My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  I always thought that part of the key to Ma Maison’s success, beyond Wolf’s cooking, was the fact that it never took itself too seriously. Patrick once overheard a couple of regulars joking that they’d rather have cheeseburgers than this fancy French stuff, so he promptly sent a busboy down the street to a place called Great American Burger to bring back a sack of those all-American sandwiches. Borrowing an idea from Paris, he launched an annual Waiters’ Race, in which servers from restaurants all over town fast-walked a little over half a mile carrying a tray with a wine bottle and two full glasses of wine. (In case of a tie, the waiter who had the most wine left in the glasses won.) He once served lunch to Monty Python’s hot-air balloon of a character, Mr. Creosote, in the parking lot, because he couldn’t fit through the door. Another time, Chippendales dancers took over the place.

  I was never sure exactly how Patrick and Wolf felt about each other. Patrick surely realized that much of the success of the restaurant was due to Wolf—not just his food but his easygoing personality, a counterbalance to Patrick’s own more deliberate way of dealing with people. And Wolf surely realized that he had been given an extraordinary forum, a chance not only to develop his own culinary talents further but also to show them off to a moneyed and at least putatively refined clientele. But while Patrick let Wolf do pretty much what he wanted to do in the kitchen, he never fully involved him in the management, even though Wolf owned ten percent of the place, and didn’t seem receptive to Wolf’s suggestion that the restaurant’s decor should be upgraded to suit the quality of the food. It was inevitable that Wolf would eventually want to open something on his own, and in 1981 he started making plans to do just that. Initially, he envisioned a fifty-fifty partnership with Patrick, but Patrick held out for a fifty-one percent interest, and Wolf refused. When he quit Ma Maison, Wolf has said, it was like a bad divorce. Patrick repossessed the car he had given Wolf and cut his company credit card in half in front of him.

  Back when he’d been working at L’Oustau de Baumanière, Wolf and the rest of the kitchen crew used to spend their nights off at an eccentric little place called Chez Gu in Salon-de-Provence. A haphazardly appointed bistro with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, Chez Gu was a popular stop for French showbiz types driving between Paris and Cannes or Monte Carlo, and the walls were covered with white plates signed in Magic Marker by the likes of Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel, Brigitte Bardot, and Jean-Pierre Rampal. The menu offered its illustrious clientele caviar, smoked salmon, and foie gras, but the specialties were steak (in eleven varieties) and pizza cooked in a wood-burning oven built by Gu—short for Auguste—himself.

  This was precisely the kind of high-low place Wolf had decided that he wanted to open in L.A., but all the experts told him that wood-burning ovens were illegal in California, and good Provençal-style pizza was key to his vision, so he put the idea on hold. On a jaunt to the Bay Area one day, though, he happened by the newly opened Café at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and—voilà!—there was a wood-burning oven happily and efficiently turning out pizzas and more. The ovens weren’t illegal after all. Wolf got the name of the oven’s maker from Alice Waters and drew up a business plan. He found an available location: the rambling old bungalow, on a hill just above a car rental office on the Sunset Strip, that had most recently housed my old friend Misha Markarian’s Armenian restaurant, Kavkaz. Wolf envisioned checkered tablecloths like Chez Gu’s, and thought he might call the place Mt. Vesuvius.

  By this time, Wolf and his first wife, a pretty French waitress, had split up, and he was living with a flamboyant Bronx-born interior designer named Barbara Lazaroff (they married in 1984 in an elaborate ceremony—the bride made her entrance riding sidesaddle on a white horse—at L’Oustau de la Baumanière). With her encouragement, he solicited investments from a couple of food-loving dentists he knew and from a small group of other Ma Maison regulars, and set about creating his restaurant.

  Lazaroff quickly put a stop to the checkered tablecloths, and the name Mt. Vesuvius reminded her unfavorably of Arthur Avenue, the bustling Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx, so she vetoed that, too. The Ma Maison regular Giorgio Moroder, who was to write the scores for films like Top Gun and Flashdance, suggested that Wolf call the place Spago—the Italian word for “string,” the diminutive form of which is “spaghetti.” Wolf liked it, both because it was simple and pronounceable and because nobody would know what it meant, and thus nobody would come to the place with preconceived ideas.

  Lazaroff began designing the interior. Any hint of Chez Gu was banished, and instead Lazaroff came up with something that would seem ho-hum today but that was revolutionary thirty years ago: a dining room that was beach-bar casual, with bare floors, wire-mesh chairs, bright contemporary art on the bleached wood walls, and an open kitchen. It was informal, raucous, fun; it was unambiguously Californian.

  When Wolf first opened Spago, though, local gastronomes and restaurant critics didn’t celebrate; they groaned. Ma Maison may have been casual in decor, but it maintained the usual French-restaurant conventions in other ways, and Puck’s cooking there would have seemed at home in the most formal of dining rooms. Why did this talented young man, then, leave haute cuisine to run an oversize bistro—something, remember, that simply wasn’t done back in those days? And how could he be wasting his considerable abilities on pizza?

  But Wolf, as it turned out, knew exactly what he was doing. He once told me that he thought there’d be a lot better food in the world if chefs cooked the kinds of things they liked to eat themselves, and that’s basically what he did, celebrating California vegetables in his chopped salad of produce from the estimable Chino Farm near San Diego, roasting whole fish of impeccable freshness in his wood-burning oven, smoking duck over tea leaves instead of drenching it in sticky orange sauce. And those pizzas? Forget mozzarella and pepperoni; Wolf topped his with fresh Santa Barbara spot prawns, California goat cheese, and homemade duck sausage. Spago confounded the critics, delighted its customers, and ultimately changed the nature of dining in America.

  Reviewing a new collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s early work in New York magazine a few years ago, the critic Jacob Rubin noted that Vonnegut’s “influence is so ubiquitous as to be invisible.” The same could be said, in a very different context, of Wolf. The innovations, both culinary and stylistic, that were introduced and/or propagated by Spago are so many and have become so commonplace that it may be all but impossible to remember—or believe—that they weren’t always with us. Before Spago, pizza was almost never seen outside pizzerias and was certainly never cooked by people who called themselves “chefs”—and nobody topped pizza with goat cheese or Santa Barbara shrimp. Wood-burning ovens were virtually unknown (even the old-line East Coast pizzerias burned coal, not wood). Pasta was rare outside Italian restaurants, and restaurant guides had no “Mediterranean” category. Kitchens fully open to the dining room were unheard of, unless you counted sushi bars or coffee shops. And there were certainly no other restaurants where you could eat food of Spago’s quality in your T-shirt and jeans—especially not with Sean Connery at the next table and Dolly Parton over by the window and Jodie Foster coming through the front door.

  Spago took the mystery and the ceremony out of great eating, and democratized the experience of dining out, which even (especially?) the rich and famous loved. It also galvanized the local dining scene, to the point that L.A. became, for more than a decade, the most exciting and trend-setting restaurant city in the country. And it introduced America to what had been an utterly unknown concept here: that of not just the celebrity restaurant but the celebrity chef. “The original Spago on Sunset,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold later wrote, “was to New American Cooking what the Armory Show was to modern painting or Meet the Beatles was to rock & roll: the one that changed the rules.”

  On opening night in 1982, Wolf once told me, he and Lazaroff stood by the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room and wondered if anyon
e was going to come. Some did, but it took a few days for the restaurant to fill completely. And then it never stopped. Wolf has always said that he never set out to have a “Hollywood” restaurant, and that he got more pleasure out of providing a unique food experience to a tourist couple from Toronto than he did from pampering the rich and famous—but he was smart enough to realize that the tourist couple from Toronto came to Spago at least partially because he was pampering the rich and famous there, and he cultivated his more luminary customers with great enthusiasm and skill.

  All the movie business people and local power brokers who had frequented Ma Maison now came to Spago. (Actually, many of them remained loyal to both restaurants; Spago wasn’t open for lunch, so it was possible to enjoy a midday meal on the Ma Maison patio and then come to Spago after dark.) Wolf was a matchmaker more than once; he engineered a flirtation at the restaurant between the ur–Bond Girl Ursula Andress and the much younger actor Harry Hamlin, for instance (the two stayed together for four years and had a son). He juggled “don’t-invite-’ems” like a diplomat—rival Hollywood columnists George Christy and Army Archerd, for instance, or two movie producers whose partnership had dissolved acrimoniously and were always trying to one-up each other for the best table—staggering their reservations or simply charming them so thoroughly that they forgot their feuds. And he indulged the whims of his regulars in the best of humor: Carol Channing brought all her own food, in silver containers, until somebody told her that Spago’s vegetables were organic and she deigned to start ordering off the menu; Suzanne Pleshette would arrive carrying a Tupperware container of her own pasta sauce. At one stage, scores of Spago customers were on the then-trendy Pritikin diet, and Wolf would gamely prepare them dishes according to the Pritikin cookbook. They always claimed it was the best diet food they’d ever had. (He never told them why: that he was adding butter—a Pritikin no-no—to everything.) The only person he banned from Spago was Patrick—though years later, he relented and the two are now on cordial terms again.

  Spago became absurdly successful; its phone number, unlike Ma Maison’s, was listed, but it was very seldom answered (regulars called Wolf or one of the maîtres d’hôtel directly for reservations), and for years it was by far the toughest reservation in town.

  The year after he opened Spago, some of his original investors wanted Wolf to duplicate his success with a similar place on the Westside. He wasn’t interested in copying Spago, he said, so instead he rethought Chinese food and opened Chinois on Main in Santa Monica. This gave his wife (who liked to say, “I’m not his wife—he’s my husband”) the chance to develop what became her extravagantly colorful, artisanal-tchotchke style of interior design (a Venice artist friend of mine cracked, “Doesn’t Chinois look like she just went to the Pacific Design Center and took one soap dish from every showroom?”). It also unleashed on the American dining scene what came to be known as “Asian fusion” food. For better or for worse, there’d be no P.F. Chang’s or Roy’s today if it hadn’t been for Chinois on Main.

  More restaurants and a host of brand extensions followed—most notably a line of frozen pizzas. (Wolf got the idea from Johnny Carson, he said, who’d take a dozen of his pizzas home after dinner at Spago on Sunday nights and freeze them himself to eat later in the week.) Wolf was on his way to becoming the most famous chef in America.

  WHEN WOLF LEFT TO OPEN SPAGO, Patrick replaced him almost at once with a chef from the acclaimed La Ciboulette in Paris, Claude Segal, and at first the daily lunch scene on the patio hardly seemed to miss a beat. When Segal left to start his own place, Bistango, he was in turn succeeded by Jean-Pierre Lemanissier, who had apprenticed under Paul Bocuse and then cooked at L’Ermitage, an elegant French restaurant not far from Ma Maison. Both Segal and Lemanissier were excellent chefs, but neither won the hearts of the restaurant’s blue-chip clientele the way that Wolf had (Segal came closer), and after a while, Ma Maison seemed to be losing steam. Patrick’s reputation suffered a blow when John Sweeney, who was Segal’s sous-chef, killed Dominique Dunne, and a rumor went around that Patrick had paid for Sweeney’s attorney (he vehemently denied it). Dunne’s father, Dominick, and her uncle, John Gregory Dunne, married to Joan Didion, called on their many influential friends to boycott the restaurant, which at least some of them did. When People magazine did a long, breezy profile of Patrick in the fall of 1983, linking him romantically to a pretty ex-model named Kathy Gallagher, ten years his junior, who ran a buzzy bar and grill down the street from Ma Maison, he shrugged off the seriousness of the relationship to me by saying, “C’est une bonne pub’ ”—it’s good publicity—in a tone that made me think that he felt he really needed some.

  In 1985 Patrick sold Ma Maison and its adjacent cooking school, as well as the half-acre lot they stood on, for something over $2 million. The following year, professing himself tired of French food, he opened a place he called the Hollywood Diner. Ruth, who had become the restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times—the continuation of a career that was to later include the posts of food editor for the paper, restaurant critic for The New York Times, and editor in chief of Gourmet—reviewed the place shortly after it opened. “This is not, obviously, your ordinary diner,” she wrote. “It has valet parking. It takes credit cards and reservations. It has caviar (with miniature pancakes and sour cream), fresh oysters and sauteed shrimp sprinkled among the hamburgers, hot dogs and pork chops. Unfortunately, what it does not seem to have at the moment is very good food.” Her review was typical of the critical reception the place got, and Patrick closed it after about a year.

  Patrick took one more stab at L.A. restaurant success: He sold the Ma Maison name to the French-based Accor Corporation, which applied it to the $55 million Sofitel Hotel property it built from scratch on the corner of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards. When the hotel opened, late in 1988, the Los Angeles Times reported that “Jack Lemmon, Ed McMahon and Suzanne Pleshette arrived by horse-drawn carriages last Monday at the ribbon cutting.” Patrick had the title of food and beverage director for the hotel, and his showplace was a large, airy, comfortable restaurant also called, of course, Ma Maison. This time, Ruth was a fan, writing that, “with its widely spaced tables, its carpet and its thoughtful service, the restaurant has the air of the old Ma Maison—but one that has grown up and gotten dignity.” I went a few times, and always ate well enough, but, dignity or not, the place just never seemed very interesting to me. It was a good hotel restaurant, even a very good one, but not much more. Celebrities continued to come for a while, out of loyalty to Patrick, but the new Ma Maison never became the new Ma Maison.

  Patrick left the hotel in 1991, and both the hotel and its dining room were subsequently renamed. He dropped out of sight for a few years, and it turned out he had been diagnosed with throat cancer. He beat the disease, got a consulting job with the Hiram Walker spirits company, and took an assignment from them in Atlanta. He stayed in Georgia, getting married to a woman he’d met there and buying an abandoned gas station in the town of Newnan, southwest of Atlanta, which he converted into Gaby’s Café & Bistro Etc. (named in honor of his mother, Gabrielle Sirigo). He and his wife now live in Hogansville, down the road a piece, where he publishes a magazine called 85 South, as in the I-85, which runs from Petersburg, Virginia, to Montgomery, Alabama.

  Spago continued to thrive well into the nineties, but in a sense it became a victim of its own impact on the American food scene. A celebrity-filled restaurant serving pasta and pizza and organic vegetables was no longer a novelty, and Wolf began to retrench, revisiting the idea of cooking more serious food for a clientele that was becoming more serious about food. The original Spago had, in a sense, been cobbled together—the too-small parking lot out back sloped downhill, to the dismay of more than one high-heel-wearing beauty after a few glasses of wine; the “back room” had originally been an unheated, uninsulated storeroom and still always felt a little bit like one—and the open kitchen began to seem inadequate for the larger menu and more deman
ding dishes Wolf was introducing.

  In 1997 Wolf convened a meeting of his original investors, telling them that his landlord wouldn’t renew his lease at a reasonable price and that he was going to move the restaurant to Beverly Hills. He offered to buy them out. A few of them balked, and tied up the transition in arbitration for a couple of years. Wolf went ahead and opened the new place anyway, and for three years there were two Spagos in town, no doubt confusing out-of-towners—but giving them the chance to finally eat at the legendary original, since most of the famous people now patronized the Beverly Hills establishment, where Wolf was most likely to be found.