Despite these shortcomings, the name nouvelle cuisine stuck. One of its defining underpinnings was the visibility of the practitioners of this bold, new style, the chefs whose personal marks showed in their dishes. The inaugural cover of the Guide depicted close to fifty toques at a time when you’d have been hard-pressed to name more than a handful. Just as each commandment includes some version of the words nouveau, découvrir, and invention (often multiple times), many of them also illustrate their principles with preparations associated with specific chefs.
“Nouvelle cuisine carved out some independence for the chef,” writes Nathan Myhrvold. “Escoffier (and [Marie-Antoine] Carême before him) had explicitly sought to establish rules and conventions. Nouvelle cuisine gave more leeway to the individual chef.”
The simplified historical storyline is that the nouvelle cuisine chefs began the shift to a more personalized cuisine, but Fernand Point deserves much credit, not only for shifting to a new style before the nouvelle cuisine era, but also for mentoring many of the chefs who would congregate under its umbrella. Bocuse, Guérard, and brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros all apprenticed for him in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Point devised a new menu each day—rendered in dramatic script by his wife, Marie-Louise “Mado” Point—a new approach for the time.
“If I take a little step back, I think Fernand Point is the beginning of the story,” says San Francisco chef Roland Passot, a native of Villefranche-sur-Saône in eastern France. “He was that figure, that man who was drinking Champagne at eight in the morning; by noon he’d already have had two or three bottles. People were flying in from all over the world. He had presidents of France and other countries coming to his restaurant.” (Point’s morning Champagne ritual has been romanticized by many. Less frequently cited is his short life span: He died at age fifty-eight in 1955.)
But there’s no doubt that Paul Bocuse was the visionary of his generation and understood the value of moving chefs into the public eye: “Bocuse was very street smart,” says Passot. “It came to him naturally. He was like the godfather of those chefs. He was the one who was leading the pack. I think he was the driving machine of getting chefs out of their kitchens. I don’t want to call them rebels, but they were my idols. And he got together in force with that group of chefs, Michel Guérard, Roger Vergé, even Gaston Lenôtre, to really expose themselves and to show chefs not just cooking behind the stove, but being businesspeople and celebrities. That was a turn.”
Bocuse, in addition to being an innate and master marketer, traveled the world, maintained relationships with chefs in many countries, employed Japanese cooks in his restaurant before others in France were doing it. He also went where no French chef of his stature had gone before, visiting the United States to perform cooking demonstrations and participate in special dinners that garnered press coverage and furthered the cause.
Americans were seduced by nouvelle cuisine both for the personality in the food itself and the attention paid to the chefs, which altered their perception of the profession and put faces to the movement. And some of those Americans could imagine themselves in kitchen whites. David Liederman, a New York City college student, was so dazzled by his meal at La Maison Troisgros that he made a bet with Jean Troisgros that if he could beat him in tennis, he could return and work in the kitchen. Jonathan Waxman remembers being in France in his twenties and seeing four nouvelle cuisine leaders on the cover of Paris Match magazine. “I said, ‘That looks pretty cool,’” he says. “Being a chef. Being on the cover of a magazine.”
A useful counterpoint is the experience of the late Judy Rodgers, best known as the chef of San Francisco’s Zuni Café, who spent a year living with the Troisgros family in Roanne, France, from 1973 to 1974. Though she never officially worked in their restaurant kitchen, she did occasionally help with rudimentary prep work there, tasted their full repertoire, received culinary wisdom directly from the brothers, and recorded every recipe in her notebooks. Despite such extraordinary access, she responded more to the food she ate outside the restaurant’s dining room: “About three weeks into my stay at Troisgros, I know that I preferred staff meal to dining in the dining room. I loved the experience of dining in the dining room, and it came off beautifully, and the food was frankly a lot simpler and more sort of easy and enjoyable to eat than a three-star meal in Paris or a three-star at Bocuse, but still, I knew that for me, the dining experience, the conviviality of the food that I was eating at staff meal or at Jean’s sister’s, where she was doing traditional Burgundian food for the most part, I just liked that better. My body liked it better, and I was a strapping sixteen-year-old. I could eat anything, but I knew I liked that better. Plus, it just struck me at that point in my life that my God, I was already sixteen, and there was no way I was going into food and the stuff that they did after seven o’clock in the kitchen was something that you had to begin training for at age fourteen, and I was over the hill.”
It was almost like an underground.
—Alice Waters
Most accountings of this subject, in this era, begin, compulsorily, with Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse. Mention the modern American restaurant movement—or even contemporary American cuisine—to the casual observer, and it’s the first restaurant most will toss out. But Chez Panisse wasn’t the first establishment of its kind in America. It wasn’t even the first in Berkeley, where it was predated by The Pot Luck, purchased by Hank Rubin in 1962, and by Narsai’s, a restaurant by Rubin’s onetime kitchen manager, Narsai David. “Pot Luck was doing regional French menus on Monday nights way before Jeremiah Tower or Alice Waters did,” said chef Mark Miller.
For more of-the-moment cuisine, there was Bruce LeFavour’s The Paragon, in Aspen, Colorado. A native of Amsterdam, New York, LeFavour had dropped out of Dartmouth College to join the army, did a tour of duty in counterintelligence in eastern France, taking in the sights and food of Burgundy, Alsace, and Paris in his off hours. He fell in love with Europe, backpacked around, then stayed in France for three years. Returning stateside for a friend’s wedding, he was so taken with Colorado that he decided to stay and write a novel, but couldn’t secure a publisher. In the meantime, he had married, had a child, and was confronted with bills to pay. He and his wife, Patricia, opened a restaurant with him as the chef, modeling his food on the (not yet named) nouvelle cuisine he’d sampled in his travels. The restaurant was intimate, comprising private rooms; the year was 1965.
On the East Coast, a fondness for both Italy and France guided John Novi, an Italian American artist, preservationist, and self-proclaimed hippy who purchased the Depuy Canal House, an eighteenth-century structure in High Falls, New York, and spent five years renovating it with plans to convert it into a restaurant. He refinished the interior with the help of volunteer teens from a local civic association. A radio blasted music while they worked; Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” in particular takes him back.
“It was a free-for-all,” he says of those days, when he hosted all-night jam sessions and parties in the unfinished space. “Everybody loved everybody. I was living instinctively and following what my mother used to call my destiny. And I look back on my life now and I realize that’s exactly what I did: I was very natural and I wanted to work as naturally as possible with food.”
In 1968, he visited Europe, taking a circuitous route to his family’s native country. “I just wanted to live in Italy with my relatives. I drove south, went into Austria, Brussels, and then I went to France, stayed in hostels and worked my way down to the family.”
Novi only spoke broken Italian but after a month found work in a kitchen at an Italian restaurant with an American name: The Picnic. He assimilated the European service style. “I learned, number one, courses. I couldn’t compare it to anything, to my parents. And when I came back, I opened up with a seven-course meal. I learned to serve the salad after the entree, not before. I loved the whole idea. I would splurge and go into a fine-dining restaurant on my way down to Italy. And I found t
hese carts come to the table loaded with cheese and I just loved that idea. I had to do that here.” (He was able to get cheese from Robert Schneller in Kingston, New York, where he also bought his meat.)
Novi recalls an epiphany when he found himself in possession of a sea bass. “A twenty-pound fish, the objective being to fillet it properly, needed study. And I had to do it right. I’m a perfectionist.” And so, just like that, he decided to become a chef. Eight months after the restaurant opened in 1969, it received four stars from Craig Claiborne in the New York Times, which puzzles Novi to this day: “We were busy. And it was a Sunday night. They had dinner and then they went into the bar and they ordered drinks. It was just a strange happening because, number one, Craig Claiborne ordered a margarita at the table and it went out to Susan, who was our barmaid at the time. Susan Hines. And Susan went up to him. She said, ‘I’m really sorry, but I don’t know how to make a margarita.’ So she said, ‘Do you mind coming into the bar and making it?’ So Craig Claiborne went into the bar, went behind the bar, and made his own margarita and taught her how to make a margarita. And he ends up in the article calling her the demure barmaid. So how we ended up with four stars . . . ?”
Those restaurants are long gone and largely forgotten, as is LeFavour’s later effort, the well-regarded Rose et LeFavour in St. Helena, California. But Chez Panisse abides, to put it mildly. The restaurant has risen to legend status and many people reading this are no doubt familiar with much of its lore; as Manresa’s David Kinch said to me in an interview, “People know who Willy Bishop is,” referring to the bearded, beatnik painter who cooked at Chez Panisse in the early 1970s. It has launched countless careers, and working there became a rite of passage for several generations of mostly California-based cooks and chefs. It’s also widely credited with at least one evolution in American restaurant practice: “What Chez Panisse did . . . not when they first, first opened, but as they found their own identity, was revolutionary because it was a restaurant that wrote menus based on what was available,” says Colman Andrews. “Every other restaurant wrote menus and then found ways to make it available. And if you couldn’t get it fresh or you couldn’t get a top thing, you got the second best, or if you couldn’t get fresh you got it frozen or canned or whatever, or you say, ‘Oh, tonight we’re out of this.’ But that was, even before the idea of sourcing organic produce from the small farmers, the idea that what you found, even if it was what you found at the wholesale market, determines what you’re going to cook. Gee, really? Okay. And it certainly wasn’t the first place to do this but it was also kind of revolutionary in that there was no ‘fondue cuisine.’ There were no stocks made up. There were no sauces. Everything was à la minute or pan sauce or sauceless or something. And those things had a tremendous influence.”
Waters herself has used her platform to advocate for food-related issues worldwide, and in the process taken on an almost messianic air. Over the near half century since Chez Panisse’s debut, founder and restaurant have become inseparable.
I didn’t know what to expect when I met Alice Waters, for whom I made a trip cross-country for a three-hour audience. I arrived at the restaurant in the early afternoon of a mid-August weekday. My sense of her was deeply developed enough from afar that I didn’t scroll through the usual options when I walked upstairs and asked the hostess at the casual Chez Panisse Café to announce me to her office. I didn’t ask for “Chef Waters,” as some houses expect, or “Ms. Waters.” “Alice is expecting me” seemed, and was, appropriate.
I was led to a table in the window of the dining room facing out onto Shattuck Avenue. There was, set out for me, a glass teapot, loose herbs suspended in the water within, tingeing it. Waters appeared and we shook hands, sat across from each other. I confess that where I usually ask subjects to recount their entire story for me, this was one case where I didn’t, because her time was limited, but also because there’s no single figure in the restaurant community in the United States whose biography has been more well documented, whose formative moments have taken on more an air of folktale. It also must be said, as others who have been down this road before me too have noted, that for every Chez Panisse loyalist, there’s a detractor who will privately, sometimes bitterly, grouse that for all of its influence on the industry and on the eating habits and food knowledge of Americans, both restaurant and founder have been inflated historically, but won’t go on the record with their grievances. Happily, our focus here is not the American restaurant, or American food, but the evolution of the American chef, and where that arc is concerned, Chez Panisse’s early days offer a useful and unambiguous case study in how, and how quickly, things changed.
Waters’s story traces—personifies—all of the aforementioned influences: Born in Chatham, New Jersey, on April 28, 1944, she grew up with only the most tangential interest in food. “I didn’t think about it very much because I grew up in New Jersey, and my family rarely went out to dinner,” she says. “We were six of us and we just didn’t have the money to go out to dinner. So I can’t say that I had much of an idea, except we always wanted to go and eat ice cream at Howard Johnson’s. And I liked to go to New York for my birthday every year. I wanted to go to the Museum of Natural History and to eat at the Automat because I wanted to be able to choose what I wanted to eat and then have it right away. And I just loved the lemon meringue pie being cut and put on the tray, and opening the door. It was a big thing for me. But I really didn’t know much about the restaurant business at all.”
The family had a garden “but I was a picky eater. I had to come to the dinner table but they kept wanting me to eat food that didn’t taste good, in my mind. I mean, when I think back, my mother wasn’t a cook and she had a hard time taking care of her kids. I loved corn on the cob and tomatoes right out of the garden, and when my father grilled steaks. But I had parfait pie and mince pie at Thanksgiving because my mother knew how to make a piecrust really well.”
Her father worked for the Prudential Life Insurance Company, which required relocations to Indiana and then to Van Nuys in Southern California. She matriculated at the University of California, Santa Barbara, then transferred with friends to UC Berkeley in 1964. “We arrived sort of front and center of the Free Speech Movement,” she says. “I just felt like I was in over my head, that I was in a really big city that I didn’t know about and I was sort of holding on to my friends, pretty much.” She recalls “a lot of drugs, a lot of parties going on simultaneously. . . . I was a little bit into Ferlinghetti and that sort of beatnik side.”
In 1965, she and a friend traveled to Paris for a semester at the Sorbonne, setting up camp in the Second Arrondissement. She was immediately overtaken by the sensuality of France, especially the food, from her morning café au lait, pastries, and yogurt, to the oysters, onion soups, and bistro fare. “I would call it my awakening. It was just unlike anything I’d ever experienced,” she says. That summer, she traveled through the South of France and discovered its distinct culinary pleasures—the traditional variety—founded on olive oil, herbs, garlic, and vegetables.
Back in the States, she began cooking, turning for guidance to Julia Child’s television show and to the books of Elizabeth David, especially French Provincial Cooking, which she cooked through from cover to cover. She fell in love with graphic designer David Goines, a Free Speech Movement leader, and moved in with him. Food became a part of their lives. They were close with Charles Shere, a musicologist, and his wife, Lindsey Shere, a passionate baker. They’d have roaming dinner parties—savory courses prepared by Waters at her and David’s, then a stroll over to the Sheres’ for dessert. But cooking was just a passion; it would never, she says, have occurred to her to go into the restaurant business.
“I got very involved with Vietnam,” she says. “I was kind of an assistant to Bob Scheer* and I traveled around with him, took him every place he spoke. I was very, very influenced by his thinking, and very, very disappointed when he lost when he ran for Congress.”
Waters graduated Berkeley in January 1967 and wasn’t sure what to do with herself. At another time, she says, she would have followed a conventional path. “I probably would have said, ‘I’m going to be a housewife like my older sister.’ I didn’t even have an ambition to work. I figured I’d be a mother.”
She tried a job in a restaurant, The Quest, but it had none of the magic of those Paris bistros and she didn’t last long. “So I taught school and then I went and took Montessori training. But I really felt that public education was incredibly valuable and we had to support it. We had to participate in it. And even though I was learning Montessori and it was a private school and a special way of seeing the world, it just fit perfectly with my whole edible education that I had in France, that I was touching and tasting and smelling and seeing all of this around me. I only stopped teaching because I left that job.”
As they did for so many in Berkeley, art and food began to intertwine for Waters, like a double helix. She started a recipe column in the San Francisco Express Times, “Alice’s Restaurant,” named for the Arlo Guthrie song—each column was a recipe, written in prose by Waters and graphically designed by Goines in a style that would help define the visual identity of Chez Panisse. “There was a lot in print happening both in terms of posters and communications that was sort of binding us as a group of young people trying to stop the war in Vietnam and caring about civil rights,” she says. “It was almost like an underground. I mean, I always thought I was part of a counterculture. And I still feel like I’m part of a counterculture, truly, deeply.”
I asked Waters how she connects the larger shifts of the 1960s with an elevated sense of food and its possibilities.
“I think a big part of it is just in our genes,” she says. “There’s certain things that are universal, and eating is one of those. I think the impulse to come to the table and communicate with other people is as old as civilization. I think the idea of cooking locally is certainly no new idea. That’s been here always. So these values, once they’re awakened, you can’t go back, you just go forward. You want to be hospitable, and cooking and the table are a big part of that. And you’re experimenting. I’m sure a lot of people came to it the same way I did, which was through an experience like going to France. I know that Elizabeth David did that. Julia Child did that. Many, many people. They traveled and/or they had parents that had traveled or were influential, and they came back and they just said, ‘You know, I want to do this. I want to have a table like this. I want to cook for my friends.’”
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 4