiration, today long-standing cooking traditions there are being eroded by common market regulations and fast-food restaurants such as McDonald’s and Wendy’s, which are replacing cafés and tavernas.)
Although Alice admired Old World values, she had a modern belief in job sharing and allowed chefs to split their duties, starting in 1987 in the Café, when David Tanis and Catherine Brandel shared the chef position, each working three days a week. Later Tanis and Jean-Pierre Moullé divided their responsibilities from 2004 to 2011, each working in six-month stints. Alice wanted her staff to be able to live well-rounded, balanced lives, but she toiled tirelessly herself. “When you’re talking about being there from 7:00 in the morning, you don’t have any other life. I never left Chez Panisse, and I never knew what was going on in the world, I never went to a movie. All I got to see were Carrie’s flower arrangements and everybody’s tired faces.”
I did not set out to write an encomium to Alice, but I’ve got to hand it to her. She drove the train of the ingredient revolution. I cannot tell you how many times her name came up while I was interviewing farmers, artisans, and chefs whom she supported and pushed to do more and better. We all have profited from her persistence and passion. She’s stuck to her guns despite criticism that she’s overly idealistic and elitist: “I think people have criticized me about being uncompromising, and I don’t regret it for one single second.”
Under the influence of the counterculture and the back-to-the-land movement, the 1970s saw the emergence of several best-selling vegetarian cookbooks, including the Tassajara Bread Book (1970) and later Tassajara Cooking (1986), both by Edward Espe Brown of the San Francisco Zen Center, Anna Thomas’s Vegetarian Epicure (1972), which became the bible for many vegetarians, and Laurel’s Kitchen (1976), by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey. Macrobiotic diets were in vogue, especially in the new communes of the era. Health food stores and food cooperatives opened, followed by small vegetarian restaurants. One of the first was the Shandygaff restaurant on Polk Street in San Francisco in 1970, where Mollie Katzen trained before moving to Ithaca, New York, to help found Moosewood Restaurant. Dipti Nivas was opened in 1973 by Deborah Santana, the then wife of legendary guitarist Carlos Santana, and her sister Kitsuan. At most of these places the food was earnest and well-meaning but rather heavy, combining grains and legumes to make complete proteins, garnished with nuts and seeds and accompanied by heaps of steamed vegetables sauced with tahini and tamari. Greens Restaurant, which opened in 1979, departed from the brownrice- and-veggies model by serving elegant vegetarian food in a beautiful setting on the San Francisco Bay.
ANNIE SOMERVILLE
Greens Restaurant, San Francisco
Annie Somerville has been the chef at Greens, a groundbreaking vegetarian restaurant at Fort Mason, for thirty years. The restaurant was opened in 1979 by the San Francisco Zen Center with Deborah Madison as the chef and meditation students as the staff. Initially, Greens served only lunch, but within a few months the restaurant had proved so successful that it began serving two prix fixe dinners that changed nightly. Annie was brought on to assist Deborah in 1981 and became executive chef in 1985 after Deborah left to do a rotation at the Tassajara meditation retreat. Annie hadn’t planned to become a chef, but she grew to love the work.
“In the early days, if we had polenta, the menu would say in parentheses, ‘A northern Italian staple,’ or for phyllo, if it was a savory phyllo dish, it would say, ‘Not a dessert.’ We had to let people know that these dishes were something other than what they might expect. Over the years the cuisine has evolved, but many of those original dishes are still on the menu, like the wilted spinach salad, because it’s so popular.”
Much of Greens’ produce came, and still comes, from the Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm in Marin, which has been farmed organically since its founding in 1972. The remainder is purchased from neighboring farms and markets. Annie declared, “For me, California cooking is seasonal, local, and organic as much as possible. I think the big part is buying from people I know, [witnessing] the cycle, the web of life. It starts with the person planting the seed, growing the produce, producing the olive oil, producing the cheese. We help support that effort, the wineries as well. Our goal is to cook with the produce of as many small local growers as we possibly can.”
The first Tasting of Summer Produce, a trade show for specialty crop growers and retail and restaurant buyers, was held at Greens in 1983. Eventually the event grew so big that in 1986 it moved to the Oakland Museum. “The phrase ‘farm to table’ is recent,” said Annie, “but we have been doing it for a long time. We know these growers and are connected to them and committed to buying from them and supporting them even when it hasn’t been the best crop.”
Like many Bay Area chefs, Annie did not go to cooking school but instead learned on the job. As she put it, “I’ve gone to cooking school at Greens Restaurant. As my husband says, this is where I got my PhD. And I’m still working on it. One of the great things that you said to me, Joyce, was, ‘Working in the restaurant keeps you young,’ because you’re working with great young people. All of these super young people, that’s the lifeblood of the restaurant.”
Rather than being shaped by cooking school or experience abroad, Annie’s culinary ideas come from living in the Bay Area. “I’m not a big traveler,” she said. “While I love the idea of spending time in Italy and France and other countries, I don’t do much of that. My inspiration is focused on learning from what I read about what other chefs are doing and what I experience other chefs doing when I go to their restaurants.”
Annie is also energized by her visits to the farmers’ market, as much by the people she meets there as by the produce. “One of the wonderful experiences I have every week at the Ferry Plaza farmers’ market is with Stan Keena of Petaluma Farms—Stan the egg man. I always call him ‘your egg-cellency.’ I ask his egg-cellency how he is, and he says, ‘I am egg-static to see you.’
“What’s also fun about going to the farmers’ market is talking to home cooks, the shoppers who are passionate about buying leeks or carrots from a particular grower. What I try to do every day is to impart that enthusiasm and excitement for these ingredients to our staff. Our diners expect to be challenged a little bit, [to get] excited about something they may not have seen before. These days that’s getting harder because there’s so much exposure to food.”
Annie sees Greens as much more than a vegetarian restaurant. “At Greens we’ve been very fortunate to be in this location in continuous operation all these years, a part of the whole food culture. What we’re doing here is nothing new in the world. This is the real way to eat. The cuisines of the world produce beautiful dishes made with vegetables [that aren’t] necessarily called vegetarian. I think what we’ve done is to make that accessible to the dining public, whether people are vegetarian or not.”
Specials at Greens Restaurant, October 6, 1979, at a time when gorgonzola still had to be identified for the diner.
Counterculture cooks in Northern California cared about quality, connecting with local farmers and ranchers, and supporting sustainable agriculture. “Small is beautiful” was part of the zeitgeist. In his book by the same name, published in 1973, E. F. Schumacher opposed mass production and argued for “a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.” The book helped promote a return to smaller-scale production and traditional values. Proponents of the new California cuisine cooked “more like our grandmothers than our mothers,” said chef Gary Jenanyan. “My grandparents, for example, grew chickens and vegetables and fruits, and had a cellar, so when we wanted tomatoes in winter, we had tomatoes, but they were preserved. We were seasonal whether we liked it or not. They made cheese, they made all that stuff. We did it all at their house.”
Given Northern California’s produce obsession, a few restaurants attempted to maintain their own gardens, but most could not provide a large, steady supply. Mudd’s in San Ramon was opened by Virginia Mudd in 1981 with a “romantic idea about creating a garden and a restaurant that would fuel itself both inspirationally and contextually with things that were grown in the garden,” said chef Amaryll Schwertner. “And, in fact, many beautiful things were grown there, primarily herbs.” Although the restaurant had ten acres of land, “nobody understood the quantities that would be required to supply a restaurant,” so the garden produced mainly garnishes, or, at certain times of year, massive tomato harvests. “There were a couple of weeks when there were full-out tomatoes everywhere. I coupled up very quickly with Green Gulch down on the coast, because we had hot weather in the San Ramon area, and they had the cool-weather crops, and we quickly figured out that we could have more diversity on our menus if each of us contributed, so the cars were going back and forth.”
In addition to raising their own crops, people were interested in old-time skills such as pickling, canning, curing meat, and smoking fish. They wanted to avoid the preservatives and additives in commercial foods and to exercise control over the flavors and quality of these products. Sherry Virbila reminisced, “It was an extraordinary generation in that everybody learned from everybody else. [They] shared information. An entire generation of cooks was learning a lost art from scratch. Nobody wanted to cook the way a commercial restaurant cooked; that was a blind alley to go down. So it meant you had to learn how to do it from scratch, the way the older people used to do it in the country. When Pig-by-the-Tail [a charcuterie in Berkeley] opened, I was amazed. It was a bizarre notion that somebody would open a place and make sausages from scratch.”
Sherry remembered eating wild fennel for the first time, and tasting mussels and oysters harvested by the “eccentric local forager Dr. Jerry Rosenfield. That was a fascinating moment when you discovered that your own land had things that were unexploited. You could go out and find authentic ingredients of place.” Foraging has become hip today, but it was still a largely untapped market when Connie Green made a business out of it in the late 1970s.
CONNIE GREEN
Wine Forest Wild Foods, Napa
Connie Green began foraging for mushrooms in the early 1970s and turned her hobby into a commercial business in 1979, when she found herself gathering more mushrooms than she could eat. She approached restaurants to see if she could trade mushrooms for dinners.
“One day I took baskets of chanterelles into San Francisco. I decided to go to Nob Hill because at that time you had Fournou’s Ovens, L’Etoile, the Fairmont. I’m sitting there with baskets full of beautiful chanterelles, polished within an inch of their life, not knowing which way to turn.” A Swiss gardener working outside one of those hotels spotted her baskets and came running up. “He took me to the chef at L’Etoile, who looked at me and said, ‘Those are not chanterelles. They don’t grow in America.’ He wanted to show me what chanterelles were, and he opened a can. He said, ‘These are chanterelles. They’re small, they’re perfect’—and they were canned. I said, ‘But these really are chanterelles; they grow differently in America.’ And he said, ‘But no, they’re not French.’ He wanted nothing to do with them, and that place was closed in two years.”
Udo Nechutnys at Miramonte was one of the chefs who did snap up Connie’s mushrooms when she appeared at his kitchen door. Connie remembers that he “almost got tears in his eyes” when he saw them. Bruce LeFavour of Rose et LeFavour in St. Helena also “was all over it. He was a self-educated man with deep knowledge and went through great trouble to get good ingredients.
“A tiny bit later, Masa Kobayashi was at Auberge du Soleil. I knew that this was an internationally famous dude, and I polished some chanterelles and took them up there. He went over the moon and made everybody in his kitchen stop and look. Then he paraded them through the dining room. He honored me to a degree I had never experienced. These are very important people who remain locked in my heart.”
Connie also approached Thomas Keller at the French Laundry. “I left a note at the kitchen and he called me up giggling—this is a man who doesn’t giggle—and asked me to come down right away. He was so excited that I was a mushroom hunter—he was just on fire.”
Chefs who want to order a steady supply of mushrooms have to be taught that the wild varieties are strictly seasonal. Connie warns people who want to order fresh porcini for a set menu that they may be available for only a few weeks. “There are chefs that are locked up, and then there are nimble chefs—people like Todd Humphries [of Campton Place] and Staffan Terje [of Perbacco]—who can turn on a dime because they have deep levels of creativity.
“Back before California cuisine, this place was filled with Italians, Napa in particular. People would be speaking Italian in the grocery store. Gardens were everywhere; everybody had tomatoes and beans. Even a little 20-by-30-foot backyard was filled with vegetables. There were certain dishes on every menu that you never see anymore that I really miss. Everybody had malfatti, cannelloni, and seafood stew. Europeans understood how to deal with wild mushrooms. But in 1981, a lot of the prep guys, and some of the chefs, had never dealt with this stuff. I’m selling chanterelles for $13 a pound and here’s the prep guy cutting the tops off and throwing the stems in the garbage bin. And I was like, ‘Don’t throw those away! That’s my favorite part.’ People had to learn from rock bottom about what they were cooking.”
Connie still hunts mushrooms and sells about five thousand pounds a week, mostly in San Francisco.
With the support and encouragement of new restaurants, Northern California foragers, farmers, and artisans began to provide chefs with the quality and variety of ingredients they were seeking. Warren Weber of Star Route Farms personally observed the evolution of agriculture in Northern California. “When I came out in 1974, Marin County was dairy and animals, because it grows grass and is a cool climate and doesn’t have the deep soils that we like to farm real [massmarket] crops in. When we started it was the Zen Center [at Green Gulch Farm] and us. The kids on the ranches would go to Davis or Cal Poly and never come back home. They’d become veterinarians or something, but there was no place for them and the dairy industry was slowly going out. Now we have a lot of vertical integration in the dairy business—people making cheese, doing all kinds of stuff. We have horizontal integration where we have guys doing strawberries on the dairies or leasing the ground out to somebody who’s doing vegetable crops. We have sheep and sheep cheese and milk and goats and some fifty organic farms in Marin County. It actually looks like the thing that we wanted to see when we started, and it took that long for it to happen.”
The South: Food as Fashion
Historically, “Los Angeles never cultivated an image of fine cuisine,” said Russ Parsons. “People didn’t think of Southern California as a place to go out to eat. When the first good restaurants opened up—when Michael McCarty opened up, Michael Roberts, Wolfgang Puck, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger—it was a shock. I remember the 1984 Olympics, and all of a sudden we were on the cover of every magazine, and it was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s actually food to eat.’”
Jonathan Waxman arrived at Michael’s after working at Chez Panisse. He recalled that “at Michael’s, it was Southern California sensibility versus Northern California. The flavors were much bolder. We were less afraid of making mistakes than Chez Panisse. The clients were so excited. People like Lillian Hellman, Ronald Reagan, and Mel Brooks were coming in, and Hollywood people, politicos, musicians like the Eagles. You would go to the table and they would grasp your hand, and they would say, ‘Thank you, that was delicious.’
“LA was much more receptive to change than Northern California was. When I got to LA [in 1979], LA was ready to go. Michael’s opened up at the right time, in the right situation, and it allowed Wolfgang to open, it allowed everybody, it was a springboard for everything.”
MICHAEL MCCARTY
Michael’s, Santa Monica
The first time I met Michael McCarty, he was wearing red snakeskin boots, had his hair slicked back like a 1940s movie star, and was talking about his “little Latinos” in the kitchen. I was with Barbara Tropp of China Moon, and we asked each other, “Who is this guy?”
When Michael opened his eponymous restaurant in Santa Monica in 1979, the dining world took notice. Jeremiah Tower said, “If there really is a California style, it’s Michael’s. Michael’s was all beige and umbrellas, waiters in pink shirts and chinos, the garden, the sunlight, the light food, and modern art on the walls—it was style.”
“In 1978,” said Michael, “if you asked any hotel concierge in any major city, ‘What’s the best restaurant in town?’ the response would be a classical French restaurant or an Italian restaurant serving Continental food. Our revolution was creating modern American food and modern American restaurants. I think one of my most important contributions was the creation of a modern American restaurant that embodied many different components.”
From an early age Michael knew he wanted to be a restaurateur. He grew up in Briarcliff Manor, New York, in a family that valued fine food and the good life. In 1969, he enrolled in the Cordon Bleu. “Before I left [for Paris], my father, my mother, and I went to Laurent, a classical French restaurant—art deco, everybody dressed to the nines, great scene. We’re having this great meal, and the owner walks in the door. The electricity level in the room just ratcheted up. I had an epiphany. It was like one of my parents’ parties, where the mix of people was perfect, they’re all eating and drinking and enjoying it. It was this pure moment of light. And then, within two or three minutes, the captain brought over the bill. That’s what a restaurant is, the whole experience, which is always what drove me here at Michael’s. That’s why I don’t own ten restaurants and places in Dubai.”
Instead, he owns the original Michael’s restaurant in Santa Monica and Michael’s New York. “I love my New York, I love my LA. The crowds that I get in both places are the people I want to talk to, and that’s a very important part of what we do.”
Michael didn’t waste a moment of his time in Paris. “I went to get the grand diplôme, and the pastry diplôme—every diplôme they had [at the Cordon Bleu]. At the same time, I enrolled at the École Hôtelière. Steven Spurrier and Jon Winroth were starting the Académie du Vin. I did everything simultaneously, and it was such a wonderful experience to live the first half of the seventies in Paris. Les Halles was still there, and it was just switching over to Rungis market.”
One of Michael’s instructors sent him to restaurateur René Lasserre. “I worked at Lasserre one night and said, ‘I want to come back here for dinner. This is how I’m going to learn.’ It was faster and more efficient to eat in all these restaurants than it was to go to school, [because] in those days, you spent the year in the kitchen as a slave. So I’m absorbing all of this. I’m learning the old, the new, the Escoffier, the Gault-Millau. We’re down at Bocuse, and at Les Frères Troisgros, and it’s all fabulous.
“Then I come back and go to the Cornell School of Hotel Administration for the summer program. Cornell was a very good program because it Americanized you. You could learn everything from business and tax law to how the Americans cut their meat differently to Vance Christian’s California wine class.”
After Cornell, Michael moved to Los Angeles and made a connection with Jean Bertranou at L’Ermitage. Together they invested in a duck farm in the high desert north of LA. “We took the Peking duck and mated it with the Muscovy duck to create the moularde. We [used the] legs and thighs for confit, the breast for magret, and made foie gras in my house in Malibu in the basement.”
Michael spent over a year looking for a site where he could open his own restaurant. “I finally found this beautiful, funky old California bungalow built in the 1930s, with a huge backyard that was totally overgrown. I wanted to make it look like a house. It was all part of what we were trying to accomplish here. A big part of it was eating outdoors, and having that indoor-outdoor feel. My wife was a painter, so we became very involved in the art community. There were all these artists in Venice; we started to build our collection.” Michael bought paintings from Richard Diebenkorn, Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Jim Dine, and Frank Stella. Their works, along with paintings by his wife, Kim, adorned the restaurant walls.
Every aspect of the ambience was carefully considered. “I said to Jerry Magnin, ‘I don’t want [our staff wearing] tuxedos. I want a modern American designer. Who do you have?’ This guy named Ralph Lauren. I go over to his shop. He’s got the pink shirts, khaki pants, Top-Siders—that’s our uniform.”
Michael went on to assemble an all-star kitchen staff. “Ken Frank came to me and said, ‘I’ve heard a lot about this place. I’m in between gigs.’ Billy Pflug comes in. The next day Mark Peel walks in. The next day Jonathan Waxman walks in. And I go, this is it, we’ve got enough, I’ve got my line designed here. Then Jimmy Brinkley walks in. There’s my opening team. Phil Reich, our sommelier, worked the floor for a long time, until he could no longer deal with humans.” “Michael created a magnificent stage,” said chef Jonathan Waxman. “And he was smart enough to let me and the boys and the girls go and cook while he did his thing in the front.”
“In those days,” said Michael, “we wanted to do modern American with French influences because that’s where our roots were, but we wanted to change it. We wanted to use more California greens. My wife was a salad nut—a very big influence on the salads and vegetables here. We continued to bring in most of our greens from France. We were the exact opposite of the locavore program, but still to this day, I do both. I’m still gonna have my Dutch white asparagus every season.”
Michael’s menu from the 1990s, listing the provenance of every item and the ingredients for every dish.
Although professionally trained chefs and restaurateurs like Michael McCarty dominated in Southern California, this did not result in a more rigid or formulaic cuisine. To the contrary, Lucques’s Suzanne Goin remarked, “in LA, I feel that there’s a little more freedom, more influences, more people going off in different directions than in Northern California.” A few years ago when cooking at the Napa Valley wine auction, Suzanne observed a certain uniformity in the approach to cooking in Northern California that was perhaps stifling creativity: “Focusing mainly on the ingredients contributes to this sense of sameness. Down here I feel like there are more people following the beat of their own drum. A lot of the LA chefs are into supporting the markets and local farmers too, but they’re going in different directions rather than echoing each other.”
Food columnist Marian Burros applauded LA’s creativity as early as 1984, in a story about California cuisine in the New York Times. “These days the focal point of culinary innovation in California has shifted from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where foods are combined with wild abandon.” She quoted Julia Child, who lived in Santa Barbara in the winter, as saying that San Francisco cooking was now “hidebound.” Julia asserted, “We’re adventurous; they are a bit selfsatisfied. We don’t have to worry about standards as much.” “Julia always exaggerated a little,” laughed Marian in our interview.
On the other hand, too much creativity and freedom could produce some clunkers, as the New York Times article went on to point out. “Judging by some of the combinations recently sampled, however, Los Angeles could use some standards. There should be no place for lobster salad with watermelon pickle on the menu at Trumps, where the chef, Michael Roberts, is supposed to have a good palate. And sole garnished with ginger, three kinds of caviar, and a shrimp sauce spiked with vodka at Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois on Main cannot be assimilated in one mouthful.” Even the most talented chefs can create ill-conceived dishes in their desire to be original and imaginative.
Mark Miller, food scholar, chef, and critical diner, observed that “California symbolizes, in the American psyche, everything new, young, fresh, multiethnic. It also has to embrace the idea of style and lifestyle above form and above what I would call content.” Southern California, in particular, was all about now, as it still is. In a 2012 essay in the New York Times Magazine, novelist Michael Chabon characterized LA as “the capital of the eternal American present.”
Mark Miller thought LA’s chefs were the cream of the crop. “When you look at Southern California, you have Wolfgang Puck, Michel Richard, and later Joachim Splichal at Patina—the three best and most experimental chefs all in one city at the same time. [In] Northern California, there was nobody equaling what they were doing.” It’s no wonder that East Coast chefs relocating to the West Coast initially tended to gravitate to LA. Southern California was viewed as more modern and permissive, while the Bay Area seemed more closed to outside points of view.
Restaurateur Piero Selvaggio of Valentino, an Italian immigrant who moved to Los Angeles via Brooklyn, suggested that “California was the laboratory of new ideas. Chefs felt that they had to be here to be part of this process, not necessarily from an economic viewpoint, but as an evolutionary moment.” Piero saw LA as the embodiment of “the new great West, the land of opportunity for culinary genius.”
But a restaurant scene fueled by fashion and novelty makes for inconstant customers. Readers of winemaker Randall Grahm’s newsletters know that he is fearlessly outspoken and not easily flustered, but he acknowledged that the capriciousness of LA diners unnerved him. “There is something about Southern California that freaks me out. The restaurant patrons are infinitely more fickle. They are into novelty, and dining is a form of entertainment in the extreme. Dining is also far more of a social statement about where you rank in social class, so being able to secure reservations at a particular place—getting the right table—is a major status thing.”
This flightiness caused Michel Richard, former owner of Citrus in LA, to close his doors and move to Washington, DC, in 1998 to open Citronelle. “Los Angeles was a great town. But the life of a restaurant is very short there, except for Wolfgang. Or McDonald’s. Very trendy. You’re good, you’re busy, and then, when a new restaurant opens, say good-bye to your business.”
MICHEL R ICHARD
Citrus, Hollywood
Michel Richard was born in Brittany and worked his way up through the apprentice system in France, beginning as a baker at the age of fourteen. He advanced to train as a pastry chef under the famed Gaston Lenôtre and in 1974 moved to New York to open Lenôtre’s Chateau France pâtisserie. When it closed in 1975—“Americans weren’t ready for Lenôtre’s pastries,” said Michel—he moved to Santa Fe to run The French Pastry Shop in La Fonda Hotel. In 1977, he made a last move, to Los Angeles, where he opened a bakery of his own. When he found that selling dessert was not enough to sustain the business, he built an adjacent café, where he offered salads, terrines, and a few other dishes. He went on to launch his restaurant Citrus in 1987.
“At first I was very French. While I was cooking in my pastry shop, I would have conversations with my guests. Most of them were not very happy about French food; they were telling me it was too creamy, too rich, had too much butter. When I opened Citrus, I didn’t use cream or butter.” Michel labeled his cuisine “French in California” and described it as “a combination of simplicity, lightness, and tasty food.”
“Los Angeles is my Provence. It’s hot, and people want to eat lighter food. And I’ve been thinking about what is California food. Fresh, fresh, fresh. More vinaigrette. More spice in the food. In most of my sauces, I stopped using stocks. I was using roasted chicken jus or miso. The miso was like consommé—it had a lot of flavor. I used to love that umami.”
Part of Michel’s menu changed every day, but not all of it, because he thought the cooks needed time to perfect a new dish. The dishes he served were his ideas, but today he says he welcomes input from his staff, whose diverse backgrounds and life experiences enrich the restaurant’s offerings. “I was in Paris last year, talking with Joël Robuchon. And I was thinking of a great thing we had in California: most of my chefs in the kitchen, they’re college educated. It’s a big change. When I left school, I was fourteen. Most of the young people working in my kitchen, they start to work in a kitchen at twenty-two.”
Citrus was a dramatic white space with umbrellas and a glassed-in kitchen. “The decision to have an open kitchen was mine. The [design of] the entire restaurant was mine. In LA, every French restaurant was dreary and dark. I managed to create a restaurant that would make you feel like you’re in Provence—bright, open, green, unpretentious. I remember going to the Troisgros restaurant in Roanne. It was real good, but the kitchen—it was spectacular. So gorgeous, but nobody was able to see it. At Citrus, I came up with that nice open kitchen.” Because his kitchen was installed in what had been an outdoor patio, it had to be enclosed in glass due to building code requirements.
“To succeed you have to be the owner,” said Michel, “and you have to work all the time. You have to introduce new things. When I go to a market, I harvest not only the vegetable, I harvest ideas. And it’s exciting for me. I need to go to a market two times a week and see what’s going on. And I’m proud—and I just love my profession. Sometimes I feel like I’m a kid when I go back to my kitchen and create a new dish.”
Restaurateur Michael Dellar, who grew up in Los Angeles, was critical of the pomp at restaurants such as Citrus and St. Germain, where he found the food “very overdone, very over-manipulated.” But chefs were trying to impress, and this was true at all the better restaurants, which were “places to see and be seen. Southern California people didn’t care about the food as much. They cared much more about the pretense.”
This apathy toward quality food and ingredients demoralized some chefs. Wendy Brucker worked at Square One and Stars before going down to Los Angeles to cook at City Restaurant in 1990. She found that the fish and meat were as good as what she was used to, but the produce was another story. “LA was about ten years behind as far as produce. And not just produce, but the sensibility about how to treat the ingredients—really taking care of the food. Ingredients were not nearly as important as they were up here. In terms of popularity of restaurants, it was really about who went there. It was all about being seen. The quality of food did not have much to do with whether a restaurant was successful because there were a lot of really crappy restaurants that did tremendous business. I think that people who live in LA don’t know nearly as much about food, and don’t care. Everybody’s on a diet of some sort.”
Jeff Jackson, a former chef at Hotel Nikko in Beverly Hills, admitted that cooking there was disheartening for a professionally trained chef. “In LA, everyone eats out every meal of every day, it seems. No one cooks. Consequently, people tend to eat very light, too. I’ve never made so many salads in my life. I was coming from classical French kitchens in Chicago, and here I was making Caesar salad with a chicken breast on it, and I was pulling my hair out. It’s all how you look, the car that you drive, and all of that stuff.”
“We’ve got good restaurants, but they’re still places for entertainment,” Russ Parsons said of LA. “Chez Panisse has a completely different ethos than Spago, which is basically ‘Come on in, have a great time. You’re gonna see amazing people, and yeah, the food’s gonna be great.’”
Mark Miller was more impressed by the playfulness and daring of Los Angeles than what he saw as the conservatism of Northern California. “Southern California has no history, no ritual, no heritage. It’s Hollywood. Southern California embraces food as fashion, food as lifestyle.” Mark sees Wolfgang Puck as the quintessential California chef. He believes that one of Wolfgang’s important contributions was to take popular dishes and elevate them. People liked pizza, so Wolfgang added prestige by topping his pizzas with costly ingredients like smoked salmon and caviar. Expensive ingredients were essential to pleasing the status-hungry LA audience.
MARK MILLER
Fourth Street Grill and Santa Fe Bar and Grill, Berkeley
Mark Miller is one of the most intelligent, well-traveled, and opinionated people I know. We did not work at Chez Panisse at the same time, but over the years we have taught and cooked at some of the same venues and have become friends.
Mark was interested in food from his early days as a student at UC Berkeley, and he ate at Chez Panisse the week it opened. He knew Victoria Wise, the opening chef, and after dining at the restaurant he would hang out in the kitchen, trading gossip and food stories. He was hired at Chez Panisse by chance several years later. He had been writing a food newsletter, “The Market Basket,” and said, “Alice was aware that I was knowledgeable and passionate about food, and that I was what I would call a good home cook.” In 1977, Alice asked if he could fill in at the restaurant for two weeks, even though, as he recalled, “I had no background in the restaurant business besides my prep school summers scooping ice cream in New England.”
About his time at Chez Panisse, he explained, “I liked the restaurant—it was easy to. Alice was always interested in people having a passion for foods she didn’t know about. She wanted to learn, and if you pursued your passion, she saw that as a good thing. In 1977, it was Jean-Pierre Moullé, Alice, and I. The format was always one cook did one course all night, 120 guests, two seatings. Tom Guernsey was basically running the restaurant as the general manager and maître d’. Jerry Budrick was around. Lindsey Shere was doing desserts.”
In those early days, the food at Chez Panisse was not yet the California cuisine that the restaurant would become known for. “It was simple French bistro food. It wasn’t any different from bistro food in San Francisco or stuff that I had had in Europe. I do not believe that Chez Panisse as a restaurant—the structure and food—has ever been revolutionary. To me it’s always represented cuisine bonne femme, the woman who cooks home-style food in a small Provençal restaurant and is the center of community life. It’s never been a commercialized restaurant business.”
Mark said that Chez Panisse opened after the ideological philosophy of the time had already been set. “Alice became an acolyte of what was going on in Berkeley at the time: the free speech movement and political activism of the 1960s. To me, San Francisco is conservative, wanting to preserve the past and [concerned with] history and status. The food in Northern California has always been ideologically based. It’s not been based on setting new precedents, new styles, new fashion, new restaurants, and it’s not based on commercialism. Alice is the ideological person who represents Northern California and its arts and crafts and its sort of purity.”
Mark found greater inspiration in the innovative restaurants of LA. “Wolfgang Puck is the most important chef in the history of the world. He is the revolutionary. He has more business than any other chef ever has done or does today. So why do people think that California cuisine is Alice Waters? This is where you have to get a little philosophical and psychological. The American people want to have safe, good, pure food; they don’t want to have really, really great food. They are puritans at heart, and the ideological argument of pure, good food that’s locally sustainable is an ideological message that they find they can identify with. Michael Pollan is a minister of pure food; he is not a chef, he doesn’t represent culinary history, he doesn’t represent the complexities or understand what is possible or the meaning of cuisine, of ritual, of flavor, of mythology. He wants to take that away and have pure food, and so do most Americans. People are motivated to make an ideological choice.”
Mark departed from Chez Panisse in 1979. “Susie Nelson was the hostess, and she had found this site on Fourth Street in the redevelopment and rail yard area. She wanted to leave Chez Panisse and open her own restaurant because she thought Chez Panisse was getting too snooty, and I wanted to leave, so she said, ‘Why don’t we become partners, fifty-fifty, and open the restaurant together?’ So I opened Fourth Street as a 50 percent partner, and it cost us $70,000. I put up half of it, the restaurant was a hit, and we paid off our investors in four months.”
At Fourth Street Grill, Mark was able to cook his own food. He changed the style of food frequently. For a while he was doing Moroccan, Italian, English, American, and regional dishes, and then he turned to Southwestern food. Two years later, he and Susie Nelson opened a second Berkeley restaurant, Santa Fe Bar and Grill. “I decided to do no more European food, only Cajun, Caribbean, and Southwestern. That was a big success. I wanted to do big-flavored food of everyday life and explore ethnic flavors in their richness and kaleidoscope of intricacies.”
In 1985, Mark had been in Berkeley eighteen years, and “it was time to go.” He left both the Fourth Street Grill and Santa Fe Bar and Grill, moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and opened Coyote Cafe, where he again concentrated on Southwestern cuisine. Today he does consulting work for restaurant companies and travels widely to study diverse cuisines. He believe his life’s work is to raise the level of ethnic food to where it receives higher esteem.
The opening menu at Mark Miller’s Fourth Street Grill, 1979, featuring classics and shoestring potatoes, with a nod to Mexico in the hot chocolate.
Word about the innovations occurring in California’s restaurants was traveling eastward. Danny Meyer, who had just opened Union Square Cafe in New York City, decided to come out and see what was going on. He traveled to California with Ali Barker, his chef. “We went to Los Angeles first. We got off the airplane and went to Michael’s for lunch. We went to Trumps. We went to Piero Selvaggio’s place, Primi. We went to Angeli Caffe. We went to Spago. We got a taste of what Los Angeles meant, and it was, because of the clientele, a flashy version. It was a big party.
“Then we went to San Francisco. We went to Square One, Washington Square Bar and Grill, Hayes Street Bar and Grill, the Post Street Bar and Grill—everything was a bar and grill. I even went to Perry’s to try to understand the San Francisco ethos. And I found that San Francisco was more focused on food.
“Stars was a bridge for me between the party of LA and the food of San Francisco. Stars and Spago pushed the boundaries. They were the first places I had gone to in this country where the party did not mean that the culinary experience had to be dumbed down. The experience I had had in my early twenties in New York was that the people who knew how to do really good food didn’t know how to have fun, and the people who knew how to have fun didn’t know how to do really good food. I was trying to piece it all together: the club, family, fun, excellence. I can say that in the absence of California, there could never have been a Union Square Cafe. What a refreshing gift that California gave the country, gave the world.”
