On my own one night, I “discovered” Guy Savoy in his first small restaurant on the rue Duret, and subsequently wrote about the place for Metropolitan Home. (Savoy still tells people that I was the first person to publicize him in America.) I also found another interesting chef, Jean-Paul Duquesnoy, who had had a two-star restaurant in Troyes and had just moved to Paris to try his luck. I coaxed Claude into coming to both places with me a number of times. (Savoy has enjoyed great success, and now has a well-deserved three Michelin stars at his main restaurant, a number of busy bistros, and an outpost in Las Vegas; Duquesnoy fared less well in Paris, and the last I heard of him was as chef at a French restaurant in a hotel in Tokyo.)
One Christmas Eve in the early seventies, Claude and Pepita took me to a wonderful old-style restaurant called À Sousceyrac, run by the grandchildren of a couple from the town of Sousceyrac, near Cahors in southwestern France. That part of France is known particularly for its wild game, its foie gras, and, in general, its hearty dishes full of concentrated flavors, and that’s exactly the kind of food the restaurant served. I shocked Claude and Pepita a bit, I think, by arriving with Lyn, my girlfriend of the time, who was about a dozen years my senior. But Pepita was always très correcte, and Claude, as usual when addressing my foibles, displayed something closer to avuncular bemusement than parental disapproval, so the evening went well, full of chatter and champagne. Lyn might even have impressed Claude a bit by the way she held her own at a table fairly heaped with foie gras, grilled boneless pigs’ feet, whole braised sweetbreads, and the restaurant’s famous lièvre à la royale—an elaborately old-fashioned dish of wild hare stuffed with foie gras, truffles, and its own innards, then stewed in wine.
THE RESTAURANTS OF PARIS, high or low, were endlessly alluring to me, fascinating, compelling. They offered me experiences unlike anything I’d known in Los Angeles. The basic form may have been the same, the tables and chairs, the china and the glasses, even the accents on the waiters and the names of some of the dishes. But this was something else. It wasn’t just the oysters with pigs’ feet or the snails with cèpes; the radishes and the butter were different, the bread was different, the pâtés and terrines had a different consistency, more unctuous, more genuine somehow. And ultimately it wasn’t even just the food. It occurred to me at some point that restaurants were in a way more essential to Paris than they were to other places; that they were an expression of all the things that make the city so seductive: not just food and conversation but art and fashion, politics and history, eroticism and romance. The restaurants of Paris, I thought, formed a kind of arterial system without which the city would hardly seem alive. They didn’t just nourish Paris and its millions of visitors; they gave the city shape, and heart. This was true above all of places like Aux Amis du Beaujolais, the neighborhood staples that animated almost every quartier of the city.
The story of Aux Amis du Beaujolais is a tale of family continuity. Philibert Bléton, a young man from a wine-growing family in Fleurie, a grand cru Beaujolais village, opened the bistro in 1921. Some twenty-eight years later, Philibert’s brother Georges bought the place from him. Georges married Marie-Clothilde Picolet, who came from a family with roots in Chénas, another grand cru Beaujolais village. Her brother Maurice, in turn, started helping out at Aux Amis, and then took it over in 1963, when Georges retired. Maurice was a character, mock-gruff, wisecracking, hardworking. Sometimes Claude would call ahead and ask Maurice to serve us something special, meaning not a dish but a wine. Maurice would then go down to the cellar and dust off an old bottle—a Moulin-à-Vent with twenty years of age on it, for instance, still surprisingly rich and lively. I noticed one day that Maurice had burn scars on one arm. These he’d gotten as a young man, Claude told me, in that very cellar. Wine used to be shipped up from Beaujolais in barrels, to be bottled at the restaurant. It was Maurice’s job, after the corks were inserted, to dip the necks in molten wax to seal them, and one day he had dropped a bottle in . . .
One autumn lunchtime in 1980, Maurice brought a young man wearing a polyester necktie and a narrow-collared suit over to our table and introduced him as his son, Bernard. Bernard would be taking over the restaurant for him the following year, when he retired, he said. Bernard seemed very nice, but to me he didn’t look anything like a bistro keeper. When they left, I said to Claude, “When I come here next year, there’ll be rare tuna with pineapple beurre blanc on the menu instead of boeuf bourguignon.”
I was wrong, as I quickly learned the next time I met Claude for lunch at the restaurant. Bernard had redecorated, with the off-white walls and red banquettes redone in shades of brown, but the menu was virtually the same, and Bernard wore a dark blue apron just like the one his father used to wear, and had the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up. He wasn’t standing behind the bar: He was in the kitchen cooking, and doing it well. His hachis Parmentier, the French version of cottage pie, was noticeably better than it had been in the old days. Best of all, Bernard’s own son, Christian, was apprenticing in the kitchen, and learning the old ways, too. Clearly, Aux Amis du Beaujolais was going to last for a good deal longer.
IN 1993, THE YEAR that Claude turned eighty-seven and I turned forty-eight, I decided to celebrate my birthday in Paris. On my first night in town, I had a good meal with my chef friend Jonathan Waxman at Alain Passard’s superlative Arpège. We shared an oversize sole de l’Île d’Yeu belle meunière, accompanied by a slightly earthy, slightly sweet gratin of paper-thin celery root, then one of the house specialties, duck impeccably roasted in its own juices with a crisp little gâteau of its own abats and some pommes soufflés dusted very lightly with cumin—simple food, done absolutely right, full of flavor, elegant in a sensibly unornamented way.
The next night, Claude and I had a more complex but equally memorable dinner at Carré des Feuillants: an exquisite chestnut cream soup with a bit of pheasant as amuse-bouche; a strange but delicious “cake” of oil-moistened bread crumbs with slices of black truffle on top for me and a Jerusalem artichoke tart with foie gras and truffles for Claude; then a shared veal shank with cèpes; and finally cheeses and coffee-flavored crème brûlée.
On my birthday night itself, Claude joined me, along with Jonathan and a few friends, for dinner at La Régalade, a pioneer in the “bistronomie” movement. I ordered a puff-pastry “pissaladière” with seared rare tuna and black olives, then an hachis Parmentier de boudin noir (in effect, a blood sausage cottage pie, superb and wonderfully peppery), followed by a piece of brebis des Pyrénées. Elsewhere on the table were pumpkin soup, duck foie gras with puréed prunes, leg of lamb with white beans, côte de boeuf with potatoes cooked in goose fat, dove wrapped in ventrèche (pork belly)—all pure, hearty, and fine. We drank a Provençal rosé and a Mâcon-Clessé from the wine list, then three wines I’d brought from Los Angeles for the occasion. I loved the evening, and wished it could have gone on for hours more. Claude was tired, though, and I’d had enough to drink, so we said good night before midnight and repaired to our respective beds. This wasn’t quite the last meal I was to have with Claude, but it was the last big, good, celebratory one.
In September of the following year, Claude and Pepita, both beset by a number of ills (“It’s awful getting old,” Claude would say repeatedly), were admitted together to a hospital outside Paris, sharing a room with side-by-side beds. I went to visit them there. They both looked weak and were all but immobile. After about an hour, I left, saying to Claude, “The next time I’m in Paris, you’ll be up and around and we’ll go to Aux Amis du Beaujolais and have a good lunch.” “Yes, that’s right,” he said, though I’m pretty sure both of us knew it wasn’t.
I flew back from Paris to New York, where I was working on one of the early issues of Saveur, and called Claude several times. He sounded reasonably good, and we had long talks. Twice he said, “You know, I just keep talking like this because it makes me feel better.” One day when I called, he said, “Oh, I am having some trouble with my ass. Can you call back?”
I said I would but got involved with the magazine close, and forgot until too late in the day. The next day I called, and he sounded very bad, drugged up; he told me that he had had trouble breathing, and now had “I don’t know how many tubes in me.” He wasn’t comfortable talking, so I promised to call again the next day. When I did, I was told that both he and Pepita were in intensive care. On September 30, I called again. A man answered, and when I asked for Claude, he asked me who I was. When I told him that I was an old and good friend of Claude’s, he said, “Well, you know, he came to us with a very grave problem. He was very sick. Il est fini.” This had happened, he told me, about an hour previously. “Excusez-nous,” he said in hanging up. Pepita died three days later, and on October 7 they were buried together at the cemetery in Saint-Cloud, which overlooks Paris from the distance.
The following year, I went to Paris to collect a few boxes of things that Claude had left for me—mostly books, photographs, and little oil paintings he’d done on boards over the years, many of the Île de Ré. He had always talked about making me his heir, but never seemed to get around to it, and that wasn’t the kind of thing I felt comfortable reminding him about. A cousin of his from Geneva materialized shortly before his demise and ended up with almost everything. What I did inherit was roughly three decades of memories of Claude and of endless meals enjoyed together over endless hours at so many tables.
I WENT BACK to Aux Amis du Beaujolais one more time after Claude’s death. Bernard had redone the place again, restructuring it from top to bottom, moving the bar and turning what had been the front room into a two-level space. The walls were now mustard yellow and the tablecloths a faint, sophisticated pink, and set with Beaujolais-themed place mats. There was more fish served than there had been in the old days (back then, marinated herring, salt cod gratinée, and the occasional sole meunière were about the only things piscatorial on the menu), but there was still plenty of good, unpretentious bistro fare, too: jambon fumé, assorted terrines, various cold vegetables in vinaigrette, thin slices of dry Lyonnais sausage, beef stewed with carrots, grilled entrecôte with pommes frites, cold smoked pork with lentils, crème caramel, mousse au chocolat. I ate well and drank too much and left with promises to return soon and often, even though Claude was now gone. I never had the heart.
Bernard Picolet closed Aux Amis du Beaujolais in early 2009. The magazines and newspapers whose journalists had been the restaurant’s best customers for decades had all decamped to other parts of the city, and, Picolet told the New York Times shortly before the restaurant’s demise, the global economic downturn had changed French eating habits. “The French are no longer eating and drinking like the French,” he said. “They are eating and drinking like the Anglo-Saxons.”
The site of the restaurant stood empty for several years. A rumor went around that the lease had been taken by the son of a famous French actor, who planned to open a nightclub there, but that never occurred. Today, the place houses an eatery called Qualité & Co., whose website assures potential customers that “Our nutritionist works with all our salad recipes to maximize their nutritional qualities and balance.”
Chapter Seven
SCANDIA,
West Hollywood (1946–1989)
BACK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, decades before a young Ethiopian-born, Swedish-bred chef named Marcus Samuelsson introduced elegant Scandinavian-inspired dining to New York City at Aquavit, and even longer before a Dane of Macedonian descent named René Redzepi galvanized international haute cuisine with his thoroughly original, locally derived creations at Noma in Copenhagen, sparking a craze for “New Nordic” food around the world, the culinary traditions of Scandinavia were represented in America primarily by smorgasbord. This was an ample buffet of cold and warm dishes, heavy on the herring, common (with slight variations in makeup and in the spelling of the name) to all Scandinavian countries.
In Los Angeles, Smorgasbord Central was a place called Bit of Sweden, which occupied a three-story, half-timbered building, surmounted by a large clock bearing the legend GRUEN TIME, on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Doheny. Like other restaurants on the Sunset Strip, Bit of Sweden—which described itself as “the World’s most unique [sic] restaurant featuring the largest Smorgasboard, fine foods and liqueurs”—drew a show business crowd. This was supplemented by a clientele of local businessmen, Beverly Hills matrons, and members of L.A.’s small Swedish and Danish communities, hungry for a taste of home. In 1942, while Casablanca was being shot at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, the gossip queen Hedda Hopper reported that Ingrid Bergman was teaching Humphrey Bogart Swedish on set, and that Bogey was “so set up with himself he drives out to Bit of Sweden for lunch just so’s he can impress the waiters—the big showoff.”
The chef at Bit of Sweden was not a Swede but a taciturn Dane from Copenhagen named Kenneth Hansen. Hansen had shipped out as a kitchen apprentice on the Scandinavian America Line in 1919, when he was fourteen, and ended up in New York City two years later, where he found a berth cooking at the Waldorf-Astoria. By 1929 he had found his way to Los Angeles, where he made hors d’oeuvres at the Brown Derby before landing a job at “the World’s most unique restaurant.”
In 1946 Hansen found financing to open his own place. He called the new restaurant, which was just a block east of Bit of Sweden—“As close as possible, so my former partner could watch the lines,” he once told Craig Claiborne—Hansen’s Scandia, dropping his own name after a few years. It quickly turned into an early “power restaurant,” long before that term came into general usage, where politicians, businessmen, and movie business figures gathered to drink and to eat such dishes as gravlaks with dill sauce, an assortment of planked steaks, and kalvfilé Oskar—a veal cutlet garnished with asparagus, crab legs, and béarnaise sauce, said to have been invented in honor of Oskar II, king of Sweden and Norway.
One contingent of local citizens used to meet at the old Finnish Baths in the basement of the Bing Crosby Building, across the street from Scandia, then troop over to the restaurant after their saunas and massages. Among their number was the L.A. County sheriff, Peter Pitchess. By the mid-fifties, Hansen felt the need to expand and constructed a new restaurant nearby with a flagstone façade, sleek Scandinavian lines, and a soaring chalet roof. In 1957, when the new location was ready to open, Pitchess obligingly closed down the stretch of Sunset between the old and new places, and a parade of regulars—among them Johnny “Tarzan” Weissmuller, the Danish pianist-comedian Victor Borge, the Air Force hero General Jimmy Doolittle, the comedian Nipsey Russell, and the Arizona senator and future presidential candidate Barry Goldwater (an assemblage of unlikely table fellows that hints at the breadth of Scandia’s appeal)—trouped across the street, led by a horse-drawn Carlsberg beer wagon, bearing a pianist, an accordionist, and the famous Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior.
In its new home, with an expanded menu, two distinct large dining areas (one sunny and airy, the other dark and clubby), and a remarkable wine list, Scandia soon evolved into one of the best restaurants of any kind in Los Angeles, offering a level of cuisine and service that would have done any classic French place proud. The new Scandia no longer mounted a smorgasbord—the closest thing was the restaurant’s lavish holiday buffets—though the menu did offer, under “Hors d’Oeuvres,” “Our individual ‘Cold Cabaret’ served at your table and consisting of all the delicacies for which the smörgåsbord is famous.” That menu was huge, both physically (it measured about twelve by sixteen inches) and in the sheer quantity and breadth of what it offered. All the “continental” standards of the era were there: shrimp cocktail, wilted spinach salad, vichyssoise, gazpacho, Lake Superior whitefish, chateaubriand, baked Alaska—and the planked steaks that Hansen had been serving since he first went out on his own continued to be a point of pride for the place. But there were also many dishes that made you feel as if you were someplace else, somewhere with a different sensibility—somewhere, well, Scandinavian.
IF CHASEN’S WAS MY F
IRST RESTAURANT and remains my romantic ideal of what a restaurant should be, and Trader Vic’s was for many years my fantasy eating place, Scandia was the first restaurant I came to think of, when I was more or less an adult, as my own. Sometimes at fancy places, I’d get pointedly seated in the establishment’s version of Siberia, no matter how empty the dining room was or how long ago I’d made my reservation; this was obviously because, while I may have been decently dressed, I was still one of them long-haired hippie kids. I eventually figured out what to do if this happened, though: order good wine. This dawned on me one evening when I went with my friend Allen Daviau to dine in the pretty downstairs dining room at a place called Au Petit Café, on Vine Street in Hollywood. I was a regular at the restaurant, but because I was a habitué of the upstairs room and went there mostly for lunch, the host didn’t recognize me, and—probably taking one look not only at my own hair but also at Allen’s dense, curly mop and matching beard (picture a slightly rounder version of Levon Helm of the Band)—he seated us at a cramped corner table as much out of public view as possible. It took a while for a waiter to approach us, and when he did, I immediately commandeered the wine list and ordered us a bottle of good champagne, to be followed by a bottle of one of the great white Burgundies, Chassagne-Montrachet. Almost immediately, the host came over and conducted us ceremoniously to a splendid table in the middle of the room, where immaculate service was lavished upon us for the rest of the evening.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 10