Читать книгу Inside the California Food Revolution - Joyce Goldstein - Страница 11
Оглавление3
Defying Kitchen Convention
Self-Taught Chefs and Iconoclasts
Something we have here [in California] that they don’t have in a lot of other areas is that entrepreneurial spirit, the passion. Passion can overcome a lot of shortcomings. As the people with the passion gain the skills and knowledge, look out, because they will set new highs.
—Winemaker Michael Mondavi
I was forty-seven years old when Alice Waters asked me to fill in for Steve Sullivan, the bread baker at Chez Panisse, while he took a six-week vacation. Although I had taught cooking classes for eighteen years, I had never worked in a restaurant. Suddenly I found myself making thirty loaves of bread, four buckets of pizza dough, and thirty pounds of pasta a day. When Steve came back, Alice asked me to stay on to cook in the Chez Panisse Café, where I later became chef. As word got out about the good food at the café, our volume of business increased dramatically. We went from serving 45 lunches and 80 dinners daily to 150 lunches and up to 340 dinners.
Three years later, I left Chez Panisse to open Square One. Today it’s hard to imagine that someone would enter the demanding restaurant field with so little experience. But in California, from the 1970s through the early 1990s, passionate amateurs, many of whom hadn’t gone to cooking school or even worked in a restaurant, jumped eagerly into the business. How did so many of us dare own and manage restaurants with so little practical knowledge? All I can say is that ignorance is bliss. We had no idea what we were getting into.
•
The model for the kitchen brigade was developed by Georges Auguste Escoffier in the late 1800s. For the next century, the typical restaurant kitchen, both in Europe and abroad, was run by trained culinarians who had either gone to cooking school or come up through the ranks of the brigade, with its specialized stations for prep, fish, seafood, meat, pastry, and so on. In the 1970s, however, a door opened for enthusiastic innocents, and scores of newcomers walked through it. According to Emily Luchetti, the early years of California cuisine presented unique opportunities. “When I took over at Stars as the pastry chef,” she said, “I had no pastry training. But Jeremiah Tower knew me, I knew him, we agreed on the style of food, and the rest I figured out. If you had a restaurant like Stars today, you would never put someone in there as pastry chef who did not have pastry training.” Ironically, Jeremiah himself would not be hired by most restaurants today due to his lack of professional culinary training.
The California cuisine revolution occurred at a time when the restaurant world was not as competitive as it is now. Before the modern phenomenon of the celebrity chef and the constant media focus on restaurants, being a cook was not considered an impressive career, so there were fewer highly trained culinary students. This helped make California in the 1970s a fertile ground for iconoclasts. Some cooks had formal training or restaurant experience, but others were completely inexperienced. Many skipped the slow and predictable career climb and clambered straight to the top to run their own kitchens or become chef-owners. They were caught up in the spirit of the revolution, which saw more unique restaurants open and their seats fill with appreciative diners. As chef-owners, they could cook a more personal type of food and develop their own culinary style. Responsible only to themselves and their investors, eventually they became celebrities in their own right.
Self-Taught Chefs
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of the chefs weren’t trained. That was freeing. You weren’t tied down to a set of rules and told, “You have to go this way.” No, I don’t, because I don’t even know what those rules are.
—Tom Worthington, chef and partner at Monterey Fish Market
Many of us early California chefs were food-obsessed college grads or dropouts from other fields. We read cookbooks voraciously, dined out frequently, and cooked constantly. Since we did not have any formal training to rely upon, we would make mistakes, but we learned from them and kept going, trusting our palates and passion to guide us.
Culinary instructor Barbara Haimes described the diversity of these new chefs’ backgrounds. “Back then, people came to cooking with college degrees, with some intellectual curiosity. People had traveled, and that sensibility came with them into the kitchen. Not everybody went to cooking school. A lot of people came in from other careers. They were smart people who had a range of knowledge. It wasn’t the European model of you’re fourteen, you go through an apprenticeship. It was a really different model, and it was more of a West Coast thing than an East Coast thing because the East Coast was still impacted by the European model. It was the usual California thing—the Wild West. You just do your own thing.”
It was a remarkable phenomenon, with lawyers, nurses, brokers, and artists moving into cooking. Mark Miller was in anthropology, Jeremiah Tower came from architecture, Alice Waters taught at a Montessori school, Bruce Marder was in dental school, and I was a painter who had studied with Josef Albers. The common bond is that we all were crazy about food.
Despite our initial naïveté, we persevered, and those of us who succeeded did so by dint of single-minded devotion and determination. California applauds and supports rebels and entrepreneurs, especially those willing to work ridiculous hours to accomplish their goals. We autodidacts were driven by our love of food and flavor.
Catherine Pantsios, former chef-owner at Zola’s, took no offense when a reviewer called her restaurant “amateur.” She explained that the word amateur comes from the Latin amāre, “to love.” “I probably had more restaurant experience than a lot of people. But at the time people just jumped in because they really wanted to do something. They didn’t want to open a restaurant and sell a predictable kind of food. They wanted to create a particular environment, a particular type of experience.” These amateur lovers of food and cooking made homes for themselves in the new California cuisine movement. One passionate novice was Margaret Fox, who raised the culinary bar in rural Mendocino, 150 miles north of San Francisco, when she gave up her academic career plans to run a rural café.
MARGARET FOX
Café Beaujolais, Mendocino
Margaret Fox liked to bake and cook from an early age and in her teens would throw dinner parties at the drop of a hat. Her mother was a self-taught cook whose creative recipes were published in Sunset magazine. Margaret remembers her mother telling her, “If you can read, you can cook.”
Despite her early interest in food, Margaret was expected to go to college. She graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in psychology, “fully intending to go to graduate school.” But what she did instead surprised everyone. She decamped to Mendocino, hoping to find a job in a bakery, and wound up taking over the drowsy Café Beaujolais with friends who knew even less about the restaurant business than she did. “My mom burst into tears when I told her I had done this. But I was twenty-four and full of spunk, and you don’t know what you don’t know, which turned out to be a very good thing. My mom did at one point say something like, ‘For this we sent you to college?’”
Like many other Northern California chefs at the time, Margaret had no formal experience, but she was wholly committed to baking and had the stamina to succeed in a tiny coastal town that was not on anyone’s fine-dining radar. “It was a slow beginning,” she recalled. “It was like, if an omelet is made in the forest, does anyone hear it? I was in this remote place and I was doing breakfast, which was really unusual. People weren’t used to going out for that.”
She started off serving breakfast and lunch. Little by little, the news got around, and Margaret was able to buy out her partners in 1977. However, it was still somewhat slow going, and to drum up business she launched a weekend summer cooking series with guest chefs. Marion Cunningham, longtime assistant to James Beard and author of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook and Fannie Farmer Baking Book, was one of her first guest instructors. Alas, it was the year of the gas crisis, and only about five people showed up in the dining room, three of whom were friends. These were hard times, and Margaret admitted to feeling “disheartened.”
Then, in December 1983, Ruth Reichl came to Café Beaujolais on assignment for New West magazine. At the time she was writing the “Best of California” column, and she included Café Beaujolais in her list of the best breakfasts in the state. When a photographer called to ask Margaret if he could come do a photo shoot, she was taken by surprise, since no one had told her about the article. After that, as she put it, “the flood gates opened.” People would drive up for the weekend to sample her coffee cake, muffins, and egg dishes.
In 1984, Chris Kump came on as executive chef. In the late 1980s, Margaret and Chris began to host a farmers’ market on their property, which introduced them to an expanding number of local growers and prompted them to start putting the names of farms and farmers on their menu. At that time this was an unfamiliar practice and people would ask why they did it, to which Margaret would respond, “We’re proud of getting what they’re proud of selling and we want to pass that on to you.” In 1989, they invited well-known oven builder Alan Scott to give a workshop, and the outcome was a fantastic outdoor brick oven on the property. In this showcase oven Margaret and Chris baked bread and pizzas and roasted tomatoes that they then froze for the winter. They offered daily specials based on freshness, availability, and seasonality and a menu that changed every month or so. Not every item changed, though. “We had certain things, like that darn baked goat cheese salad, you never could take off.”
Margaret marveled that forty years after the start of the California cuisine movement, “you still see this amazing energy and enthusiasm and celebration of ingredients. People who have grown up in more recent years probably take this as a matter of course, but we who have been around for longer look at it and say, ‘Oh my god.’”
Like Margaret Fox’s, many parents were shocked when their children selected careers in the restaurant industry. They hadn’t sent their kids to college to become kitchen workers. Barbara Haimes, one of the rare chefs who studied in a culinary training program, said, “My parents cried—sat in front of me and cried for hours when I told them. ‘My god, what are you doing with your life? It’s manual labor. It’s blue-collar stuff.’” Barbara disagreed, and went on to a successful career cooking at Mudd’s, Chez Panisse, Square One, and China Moon. “I think people were so intelligent and well read that it didn’t come out as blue-collar food. It came out as way more than that, which was a mixed blessing, because it came out pretty elitist, and a lot of people weren’t happy with that either. But then we had more sophisticated diners.”
When she was in the kitchen at Chez Panisse, said Barbara, she observed that “a lot of really good people were not trained and, in some ways, weren’t interested in being trained. To some extent at Chez Panisse, there was no respect for technique because they were anti culinary training. You couldn’t possibly have a palate if you had technique; if you were technically good there was something wrong with you. They were interested in the sensual experience of something that reminded them of something else. They considered ingredients more important than technique.” The Chez Panisse staff put down technique because most of the culinary school alumni they tried out or worked with had no sense of food history and were taught only to execute, not how to taste and explore ingredients. Most trained chefs did not understand how to put flavor first, which had become the mantra of California cuisine.
Janet Fletcher worked on the line at Chez Panisse Café in 1982 and is now an accomplished reporter and prolific cookbook author. She credits Alice Waters for much of the sea change in the public’s perception of restaurant work. “Cooking became a respected profession partly because of the kinds of people Alice had in that kitchen. Until then, most professional cooks and chefs had come up through the apprenticeship system. Alice not only disregarded it; she disdained it. She was looking for cooks with an educated brain and some exposure to a broader world, someone who knew the history of food and culture. So that kitchen became a very stimulating place to be. I think it reinforced the notion that this is an exciting profession and a profession of prestige.”
In the early days at Stars, said Emily Luchetti, “PhDs were prepping three cases of tomatoes and were thrilled. These were bright, educated, artistic, creative people with raw enthusiasm and passion. Their overall goal was producing great food.” Many big-name chefs learned their craft on the job, including Loretta Keller, Mark Miller, Nancy Oakes, Catherine Pantsios, and Amaryll Schwertner in Northern California and Ken Frank, Octavio Becerra, Suzanne Goin, Evan Kleiman, and Nancy Silverton in Southern California.
A daring few opened their first restaurant with no restaurant experience at all, including Sally Schmitt, Bruce LeFavour, Daniel Patterson, Alice Waters with Victoria Wise and Lindsey Shere, Michael Wild, and Jesse Cool. They were ardent home cooks with refined palates who took great pleasure in cooking for others. This intrepid band also includes several chefs who were born abroad: Charles Phan and Mai Pham from Vietnam, Mourad Lahlou from Morocco, and Hoss Zaré from Iran. They taught themselves to cook because they missed the flavors of their homelands and then opened restaurants to share their culinary heritage. They embraced entrepreneurship and the do-it-yourself model. All four also saw their cooking styles evolve over their years in California. Like many foreign-born chefs, they incorporated new local ingredients into their basic dishes. Both Mai and Charles began to expand beyond the repertoire of traditional Vietnamese cuisine, Mai reaching toward Korean and Indian food, Charles adding Mediterranean tastes. Mourad became interested in mastering new cooking techniques, with his food taking on a more modernist California style. Hoss started delving more deeply into his native cuisine, introducing more Persianinflected dishes to his menu.
HOSS ZARÉ
Zaré at the Fly Trap, San Francisco
Hoss Zaré grew up in Tabriz, a region in northern Iran famous for Persian rugs, agriculture, and hospitality. “We had a farm about ten to fifteen minutes’ walking distance from our house, and from the beginning of spring to the end of fall, we had all kinds of fruits and vegetables. We had chickens, lamb—everything grew there. When I tell people we had forty-five kinds of grapes and fifteen kinds of apricots on one farm, they can’t believe it. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.” Before dawn store owners used to go to the farm, pick the ripe fruit, pay, and by 9 o’clock, all the stores were stocked with produce. Every herb was cut the morning it was sold. Hoss grew up with freshly harvested seasonal produce.
He was twenty-three years old when he came to California in 1986. “The first few years I was unhappy because the food wasn’t good. Everything was picked too early. The big supermarkets put green tomatoes in the stores. Everything was money, money, money—big and cheaper products. I was used to eating a tomato like an apple, but here I lost interest in tomatoes in the market. The flavor was not there.”
Hoss went to Skyline College and then UC Davis, where he took pre-med classes. While attending school, he hung out at the Billboard Café in San Francisco, which was run by his brother. “My passion for cooking started there. I had no idea about cooking before. I was watching and learning.” He started working at the Billboard, and then moved on to the Fly Trap, an old-time San Francisco restaurant. “For a year and a half, I commuted an hour and a half every day to the Fly Trap. It was a battle between going to school and cooking. Cooking took over.”
Eventually Hoss bought the Fly Trap and renamed it Zaré at the Fly Trap. He was nervous about changing the menu because the restaurant was a San Francisco landmark. “It’s been there a hundred years, and it was an Italian immigrant’s story. I thought, why not do my best to make it another immigrant’s story?”
He described Zaré as a Mediterranean restaurant with a Persian influence, a combination he felt comfortable with because Mediterranean cuisine is widely accepted in San Francisco. Hoss borrows flavors from the Mediterranean and incorporates them into his Persian food. “Some spices I mix, we didn’t have in Iran, and I’m enjoying it. Persians, they never use spicy food—spices, but not spicy. But charmoula and harissa are my favorite tools right now. I make buckets of harissa fresh. It gives a nice subtle heat but doesn’t overpower.”
At the same time he is teaching himself to cook more authentic Persian dishes. “I’m learning from myself actually, from taste memories of my childhood. Even though I have the cookbooks and recipes, if it doesn’t taste the same as my mom used to make, I don’t like it. I do it again. I am taking the backbone of the cuisine that I have, and twisting it a bit with the others, as long as it works. When I did a traditional dish like gormeh sabzi, a stew with beans and vegetables, to make it more appealing, I put a braised short rib on top. The presentation was beautiful, people saw the meat, and underneath was stew. It started selling. But if I had put just the gormeh sabzi and rice, it would be a hard sell. Or the fesenjoon; I did the chicken separately, flavored it, put sauce on the bottom, and added a timbale with the wild rice. I introduced people to fesenjoon and later, when I did it the traditional way, it worked.”
Hoss could give a primer on how to acquaint people with unfamiliar foods. “When I try a new dish, I give it to my staff first, and a small audience next. Then I put it on the menu. For example, with rosewater, no matter how much you try and train Americans, it’s hard. You have to go very subtle. Like yogurt, I put it in barely. I don’t want to give up, but I put it on the side. But some other flavors, I try and incorporate them into my dishes so I can bring in more authentic Persian flavor.
“It’s fascinating to me that if you compare California and Iran, it’s the identical climate and agriculture. Bergamot is in the north of Iran near the Caspian Sea, where we have oranges, tangerines, like California. You can get drunk from the smell of citrus when you’re driving there. So for me California is coming home, but in a different way.”
Professionally Trained Chefs
In traditional culinary schools in the United States and abroad, students learn the basics that will prepare them for their profession. Not all of them go into the restaurant field. Some become food writers, stylists, caterers, and private chefs. In the classroom they study food safety, business practices, and food history. In the kitchen they learn knife skills: how to butcher meat and poultry, fillet fish, turn vegetables to create even surfaces for cooking, cut foods into uniform dice for mirepoix and brunoise, and chop herbs into tiny fragments. They study cooking techniques: how to poach, steam, braise, roast, sauté, and grill. In recent years sous-vide cooking has been added to the curriculum. Students learn to make clear and flavorful stocks and master the sauces: espagnole, velouté, béchamel, mayonnaise, hollandaise, and aioli. (In contrast, in the early days of California cuisine, some self-taught chefs avoided complex sauces that required stock, and instead used compound butters and salsas.) Students take turns working at all of the kitchen stations in the traditional brigade: commis (prep), garde manger (cold station), entremetier (vegetables and sides), poissonier (fish), rotisseur (roasts), saucier (sauces), and tournant (a rotating position). They also learn how to bake bread and make pastries and desserts. Some schools have basic classes in wine.
Finally, as part of their studies, culinary students apprentice at an approved restaurant, usually one run by a graduate of the school. If their school has a restaurant on the premises, they work there in both the back and front of the house. Their training is rigorous, usually of two-year duration, with a codified curriculum. In the United States and Europe in years past there was no in-depth study of “foreign” cuisines, such as Asian or Italian. Nor was there any attention to creativity or originality. For years, culinary school was a highly regimented and competitive environment dominated by men.
The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, produced many notable graduates, including Northern California chefs Michael Chiarello, Gloria Ciccarone-Nehls, Gary Danko, Todd Humphries, and Bradley Ogden and Southern California chefs Susan Feniger, Anne Gingrass, David Gingrass, Jeff Jackson, Joe Miller, and Roy Yamaguchi. The CIA, as it is known, opened in 1946 as the New Haven Restaurant Institute, with fifty students, many on the GI Bill, and three faculty members: a chef, a baker, and a dietician. In 1972, the thriving school, now called the Culinary Institute of America, moved into a larger campus at the former St. Andrew-on-Hudson Jesuit novitiate in Hyde Park, where it grants associate and bachelor’s degrees in the culinary arts, baking and pastry arts, and culinary science. In 1995 the CIA opened a West Coast campus at Greystone, the former Christian Brothers Winery in the Napa Valley, which offers a global cooking program and in-depth studies in wine.
While the CIA is perhaps the best-known culinary school in the United States, a host of other schools taught notable chefs as well. David Kinch of Manresa studied at Johnson and Wales in Providence, Rhode Island. Bruce Marder attended Dumas Père cooking school in Illinois. Emily Luchetti went to the New York Restaurant School. Mark Peel of Campanile studied in the hotel and restaurant department at California Polytechnic University at Pomona. Others studied abroad. Michael Roberts attended the École Jean Ferrandi in Paris, and Cindy Pawlcyn went to both La Varenne and Le Cordon Bleu after finishing hotel and restaurant school in Wisconsin. Michael McCarty did stints at the Cordon Bleu, the École Hôtelière, and the Académie du Vin in Paris and rounded off his education at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration in upstate New York. Wendy Brucker was one of several women who attended culinary programs before opening places of their own, along with Suzette Gresham, Heidi Krahling, Jennifer Millar, and Maria Helm Sinskey. Wendy graduated from the California Culinary Academy and then extended her training through jobs at Ernie’s, Square One, Eddie Rickenbacker’s, Stars, and City Restaurant before finally opening a place of her own.
WENDY BRUCKER
Rivoli Restaurant, Berkeley
Like many California chefs, Wendy Brucker was inspired by travel abroad. “I grew up in Berkeley, and my father was an Italian historian, so I spent a lot of time in Italy and France eating really good food. There was a lot more good food in Berkeley than probably almost anywhere else in the country, with maybe the exception of New York.”
She spent several aimless years before deciding to pursue a career in food. “I went to cooking school at nineteen, sort of by happenstance. My brother worked in the same building as the California Culinary Academy. I was a high school dropout, cleaning houses, painting, not going anywhere, but I had started cooking at home and doing dinner parties for wealthy ladies at the Berkeley Tennis Club. My brother said, ‘Wendy, you should check out this school.’ And I loved it. I asked my dad, ‘Would you send me?’ I think he was so happy that maybe I would find a career that he was like, ‘Hell, yes!’”
The standard culinary school curriculum was still firmly entrenched at that time, even in California. “When I started in 1980, all of the chefs at the CCA were European, predominantly Swiss or German, and the food was very old-school Continental, not a hint of nouvelle anywhere. They had all been cooking since they were ten and were bitter and unhappy people. First semester, most of them were fired, and the second batch was European and classically trained but younger and more open-minded, a breath of fresh air. Nouvelle cuisine was the big thing then, so we were doing carrot mousse and scallops in beurre blanc. Flour-thickened sauces were a thing of the past. They started getting in really good chefs to do six-week classes, including Wolfgang Puck, Jeremiah Tower, and Ken Hom.”
After graduation, Wendy landed a job at Ernie’s in San Francisco and fell under the spell of chef Jacky Robert. “He became one of the great influences in my cooking career because he was the first chef to hire women at Ernie’s. He did not care if you were black, white, male, female, Asian—he had the most diverse kitchen I have worked in to this day in terms of experience and age and sex. He was an amazing teacher because he knew how to do everything and was really, really talented. You didn’t get to work on the next station until you knew how to do the first one. So by the time I left, I had done all the stations, which included prep, pastry, butchering, sauté, and grilling.”
During her time at Ernie’s, the restaurant was changing over from traditional French to nouvelle cuisine. “It was real old school/new school,” said Wendy. “We used orange juice concentrate in the sauce for the classic duck à l’orange. We were getting gorgeous Dover sole from France and freezing it, yet we also got in gorgeous fresh scallops and served them as they came in. The food went from the ridiculous to the sublime. The favorite nouvelle cuisine [dish] was seared scallops in a vanilla beurre blanc, and each scallop was topped with a slice of kiwi. Some of the old dishes were lovely, like we did a beef Wellington that was exquisite. So it was a funny, in-between thing.”
Wendy worked at several restaurants over the next few years, each of which gave her new insights. “Square One opened my eyes to another kind of cooking and food and sensibility. Ingredients had not been a big deal in the restaurants that I worked at up until that point. Baking the bread, getting fresh seafood from Monterey Fish, the menu changing every day, pastas—that was an amazing experience.
“When I left Square One, I worked one year at Eddie Rickenbacker’s, which was a nightmare. I learned a lot about organization and writing menus, but it was a crazy place. Then I went to Stars, which was another revelation. Square One was doing authentic food, which was a great grounding for me, and at Stars, we had a lot of leeway, and dishes would be more vaguely Asian, or Moroccan. Then I worked at City Restaurant for Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken. Again, a very different cuisine. They were true to each dish, they were doing international, not fusion.”
In keeping with her sundry cooking experiences, Wendy opened two stylistically different restaurants. Her first was Rivoli, a special occasion restaurant that she established in 1994 with her then husband, Roscoe Skipper. At Rivoli, Wendy started out serving Mediterranean standards but then broadened the focus to offer an eclectic menu. Wendy said, “Right now I’ve got a pot roast with potato pancakes, blue cheese, and bacon and a quail dish that is Italianish—it’s got a hazelnut stuffing and we’re doing it with farro and mustard greens and a Bing cherry sauce. I’ve got an appetizer that’s kind of southern—a corn spoonbread soufflé but with prosciutto instead of southern ham and succotash and a grilled peach. We do what I think of as truly California cuisine. It isn’t Mediterranean, because you wouldn’t see pot roast or spoonbread soufflé.”
Corso, which Wendy and Roscoe opened in 2008, is based on the Italian trattoria, a more casual place where you get a carafe of water on the table to pour yourself. “It’s very straightforward. Order a whole grilled fish, you get whole grilled fish. They don’t bone it for you; you’re going to bone it yourself.”
The two restaurants illustrate two different styles of California cuisine: one eclectic and inventive, the other more orthodox, using local ingredients. “Rivoli has a smaller menu and is more about presentation. We’re going for whatever I feel like cooking. Corso is more about trying to recreate a kind of food that I know and love, and the dishes are very traditional. Our classic meat sugo came from a tenth-generation Florentine man, and it tastes like when you go to a trattoria in Florence.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, American restaurants, hotels, and country clubs decided it would add prestige to their establishments to bring in foreign-trained chefs. Highly skilled professionals could land good positions in the United States, and many of them leaped at the chance to leave their predictable career paths behind and take advantage of these overseas opportunities for advancement. Most thought American food meant hot dogs and hamburgers, but they were willing to come and elevate our cuisine and have an adventure too.
The majority arrived from Europe—primarily France, Germany, and Scandinavia. Some had endured a lengthy apprenticeship from a very young age, in which they were often treated harshly, but they learned how to work hard and fast. Those who attended culinary school were trained in the manner of the rigorous Escoffier brigade.
European chefs who settled on the East Coast generally retained a European culinary point of view, whereas those who came west found that their cooking evolved. In California, chefs were exposed to diverse cultures and gained access to local and seasonal ingredients, and soon they were putting more vegetables on their plates. Their food became lighter and healthier. Ethnic influences made their mark on chefs who had essentially grown up in a monoculture, and California’s unfettered restaurant milieu allowed European chefs to break away from culinary traditions and rules and enjoy increased creative freedom. Their cuisine could become more individual.
In Southern California, almost everyone who opened a restaurant had either worked in restaurants or gone to cooking school or both. Michel Richard, Joachim Splichal, and Wolfgang Puck had started working in European kitchens as teenagers, although in keeping with the entrepreneurial spirit of California, Michel Richard trained in pastry and later reinvented himself as a restaurant chef and became a master of technical ingenuity. His clientele were delighted by his fried shrimp “porcupines” wrapped in kadaif pastry, thousand-layer salmon terrine with caviar sauce, and phyllo-wrapped white bean “belly dancer” rolls.
In the early 1980s, Joachim Splichal was representative of many Europeantrained chefs working in fine-dining establishments. Chef Traci Des Jardins, who joined the staff of his Max au Triangle at the age of seventeen, noted that the restaurant “had a very extensive menu, a lot of fancy ingredients—foie gras, truffle, lobster, John Dory, sole—all imported from Europe. We were using the best ingredients, but I don’t know that we were paying as much attention to season as we were to luxury. I can remember menus where we would have asparagus in December, and they were beautiful asparagus, but they weren’t from California, and they weren’t seasonal.”
It was a major departure for a classically trained European chef to step back from the premise that a recipe, once perfected, doesn’t ever change, and instead decide to use something else or alter the recipe if the prime ingredient is not in season. It took Joachim a while, but he eventually adopted the philosophy of California chefs such as Mark Peel, whose credo was “the best dish today is going to be made with the best ingredients today.” Joachim narrowed his list of menu items and shifted from imported goods to local.
JOACHIM SPLICHAL
Max au Triangle, Beverly Hills; Patina Restaurant, Los Angeles
Joachim Splichal is the chef of Patina Restaurant Group and runs a culinary empire that includes pizzerias, the Nick and Stef’s steak house chain, the Pinot bistros, and his flagship Patina Restaurant, which has reopened in the Frank Gehry– designed Disney Concert Hall in LA. Born in Germany, Joachim began his training on the international hotel circuit. In his early twenties he moved to France to work at La Bonne Auberge in Antibes and the legendary L’Oasis in La Napoule, and then he spent four years on the Côte d’Azur under the tutelage of famed chef Jacques Maximin at the Chantecler Restaurant in the Hotel Negresco.
Joachim came to the United States in 1981, when he was hired to serve as executive chef for the Regency Club in Los Angeles. He stayed for three years but felt frustrated because the LA clientele never warmed up to what he liked to cook. His cuisine, which included such Provençal-derived dishes as vegetable napoleon, stuffed zucchini blossoms, shrimp ratatouille, and salade niçoise, may have been too authentically Mediterranean for diners who were used to heavy cream sauces and classical French fare, so he was forced to compromise and offer a few more familiar dishes on his menu. Initially he shipped in ingredients from France, including truffles, olive oil, and fish. “But then I met a couple of guys from Santa Barbara who brought fish to my doorstep and I went away from the European imports.
“When I first came [to the United States], I was shocked. You went to the supermarket, you had big carrots, ugly produce, and there was not much there. I was amazed because, for example, people threw the zucchini flowers away. Everything was a size too big. There was a lot of produce I was used to in the Mediterranean that I couldn’t get. That became better very rapidly; within five or eight years we had a tremendous amount of progress. First the variety was better, and then there also was a direct connection between farmer and chef. I didn’t know any other way because wherever I worked in Europe, mostly in France, you went to the market, you knew the farmer, you ate tripe early in the morning with him. Then he came to the restaurant. There was a strong connection between farmer and restaurant or restaurateur or kitchen.”
Joachim built his own network, because at the time the Santa Monica farmers’ markets weren’t in full swing. In the 1990s, new produce companies started up that acted as brokers between the farmers’ markets and the chefs. “You could call and ask, ‘What’s really looking good?’ If they said ‘tomatoes,’ you could say, ‘Bring me two cases of tomatoes.’”
After leaving the Regency Club Joachim opened Seventh Street Bistro in downtown LA, then Max au Triangle in Beverly Hills in 1984. Patina opened in 1987 to great acclaim. By then LA was ready for Joachim’s inventive cooking. Diners loved his innovative lasagna made with thin slices of potato, duck liver with rhubarb, lobster minestrone, corn blini with salmon, and squab with bacon sauce atop spiced bread.
“When you’re in Europe, you eat in French bistros, Italian trattorias—typically the food of that country. When I came here, I started to eat at sushi places, Korean places, Indian places, Chinese places, and that influenced my cooking. I used some of their ingredients, some of their vegetables, and incorporated them into the food I did. In my opinion, everybody was influenced by ethnic cuisines because it’s Southern California and that’s the way we live. It’s totally different from Europe.” Joachim became enraptured by California’s bountiful ingredients and never stopped exploring and sharing what he discovered.
“The basic approach I took was French, and I added a twist to it, and people loved it. People really appreciated variety. When I came here, [the food] was basically French, heavy and super heavy. The restaurants at that time—L’Hermitage, L’Orangerie—did that old-fashioned cooking. I was taught under nouvelle cuisine—light, the vegetable stock sauces, really letting the quality of the produce and the protein speak and not bothering with some sauce. Early on I was doing vegetarian menus.
“If I had stayed in Europe, I would have been most likely part of the group of people who took nouvelle cuisine to a different level. I think it was better that I made the decision to come here and elevate the cuisine in California. I saw my food evolving from a very traditional, nouvelle cuisine standpoint, and now I feel my approach about food is ten times more casual. I incorporate all elements, the pizza oven as well as the grills. My food, I want it light. It’s all about the product. It’s all about the connection with the farmers and the fishermen.”
Although Northern California was shaped in large part by its preponderance of self-taught chefs, it also had its share of the professionally trained. Foreignborn chefs René Verdon, Jacky Robert, Hubert Keller, Masa Kobayashi, Jean-Pierre Moullé, Udo Nechutnys, Julian Serrano, and Staffan Terje had received classical training in Europe, along with a legion of hotel and country club chefs.
Roland Passot illustrated a typical progression from France to the United States. He grew up in Lyon and at the age of fourteen apprenticed at Les Trois Dômes at the Hôtel Sofitel Bellecour. He then went to work for Jean-Paul Lacombe, whose restaurant Léon de Lyon was a one-star Michelin establishment transitioning from classical to nouvelle cuisine. Roland emigrated to the United States in 1976 and after several restaurant ventures opened the elegant La Folie in San Francisco in 1988. After more than twenty-five years in California, Roland still cooks his “root French cuisine,” but being here, he said, “has liberated me, because I feel like I can cook whatever I want.” In fine-dining restaurants in France, he was taught that seasonality was not important; in California, he rejoices in feeling “in tune with the seasons. I know when corn is coming; I know the first peach. I may not get the first one if I don’t think they’re good yet, but I know they’re here.”
Joachim Splichals’s menu at Patina Restaurant, January 13, 1994, with the famed potato lasagna and Asian touches on the French-Inspired cuisine.
Roland’s friend and former sous chef Gerald Hirigoyen is another Europeantrained chef who embraced the California produce-centric approach to food. Unlike Roland, who had worked in Michelin-rated restaurants with fine fresh ingredients but no commitment to changing food according to the time of year, Gerald grew up in a family of good cooks who always followed the seasons. “When I first came [to California], we didn’t quite have seasonality. I’ve seen the evolution of the product and of seasonality. When I worked at Lafayette restaurant, I was very limited in what I could use—I had spinach and carrots and frozen foods.” As a professionally trained chef, he simply made the best of what he had.
GERALD HIRIGOYEN
Le St. Tropez and Fringale, San Francisco
Gerald Hirigoyen started out as a pastry chef in his hometown of Biarritz. His father told him, “Pastry is going to give you some discipline. Once you know pastry, you can switch to the other side and do both.” When he was only thirteen, Gerald moved to Paris on his own. “When I look at my boys at thirteen, I can’t believe I was working at this age. But it gives you a good perspective. You go through all the emotions and the difficulty. In Paris, I caught the infectious disease of wanting to cook and wanting to learn. It was perfect for me.”
At twenty-one, Gerald was at a crossroads in his career. Should he stay with his boss in Paris, where he was getting rudimentary kitchen training along with the pastry work? Or should he follow his heart and go to California? A Basque friend and mentor set him up with some contacts on the West Coast, and Gerald seized the opportunity. When his intended job in a commercial bakery on the Peninsula did not pan out, he came to San Francisco with suitcase in hand. At the first French restaurant he approached, he was told to go to Le Castel, where there was a new young chef, Roland Passot. “Roland was a driven young man,” recalled Gerald, “and he’s driven to this day, like we all are, very dedicated to his profession. We had a five-minute interview. He asked me what I wanted to do and I said, ‘Listen, I’ll do anything for you. I can cook. I can do desserts.’ I was a perfect candidate for him. It was only the two of us in the kitchen, plus the helpers, so he used to do the meat, and I used to do the fish, and that little restaurant got some attention. We tried to elevate it and do something different. It was a fun experience, and I felt like I was back into that groove of being professional and wanting to do my best.”
The stint at Le Castel lasted only about a year, and then the owners sold the restaurant. After a brief tenure at a new restaurant, Le Vaudeville, which folded, Gerald tried but failed to get a job at Chez Panisse. Jean-Pierre Moullé was already there, and Gerald suspected that Alice Waters was wary of hiring another French-trained chef, preferring someone with a less structured approach to food. He was hired instead as chef at Lafayette on Pacific Avenue. It had a tiny kitchen and an even tinier budget, but Gerald managed to cook excellent food there. That brought him to the attention of restaurateur Jean-Baptiste Lorda, who was in need of a chef. He partnered with Gerald at Le St. Tropez on Clement Street and later at the very successful Fringale, where Gerald served bistro fare along with a few Basque dishes from his heritage.
Gerald credits his parents for his passion for cooking and exemplary ingredients. They were avid cooks and canned their own vegetables and fruit. “My uncle had a farm, and I grew up with seasonality. We didn’t eat green beans in winter except [for] the canned ones that my father was so proud to have [put up] in the summer.
“I’m very conscious of the freshness of the product, like everybody else. I am moving away from the heavy sauces. In France, people are used to eating in certain ways, and they’re more difficult to change. Here, people don’t necessarily have a foundation [in technique], which can be difficult because they don’t understand certain things, but the good thing is that they’re open to anything. European chefs are sort of restrained, and they know not to put crazy stuff together. Here you can evolve because you know that if you try to do certain things, it probably will work, because in the end it’s good food.”
In spite of an abundance of fresh produce in European markets, Gerald found that much of it didn’t show up on the plate in restaurants. “In Europe you get fish and a potato, but you don’t get a lot of vegetables. Spain is even worse—you get unripe tomatoes. In California, no matter what you order, you’ve got vegetables on that plate. It’s funny, because my vegetable bill is more than my fish bill.
“In California we include the vegetables in the profile of the dish. When you compose a plate, you think about what the vegetable is going to be, and how its flavor works with the other things. All my dishes have different vegetables. The lamb comes with braised fennel and little confit potatoes. The chicken comes with parsnips. The sea bass is with Brussels sprouts right now. You work with the season, then balance the flavors. It’s a whole composition. Fruit’s also important to the composition throughout the season.”
After years of running classic French restaurants, in 2002 Gerald returned to his roots and opened the Basque-inspired Piperade. The cuisine has been a part of California’s culinary landscape for a long time, mostly associated with Basque immigrants who opened casual family-style restaurants to feed their communities. Gerald’s goal was to raise Basque cooking to the level of fine dining. “It was interesting for me to put [a cuisine] like that on the map, to revive it and keep it alive. People were intrigued. There’s a generation of older people who grew up with their parents going to the Basque dinner, and to this day, they’re still coming. It’s funny because when I go to the Basque regions in Spain or France, I look forward to coming back here, where there’s a healthy way of eating. California has been a great place for me.”
A small but significant contingent of chefs trained in Asia. Kazuto Matsusaka, Hiro Sone, and Udo Nechutnys studied in Osaka at the esteemed culinary school École Technique Hôtelière Tsuji. There they received impeccable training, especially in knife skills. They learned the Asian cooking techniques of stir-frying, grilling, frying tempura, preparing sushi, pickling, and preserving. They were taught the traditional ingredients and plating styles of Japan and the fundamentals of the rich and varied cuisines of China, Singapore, and Thailand. Given the status of French cooking in the culinary world, they were instructed in European cooking techniques and recipes as well.
While most European chefs who came to California became established in Eurocentric restaurants, usually French or Italian, Asian chefs often did not end up in traditional Asian restaurants. Kazuto Matsusaka worked with Michel Blanchet at Jean Bertranou’s L’Ermitage and with Wolfgang Puck at Spago and Chinois on Main before opening Zenzero and then Beacon, where he served Asian fusion food. Alex Ong, who undertook a formal apprenticeship at the Shangri-La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, trained in French cuisine at the Ritz Hotel chain, and then brought his knowledge of Asian flavors to Stars. Hiro Sone collaborated with Wolfgang Puck at Spago before he opened the eclectic Terra in the Napa Valley.
HIRO SONE AND LISSA DOUMANI
Spago, Beverly Hills; Terra, St. Helena
Hiro Sone owns Terra in St. Helena with his wife, Lissa Doumani, whom he met while working for Wolfgang Puck at Spago in 1983. Hiro studied in Japan at the École Technique Hôtelière Tsuji, where he trained under Paul Bocuse, Pierre Troisgros, and Joël Robuchon. For Lissa, the restaurant life was “bred in.” Her father, Carl Doumani, was owner of Stags’ Leap Winery as well as two Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles, and she always knew she would have a restaurant of her own someday. She moved to LA and talked Wolfgang Puck into hiring her when Spago was only a couple of months old. “The first day, I peeled a case of asparagus, and the next day I went to work with Nancy Silverton, making desserts and pastries, and that’s where I stayed.”
Hiro was cooking at an Italian restaurant in Tokyo when a friend introduced him to investors planning to open a Japanese branch of Spago. “They explained that Spago’s cooking was called California cuisine. That was first time I heard of it. They told me the chef was from Austria but had been working at three-star Michelin restaurants in France. I didn’t know what California cuisine was, but the background sounded French, and I had experience with that, so I thought maybe I could cook it.”
Hiro was brought to California for training at the original Spago. To educate himself, he asked everybody what California cuisine was, but nobody could give him a clear answer. He started studying what they were cooking and what products were available in the kitchen and at the market. Like Wolfgang Puck, Michel Richard, and Joachim Splichal, Hiro began eating out in LA, and not just in restaurants featuring California cuisine. “I tried Thai restaurants, Vietnamese restaurants, Mexican restaurants, understanding the culture and background of each, and kind of melding everything on a plate. I started understanding what’s going on here, but I still didn’t know how to explain California cuisine.”
After training at Spago LA, Hiro returned to Japan to open the restaurant’s Tokyo outpost, but he found that California cuisine could not be transplanted to foreign soil. “Wolfgang used to make angel-hair noodles with goat cheese sauce,” said Hiro. “He used goat cheese from Laura Chenel. When I tried to do exactly the same food in Tokyo, that goat cheese was not available, so I had to use French goat cheese. Then I asked, ‘Is this California cuisine?’ Even if the recipes are exactly the same here and over there, the availability of ingredients is different.”
“It’s the purveyors that aren’t available, the little growers,” said Lissa. “There aren’t farmers’ markets and things like that. So if you think of California cuisine as farm-to-table, and pairing with your purveyors, in this case, your purveyors are Japanese, and what you’re doing is not California cuisine because you’re not in California.”
After getting Spago Tokyo off the ground, Hiro returned to the States to become chef at Spago LA. In 1988, he and Lissa, then married, left to open their own restaurant, Terra. “We found this location in St. Helena,” Hiro recalled, “and the minute we looked at the building, we said, ‘Wow, this is a great spot.’ We told Wolfgang, ‘We are leaving.’ We had a really short time to move from Los Angeles to St. Helena.”
“Everybody told us to do pizza,” said Lissa. “And we were saying, no. It’s been done. We don’t need to do it just because we’re both from Spago.” Hiro added, “At Spago, everything is fresh, basically a showcase for ingredients. A simple way to prepare vegetables, very à la minute, just sauté quickly, then add a simple sauce. Instead I want to do ragù because it cooks a long time—a classic approach. More rustic, too.” Lissa chimed in, “We wanted bigger flavors, more developed, because the other side had been like a grilled veal chop with baby vegetables with a very light sauce, which was delicious, but we had moved on from that. We wanted more depth to what we were making.”
That style of cooking suited Terra’s Napa Valley clientele. “The Napa Valley has many immigrants from Italy,” said Hiro. “They ate mom’s cooking, so Italian cooking was great for us to do. Ragù, innards, tripe, tongue, sweetbreads—they loved those things.” Lissa added, “Napa was much more open to that than people would’ve been in Los Angeles, probably even at that time, in the late 1980s.”
When Terra opened, only a few dishes on the menu had Japanese elements, because Hiro didn’t want Asian flavors to dominate his Napa Valley cooking. “Hiro is Japanese,” said Lissa, “so some of that comes into the food. He might know if you put soy sauce here, even though it’s a Western dish, it’s going to develop a deeper flavor. He did an eggplant dish where you deep-fried it, then blanched it with water to take the oil out, and then cooked it again with the sauce. It created a lighter eggplant, the way they do it in Japan. That went with the veal, and people were crazy for it.”
Restaurant guides and newspapers had trouble categorizing Terra’s cooking. “Each year, we were in a different category,” they laughed. “One year was best Italian restaurant. (Good friends of ours in Los Angeles said, ‘Congratulations?’) Then one year was fusion. Also best California or best American. Mediterranean a couple times. We’ve been just about everything.”
In the days before California cuisine, once a French restaurant, always a French restaurant. Whether they were professionally trained or had forged their own path, the new California cuisine chefs resisted labeling. They did not want their restaurants to be categorized and constrained. Stars started off serving hamburgers and andouille-infused gumbo alongside French- and Italian-inspired dishes, added salsas from south of the border, and eventually assimilated more Asian ingredients as Jeremiah Tower expanded his restaurant domain into Singapore and Hong Kong. Conversely, at Square One we opened with a California menu with global touches but over the years focused more on the Mediterranean. Our restaurants were a work in progress, a voyage of discovery, and our customers were delighted to come along for the ride.
