My first taste of what I eventually figured out was an emblematic Texas specialty introduced me to flavors I had never imagined—cumin, chili powder, garlic—and I was smitten. Back home that afternoon, I told my mother, with considerable excitement, that I’d tried this great new dish called chili and that I couldn’t wait to try it again. She scrunched up her nose and informed me, with unimpeachable maternal authority, “Oh, you don’t like that.”
When I started spending time down in Charlie’s home state about forty years later—for reasons having to do more with music and romance than with gastronomy—I would always establish my bona fides as an aficionado of Tex-Mex food by telling people “Hey, I’m from L.A.; I grew up eating all the same stuff.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t really true. Mexican food had no place in our house—no place in our family consciousness. Chili powder and exotic spices were banned from our kitchen as surely as were garlic and onions. We wouldn’t have recognized a fresh chile, let alone known what to do with one. Tortillas would simply have made no sense; you couldn’t put them in the toaster like the English muffins or Wonder bread we ate every day. Shortly before my father’s death, in 1976, he asked me in all seriousness, after noticing a sign at a Mexican fast-food place we were passing, “Just what is a taco, anyway?” At that point, he had lived in Southern California for more than thirty-five years.
What finally made me fall in love with the flavors and textures and perfumes of Mexican food (and I include Cal-Mex, Tex-Mex, and New Mexican in that category, as well as what it is now trendy to call “interior Mexican”)—which today I regularly tell people, honestly this time, is my favorite food of all—was a noisy, friendly, colorful, Americanized Mexican place on Beverly Boulevard, a couple of miles and a world away from Chasen’s, called El Coyote. It took me a while to get there, though.
MY DINING EXPERIENCES at the Ranch House undeniably broadened my culinary horizons (and probably my waistline as well), but it wasn’t until I went off to college, in the fall of 1962, that I really began discovering the variety and surprise of international cuisines. Having finished four years at Villanova with credible grades, I was pretty much a shoo-in for a berth at Southern California’s major Catholic college, Loyola University (it’s now Loyola Marymount), near L.A. International Airport. At Loyola, I fell in briefly with a loose clique of foreign students—mostly Latin American and French-speaking African—and regularly dined with them in the cafeteria. I have no recollection of what we ate, but it was from them that I picked up my lifelong habit of using my knife and fork “foreign” style, holding the fork upside down in my left hand for eating instead of shifting it to my right hand after cutting my food like everybody else seemed to do.
On one of my earliest excursions off campus for dinner, my roommate introduced me to the Lebanese food of his childhood at a wonderful, now long-defunct place called Hatton’s, which billed itself as the first Middle Eastern restaurant in Hollywood. I fell immediately in love with this strangely flavored fare, even farther than chili con carne from anything I’d known at home: creamy, garlicky hummus, with its faintly chalky sesame-paste flavor; tabouleh, so bright and sharp and lemony; kibbee, both cooked and raw (this was the first raw meat I’d ever eaten), which revealed lamb, which I’d formerly known only as chops, to me in a whole new form; pine-nut-studded, sumac-dusted ground-lamb flatbread. . . . This was heady stuff for me.
I loved music, and that affection, in a roundabout way, led to my further culinary education. My parents weren’t musical themselves, but Dad had racks of 78 rpm albums lined up underneath our old blond-wood Capehart music console, everything from Ambrose (an English dance band leader) to the gospel-singing Blind Boys of Alabama, from the jazz pianist Hazel Scott to the leftist folksinger-actor Tony Kraber, and I put these on the turntable constantly as a kid. Famous composers of the era—not just Jimmy McHugh, but also Gene Austin, Ralph Blane, and Frank Loesser, among others—used to play piano at our parties. I was a faithful fan of Your Hit Parade on radio, and then on TV, and remember vividly the first time I heard “Rock Around the Clock.” I used to listen to Hunter Hancock playing R & B on KGFJ, concealing the radio under my covers at night when I was supposed to be asleep. Probably inevitably, then, I was drawn to Loyola’s campus radio station, KXLU-FM, and wanted to be a part of it. I already had a fairly deep, resonant voice, so I auditioned to become a college DJ, and got the job. My show was called Soul Meeting, after an LP by the great R & B and soul-jazz tenor player King Curtis, and I featured, as I would intone in what I imagined was a hepcat voice at the beginning of every broadcast, “the finest in blues and jazz and the blues in jazz.”
At KXLU I fell in with an older crowd, former students who still hung out around campus and helped run the broadcasts. They all lived off-campus, of course, and before long, I was sneaking into Hollywood to meet them, going to hear Lou Rawls and Ernie Andrews and Richard “Groove” Holmes at places like the It Club and Memory Lane in central Los Angeles, where we’d fantasize about the pretty waitresses and drink Cutty Sark on the rocks (nobody ever asked us for ID). Then I’d hitchhike back to campus along Manchester Boulevard at two or three in the morning, dodging the sprinklers that would sometimes suddenly spring to life along the grass strips separating the sidewalk from the street, and accepting rides from drunken businessmen and sleepy restaurant workers and jumpy kids out doing things their parents would probably kill them for. Just like me.
After a few months of this, I began extending my off-campus stays to whole weekends, sleeping on a cot in an enclosed porch off the kitchen at a house in Hollywood owned by one of my new friends, a recording engineer named John Stachowiak (he later mastered the Beatles’ White Album, among many other classics). John introduced me to my first fresh mushrooms, and to a weird vegetable I’d only vaguely heard of, called eggplant, which he ate for breakfast. I didn’t like the sound of it, considering my aversion to eggs, and I watched with skepticism bordering on mild fright as he sliced one of these shiny, purple-black ovoids thin, salted the slices, let them sit for a few minutes, wiped them off, dipped them into a bath of, yes, beaten egg, dredged them in flour, and browned them in bubbling Wesson oil. He pretty much shamed me into trying a piece, and of course it was delicious—and before long I was making fried eggplant myself.
John’s house was a gathering place for an oddball group of ex-Loyola students, fledgling artistic types, and stereo-music lovers (John had a knockout sound system and a record collection that went on for miles), among them a young photographer and television-history buff named Allen Daviau, who became one of my best friends. (He grew into an award-winning cinematographer, shooting E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and other classic films.) John’s house was on Serrano Avenue, and we took to calling the place the Serrano Gay Bar, in recognition of the fact that women were rarely seen on the premises (though we were all straight, at least as far as anyone knew at the time). Throughout these weekends, various configurations of regulars would sit around and talk and drink supermarket gin and Squirt and listen to Nina Simone and Muddy Waters, the Dukes of Dixieland and Candide. (None of us had started smoking pot yet, much less ingesting LSD-soaked bits of fuzzy paper.)
We ate sandwiches and I think must have ordered in pizza; we’d go pick up ribs from Carl’s Hickory Pit on Pico or, when somebody felt brave enough, from Mr. Jim’s (“You need no teef to eat Mr. Jim’s beef”), a few miles to the south in what we called Soultown. When John or Allen had some money, they’d buy aged rib eyes or pork chops at Larsen’s Meat Market on Western and John would pan-fry them. But it was also at John’s house, one weekend in the spring of 1963, that I first really cooked dinner myself—not just assembling a salad or a sandwich or opening a can but following a recipe and producing something good enough for us all to eat. The dish was carbonnade, a Belgian beef stew made with dark beer. I’d clipped the recipe out of some magazine or newspaper just because I liked the sound of it—I vaguely knew that chefs cooked with wine, but I’d never heard of anybody cooking with be
er—and I followed the directions precisely. I remember standing at John’s old gas range and browning the meat and onions and pouring in the beer and simmering it for however long I was told to simmer it as the aromas gathered and blended and grew. If it garnered any effusive praise from my companions, I don’t remember it, but I’m pretty sure that there wasn’t any left a half an hour later.
I started cooking for the group at least once a weekend. Our typical Sunday evening dinner, which didn’t cost much more than a dollar—for all four or five of us—was pasta of a sort, though I don’t think anybody used that term back then: a Franco-American spaghetti-in-a-box kit (a pound of noodles, a little can of tomato sauce, and a metallic envelope of powdery so-called Parmesan cheese), a pound of ground beef, and—thanks for the idea, Mom—a small can of corn. I’d cook the ground beef loose, toss in the corn, moisten it all with the tomato sauce, then toss it all with the doubtless long-overcooked noodles before dusting the whole thing with the “Parmesan.” Filled out with a loaf of what passed for French bread in those days in L.A. that somebody had contributed, it made a fairly satisfying meal.
Sometimes, we’d go out to eat, to the definitive Googie-style coffee shop Norms, on La Cienega; to Nickodell, next door to KHJ-TV on Melrose, where we’d eat roast chicken and watch the local celebrity news anchor Jerry Dunphy drinking at the bar; sometimes to the Balalaika, farther east on Melrose, where I was introduced to borscht, piroshki, and Pojarski cutlets. One night, John suggested that we go to a place called El Cholo Spanish Cafe, on Western Avenue south of Wilshire Boulevard. For decades, Mexican restaurants around Southern California, and probably beyond, called themselves “Spanish.” El Cholo was one of the older such establishments in town, growing out of a café that had first opened in downtown L.A. in 1923 and had occupied its present location since 1931. (It is probably the second-oldest Mexican restaurant in America, after the 1922-vintage El Charro in Tucson.)
El Cholo was my first Mexican restaurant, by a long shot, and I was full of anxiety as we walked into the cluttered, warmly furnished, pleasant-smelling dining room and sat down. I doubt that I admitted this to my friends, but when I opened my menu, I recognized almost nothing—tamale, enchilada, tostada, chile relleno. . . . These were another language to me, literally and otherwise. I did see my old friend chili con carne, but I ended up ordering what looked like the safest thing (and I quote): HAMBURGER STEAK, with Chile Beans, Spaghetti and French Fried Potatoes. I think my friends must have ribbed me for my pedestrian (and non-Mexican) selection, but I enjoyed my dinner, and I had the same thing the next couple of times we went. Then one night I tried the albóndigas soup and eventually the enchiladas and even the chile relleno. I started liking the food, though I remained intimidated for some time by the leaf-wrapped lumps of damp dough called tamales. There’s no question, though, that El Cholo introduced me to Mexican food. It also got me ready for El Coyote.
MY FRESHMAN YEAR at Loyola was not a success. I spent too much time at KXLU and listening to jazz and drinking scotch in Hollywood, and I was not invited back for my sophomore year. I stayed out of school for the next eighteen months or so. Through an old film business associate, my father got me a summer job that turned into a yearlong post as an “apprentice film editor” at ABC-TV. In those days, the network sent out sixteen-millimeter prints of its various series—Wagon Train, General Hospital, Hootenanny, and so on—to affiliates around the country; my job involved inspecting the returned prints, making minor repairs as needed, and helping keep track of them in our film vault. While I was at ABC, I rented a studio apartment in Beverly Hills. I also auditioned for a part in a theatrical presentation, an evening of excerpts from García Lorca plays, at the women’s college Mount St. Mary’s, on a hill high above West Los Angeles, where my sister had enrolled. I ended up playing the bridegroom in a scene from Blood Wedding (with the poet Michael C. Ford as my valet) and the husband in a fragment of Yerma. A few months later, I got on a Greyhound bus to follow my Lorca costar, a tall senior with dark hair and Cherokee cheekbones named Vickie, to Atlanta, where she had gone to live and work for the summer.
We set up housekeeping in a little efficiency apartment on Thirteenth Street between Peachtree and West Peachtree. Vickie went off to Kelly Girls every morning, ending up in some office or another, usually answering phones; I went to the Manpower office and stood in line with an assortment of young white boys and older black men (never, for some reason, the other way around), waiting for whatever came up. I worked at the Ford Motor Company tractor parts warehouse in Decatur for a week or so, wheeling an overgrown shopping cart around and filling orders for bale counters and fan belts from the huge metal shelves; I helped dismantle an Arrow Shirt Company warehouse; I unloaded a boxcar full of office furniture for Cole, the big office products distributor. My worst job was laying tennis courts in a public park, which involved loading wheelbarrows full of molten paving goop from the machine that mixed it up, wheeling it up a slope to the courts through the hot, damp Atlanta summer air, dumping it out, then returning for more. The words “fire and brimstone” occurred to me more than once, and I’d come home at night with my skin and hair flecked with bits of sticky black tar.
We ate Sugar Pops cereal or Sara Lee coffee cake for breakfast. Lunch was mostly sandwiches on the job. At night, Vickie made sloppy joes, spaghetti with meat sauce, or tuna à la king on toast with frozen peas and jarred pimiento strips. Occasionally we’d splurge and go out. One night we ended up at Aunt Fanny’s Cabin, a sort of Old South theme restaurant with murals of pleasant plantation life on the walls, complete with frolicking little black girls in pigtails and gingham dresses. “Dixie” played loudly on the sound system every half hour or so, at which point half the customers stood up proudly, as if it were the national anthem. We ate there only once.
In the fall, I followed Vickie to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father was working for an outfit called the Academy of Applied Science, dedicated to “promoting creativity, invention and scientific achievement” (one of the academy’s projects was a long-running search for the Loch Ness Monster, using the most advanced sonar equipment). The director was a polymath named Robert H. Rines, who put me to work on various writing projects, and allowed me to bunk in a room adjacent to the AAS office. I spent a lot of time walking around Cambridge, stopping in shops, and reading restaurant menus. I remember in particular a spice shop on Massachusetts Avenue with big wooden barrels of olives in half a dozen colors and shapes by the door; nearby was a neon-lit Greek restaurant where, for ninety-nine cents, I could eat my fill of white rice with meat sauce spooned on top. I used to say, and honestly felt, that I experienced a New England boyhood, greatly compressed, that fall in Cambridge, and I conceived a real affection for Boston and, by extension, for New England—but as the holidays approached, I wanted to go home. Vickie stayed on in Cambridge for a few months, then came back to L.A. We broke up soon afterward.
Meanwhile, I had reclaimed my apartment in Beverly Hills, gotten a Christmas job at Campbell’s Book Store, a Westwood Village institution across the street from the UCLA campus, and enrolled at L.A. City College, trying to get my higher education back on track. I declared my major as philosophy—partly, I’m sure, because I was putting on airs, but also because I’d come across a Bertrand Russell line in which he said something to the effect of “There’d be no reason to study philosophy if it weren’t so much fun,” and I thought I’d find out for myself if that was true. As long as I was putting on airs, I also thought, for some reason, that it might be a good idea to study Arabic, which I did for two years with an eccentric Sardinian named Dr. Curti, who’d taught himself the language. I never learned to speak more than a couple of words, but could read a little and can still transliterate the script. One of my fellow students around the language department was a young Sicilian named Piero Selvaggio, who went on to become the city’s most distinguished and successful Italian restaurateur with his Valentino in Santa Monica. Another was an Armenian-American named
Misha Markarian, whose family owned a restaurant called Kavkaz, in the old house above the Sunset Strip that later became the home of the original Spago.
After about a year at Campbell’s, I talked myself into a position as a stockboy and sales clerk in the bookshop at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, starting there a few months before the institution opened. I also found a new apartment, closer to the museum, a studio overlooking a little fountain in the courtyard of a red-brick Gothic Revival castle—actually an office building with a few apartments attached, built by the company responsible for many of L.A.’s classic art deco theater interiors. It was quiet, romantic, convenient to my new workplace, and reasonably cheap. And El Coyote was two blocks away.
EL COYOTE BEGAN LIFE as a little Cal-Mex café, opened by Blanche and George March on La Brea Avenue in 1931. Their intention was to feed their friends and neighbors the kind of fare Blanche had grown up with in Thatcher, Arizona, northeast of Tucson. George was in the kitchen, and Blanche ran the dining room. The restaurant got off to a slow start, but John Wayne and some of his fellow actors discovered it, and business slowly built. In 1951, when their original lease was up, the Marches moved El Coyote to a much larger building nearby, on Beverly Boulevard a few blocks west of La Brea.
By the time I arrived in the neighborhood, the restaurant had become something of a local institution, and I had become an experienced consumer of tacos, enchiladas, and the rest—even tamales. The sign the Marches installed outside their place—“El Coyote Mexican Food” in white neon against a bright red background, “Mexican” in block letters, the rest in script—usually dramatically silhouetted against a vivid blue or inky blue-black L.A. sky, was like a beacon to me. Almost as soon as I had unpacked my boxes, I headed over for a meal.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 6