In 2000 Wolf and Lazaroff—who were by then personally estranged, though they remained (and remain) professionally entwined—finally closed the old place down. I was there on the restaurant’s last night, sitting at a big table across from Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, listening to Don Rickles insult Aaron Spelling on the mike, eating Chino Farm chopped vegetable salad, and toasting the demise of a great L.A. institution.
The new Spago was a larger, fancier iteration of the old place, with the kitchen concealed like kitchens used to be and a more serious menu. Under Wolf and his longtime executive chef, Lee Hefter, it is easily one of the best restaurants in Los Angeles, but a very different one from the original. There are other, more casual Spagos in Las Vegas, Maui, and Beaver Creek, Colorado. Wolf also runs (at this writing) twenty other fine dining restaurants around the country (and one each in London and Singapore) and his company has more than forty Wolfgang Puck Express and other casual dining units in airports, shopping malls, and museums nationwide. His lines of canned soups and frozen pizzas and entrées are sold in every supermarket. He has a huge catering business (for years, he’s provided elaborate dinners for the Academy Awards’ Governors Ball), has written five best-selling cookbooks, and grosses an estimated $20 million a year selling his signature line of cookware on the Home Shopping Network alone. His companies bring in almost $400 million annually. A recent survey reported that his name is recognized in seventy-seven percent of urban households in this country, and another calculated that his name is better known than Martha Stewart’s.
Chapter Twelve
HOSTELLERIE DU VIEUX MOULIN,
Bouilland, France (194?– )
WHEN I QUIT COAST IN 1975, ONE OF THE MAGAZINES I started freelancing for was Apartment Life, a sort of precursor to Real Simple. (I remember describing it to somebody at the time as a magazine that told you how to make a coffee table out of thread spools, which, of course, was a little unfair.) My first assignment for it was a short piece on peppercorns—black, white, green, and pink, the latter two just starting to appear on our tables through the influence of nouvelle cuisine. My article was published in December 1978, and for the next few years, I wrote fairly regularly on food and, increasingly, wine for the magazine.
In 1981 Apartment Life disappeared, or rather evolved into a more grown-up publication, christened Metropolitan Home. Met Home, as everybody was soon calling it, was to become my lifeline—my best market as a freelancer, my training ground as a late-twentieth-century magazine editor (it was at the magazine’s Manhattan office that I first tentatively tried using a computer), and my entrée into the New York food and magazine worlds. It was also where I learned a very important lesson about writing.
At first, I kept sending Met Home basically the same kinds of meet-the-contract pieces I’d done for Apartment Life. Then one day the editor in chief, a calm, confident Connecticut-bred professional named Dorothy Kalins, kicked something back to me. I had been assigned an article on vintage port, a genre of wine I’d been fortunate enough to be able to enjoy in some profusion, thanks to my Saturday lunch friends at Café Swiss. I thought I knew the subject pretty well, then, and I approached my article the way I’d approached similar pieces for years: I assembled some research materials and synthesized them into a dozen paragraphs of Port 101, then sat down with a tableful of bottles, bought at Met Home’s expense, tasted through them, and made notes on each one, to be crafted into prose that I hoped would evoke their flavors and aromas.
Sorry, said Dorothy when she read the piece, but this isn’t what we want. You can get Port 101 anywhere. A little bit of background and some tasting notes are fine, but what we really want to know is how you feel about Port, how and when you first tasted it, what you thought when you did, what feelings it evokes in you now. Most of the editors I’d worked for up to that point had discouraged the use of the first person, on the grounds that what people were interested in was the subject matter, not the writer. Fair enough. But now that Dorothy mentioned it, I realized that what could make my stories interesting (I hoped) to other people wasn’t that they were about me but that they were about the experience of discovery; I could be an educated, well-prepared novice taking readers with me as I learned about Port (or anything else). Years later, when Dorothy and Christopher Hirsheimer and I were developing the editorial voice for Saveur, we agreed that the proper tone for us to adopt wasn’t one of impeccable authority but one of informed curiosity: Hey, we’ve never really stopped and taken a good look at Burgundy or Venice or the Anderson Valley, either, but we’ve done our homework and we have the right connections and we’re going to go find out what these places are all about, and you’re invited to come along.
My freelance relationship with Met Home turned out to be something of a dream job. In the magazine’s first decade, I wrote dozens of articles for its pages. The majority of these were about food or wine, but Dorothy also let me cover art and design on occasion, which I loved. I interviewed and wrote about David Hockney, Terry Allen, and the architect Charles Moore. I even wrote the entire feature section for a special issue, in February 1989, on a DIFFA—Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS—showhouse, interviewing Michael Graves, Andrée Putman, Mario Buatta, Santo Loquasto, Hockney again, and all the other contributors to the project.
But food and drink remained my main beat, and I could pretty much pick and choose what I wanted to write about. My piece on “new American bistros” brought me for the first time to Houston, to visit Cafe Annie, whose owner-chef, Robert Del Grande, later became a good friend. I introduced American readers to the great Paris chef Guy Savoy, and trekked up into the eastern Alps to Merano to write about the ill-starred Villa Mozart. I covered the opening of the original Rattlesnake Club in Denver, first of a proposed chain created by Michael McCarty and the Detroit chef Jimmy Schmidt, and the launch of Mark Miller’s Red Sage in Washington, D.C. I wrote about three-star restaurants and cafés alike, and offered detailed dining suggestions for Boston, Chicago, Washington, Barcelona, Paris, Berlin. I wrote about the wines of Long Island, the Napa Valley, the Languedoc; about Alsatian eau-de-vie and bourbon. Somehow, imperceptibly, along the way, I went from being just another freelance contributor to being part of the magazine, a sort of honorary editor. I was never officially employed by Met Home, but I was on the masthead, and on the circulation list for memos; my opinions of writers and proposed stories were solicited; I helped brainstorm and plan and plot direction.
In 1989, in partnership with a big British publishing house, Met Home launched a U.K. edition, edited by a delightful Australian named Dee Nolan, and this became another of my major markets. The U.K. Met Home used longer pieces than the American magazine, and paid more for them. I did a certain amount of recycling, in both directions, but also did a lot of original work for Met Home U.K. I had great fun writing about restaurants in Scotland that were developing a modern cuisine based on traditional recipes. (As an old philosophy student, I was fascinated to learn along the way that David Hume had retired from philosophical studies in later life to devote himself to cookery; sheep’s head soup was his specialty.)
Another article I enjoyed doing was “Conran’s Paris,” for which I followed the estimable British designer and restaurateur Terence Conran around that city for a day, with Dee and a photographer in tow, while he introduced me to his favorite restaurants and shops. As a young man, Terence had worked briefly as a plongeur, or dishwasher, at a restaurant called La Méditerranée, and when we happened to walk past it, Dee suggested that we take a picture of him outside. I had a better idea, and went in, introduced myself to the proprietor, explained who I was with, and asked if we could possibly shoot the former plongeur down in the basement kitchen, at the sink. He was game, and so was Terence, and the photo (and the story of its origins) helped make the article.
In the first few years of our marriage, Leslie and I traveled together frequently, going to Europe at least once a year, usually for three weeks or so in the summer. Our trips, of co
urse, were built around food, sometimes on assignment for Met Home, sometimes not. In Nice, we always dined at Barale, a kind of museum of old farm implements and Niçois bric-a-brac, where the energetic, wizened Madame Barale served a fixed-price meal of local specialties, from pissaladière and “le vrai” salade niçoise to ravioli with meat sauce and the emblematic Niçois dish of stewed air-dried cod called estocaficada—and then passed out song cards, cranked up an old Victrola, put on a scratchy 78 record, and made everybody sing along with the city’s unofficial anthem, “Nissa la Bella.” Or we’d go to the matchbox-size La Merenda, which had no telephone, took no credit cards, and seated only about twenty diners at a time, on tiny wooden stools—but served absolutely delicious versions of soupe au pistou, merda de can (literally “dogshit,” but actually Swiss chard gnocchi), and tripe à la niçoise.
One day we drove up the coast to eat bouillabaisse in a form we had never imagined it at the vertiginous La Roquebrune, on a sliver of cliff above the Mediterranean, beginning with a rich stock dappled with rouille made at the table and continuing on with a veritable fleet of fish and shellfish—gurnard, wrasse, langoustines, the indispensable rascasse—presented on a huge tray of free-form cork and laboriously boned and shelled before our eyes by the slightly rakish looking white-haired patron; the process took almost half an hour, but the results were worth the wait.
Across the Italian border from Nice, we discovered Ligurian cuisine—things like lasagna with pesto and meat-stuffed ravioli with dried porcini at La Cambusiere in Albissola Marina; the addictive focaccia col formaggio at Manuelina in Recco; and, most memorably, an entire repertoire of definitive local specialties at an extraordinary establishment, now long gone, called A Çigheûgna, “The Stork” in the local dialect. A Çigheûgna was a one-of-a-kind place, way up, farther than you thought it could possibly be, in the hills above Rapallo. It was open only Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons, strictly by reservation. As far as we could tell, the signora of the house did all the cooking, alone, while her husband and a uniformed serving girl ran the dining room, which had big windows looking out on the far-distant coastline, and wooden furniture that was obviously homemade. There was no menu or wine list. We drank unlabeled Piedmontese dolcetto and barbera, made by relatives of the proprietors, and ate what they brought us, which was plenty, wheeled out to the tables on big three-tiered wooden carts. First came focaccia, glistening with olive oil. Then cima alla genovese (cold veal breast wrapped around a forcemeat of puréed organ meats studded with vegetables and thinly sliced, sort of a Genoese ballotine), rice croquettes, homemade salami served with fried beignet-like breadsticks, two kinds of ravioli (one filled with finely ground veal, sweetbreads, and liver and sauced with herb butter, the other with a stuffing of cheese and herbs and a light meat sauce), tagliatelle al pesto, meat-stuffed vegetables (onions, sweet yellow peppers, hot round green ones), roasted rabbit covered in fresh herbs, potatoes in a sauce of porcini mushrooms and parsley . . . and finally dessert: homemade peach ice cream, little meringues, and a square of golden tart dough topped with apricot preserves. This remains one of the most memorable meals of my life, and was one of the main inspirations for Flavors of the Riviera, the book I later did about the cooking of Liguria and Nice. I’m not sure why I never wrote about it for Met Home.
AT ONE POINT I set myself the challenge of finding an undiscovered gem of a restaurant somewhere in the French countryside, a kind of rural counterpart to Guy Savoy in Paris, a place I could “discover” for Met Home readers. My friend Michael Roberts, the chef at Trumps in West Hollywood and one of the underrated, unjustly forgotten pioneers of California cuisine, recommended just the place to me: a modest inn called Hostellerie du Vieux Moulin, hidden away in the tiny hamlet of Bouilland, near Beaune in Burgundy. (Michael, in turn, had heard about it from the American-born, Burgundy-based wine exporter Becky Wasserman, who lived in Bouilland and ran her business from the village.)
On my next trip to France, then, I found my way to the place, staying and eating there for a couple of days, and enjoying it very much. It was just what I’d been looking for. The morning of my departure, I paid my bill and then told the proprietors, a young couple named Isabelle and Jean-Pierre Silva, that I was a writer and would like to ask them a few questions about the place. They were astonished. This was not how French food critics worked at all, they said. I should have told them that I was a writer, so they could have taken care of me properly. I assured them that I had been very well taken care of, and that going anonymously and paying one’s own way was how we did things in America. I added, jokingly, that Americans were better critics anyway. They laughed, and joked right back at me about how honored they had been to host a great gastronomic expert like me. (Ever after, when I’d call to make a reservation, I’d announce myself as “Le plus grand critique gastronomique du monde,” which could mean either the greatest or the largest food critic in the world.) I decided right then that I liked the Silvas as well as their food, and for more than a decade after my first visit, Le Vieux Moulin was an inevitable stop on my frequent French itineraries—my home in Burgundy—connecting me to rural France as surely as I felt Claude had connected me to Paris.
Bouilland is an anomaly in the Burgundy region: a village with no grapevines. It’s too cold, say locals. Set in a narrow channel of grazing land between high hills, more glen than valley, it doesn’t get a lot of sunlight, and has a chilly microclimate that has earned it the nickname “the little Burgundian Switzerland.” Bouilland has a population of fewer than two hundred souls, and there isn’t much there other than a few farms, a small church, a café, and, on the banks of a slender stream called the Rhoin, the Hostellerie du Vieux Moulin.
There was once a working water mill on the site, hence the name (a vieux moulin is an old mill), but it has long since stopped functioning. The original millhouse, vintage 1860, and another old building were all that remained when, sometime after World War II, one Madame Lebreuil repurposed the place as a bar tabac with a large terrace giving onto the Rhoin. Trout ran in the river, and Mme. Lebreuil served them to her customers, à la crème—just trout, nothing else, according to the American wine writer Eunice Fried in her charming book Burgundy. Later, at the request of regulars who had probably had enough trout, she added pâté, sausage, and a few other dishes. In the mid-1960s, she sold the place to an amateur cook and former sportswriter for the Burgundian regional newspaper Le Bien Public, Raymond Hériot. It turned out that he had a natural talent in the kitchen, and he earned a good reputation and eventually a Michelin star for his straightforward interpretations of such traditional French dishes as veal kidneys in white wine sauce, poularde en vessie (chicken stuffed with foie gras and truffles and cooked sealed in a pig’s bladder, a specialty of the legendary Fernard Point at his seminal La Pyramid in Vienne), and trout served not à la crème but au bleu—cooked live in vinegar-spiked court bouillon.
Hériot was reportedly an unpredictable character. The GaultMillau guide, awarding him a more than respectable fifteen points out of a possible twenty, wrote that he was “a man with two faces: sometimes a thundering Jupiter denouncing those who dare to criticize, sometimes a delightful being in whom, when he talks about cuisine—especially his own—one finds a true poet.” Elsewhere, it described him as papillonnant, flighty. When Michelin took away his star in 1978, presumably for reasons having more to do with his cooking than with his temperament, Hériot reportedly went into a funk and began to think about selling the place. In 1981, he did just that.
The new proprietors were the Silvas. Jean-Pierre, who was born in Lyon in 1957, had decided by the age of eleven or twelve that he wanted to cook for a living. After his family moved to the south of France when he was a teenager, he found a job apprenticing in a restaurant kitchen in Antibes. There he met Isabelle. The two got married in 1976, and the following year, he landed a good job cooking at a highly regarded restaurant called La Mourachonne, in Mouans-Sartoux, in the hills about halfway between Antibes and Grasse
. The Silvas saved their money as Jean-Pierre honed his skills, and they started looking around the Côte d’Azur for a small restaurant they could buy. Such enterprises were expensive in that part of France, though, and one day, on a trout-fishing trip in Burgundy, Jean-Pierre discovered Le Vieux Moulin. A short time later, after a brief stint cooking at a ski resort in the mountains above Nice, he and Isabelle bought the place.
I CAN QUOTE from memory the first few lines of my piece on Le Vieux Moulin for Met Home: “One afternoon not long ago in Burgundy, I bit into a carrot. It was tiny and neatly beveled, lightly steamed and glazed in butter. . . . I thought for a moment that it was perhaps the most perfect thing I had ever tasted.” If I had been offered a truffle instead at that very moment, I continued, I wasn’t at all sure that I would have preferred it. The carrot was really that good, but it was also in part a metaphor for the quality of the raw materials the restaurant used in general. Long before “local” and “farm to table” became marketing clichés, Jean-Pierre used vegetables grown in a little market garden just across the road; his baby pigeon came from one nearby farm, his superlative goat cheese from another. It wasn’t just the ingredients, though; Jean-Pierre’s food was unfailingly fresh in conception and always full of flavor. He had a gift for matching flavors and textures (he used little wisps of grapefruit and a scattering of pink peppercorns, for instance, to turn paper-thin slices of raw sea bass and wild salmon into a kind of French ceviche, unlike anything I’d ever imagined), and his technique was flawless; never did he serve an overcooked piece of fish or fowl, an unbalanced sauce, a soggy bit of pastry. He didn’t yet have the polish of a Guy Savoy, but he clearly had the makings of a first-rate chef.
Isabelle ran the dining room and schooled herself in wine, especially Burgundy, as Jean-Pierre kept getting better and better in the kitchen. In 1986, the Guide Michelin awarded Le Vieux Moulin a well-deserved star, and the Silvas responded by beefing up the staff—a maître d’hôtel was hired—and converting the dining room from its rustic original form (for a time there was actually a gently plashing little fountain in the middle of the place) into something sleek and hard-edged, with a shiny interior canopy and black-and-white color scheme. Before long, the place had earned a second Michelin star.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 20