You only have to go back to the early sixties, into basically the generation that sought to overthrow the government, in a sense, the antiwar movement, that bunch of us who objected to the way our parents’ generation was thinking. It has to do with art, it has to do with revolution, the Andy Warhol revolution, if you will. It has to do with the novel, with perhaps In Cold Blood, the first novel to create the genre of the nonfiction novel. It probably has to do with the overthrow of music by the Beatles and Elvis. There’s no creative effort, I would think, that was not questioned by my generation. I’m a post–World War II baby. That generation that stood up against the Vietnam War, that welcomed the Beatles and Elvis, that even sanctioned nonrepresentative painting. All of those aesthetics were questioned over a period of a decade, perhaps. And not just questioned, but they were kind of overthrown. So why not food, too? Because food suffered in a sense by not being thought of as an aesthetic endeavor, a creative endeavor, or a personal endeavor, as movies were not. All of these things were thought to be the bailiwick of the privileged few who laid down the rules and said how things were to taste, look, sound, and read. And that all kind of happened at that time. And food was just maybe the caboose of that train.
—Tony Bill, filmmaker and restaurateur
This is the story of the dawn and rise of the American chef, which for our purposes commenced when Americans, from coast to coast, and in large numbers, began voluntarily, enthusiastically cooking in restaurants for a living—a once forbidden and unrespected professional course—screw the consequences. Many started like Marder, spontaneously, rebelliously, often in isolation, with no idea there were others like them Out There. A few stuck their toes in the water in the 1960s, a few more in the 1970s, and then hordes jumped into the pool in the 1980s and ’90s, after which there was no looking back.
These weren’t the first American chefs, or even the first prominent ones. There had always been exceptions, like the astounding Edna Lewis, who for five years ending in 1954 had been the chef and a business partner at Café Nicholson in Midtown Manhattan—that she did this as both an African American and a woman in the 1950s is nothing short of miraculous. But those stories were few and far between, not part of an overarching national phenomenon. And the lower kitchen ranks were more often than not populated with lost souls who lacked ambition or the aptitude for a traditional career, weren’t pursuing a love of food and/or craft, or acting on Marder-like epiphanies, a version of which became a rite of passage for an entire generation. Professional cooking was viewed as menial, unskilled labor performed, often in unsavory conditions, by anonymous worker bees. The United States Department of Labor categorized chefs as domestics through 1976 when—after lobbying by the American Culinary Federation, who themselves required nudging by Louis Szathmary, the Hungarian American Chicago chef, writer, and television personality—it recognized them as professionals. Domestics suggests chauffeurs and housekeepers; most Americans regarded cooks as something grittier. “I came from a nice family,” says Mary Sue Milliken, who today co-owns Border Grill and other restaurants with business partner Susan Feniger. “My dad had a PhD and my mom went to college and my sisters both went to college. I think they looked at me like I had said, ‘I’m going to go be an auto mechanic.’ They thought, Oh, God.”
“Cooking was not really considered a career,” remembers Mario Batali, one of the most visible chefs in the United States today, who double-majored in Spanish theater and business management at Rutgers University before falling in love with the pro kitchen at Stuff Yer Face restaurant in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1978. “It was the first thing you did after you got out of the army, and the last thing before you went to jail. And that was because anybody could get a job and put on a white apron and go peel potatoes and make soup and do the grunt work, because it was the lowest common denominator in the city. Not necessarily in the country, where you would have been forced into construction or farming. But if you lived in an urban area you just got hired as a cook. You didn’t have to train.”
“One of the comparisons I make today that illustrates the difference between then and now is back in the day you never would put your uniform on or anything that made you look like a cook on the way to work,” says San Francisco–based chef Jan Birnbaum, who started his career in New Orleans and New York. “Because it wasn’t a proud thing to be. You’re that guy behind the door who has no skill. He’s certainly not intellectual, and he probably is either a criminal or he’s amongst them. There’s just a whole lot of undesirable stuff. Today the streets of San Francisco, man, they proudly walk down the street all the time in full uniforms.” Even in France, historically the Western capital of fine dining, this stigma attached to the profession through the 1960s. Chefs were not renowned or celebrated; at best, they were regarded as craftsmen. Alain Sailhac, who grew up in the mountain village of Millau, France, and would go on to become the chef of Le Cygne and Le Cirque in New York City, remembers the moment he first became enticed by the kitchen, in the mid-twentieth century: At age fourteen, at his brother’s wedding, he struck up a conversation with the chef, which sparked an interest he couldn’t shake.
“Why do you want to be a cook?” demanded his father, who wanted his son to take up the family’s glove-manufacturing business. Sailhac persisted until his dad relented, walked him into the town’s only one-star restaurant, where the chef was a World War I buddy. “Do you want to take my son?” asked the senior Sailhac. “He wants to be like you, a stupid chef.” (Even after he became a cook, Sailhac hid his profession from women; if they learned he worked in a restaurant, he told them he was a chef de rang [dining room captain], which was more prestigious.)
Consider, too, Auguste Escoffier, whose crowning achievement, Le guide culinaire, first published in 1903, was the kitchen bible of its day. The book codified basic recipes and techniques, set forth a system for organizing the kitchen brigade, and recommended a front-of-house structure. Yet Nathan Myhrvold, author of a defining tome on modernist cuisine, unsentimentally dubs Escoffier “the Henry Ford of the conventional kitchen. . . . His masterwork was fundamentally motivated by gastronomy as a manufacturing process rather than as an art. . . . He was an artisan striving to run a factory rather than be an artist.”
So what happened? To impose biblical simplicity on the narrative would be dishonest; there was no Garden of Eden, no aproned Adam and Eve from whom all future American chefs descended, no single moment that lit the fuse. The movement was scattershot but not coincidental, produced (Big Bang–style) by a confluence of events and phenomena: the Vietnam War and the resistance at home; the counterculture; easy access to travel; the music, movies, and literature of the day; drugs, including “the pill”; and a new approach to restaurant cooking, to name the factors most often cited by those who were there as the ones that propelled them into the kitchen.
“It’s a universal mind,” says Thomas Keller, chef-owner of a restaurant empire founded on Yountville, California’s The French Laundry, of the national reach of those influences. “We all talk about universal minds and how people come up with the same idea relatively around the same period of time without having had conversations about it personally. They’re just doing the same thing.”
Jonathan Waxman, a California chef who has toggled back and forth between the coasts throughout his career, puts it slightly differently: “We all had the same acid flashback at the same time,” he says. “But each of us did it differently.”
I was against the Vietnam War. I saw hypocrisy everywhere, racism everywhere. In New Jersey, there were race riots going on in Asbury Park. It was the next town over from where I grew up. Our high school was closed for racial tension when Martin Luther King got shot. I saw hypocrisy in justice. And I didn’t want to be a part of that world. I wanted an alternative existence. I was in the draft; it was something that you had to think about. You couldn’t say, “I’m against the war because war sucks.” It was, “I might have to go to the war.” I had friends whose older brothers w
ere killed in Vietnam. It wasn’t the elephant in the room; it was the room that we grew up in.
—Jasper White, chef and restaurateur
Shots rang out over Kent State. Sixty-seven rounds over thirteen seconds. The date was May 4, 1970. Within weeks, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were eulogizing the victims—student protestors slain by National Guardsmen—in song: “Four dead in Oh-hi-oh.”
Violence had erupted periodically, traumatically, throughout the prior decade—thunderclaps in a slow-moving storm that felt like it might never end: Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, terminating the Camelot era; James Earl Ray assassinated Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968; Jordanian Sirhan Sirhan claimed Bobby Kennedy two months later, on June 6, 1968 in the kitchen of Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel. No leader was safe, least of all those who preached nonviolence and progressivism. Nor were casualties confined to the political class. In August 1969, followers of Charles Manson, known as his “family,” murdered actress Sharon Tate and four others in the hills of Benedict Canyon, thickening the air of mayhem. Other losses were self-generated but no less searing: Jimi Hendrix, discovered unresponsive in a London apartment on September 18, 1970, and pronounced dead in a hospital later that day; less than a month later, on October 4, Janis Joplin succumbed to an accidental heroin overdose at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood, California. Both were twenty-seven years old, just kids.
The struggle for civil rights threaded through the decade: In 1961, the Freedom Riders, a student activist group comprising both African American and white members, protested segregation on buses and in waiting rooms throughout the South, requiring protection from law enforcement. On August 4, 1964, three civil rights workers who had been missing since June were found murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi; later that month Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his rousing “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington. Malcolm X, leader of the black nationalist movement, was shot and killed in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood in February 1965. There were historic gains—President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, and followed it with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the appointment of the first African American to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, in June 1967—but they came at a high cost in an undeclared second civil war.
At the University of California, Berkeley, a ban on on-campus politics of any kind triggered the Free Speech Movement, which grew directly out of the civil rights movement—students had protested racial discrimination in hiring practices throughout San Francisco, prompting complaints to the university, and a Berkeley professor was prevented from promoting CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) on campus. The movement peaked on December 2, 1964; more than one thousand students occupied the university’s student union building, Sproul Hall, and the movement’s leader, Mario Savio, delivered what became known as his “An End to History” speech on the steps of the building. “The time has come for us to put our bodies on the machine and stop it,” he declared. Two days later, close to eight hundred were arrested, the largest mass incarceration of students in U.S. history.
In 1965, the United States began deploying troops to Vietnam, a conflict opposed by much of the nation. The resistance redoubled in 1969, when the draft was instituted, taking the form of two lotteries.* The nightly news, at a time when it was confined to thirty minutes each evening, delivered reports of carnage to American homes. For young men, the existential dread of being called up washed over life itself, causing many to reflect on the conservative preordained career paths laid out for them by their parents.
“There was a disturbance in ‘the Force’ about the Vietnam War and the uncertainty of Hey, you might be shipped out and you can’t count on tomorrow,” says chef Jimmy Schmidt, who came of age in Detroit, Michigan. “I think that led to being more adventurous, a kind of anti-the-status-quo-type situation. Let’s go live it while you can live it. I was still around when they had the mandatory draft and I had to go get my draft card. You didn’t know whether you were going to get shipped out or not. I remember getting it, going, I don’t want to go into engineering; I want to do something with my life. That also, I think, led to people traveling and going to Chicago and watching some band, like the Grateful Dead, Eric Clapton, all that kind of stuff. The Doors were out; the Rolling Stones played at the Illini Assembly Hall; that kind of was big stuff going on that was pretty massive for a kid in a small town. That was the days of Easy Rider* and that type of thing going on in the movie front.”
Music, which in the pre-Internet age could be disseminated most quickly and democratically via the radio, left the deepest crater, from the songs of folk singers such as Joan Baez to the transformation of the Beatles from besuited, mop-topped lads from Liverpool to full-fledged renegades, along with a shift from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in 1963 to “Helter Skelter” in 1968. (Of course, there was also the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in 1969.) Perhaps most influential was Bob Dylan, who turned folk music on its ear throughout the 1960s, channeling the very forces that crisscrossed the republic. “He probably single-handedly changed the world,” says San Francisco chef Mark Franz, formerly of Stars, and today of Farallon and Waterbar. “The way he wrote music. The way he wrote his songs. They dragged us forward and made us look at what was going on and made us conscious. And then drugs and all of the things that came around because of that. It was, I think, a natural progression. Art, writing, cooking—it was a renaissance.”
I’ll tell you another thing that played into it: a certain idea of women’s lib. I know that’s an old-fashioned term. It was a moment where there was the pill. So we were free. We were free from worrying about pregnancy. There was just a hunger to be independent, to be our own bosses, to just strike out in our own world. I thought that that was a huge part of it. I wanted to be free. It was the exact right moment that coincided with that. . . . There was a huge counterculture movement going on. Berkeley, when I went there, was a battle zone. Students were completely up in arms over Cambodia. The culture changed. There was a huge liberalizing of culture so that all the old forms were just blasted and turned upside down and everyone was kind of reinventing themselves as a hippy or they were going through those whole counterculture movements. And I think that in some way this thing became possible, of just laying out, starting from scratch, not knowing a thing, fulfilling yourself. I think all of that was part of it. The women’s movement, the counterculture movement, the antiwar thing. The whole society changed.
—Patricia Unterman, chef and writer
As the seventies settled in, mistrust of authority and the government swelled. At about two o’clock in the morning on Saturday, June 17, 1972, police in Washington, D.C., discovered five men rummaging around the Democratic National Committee offices on the sixth floor of a building in the Watergate complex. They turned out to have intelligence backgrounds and ties to the Nixon administration and were attempting to bug the DNC mothership and photograph party files while they were at it. So began the slow drip that would claim the Nixon presidency in 1974.
Other forms shattered their conventions, including comedy: Lenny Bruce was arrested repeatedly for testing obscenity laws. Norman Lear revolutionized the TV sitcom, thitherto populated by the domestic and the silly, with shows that reflected the current reality, such as All in the Family, which premiered in 1971, featuring sociopolitical duels between bigoted Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) and son-in-law Mike Stivic (Rob Reiner). Saturday Night Live, which debuted in October 1975, began life as a truly subversive show that exploded the lie of television with commercial parodies that poked at the supposedly contented facade of American life (the fake ads often ended with the actors mocking the exaggerated laughter on which real commercials ended), and Weekend Update, a satirical newscast.
A newfound interest in food and cooking was of a piece with these shifts. The frozen dinners (unironically known as
TV dinners) and industrialized food meant to nourish young Americans was no longer adequate. Just as they sought authenticity from their leaders and the arts, they craved something real to please their palates and sustain their bodies.
Ever since watching the Vietnam War on television in ’69 and seeing the riot in Chicago’s Grant Park and the Democratic Convention and then Watergate and the continuation of the war and the continuation of things like the Kent State disaster, those things made me feel that our country had taken an absolutely wrong turn. And I believe very much in the world that I grew up being taught about in terms of America being a country about freedom and the ideals of democracy. And I felt like we were making serious criminal errors, and I was really disappointed by it. It was fractious: Many people in our community thought we should bomb the hell out of Vietnam and get it over with, and then there were people that thought, Why are we over there? What are the real reasons that we’re over there?
I was on some of the campuses where there were very big demonstrations. I was in Carbondale, Illinois, shortly after Kent State. There was actually going to be a Woodstock-like celebration in May, one year after Woodstock. May 4 was Kent State, and the celebration was planned for, like, May 15. We already had our tickets. So when Kent State happened, the government was getting very nervous. Bunch of us still went down to Carbondale for this festival. They issued the National Guard in. Fifteen hundred National Guard were ensconced on that campus. I was never militant at all. I was sitting in a trailer drinking some soft drink when suddenly storm troopers burst through the door and arrested all of us in the trailer for trespassing. They had declared a curfew on the town for sundown. It was still dusk and I wasn’t outside. Anyway, they mistook me for another guy that had been seen demolishing a phone booth. I knew the guy, and I did look a little like him. But there were moments like that that were personal. There were things like watching it on the news. There were things like hearing your next-door neighbor was dead from Vietnam. And then there were things like, fucking arrest me, and throw me in a jail that hasn’t been used since the Civil War, and I want the fuck out of here. I’ve had it with this. I’ve just got to go someplace that there isn’t this.
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 2