The Marina Green was a cheerful place where people went to fly kites, sun themselves, throw Frisbees to their dogs and one another, skate, and take a break from whatever else they were doing. Given the proximity to the green, our vegetarian menu, and the name of our farm, Green Gulch, the name Greens seemed like a good one for our restaurant. It was nicely ambiguous, but if one were pressed, it could easily be explained because it made sense on a number of levels. The theme was clearly green.
The enormity of the job ahead cast a dark, anxious shadow over my life for the year leading up to the opening. This was hardly the little five-table restaurant I had imagined, hoped for, and could far more easily conceive. I was scared witless just trying to imagine what might lie ahead and trying to figure it all out in advance—a fruitless effort, in any case. I woke up most mornings feeling as if a mountain were sitting on my chest, one I had to somehow climb by the end of the day, then revisit the next. And we hadn’t even opened yet.
My part in this endeavor was to design the menu and the kitchen, and then become the chef once we opened. Although I was scarcely trained to do this, even my limited experiences were greater than those of anyone else in the community. But I was very fortunate to have someone to work with who had a more practical sensibility and more experience than I, a student named Karin Gjording, who grew up in a restaurant family. She was enormously capable and had the nuts-and-bolts vision that I lacked. I never managed to cultivate Karin’s perspective as my own, but I grew to appreciate it. Greens couldn’t have happened without Karin as the manager.
Right away I started working on the menu. I tested recipes in the Page Street kitchen and served the results to whoever was around. “More cheese!” was the main response to my efforts. Once again, Zen students were seemingly addicted to cheese and this was the era of the more the better. Bring it on, they’d cry. But it turned out that our customers didn’t want everything drowning in cheese. I worked to expand our offerings and to find a middle way between gobs of cheese and a little. Recently while reviewing recipes I made at Greens that I especially liked, I noticed cheese appeared where none was called for in the original recipe. I think that I, too, was nervous people would leave Greens feeling hungry if there wasn’t at least some cheese, our main protein, in a dish then.
Since we were building out the restaurant, we didn’t have to design a menu around existing stoves, counters, and other features, but we needed a menu in order to design the kitchen from scratch since the menu would drive its layout. Once I had a menu pretty much in place, the kitchen started to take shape. The lineup went like this: an old three-ring candy burner was installed because it would be useful for making huge pots of soup and boiling gallons of water for pasta. A mesquite grill—de rigueur at that time—would go next to that, then two Wolf six-tops with ovens, followed by a double stack of pizza ovens and a salamander, a narrow broiler for browning dishes. There was a cold area for salads and yards and yards of wooden counters. Vegetables took a lot of room, especially when you were breaking them down from their foliage-laden, right-off-the-farm state, so all those countertops were constantly in use and covered with produce at one stage or another, from raw to cooked.
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Few American seed companies in 1979 offered seeds for the kinds of vegetables we commonly see now. Seed Savers Exchange, which played the most vital role in establishing heirloom vegetables and fruits in America by connecting people and their seeds with one another, had only just begun and was not yet as far reaching as it is today with its gorgeous catalog, organic seeds, classes, campouts, and website. Inspired by the produce I had seen on my trip to France, before leaving Paris I bought seeds from Vilmorin, a distinguished seed house, to take home. Wendy Johnson planted them and what she raised gave Greens its unique produce, frequently vegetables that had never before been seen or tasted either by our customers or by us. We had stunning varieties of lettuces, rows of sorrel, and a new green called roquette, or rocket, or arugula. Wendy grew out seven kinds of cucumbers and all kinds of new exotic potatoes, such as fingerlings, which hardly anyone knew about then. There were the first golden beets and the striped beets of Chioggia plus King Richard leeks with their tall white shanks and lengthy wands of blue-green leaves. Borage and other flowers tossed into salads weren’t a tired conceit but a novel bit of flavor and colored surprise. Vegetables that were new to us filled our walk-in—slender green beans, purple-fleshed beans, wildly striped shelling beans that I cooked with pasta. And that was just the beans. In the fall there were stacks of gorgeous Cinderella pumpkins, or Rouge Vif d’Etampes, and that sweet little buttercup squash called Perfection, which made the best soups. People always asked if we put sugar in the soup, but we didn’t. It was just made from that very sweet, roundly flavored squash. Among the herbs were lovage, marjoram, sorrel, and rosemary. When I drove to work, number 10 cans of herbs of all kinds filled the car with their perfume. The scent was dazzling. I planned my menu for the day by smell.
As with our cooking at Zen Center, much trial and error was involved in learning to farm. Our first carrots were stunted, twisted roots that managed to penetrate only a few inches into the hard clay soil. We grew corn, but the raccoons got it all the night before the farm crew intended to harvest it. Tomatoes utterly failed to ripen in the fog-soaked summer days of Muir Beach. Broccoli grew, but so did colonies of aphids, an alarming sight that made you forever nervous about eating broccoli that hadn’t been heavily doused with chemicals, an even scarier proposition. The lettuce was gorgeous, but sometimes the deer got into the field and nibbled just the heart out of each head. (I’ve always found it amusing that there’s a lettuce called Deer Tongue.) In addition to the deer, the rabbits and quail did their share of munching. Organic gardening seemed to be one big heartache. The exception was the Sweet 100, a variety of cherry-type tomato given to us by Alan Chadwick, which thrived even in the foggy clime of the farm. Those sweet little red spheres gave us hope.
Except for the stellar Sweet 100s, Green Gulch was too foggy to produce hot-weather crops for Greens when we finally opened. For those heftier tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and summer squash my sous chef, Jim Phelan, and I drove up to Suisun Valley, near Fairfield, on Saturday mornings and spent a few hours at a u-pick farm, our knees digging into the scratchy soil while our hands got busy picking produce and loading it into boxes. The car loaded and bill settled, we drove back to the city, stopping at the Union Hotel in Benicia, where Judy Rodgers, having left Chez Panisse, was cooking her wonderful traditional American foods, like yeasted waffles and scrapple. After breakfast and during the rest of the drive, we got serious and planned the evening’s menu based on what we had packed into the back of the car. Sweet perfumes rose up from all those vegetables and again, we were planning a menu by smell.
Eventually, we met Dorothy Coil, a farmer from Modesto, over the Coast Range and right in the Central Valley, who was willing to drive a pickup of hot-weather vegetables to Greens. She and her elderly mother pulled up to the restaurant around nine each Tuesday morning and again later in the week. We rolled back the tarp on their truck and there were the most beautiful zucchini, eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, all vegetable-fruits that loved the heat of the valley. We fed Dorothy and her mother a good breakfast for their efforts and the long drive back. With our Dorothy connection, our menu managed to stay fresh and mostly small-farm-driven nearly year-round.
At first some foods, especially fruits, had to come from the big San Francisco produce terminal, but over time it became increasingly possible to buy good fruit from small-scale organic farmers who grew enough to sell it at some of the smaller produce houses, like Greenleaf and Veritable Vegetable, both still in business today. I sometimes see the Veritable Vegetable truck delivering the best foods from the small organic farms in California to our local co-op to fill the gap created by our desert winters. I always feel the need to flash a peace sign when I see a VV truck. As for olive
oil, Mr. Sciabica still delivered his five-gallon tins of Mission oil to us, and the tofu still came from Quong Hop. That’s no longer the case as there is far more choice today. If you look at a menu from Greens online you’ll see that there are more producers named for everything, from olive oil to tofu, grains, chiles, and cheese.
A few other people in the area were growing beautiful organic vegetables when Green Gulch began, like Warren Weber over at Star Route Farm in Bolinas. Chez Panisse now had its own salad garden in Berkeley, so we weren’t the first or the only people growing vegetables. But at Greens hundreds of customers had their first encounter with the deep burgundy leaves of Marvel of Four Season lettuce, thin-sliced fans of those seven different cucumber varieties, piles of tiny green filet beans entwined with slivers of opal basil, those odd-shaped fingerling potatoes, and salads that sparkled with lavender chive flowers and bright blue borage blossoms. Chef Jeremiah Tower brought his students to lunch so that they could experience all these new vegetables.
It was a joy to be cooking with this food and a joy to be able to introduce so many people to the possibilities that unfamiliar varieties offered. I was madly in love with this produce. And except for some golden hills blocking the view, Green Gulch was pretty much right in the eye of our diners; we were literally eating from our landscape. Talk about local and seasonal eating—this was it. But those words weren’t being spoken at that time. We didn’t seem to need to put a name to what we were doing and I didn’t do that myself for many years. Later “local and seasonal” formed the theme of my books, especially Local Flavors and Seasonal Fruit Desserts: From Orchard, Farm, and Market. But rereading The Greens Cookbook, I found no reference to eating local foods or foods in their season. It was just what we were doing. This was the food that tasted best and it was the food that made the most interesting dishes. Today, “local and seasonal” have been buzzwords long enough that, like that of “fresh,” their true meaning has become imprecise and even tiresome. They are now common words. I liked to think of Greens as having had a farm-driven menu, rather than a local/seasonal menu, because that was what it was, and of course if the food was grown locally that always meant it was seasonal. But it wasn’t all from our farm. It couldn’t be. The foggy farm was new, too, and it didn’t get the summer heat of the Central Valley. It was perfect for lettuce, greens, and herbs, but there were other nearby growers we could buy hot-weather produce from and we did.
16. Creating a Predictable World
The unknowns we dealt with each night at Chez Panisse—the changing menu, dishes that had never been tried before, the possibility that ingredients wouldn’t be there—were conditions I assumed existed in all restaurants. I didn’t realize that one could create a more predictable world where dishes were always on the menu except for a few specials, the ingredients for them always available, and the know-how to make them something you could count on. Having become comfortable with the unpredictable adventures of the Chez Panisse kitchen, which really were quite exciting, I assumed that I’d bring that way of doing things to Greens. In addition, I had an inherent dislike for restaurant equipment and time-saving machines. I foresaw doing everything pretty much by hand, as we did in the different Zen Center kitchens, a notion that Karin tried to correct. I tended to view the kitchen as an extension of a home kitchen, albeit a very large one, with everyone peeling garlic and chopping parsley just as it was across the bay in Berkeley or over at the farm, or at Page Street. In the end we didn’t buy a lot of kitchen gadgets—a Hobart mixer, a Robot-Coupe, and a blender were about it—but I did have to alter other parts of my vision.
Karin must have been driven up the wall by my refusal to comprehend what would be entailed in serving what we guessed would be at least a hundred lunches a day. Actually the average quickly became 250 and a few times we served 300-plus lunches. Karin knew that rolling racks were more than useful; they were essential. I fought her on those ugly racks until she just went and bought them. It wasn’t until the very day we opened that I finally understood what Karin had been trying to explain all along: that this was not a large, warm kitchen responsible for calmly turning out fifty, maybe one hundred tops, lunches a day. There were about a hundred seats in the dining room and a crowd of people wanting to check us out and enjoy the view. It was bedlam from the start and we needed every piece of equipment, every rolling rack, and every stainless steel bowl, insert, and pan that we had. Plus some.
We opened on July 4, 1979, with one hundred guests who had been invited to try the food and view the fireworks bursting over the Golden Gate Bridge. That was fine—but it was a single menu with no choices, and not at all our intended menu. Plus it was dinner, not lunch, and we wouldn’t be serving dinner for another six months. When we opened for real the next day, it immediately became a struggle to keep up with the numbers while basically learning to cook what our menu promised. That is not uncommon in a soft opening, but we hadn’t really had one. I’d been to enough soft openings to know that even the most experienced chef might end up serving a greasy chile relleno, or the coffee might be cold, or any number of things that shouldn’t happen, did, as you figured out your equipment and what it could and couldn’t do. That’s why there are soft openings, where friends are invited and don’t have to pay for being guinea pigs. They’re the only way to have a dry run. But because we hadn’t really had that, we were learning by the seats of our pants.
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There were lots of reasons people came to Greens besides the opportunity to eat vegetarian food, although that was one. There was the stupendous view of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. It was new and different. The dining room was interesting with large paintings by Edward Avedisian, and JB Blunk’s redwood burl seating area, “the most uncomfortable seating in San Francisco,” I once overheard a customer say. The food promised to be different from what was found in most restaurants, vegetarian or otherwise. There was some curiosity about the Zen connection and there were those who knew us from Tassajara. Along with all of this, a certain amount of buzz had been put into motion before we opened. And there were scads of free parking.
For the most part our customers weren’t vegetarian, but sophisticated diners looking for a new dining experience. Regardless of what was on the menu, there were certain vegetarian clichés that I was determined to banish before they got started. There would be no grassy clumps of alfalfa sprouts bursting out of sandwiches, no cheerful snippets of parsley or orange slices decorating plates. And certainly no broccoli “trees.” Appearance, as well as the taste of the food itself, mattered because an impression is formed the second a plate is slid in front of the customer. Above all, I didn’t want the plates to scream “vegetarian” or “health food.” “How beautiful!” would be a more desirable response, or a good hearty “Umm!” Each red-rimmed white Ginori plate should look bright, pretty, and nothing less than utterly appealing. The main challenge for me was figuring out what foods worked best for a mostly nonvegetarian dining public, and how to make them sparkle on the plate.
But the really challenging part (what wasn’t challenging?) was keeping an eye on the plates as they left the kitchen and subtly deconstructing any clumps of sprouts or orange slices or broccoli “trees” that might have wandered over. I had to be really watchful as well as tactful. The staff didn’t like my fussing and they complained to the abbot. I was called in and reprimanded for my behavior, but I was also reminded that the success of this huge investment essentially rested on me. It was a Catch-22. I did try to be nicer to everyone, but I was still a watchdog. I believed that these were the details that did make a difference, especially when we were trying to do vegetarian food differently than it had ever been done before. When I finally left Greens, I was happy to shrug my shoulders and say, “That’s fine” or “Whatever” to someone’s question about cooking. Eventually, I became accepting, and maybe a little lazy.
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Originally, Zen students were simply told to work in the kitchen, whether or not they had any experience cooking. We also did all of the cleanup after the lunch service was over, including hosing down those heavy rubber mats. Fortunately that didn’t last more than a few months. Today Greens is structured very differently and cooks are hires with actual kitchen experience. Now it’s professional. The menus are gorgeous, printed on heavy paper rather than hand-drawn and xeroxed at the last minute. It’s a completely different place. The staff today knows the word is “espresso,” not “expresso.”
17. The Menu
A look at the original Greens menu reads as if it’s made up of pretty standard dishes, even dated ones, but they weren’t standard or dated in 1979. Black Bean Chili, a favorite and menu standard for years, was a very new idea. Why did we use black beans? Because they were the most exotic beans available then. Now we have so many more varieties, more interesting ones. The Rio Zape bean makes a great version of that chili. Still, it was a good dish—a bowl of smoky-hot black beans sporting a dollop of crème fraîche and a single sprig of cilantro. It looked simple, but a lively group of flavors danced in the background. What made it special was the presence of chipotle chile, a new ingredient that Mark Miller told me about when we were both on the line at Chez Panisse. These smoked jalapeños have been part of our food culture for a long time now, but then no one had heard of them outside the Mexican community and Mark, apparently. We could find them, canned, in San Francisco’s Mission District markets. Chipotle chiles gave us a great way to introduce smokiness to a dish, but because they were hot, they had to work with dishes that were intended to be spicy. This chili was the perfect vehicle for them.
An Onion in My Pocket Page 15