Sometimes, I’d have just local seafood, simply prepared—squid sautéed with garlic and parsley, red mullet on the grill, mussels steamed in white wine. Other times, I’d sample classic Mercader specialties such as his fava bean salad with mint, his salt cod gratinéed with garlic mousseline, his veal loin with samfaina cream. Probably my favorite Mercader dish was perdiu amb farcellets de col, cabbage stuffed with boneless partridge. The chef created it in honor of his friend Josep Pla, the distinguished essayist and laureate of the landscape and seascape of the Costa Brava, and also a noted gourmet who wrote a wonderful book about Catalan cooking called El que hem menjat, What We Ate. One of Pla’s favorite dishes was roast partridge, traditionally served with cabbage stuffed with pork forcemeat on the side. As he got older and started losing teeth, he found it increasingly difficult to gnaw the partridge off its bones, so Mercader invented this preparation for him, melding main dish with accompaniment. It was an intensely savory dish, homey but complex in flavor and texture, and typified for me the imagination and culinary good sense that Mercader possessed, and obviously passed on to his son-in-law.
For years, habitués of the Hotel Empordà, as it was eventually renamed yet again, had called the dining room, offhandedly and affectionately, “el motel”—and in 2011, in honor of the establishment’s fiftieth anniversary, Jaume officially renamed the restaurant just that. He has continued to extend the menu, recasting familiar regional ingredients and dishes into new forms just as his father-in-law did. He makes a “pepper steak” of fresh tuna, wrapped around a denuded ham bone, then braised in red wine with black peppercorns. He turns monkfish into a warm terrine, then tops it with Mercader’s garlic mousseline. One afternoon, he proudly brought me one of his latest creations, combining tiny snails and the sweet meat of pigs’ feet, two common ingredients in the baroque multi-ingredient stews of the region, into a rich, complexly flavored, completely original terrine. Another time, he came up with a “paella” made not with rice but with lentils, and ornamented it with minuscule, vividly fresh scampi. And his black-eyed peas with shreds of crispy pig’s ear has been known to convert even picky eaters who ordinarily eat no part of the pig except pork chops and bacon. There is nowhere that I’d rather eat in Spain.
IN 1986, IN THE MIDST OF MY RESEARCH, I took time out for an interlude of sheer gastronomic indulgence, a week of pure and excessive eating and drinking with no notebook in hand but some of America’s leading culinary figures in tow. I’d become something of a regular at many of Barcelona’s better eating places by this time, and word was starting to get around the local culinary community that there was an American writer in town asking serious questions about the region’s cooking. One day, the gruff-voiced, highly respected local restaurant critic Luís Bettónica conveyed to me an irresistible invitation: His friends at the Barcelona Restaurant Association would like to fly in half a dozen or so top American chefs for a culinary tour of the city, at the association’s expense; in return, the chefs would agree to cook a dinner based on Catalan ingredients for a group of local restaurateurs and food writers. Would I be interested in choosing the chefs and bringing them along on my next visit? Of course I would. I loved the idea, because it would give me a chance both to introduce some of my American chef friends to the food I’d been going on about in recent months and to help show off to my new Catalan acquaintances some of what was going on gastronomically in my own country.
Back in California, I started assembling the cast. Alice Waters was a given; more than anyone, she had championed Mediterranean cooking in America. Jonathan Waxman, then almost midway through his tenure as chef and coproprietor of the California-inspired Jams in Manhattan, was another easy choice, partly because we had become good friends by then and he would have killed me if I’d left him out, but also because he was a natural, intuitive cook, who I knew would be able to meet with aplomb the challenge of cooking a high-profile meal in a strange city. With the two coasts taken care of, I decided that I should bring somebody to represent other parts of the country, and thought at once of Mark Miller, who had made a name for himself cooking southwestern-inspired food at the Santa Fe Bar & Grill in Berkeley and was now working on a restaurant in Santa Fe itself, to be called the Coyote Cafe. To represent the Midwest, I invited Michigan-born Bradley Ogden, an amiable young chef who—though he was then in the kitchen at Campton Place in San Francisco—had come to prominence as chef at the American Restaurant in Kansas City. Because I wanted to acknowledge New England, and because I thought we needed another woman in the group, I added someone I’d met only once, Lydia Shire, then chef at Seasons in the Bostonian Hotel in Boston, and a cook whose food was big and bold in a way that I thought might appeal to the Catalans. Finally, to the delight of the publicity-conscious restaurant association, I invited two journalists to record the proceedings: my friend and former New West restaurant critic Charles Perry and—how could I resist?—Ruth Reichl, who had by that time become food editor of the Los Angeles Times.
A problem arose our first morning in town: It quickly became apparent that our hosts had arranged a program for us that included guided tours of the city and meals at a succession of old-line restaurants—the ones at the heart of the restaurant association—most of which, frankly, were a long way from the city’s best. I wanted to show the group my Barcelona, and let them enjoy it at their own pace. We were good guests for a few hours, going along with a very pleasant young man from the city tourist board as he walked us along the Ramblas and through the Boquería, and then, happily, led us into Boadas, a tiny triangular bar known for its excellent cocktails and its showoff bartenders. Here, out of earshot of our guide, we agreed on mutiny. From a pay phone outside the bar, I called Luís Bettónica and explained the situation; if it wouldn’t put him in a difficult position, I said, we wanted to be on our own, choosing our own restaurants, and would pay for our own meals—and, of course, still cook that dinner. He gave us his blessing and promised to square things with our hosts.
For the next six days, loosed from our keepers, we consumed Barcelona. Bradley, who had been to Europe only once previously, years earlier, before he’d become a chef, was quiet but obviously wide-eyed. Mark, on the other hand, was full of energy from the start, scrappy and opinionated, ready to sample almost any foodstuff, head off down almost any alleyway. Alice walked around with a contagious sense of wonderment, eyes wide, asking what everything was, sometimes exclaiming in delighted recognition, sometimes shaking her head briskly, in that way she has that reminds you that she was once a Montessori teacher, as if to say, “I don’t care if that’s something everybody eats here, it’s not very good.” Waxman was relaxed—he’d been here before—and seemed to be standing back from the fray a little, sipping his cocktail, popping a few more deep-fried whole baby squid into his mouth. Lydia was quiet and observant, coming to life in the market when we’d pass a butcher’s stall (she was probably the only one who knew what all the animal parts were, and how to cook them) or vegetable stand where she’d spy a heap of some Central American root vegetable that only she recognized. Charlie was studious and at first a bit restrained, but he kept a list of every morsel of food we ate at every meal and in between. Ruth just seemed in her element, roaming a fascinating city with people who were mostly longtime friends, addressing every dish with her usual critical equanimity. Like most good restaurant critics, she wanted to like everything.
Our first meal after Boadas was at Can Solé, a famous seafood restaurant in Barceloneta, the city’s old fishermen’s quarter. An aquarium’s worth of perfectly fresh, mostly local raw fish and shellfish was arrayed on beds of ice near the entrance to the place, and there was much exclamation and inquiry from the chefs as we looked it over. Once we got settled at a big table in the upstairs dining room, we ordered almost everything. We shared big dishes of cuttlefish in tomato sauce; whole giant shrimp fried golden brown in their shells; monkfish and potatoes in caramelized garlic sauce; and, of course, espardenyes.
Over the next few da
ys, we went to Petit París and Florián and Eldorado Petit. We drank constantly, starting our days with carajillos—cups of dense black coffee spiked with anisette or Catalan brandy—around eleven every morning. We went back to Boadas more than once, and to a comfortable, old-fashioned place called Dry Martini, where we drank cava or the “cocktail del día” (every bar seemed to have one, its name scrawled on a little blackboard or carefully lettered on small cards along the counter). Siestas were popular after lunch, which meant around five or six in the afternoon, and then it would be time for an aperitif, followed by a wine-fueled dinner, followed by a nightcap or three at Tres Torres or some other soigné “design bar.”
One night I took everybody to La Vie en Rose, a dark, Piaf-themed watering hole in the Barrio Chino, which isn’t literally a Chinatown, as its name suggests, but an old-fashioned seedy neighborhood of little urine-soaked streets off the lower end of the Ramblas. After a round or two of sidecars accompanied by the sound of scratchy 78s playing “Non, je ne regrette rien” and, yes, “La vie en rose,” we headed off down the street back toward civilization. A tall, gaudily garbed transvestite prostitute walking past us must have assumed, from our singing and laughing, that we were making fun of her (nobody was, as far as I know) and pulled a little can of pepper spray out of her purse and let us have it. Poor Alice and Lydia got it the worst. I hustled them out of the barrio and we piled into cabs that sped us to a considerably more sophisticated drinking establishment called Ideal Scotch, where Alice and Lydia repaired to the ladies’ room to flush out their eyes and wash their faces. “Forget it, girls,” I’m afraid I said when they came back out to join us. “It’s Chinatown.”
We were having a great time, but there was a cloud on the horizon: The Dinner. The event was to be held at a little restaurant called Café de l’Acadèmia on the plaça Sant Just in the Gothic Quarter. It was a nice establishment with a modest menu of Catalan specialties, but certainly not one of the city’s gastronomic landmarks, and I’ve always wondered if this choice of venue was some sort of act of revenge by the restaurant association for my rejection of their program and our subsequent gustatory independence. Of course, my chefs didn’t realize quite how small and ill-equipped the Café de l’Acadèmia was. Everybody was having too much fun eating and drinking to worry about cooking.
The day before the dinner, we took an excursion out of town, taking a van the restaurant association had provided for us, to Tarragona, for lunch at a highly regarded restaurant called Sol-Ric. It was there, over a disappointing meal of mostly overcooked seafood, that the shape of the dinner was discussed for the first time. (Alice was later to maintain that the enterprise was cursed because we had talked about it over bad food.) Each chef, reasonably enough, wanted to prepare something that had at least some connection to what he or she might make back home. Waxman, who has a traditionalist streak, thought it might be fun to make clams casino as an appetizer. Mark felt that he had to grill something over a wood fire, and hoped that the kitchen had the facilities. Bradley had brought along blue cornmeal, something he rightly assumed would be a novelty to the Catalans, and was determined to make corn bread. Alice had some kind of gorgeous fresh salad in mind, and wanted to make sorbet. Lydia, still considered the junior member of the group, said something in an uncharacteristically meek voice about calf’s brains, but nobody paid her much attention.
The next morning, the day of the dinner, we mounted a raid on the Boquería. Mark had seen some quail he liked the looks of a few days before, and thought that they’d be good to grill. Alice luxuriated in the produce, gathering up bundles of long, wire-thin wild asparagus and loading baby lettuces and plump blood oranges into her sack. Waxman went looking for his clams, and came back with some fresh shrimp and tuna, too. Bradley somehow found chiles and cilantro, neither in common use in Barcelona back then, and Lydia . . . well, she found her calf’s brains, along with some jars of oversize salted capers.
When the shopping was done, we took everything back to the restaurant, and for the first time the chefs took a close look at the kitchen. And blanched. It was tiny and ill-equipped. There was no grill, of course. There was no broiler or salamander (hence no clams casino). There was no ice cream maker (hence no sorbet). There were only four little burners, and barely any pots and pans. Even metal spoons and tongs were in short supply, and would obviously have to be shared. There was only one thing to do: We went out to lunch. The restaurant was a place called Senyor Parellada, near Barcelona’s Picasso Museum, where we consumed a particularly rich, traditional-style meal including canelones with a livery filling (the defining dish of Barcelona’s fondes, or casual inns, since an influx of Italian immigrants reached the city in the nineteenth century), pigs’ feet with turnips, and a fricassée of veal tongue, pork cheek, and chicken livers, with plenty of rough Priorat red to wash it all down with. Before we knew it, it was almost five. Dinner was at ten, a respectable hour for the evening meal in Spain, with the reception starting an hour earlier. Now we were really in trouble.
I have no idea how we did what we did next. Somehow we got out of Senyor Parellada and found our way to the plaça Sant Just. Somehow we shrugged off the effects of the pigs’ feet and the chicken livers and the wine. Because a grill was deemed essential, some kind Catalan or other went off to borrow a backyard barbecue from somebody’s terrace, while Charlie and I trudged off down a winding stone street, found an old-fashioned charcoal seller in an alcove, and lugged two bags of blackened wood back to the restaurant. It started to rain lightly. I think because they were by that time a little mad at me for having gotten them into this, the chefs elected me to stand outside in the drizzle and get the fire started. Then Charlie took over and charred red peppers on the grill.
The kitchen, meanwhile, was in tumult. The wild asparagus Alice had been so happy to find earlier was chewy and bitter, and ended up in the trash. Waxman started shucking clams with no apparent end in mind. “Peel this garlic,” Mark ordered no one in particular (I took the job). Ruth was everywhere, putting her old cook’s skills to good use, rinsing, peeling, dicing, stopping periodically to scribble notes. Lydia worked quietly in one corner, cleaning her calf’s brains. Bradley saved the day for dessert—and impressed the other chefs along the way—by whipping up a kind of sangria sorbet, made with red wine and blood orange juice, using a couple of stainless steel bowls, some rock salt, and some ice in place of an ice cream maker. “I didn’t know you could do that,” said Alice.
The restaurant filled up at the appointed hour with some of my Barcelona friends, including the Jausases and Luís Bettónica, and more than a few of the chefs and journalists who had been helping me in my researches, as well as a few civic officials and, of course, the officers of the restaurant association. Leaving the professionals to their work, I sipped cava with the crowd, which was bursting with curiosity about just what kind of “American” food they would be served. Mark scared off at least a handful of the locals with his passed appetizer of tuna tartare with lime and chiles on toast. Lydia, on the other hand, scored big with her calf’s brains, which she’d deep-fried in a light, crisp batter and served with deep-fried capers and parsley.
We sat down to a first course of clams and shrimp in the form of a seafood salad, with roasted peppers, green beans, white asparagus, radicchio, and peeled favas (which occasioned much comment, as Catalans never peel the beans). The main course was Mark’s grilled quail, not a great favorite of the group—Catalans apparently prefer wild quail, and this was farm-raised—with assorted vegetables and some misshapen blue-corn muffins Bradley had gamely essayed. Everybody loved the sorbet, though, served with thin-sliced blood oranges and fraises des bois moistened with moscatel. The chefs got, and deserved, a standing ovation.
At about two in the morning, we staggered out of the Café de l’Acadèmia, looking for something to eat, and ended up toasting each other with cheap wine over bad pizza at a “drugstore” on the Passeig de Gràcia, then pillaging everybody’s hotel minibars and drinking in
Waxman’s room until the sun came up.
Chapter Fourteen
THE WEST BEACH CAFÉ,
Venice, California (1978–1996)
&
REBECCA’S,
Venice, California (1983–1998)
AS MY BOOK ON CATALAN CUISINE TOOK SHAPE and I became obsessed with following little gastronomic and historical pathways all over the western Mediterranean, I began spending more and more time away from home. On one of those evenings abroad, I called Leslie to catch up. We talked for a few minutes about the usual things, then she broke down in tears. “I’m just so lonely,” she said. I should have gotten on the next plane back to L.A. right then and stayed home for a while, but instead I thought, I’m a professional and this is what I do; she’s a professional, too, so she’ll understand. Roughly one year and four or five trips later, in 1987, Leslie wasn’t there to meet me at the airport when I landed, as she usually was. She moved out the following month.
As an unofficial bachelor in the months that followed, I spent three or four evenings a week between two Venice restaurants, the West Beach Café and Rebecca’s, both owned by my friend Bruce Marder and his wife, the eponymous Rebecca. Like Ports before them, they became a second home to me. I knew everybody, staff and customers alike, got a lot of free drinks, could always nab a good table. The two restaurants were just across the street from each other, a block from the beach, and I sometimes thought of them as a kind of Scylla and Charybdis, each dangerous in its own way.
The West Beach—inevitably referred to, by at least some of its habitués, as the Wet Bitch, for reasons that would have soon become obvious to any young man spending much time at the bar there—was in many ways the definitive Southern California restaurant. It occupied a rectangular white cinder-block building with windows across the front; inside, the dining room, an open rectangle, was white with industrial gray carpeting and dark gray booths and a regularly changing, informally hung exhibition of art on the walls, most of it pretty good. There was an excellent wine list; there were short little tumblers filled with an assortment of loose cigarettes on the tables (this was years before restaurant smoking bans, of course); and there were people doing cocaine and beyond in the bathrooms.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 23