My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  They had, in other words, nothing to fall back on, and in 1959, worried that they wouldn’t be able to continue paying the property taxes and upkeep on our house, they put it on the market. Away at Villanova and already missing the place, I was devastated. This was home. How could we be leaving it? I’d just automatically assumed that, well, we’d always live there. It was a given, a constant in my life. I cried and railed, I got sick, I prayed—literally—that somehow it wouldn’t sell. It did, of course, fairly quickly, for what was then a decent if hardly excessive price of eighty-five thousand dollars. I’ve hated moving ever since. Counting Beverly Glen, I’ve lived in probably twenty or more houses and apartments in my life, and every act of packing up has hurt.

  MY PARENTS NEVER OWNED a home again. We relocated first to a rented ranch house in Encino with orange trees in the yard, cottage-cheese insulation on the ceiling, and Jack “Sgt. Friday” Webb next door. After a year there, we moved to a place we all knew well, where nice houses could be rented for reasonable prices: Ojai. It was, my mother explained to me one day, a matter of “saving face.” If they had downsized in Los Angeles, their friends would have known that they were in financial difficulties and—horrors!—they might be drummed out of the society pages. By moving to a resort community, ostensibly so my father could concentrate more on his writing projects, they were able to maintain the fiction that they were still doing well.

  The first house we rented in Ojai was an architectural monument of sorts, a soaring steel-frame, glass-walled structure on the brow of a hill. It was fun for a while, but there were gaps in the corners that allowed birds to fly through the place and tarantulas to creep in, and moisture from a wall of tropical houseplants set into sphagnum moss by the front door, which had to be soaked with water daily, made the interior permanently humid. After a year, we moved to another rental, a sprawling ranch house on the grounds of the Ojai Valley Inn, owned by Loretta Young (who had, remember, starred in the first movie made from one of my father’s books). It was a comfortable place with a big rose garden, a one-of-everything orchard between the house and the street, and an immense hedge of night-blooming jasmine, a ghost of whose aroma sometimes still haunts me on summer evenings.

  Ojai is said to take its name from a Chumash Indian word meaning “the nest,” and the town is inevitably described as being “nestled” in its little valley. Ringed by purple mountains and green with orange and avocado groves—the tarry odor of the smudge pots lit to protect the fruit on frosty evenings competes in my memory with the scent of jasmine—Ojai had a population of about five thousand in those days (it’s only around seventy-five hundred now) and was famous for its annual tennis tournament and music festival. It is also home to the Krotona Institute of Theosophy—a system of esoteric philosophy—and to the Indian religious teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was one of the valley’s best-known celebrities, along with Young, Irene Dunne, Anthony Quinn, and the artist and ceramicist Beatrice Wood, known to her friends as Beato.

  Once my parents moved to Ojai, and I became a “dayhop” at Villanova, I found myself eating considerably better food than I’d choked down as a boarder. Vegetarianism was rife in the community, but I was definitely a carnivore, and unapologetically so. I loved the steaks at a restaurant in town called the Firebird, and had at least as many hamburgers and Cokes every week as any normal red-blooded American kid of the era did, either at the Foster’s Freeze in town or on the Inn’s oak-shaded terrace.

  We ate dinner at the Inn once or twice a week. It was an all-American affair: Meals started with an iced relish tray and finished with cheesecake, cherry cream pie, or a slab of Neapolitan ice cream; in between were things like crabmeat cocktail, New England clam chowder, broiled lobster tails with butter, Cornish game hens with wild rice, broiled ground round steak with mushroom sauce, roast prime rib with creamed horseradish, and roast rack of lamb. The Inn was also famous for its big weekend luncheon buffets, complete with ice sculptures. From these, I’d eat roast beef carved to order and fruit salad and green beans with slivered almonds. It was all good, but I remember eventually starting to think that the food was a little monotonous. Some part of me must have craved more salt and sourness and spice, I suspect, whether I realized it yet or not. That’s probably why my first experience at the Ranch House was so electrifying.

  The Ranch House was just that, a rambling one-story fifties-era California bungalow shaded by live oak and eucalyptus trees set amidst open fields, little plots of vegetables, and makeshift paddocks in which a scattering of horses stood, licking big pink salt blocks or rubbing their necks on splintery rails. There was a small dining room, bohemian in a ranchy sort of way, with louvered windows and unfinished wood paneling covered with drawings and ceramic plaques by Beatrice Wood. Most of the tables were outside, on a redwood deck under an awning, overlooking a fantasyland garden full of latticework arbors, ferns, wisteria, and tall thickets of bamboo, through which ran both a brick pathway lined with clumps of herbs and a gurgling stream in which diners used to cool their bottles of white wine back when this was a bring-your-own establishment.

  I don’t remember exactly when I had my first Ranch House meal—it might have been while I was still a freshman boarder at Villanova—but I do remember the first bite of food I had there: At home, pea soup had always come in cans. Made from dried split peas, it was pale green and as thick and murky as hot cereal, with little bits of ham lurking here and there. I liked it pretty well, and when I ordered pea soup as my appetizer at my first meal at the Ranch House, that’s what I thought I’d be getting. Instead, what was set in front of me was as thin as vichyssoise (the only “fancy” soup I’d tasted up till then) and bright electric green in color. There wasn’t a speck of ham in it, but it tasted unmistakably of sweet, faintly earthy peas—not dried but fresh ones, real vegetables instead of some mysterious substance in a can. It was like nothing I’d ever tasted before, and I thought it was delicious. I don’t remember what I had for a main course that evening, but the out-of-nowhere gustatory surprise of my first taste of that Ranch House pea soup is something I’ll never forget. We ended up going to the Ranch House often over the years we lived in Ojai, and I discovered many new flavors and ingredients there. It was at the Ranch House that I had my first chicken liver pâté, creamy and laced with cognac; my first spinach salad; my first beef stroganoff (there was the sourness I’d been craving). One evening I ordered meat loaf, and found to my surprise that it was inset with pieces of a buttery green something I’d never seen before—which was how I first came to taste avocado. I also discovered the flavors of fresh herbs at the Ranch House. I’d encountered basil, oregano, and rosemary before, but only as brownish green flecks in glass jars on the spice rack. Suddenly, I was tasting not only those herbs in their fresh glory but such exotica as lemon verbena, chervil, summer savory, and salad burnet. At the Ranch House, my palate almost literally blossomed.

  THE RANCH HOUSE was the domain of Alan and Helen Hooker, a quiet, white-haired couple who had never quite intended to become restaurateurs. Someone once called Alan “the grandfather of California cuisine.” In reality, he was more like an intuitive but vaguely eccentric uncle. The Ranch House certainly anticipated some aspects of the California culinary revolution, but it was not in any sense a direct antecedent of Chez Panisse or Spago. The Los Angeles Times, in its obituary of Hooker, described him as a man “who helped introduce the lighter fare that came to represent California cuisine.” That was closer to the mark.

  The Ranch House menus have always been more “continental” than regional American. Hooker’s recipes, set down in his self-published Alan Hooker’s New Approach to Cooking (1966) and in other cookbooks, sometimes called for MSG, onion and garlic salts, canned vegetables, and meat substitutes (including something called Choplets; don’t ask). Even that pea soup, I later learned, was often made with frozen peas. But Hooker was undeniably ahead of his time in many ways. In an age of margarine and bottled salad dressings, he baked with real butter and dr
essed his herb-strewn salads with extra-virgin olive oil when that compound adjective still drew titters. In a society that still equated fine food with French food, he served, with pride but also with a sense of fun and of experiment, elaborate Indian curries and dishes inspired by recipes from Puerto Rico, Indonesia, Hungary, and Japan. In what was still largely a meat-and-potatoes dining culture, he cooked his salmon medium-rare and elevated a myriad of fresh fruits and vegetables to a place of honor on the plate. And decades before restaurants hired foragers and contracted for baby lettuces from boutique farms, Hooker was buying Swiss chard, raspberries, and avocados from neighbors with tiny kitchen gardens or mini-orchards and plucking mushrooms from the Ojai woods.

  The Hookers came to Ojai from Ohio, as followers of Jiddu Krishnamurti. To support themselves, they rented an old ranch house in Meiners Oaks and converted it into a boardinghouse, offering rooms and vegetarian meals to fellow Krishnamurti followers for fourteen dollars a week. In 1950 they opened their “Ranch House” to the public. Four years later, the house was sold, and the boardinghouse and restaurant closed. In 1956 the Hookers bought an abandoned apple orchard down the hill from the original place and built the structure that is still the heart of the Ranch House, this time serving Alan’s vegetarian specialties but not taking in boarders. Business was slow, however, and this new enterprise closed, too, after a few months. Trying one more time in 1958, the Hookers decided to make a significant change to the menu: They added meat and poultry—specifically, at first, beef stroganoff, veal scaloppine, and chicken cacciatore. As Hooker recalled in his New Approach to Cooking, “As I began to investigate meat dishes, I came upon names which held a certain fascination for me but had no meaning as far as personal experience went. . . . I had no way of knowing how things should taste . . . so I had to depend upon my own palate and sensitivities.” He always said that this was perhaps the secret of his success as a cook of nonvegetarian dishes: that he had created them as he imagined they should taste, not as they had been made in the past. He was an original.

  The Hookers retired from the Ranch House in 1969, leaving David Skaggs, who had joined the staff as a busboy in 1963 and worked his way up, in charge as manager. Alan died in 1993. When Helen followed him, seven years later, Skaggs and his wife, Edie, another veteran of the restaurant staff, inherited the place. In 2012, the Skaggses divorced and put the Ranch House up for sale, for a reported one million dollars. At this writing, they both still work there, apparently amicably, and there have been no takers for the place.

  I WAS NOT AT MY BEST in high school. After my freshman year of straight A’s, I slid steadily down to a comfortable berth somewhere between B and C. I liked to read but found rote study boring. Fortunately (or perhaps not) I was already facile enough as a writer to be able to “snow” at least some of my teachers, filling those pallid little “blue books” with fine-sounding verbiage that probably ultimately meant very little but was well crafted enough to earn me at least a passing grade.

  I had a tough time socially at school. I wasn’t particularly athletic, I didn’t have a driver’s license (and didn’t get one until a couple of years after I graduated), and my mother was entirely too visible a presence, loud and intrusive, at school functions or when picking me up after school. I got mocked regularly and occasionally “pounded” by the red-blooded local boys who drove up to school from Oxnard or Ventura in their pickup trucks or muscle cars. I had a few friends among my classmates, but none that I particularly cared to keep in touch with after my senior year.

  My political leanings didn’t help my popularity. My parents were hardly radicals—they’d voted for Eisenhower—but my father had been on the ground in some of the Asian battlegrounds of the Cold War and I think considered communism more as a deeply flawed ideology than a poisonous plague. He had also had Hollywood friends and colleagues blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and despised the climate that made that kind of career wrecking possible.

  Father Glynn, the headmaster at Villanova, was a rabid anticommunist. A stern-faced man even when he was in a good mood, he conducted obligatory seminars in which he’d harangue us, spittle occasionally spraying from his sneering lips, about the satanic godlessness of the Soviets and the Red Chinese and their plans to conquer America. He’d load us into buses and take us off to hear professional rabble-rousers or to screenings of propaganda films endorsed by the maleficent House Committee on Un-American Activities. On one occasion, he assembled the entire student body to listen to a right-wing activist from Mexico who assured us that her country was about to “go communist” and that we’d be next. As it happened, I’d recently been reading an article about that very subject, probably in some pinko journal, and when our speaker asked for questions, I asked how a political party that had been active in Mexico for at least fifty years without significant impact and whose membership currently amounted to about one-fifth of one percent of the total population was going to take over the country. Father Glynn shut me down quickly, saying something like “You’re not as smart as you think you are, young man”—and I got mildly pushed around and goaded (“Commie lover!”) by a few of my classmates after the assembly let out.

  Away from Villanova, I was a pretentious little squirt, arty and supercilious (a word that my mother once assured me, over my father’s vigorous objections, meant “very silly”). I listened to folk music and read Camus, Dos Passos, The Great Gatsby, Paul Tillich, and Huxley on LSD (both books), without understanding much of any of them. I also took to writing letters to the editor of the local newspapers denouncing what I saw as various political or cultural stupidities (Father Glynn just loved those). I played the guitar, a few chords’ worth at least, and sang songs like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “The Inebriated Pig,” sometimes by myself and sometimes with my friend Dave Shepherd, who was a far better guitarist. (I think we won a talent contest one night at the Ojai Bowl.) On trips to L.A. with my parents, I’d visit my oldest friend, Gary Lund, who was several years my senior, and go off with him to coffeehouses and clubs to see anyone from Reverend Gary Davis to Barney Kessel to Lenny Bruce. For a while, I wore dark glasses day and night.

  On Saturdays in Ojai, I hung out at the workshop of a Polish-born sculptor named Leon Saulter, who welded dramatic abstract sculptures of jagged metal and loved to talk to me—to everyone—about the nature of art and the dynamics of the creative process. Beatrice Wood, who had also come to Ojai originally to be near Krishnamurti, was a friend and frequent dinner guest of my parents—she taught me how to twist a bottle of wine slightly after filling a glass to avoid dribbling any on the table—and I also spent time at her studio, watching her work wet clay on her potter’s wheel or listening to her stories over cups of herbal tea. These were unfailingly colorful: Wood had been an associate of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray in Paris—someone dubbed her “the Mama of Dada”—and may have been the model for the woman in her onetime lover Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel Jules et Jim, made into a famous film by François Truffaut. She was definitely an inspiration for the character of Rose in Ojai resident James Cameron’s film Titanic.

  In the fall of 1961, the Villanova senior class took a “preference test,” and to nobody’s surprise, I scored high in the literary, musical, “persuasive,” and artistic categories; average in social service and clerical; and low in computational, outdoor, scientific, and mechanical. The same year, I talked myself into a freelance gig at the Ojai Valley News, and for the next twelve months or so wrote church news, synopses (rather than reviews) of movies that were opening at the little Ojai bijou, and other local miscellany. This was my first writing job; I got paid thirty-five cents per published column inch (I had to measure my copy in the paper every week and submit an invoice). I think I have probably subconsciously tended to embellish my prose ever since, in hopes of earning just a little more.

  I never sat down and made a conscious decision to become a writer, but it seemed like a natural thing to do. When my father wasn’t working in an office on
a studio lot, he’d be in his office at home, sitting on a big custom-made white leather chair with an oval back, probably suspect ergonomically but very comfortable in the short term, pounding away without cease on his big black Royal standard typewriter, its end-of-line bell ringing every second or two. He typed something like 125 words a minute, and would sit there for hours and hours, hammering the keys, sometimes muttering dialogue to himself, rarely getting up, even for a bathroom break, and stopping only long enough to pour himself another cup of inky coffee from the percolator at his elbow (his cup was huge, and emblazoned with the legend “I Am Not Greedy but I Want Enough”) or light another cigarette. (He went through three or four packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes or Camels a day, letting most of each one smolder out in the ashtray after he’d had a drag or two. He died of lung cancer.) I had a pint-size kids’ typewriter myself, one that actually worked, and I remember writing a short story on it (very short, less than a page double-spaced)—something about a mad scientist in a box canyon—when I was seven or eight. I guess I just grew up thinking that writing was what guys did. I’ve always suspected that if Dad had been out in the yard in overalls working on the Buick every day, I’d probably be an auto mechanic by now.

  Chapter Four

  EL COYOTE CAFE,

  Los Angeles (1931– )

  ONE LUNCHTIME AT THE SCHOOL CAFETERIA, WHEN I was in the fifth grade, I watched Mr. Reed, who ran the place, spooning foreign-looking reddish brown glop into round, white, waxed cartons, a thin rim of orange grease beading around its edges. As I tentatively placed one of the cartons on my tray, a sweet, slightly sharp aroma filled my nostrils, strange and compelling. When I raised a plastic spoon full of the stuff, not without apprehension, to my mouth, it tasted salty, faintly sweet, a little earthy, a little fiery. “What is this?” I asked my buddy Charlie, who had recently moved to Los Angeles from Texas. He looked at me as if I’d just asked what apple pie was. “It’s chili con carne,” he said.