My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  At Scandia, I never had a problem. At first, this was doubtless because I’d been introduced to the place, and its staff, by my parents, but before long I had gotten to know many of the key players on my own terms—John the bartender; Angel, who ran the front most evenings; Freddy, the maître d’hôtel. They’d greet me by name, joke with me a little, and always give me a good table in the dark, clubby dining room adjacent to the glamorous bar. This room was decorated with copper pans, blue-and-white ceramics, and Scandinavian coats of arms, and the best seats weren’t the banquettes but the tall, broad, reddish brown leather swivel wingback chairs with embossed heart-shaped backs. Once I was ensconced in one of these, I’d order good wine not for defensive reasons but because the list was long, imaginative, and astonishingly reasonable in price, and then would settle in and eat some of the best food in town.

  It was at Scandia that I discovered that I loved herring, which came marinated in vinegar, steeped in sherry, or cloaked in sour cream. I always ordered a combination of the three, along with the almost-frozen aquavit and icy Danish beer with which all the real connoisseurs seemed to wash herring down. Norwegian lobster tails—frozen, certainly, but flavorful nonetheless—came fried, with fried parsley (a great delight that I first encountered here), and also, even better, in the form of “The Great Hamlet Dagger,” for which they were “deviled and broiled on the skewer, served with an ice-cold sauce made with caviar and aquavit.” There were also, among many other things, oysters baked in their shells with herbs and aquavit, gravlaks with dill sauce, mushroom caps stuffed with snails in garlic and walnut butter, something called “The Crêpe” (“Thin pancake wrapped around tiny coral-pink Shrimps in Dill and Hollandaise, glazed under fire”), sweet-and-sour stuffed cabbage that remains the best I have ever tasted, a tasty tenderloin steak buried under heaps of butter-fried onions called bøf med løg, the inevitable veal Oscar, and a changing selection of simply cooked fresh North Atlantic fish—turbot, plaice, sole—flown in “via S.A.S. over the Pole.” I also had the first venison of my life at Scandia, overcooked by today’s standards but luxuriating in a classic sauce veneur, and fell in love with the meat’s woodsy intensity.

  The big production on the menu was a tourist-pleasing showpiece called the “Viking Sword,” which was described as “Large brochette of broiled breast of turkey, small Chateau-Briand [sic], center of a smoked pork chop, tomatoes and mushrooms, served on a flaming sword with many kinds of vegetables and sauce bearnaise.” The sword was not ignited at the table, mind you: It was carried high through the dining room, boldly aflame, with more than a little pomp, stopping conversation and eliciting oohs and aahs and occasional shrieks of delight or fear (or both) from the children in the room.

  At lunchtime, the fare was simpler. There was a long menu of smørrebrød, open-face Danish sandwiches inspired by those at the world-famous Oskar Davidsen in Copenhagen. These included everything from smoked whitefish with sliced onion, homemade liver pâté with mushrooms and bacon, and thick-cut Danish salami on duck fat with meat jelly to Burgundy-baked ham with scrambled eggs and chives. Even better, though, was the blackboard lunch menu, which offered two courses for some unbelievably low price, maybe five or six dollars in the seventies. I realized fairly quickly that the secret of this menu was that it was constructed largely of by-products of the previous night’s dinner. The spinach salad was made with the ribs, not the leaves, of the spinach; the irresistible frikadeller (ground veal croquettes) and Danish meatballs were made with scraps from the veal Oscar and the various steaks. Five or six appetizers and main dishes each were offered, similarly derived from recycled foodstuffs. Occasionally, when I explained this to a luncheon guest, he or she would take exception to the practice, as if the kitchen was trying to pass leftovers off as fresh food. I thought the contrary: that this practice showed intelligence, creativity, and even a kind of environmental responsibility. I loved the whole idea.

  IN 1967, WITH GOOD GRADES from Cal State, I transferred to UCLA, still a philosophy major but taking history courses on the side. I got student loans to pay my tuition, theoretically with enough left over for living expenses, but I was already spending far too much money on food and wine, and so needed to supplement the loans somehow. I started digging through Writer’s Digest and The Writer at the library, and sending unsolicited articles and reviews off to an assortment of obscure publications—the Ford Times, Mankind (“The Magazine of Popular History”), The New-England Galaxy—and occasionally selling one for fifty dollars here, a hundred dollars there.

  The following year was a tough one for me: I was let go from my museum bookshop job and evicted from my castle apartment near El Coyote, because the owners of the building were converting the apartments there to offices. Then my car, a 1949 pink Cadillac Fleetwood with an impeccable interior, which I’d bought for a thousand dollars and into which I subsequently poured many thousands more, finally expired from a cracked engine block. The really awful thing, though, was that my best friend at UCLA, John Lydon, a black sheep from a Boston family prominent in the media, dropped dead while having lunch with his wife one afternoon—he sneezed, and a vein in his head burst. I walked around feeling hollow for months.

  I needed a place to live and a new job. I found the former quickly, an inexpensive one-bedroom on Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood where a friend of a friend, the writer Robert Gover—whose first novel, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, had been a cult best-seller a few years earlier—had been living. There was no air-conditioning and there was traffic noise day and night, but Fountain was equidistant from Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards, both good hitchhiking streets, and my rent was $87 a month at first, and never rose above $125. I ended up staying there for ten years.

  Around the time I got my new place, I also found a new job, through the student employment office at UCLA: I became a shipping clerk and film inspector at Medallion TV, a minor-league distributor of old movies and television series. The office was a few blocks east of Scandia on the Sunset Strip. I only made seventy-five dollars a week, but the hours were flexible, so I could keep going to classes in the mornings—and leave in the evenings early enough to hitchhike to downtown L.A., where I had a second job teaching English as a second language three nights a week.

  My boss was crass, erratic, well-to-do, and sometimes unexpectedly generous (he let me drive his custom-painted electric blue Coupe de Ville convertible when he was out of town, and later bought me an old VW Bug with a whiny transmission). He also practically lived at Scandia, and every weekday at half past twelve, he’d drive a few blocks down the street to the restaurant to meet his buddies and, as far as I could determine, drink his lunch. This inspired an almost comical Jekyll and Hyde situation: He’d do business as usual in the mornings, occasionally calling me in to ask about the disposition of a print of some old British film like Dick Barton at Bay or The Crimes of Stephen Hawke that had been returned slightly damaged from a TV station in Fargo, North Dakota, or Bellingham, Washington. He’d bid me good-bye as he left out the film vault door into the parking garage. He’d reenter, postlunch, scarlet-faced and swaying, and demand, in an aggressive tone, where this or that was, what I’d done about something or other, when was I going to clean up the back room or find those missing dupe negatives. Then he’d go into his office and, if I was lucky, I wouldn’t hear a word from him for the rest of the day.

  His other hangout, besides Scandia, was the Classic Cat, directly across the street from the office. This was—depending on the latest ruling by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors or the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, and these seemed to change almost monthly—a bikini or topless or all-nude bar. He got to be friends with the owner, and ended up buying an interest in the Cat, at which point he put me to work moonlighting there, running errands, repairing the light-show paraphernalia, even writing scripts for the shows, which featured a revolving cast of “amateur” dancers and an energetic Mexican master of ceremonies named Raul, who was by natur
e immune to the charms of naked women. In return I received unlimited free drinks, and got to know everybody in the place, which sometimes turned out quite nicely.

  IN 1978 KEN HANSEN was ready to retire and sold Scandia to one of his longtime regulars, the magazine publisher Bob Petersen (Tiger Beat, Motor Trend, and Guns & Ammo were among his titles), whose offices were a few blocks down the street. The restaurant continued on more or less as before at first, with few personnel changes, though regulars noted that the ship wasn’t as tight as it had once been. During one of the Christmas lunches I had annually there with a group of fellow wine lovers, a waiter dropped a large tray full of dirty dishes and glasses, with a resounding crash and clatter. The dining room was silent for a moment as the last resonance died out. Then the wine writer Roy Brady said drily, “In Hansen’s day, that fellow would have been dead before the dishes hit the floor.”

  But Hansen’s day was gone. By the time Ken died, in 1980, the restaurant itself was ailing. In a restaurant guide I published in 1984, I noted that the food was at least decent and the wine list still excellent, but that the service was a mess. “The restaurant’s founder and original owner, the late Ken Hansen,” I wrote, “was a terror—with suppliers, in his kitchen (and it was always finally his kitchen, not the chef’s), and most of all with his captains, waiters, and busboys. He demanded the best from them and almost always got it. Today, the service is a joke—an unorchestrated dissonance of bewildered novices, bored old hands, and bumbling captains in whose hands a can of tableside Sterno becomes a dangerous weapon. Somebody’s still at the stove here, but nobody’s at the stick.”

  Even if the old standards had been maintained, Scandia would have had a rough time. The Sunset Strip had once had an aura of glamour, but by the eighties it had grown increasingly tacky, and fancy cars turning in to the Scandia driveway sometimes had to thread their way through crowds of drug-addled teenagers. Tastes in food had changed, too, and the children of the generation that had built Scandia into an institution were now going to hipper, more casual places, like Spago, Trumps, and Morton’s, or even heading to (or staying on) the Westside to eat at Michael’s, Chinois on Main, or 72 Market Street. Prime-time reservations at Scandia had once been as hard to get as they are today at the latest hot restaurant in Manhattan; now the dining rooms were half empty at eight on a Saturday night. In 1989 Bob Petersen gave up and closed the place.

  I mourned it. Sometimes I think that if I could summon back to life one vanished restaurant from my past, bringing it into the early twenty-first century intact, with all the same food and drink and people and vitality, it would be not Chasen’s but Scandia—so luminous, so perfectly designed for conviviality and indulgence. Sometimes.

  Chapter Eight

  CAFÉ SWISS,

  Beverly Hills (1950–1985)

  APART FROM THE ODD STOLEN TIPPLE OF PLONK AS a teenager or the occasional desultory plastic cup of jug wine at parties where the more common intoxicant was something you smoked, I didn’t start drinking wine until I went to work at the L.A. County art museum. I had discovered by that time that I liked the way wine tasted, and besides, it seemed like the thing to have when I went out to gallery openings on Monday nights on La Cienega Boulevard or to nice restaurants with Martin and later other women—part of the worldly image I was anxious to project. Not just drinking but knowing about wine, I decided, was something a young gentleman should aspire to, so I tried to pay attention to what I drank, and read a wine book or two along the way. I was starting pretty much from scratch, though. I had a hard time remembering the difference between Bordeaux and Burgundy for at least a year. Once, trying to impress a sexy blonde at Chianti in Hollywood, I ordered Château d’Yquem, one of the sweetest and most unctuous of dessert wines, with the scampi (it was the most expensive white on the list, so I figured it had to be the best). Fortunately, our waiter politely steered me toward a crisp, dry verdicchio instead.

  I got better on my own, little by little, but I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t start to actually learn anything worthwhile about wine until I met Roy Brady, and began spending my Saturday afternoons at the Café Swiss. I first became aware of Roy at a tasting lunch devoted to the wines of the eccentric, legendary Santa Clara County vintner Martin Ray in Hollywood in 1971, the first such event I had attended. There were all kinds of Wine Experts bouncing around the place, among them my parents’ old friend Robert Lawrence Balzer, the so-called dean of American wine writers, who at one point tasted Ray’s 1963 pinot noir and announced, “This wine is an effrontery, just an effrontery!” A bit off to the side, not bouncing at all (or saying anything audible), was a distinguished but vaguely roguish-looking gentleman, sipping wines and making notes as if he and the contents of his glass were the only creatures in the room. “Who’s that?” I asked somebody. “That’s Roy Brady,” somebody answered, in a tone of respect bordering on awe.

  A year or so after the Martin Ray event, I chanced to sit next to Roy on a flight to San Francisco, and introduced myself. We’d both been invited to a luncheon in the Bay Area hosted by Browne Vintners to introduce a new line of “branded” imported wines. Roy and I started talking on the plane, and I ended up sitting next to him at the event as well, continuing our conversation. Along the way, I shared with him some of my budding-oenophile insights, and he listened politely enough—and before we parted company, he suggested that I drop by a modest Beverly Hills restaurant called Café Swiss the following Saturday with a bottle of wine in hand, to sit in on an informal wine lunch he enjoyed there weekly with some friends.

  I don’t remember what I brought that Saturday, but it must have passed muster, because I was invited back the next week and soon found myself a regular member of the group, spending most of my Saturday lunchtimes at the Café Swiss (and most of my Saturday afternoons sleeping off the results). I think I can safely say that no young man in the world, during that period, was more regularly exposed to so large and diverse an array of wines, good, bad, and indefinable.

  CAFÉ SWISS WAS THE KIND OF RESTAURANT that has pretty much disappeared from major cities around the country, or at best languishes on the periphery of local dining scenes. It was, in other words, friendly, comfortable, and dependable, with a large menu of American and “continental” dishes, supplemented by specialties that were at least a little exotic, in this case from the exotic land of Switzerland. Swiss cooking was never as much a part of the menu there as, say, Scandinavian cooking was of Scandia’s, but there were still ten or twelve offerings that were undeniably more Swiss than anything else—émincé de veau zurichoise, ravioli tessinoise, croûte au fromage valaisanne, and so on—and in some ways, Café Swiss was a bit like a less elegant, less expensive counterpart of Ken Hansen’s place.

  The restaurant belonged to a Swiss chef named Fred Hug and his wife, Laura. They opened Café Swiss in 1950, on the site of a former coffee shop on Rodeo Drive. Beverly Hills in those days was less than fifty years old, and was still basically a village. The house I grew up in was technically in West Los Angeles, but we did our shopping in Beverly Hills, and I remember well, from my childhood, the lazy streets with plenty of unmetered parking by the curb and the small shops owned by nice men and women who’d greet us by name when we walked in and let us buy things with house charge accounts. (I loved ElGee’s, the butcher shop, with its museumlike display cases full of rosy beef tenderloins and long racks of lamb with pastel paper cuffs on the protruding bones; I hated Livingstone’s, a dress shop that I thought smelled like old people, where Mom would spend what seemed like hours trying on clothes and gossiping with the salesgirls while I sat on the floor and drew.) A couple of decades before it became one of the most famous shopping streets in the world, Rodeo Drive had a gas station, a hardware store, a big independent bookshop (Marian Hunter’s), and at least twenty beauty parlors that never would have thought to call themselves “salons.” There may even have been a camera shop. What there weren’t were marble edifices housing fancy boutiques selling Louis Vuit
ton and Yves Saint Laurent, tour buses full of gawkers hoping to see Richard Gere and Julia Roberts skipping out of a lingerie store giggling, or millionaires clogging the streets with their canary yellow Maseratis or metallic blue Maybachs on their way to buy ten-thousand-dollar suits at appointment-only menswear stores. The “real housewives” of Beverly Hills in those days were Mary Pickford, Lana Turner, and Dinah Shore.

  Café Swiss fit right in. It was in the middle of things, casual, easy, the kind of place you could decide to stop by at the last minute on the way home from the office or the studio; you didn’t have to dress up like you did for Chasen’s, and the lighting was dim enough to facilitate discretion. The place didn’t even have a liquor license until 1955, when the Hugs became American citizens. With alcohol on offer, its popularity grew. Clark Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, and Groucho Marx were among the regulars; studio executives from Twentieth Century–Fox, which was only a ten-minute drive to the south, liked to come for lunch, sitting on the umbrella-shaded (and later Astroturfed) back patio eating spaghetti bolognese and chicken-liver omelettes and downing vodka martinis or Michelob on draft. For some reason, Café Swiss also became the preferred hangout for a large number of songwriters, composers, and arrangers. One group of old-timers, including Harry Ruby, who wrote music for Marx Brothers movies, and Arthur Hamilton, who wrote “Cry Me a River,” met every week for a patio lunch. In the evenings, a more famous crowd, including Johnny Mercer, Sammy Cahn, Bronislau Kaper, Harry Warren, and Jimmy McHugh, gathered around the piano, where Joe Marino, both a studio musician and a credible jazz performer, played most nights.

  The group of decidedly nonmusical gentlemen that Roy Brady invited me to join had gotten its start one Saturday morning in 1964, when a wine distributor named Martin Weiner was visiting one of his customers, Bill Shapiro, manager of the old Vendome wine and liquor store on Beverly Drive. The two decided that day that instead of tasting wines in the back of the store, they’d pack up a bunch of bottles and go to lunch together at Frascati, an attractive Italian-French restaurant nearby, across the street from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It was a pleasant experience, so they decided to do it every week, sampling not just wines that Marty brought in but other samples that had been dropped off for Bill at the store. Roy, a customer of Bill’s, joined them almost at once, and gradually the group expanded to include a core of other Vendome customers, including three local businessmen, an attorney, and an ophthalmologist.