Tower transformed the kitchen immediately, ordered that the rock and roll on the stereo be replaced by opera. He began crafting menus the likes of which hadn’t been seen anywhere, marrying his academic cleverness with his depth of culinary knowledge. Within days, he was offering obscure French preparations and before long the menu, written in French in Waters’s calligraphy, was paired with a typewritten sheet featuring English translations, something that hadn’t been necessary in Chez Panisse’s more culinarily conservative early days.
In service of the food, the odd couple scoured the Bay Area for ingredients, sourcing from Italian delis, meat markets, fish shops, and also welcoming an early generation of foragers who would bring them mushrooms, fruits, eggs, and other ingredients.
“The two of them really were the two scientists or the mother and father of what we are really talking about now,” says Jonathan Waxman. “I think that Alice had always had a vision about what she wanted. Auberge of the Flowering Hearth* is a very strong influence on her. She has lots of influences. The idea of cooking food in one’s home that was really of the earth. It has always been Alice’s vision. Whether it was pure French food or regional food of France, that is how the whole thing started and it evolved from there. Jeremiah came with a much more cosmopolitan attitude. He had been around the world, he had been on the SS France. He knew clubs in London. He had eaten in Germany. He really had a sophisticated palate. Much more sophisticated than most people at Chez Panisse at that point.
“The two of them coming from different backgrounds were able to create this amazing food. It wasn’t about anything specific, there was no agenda, there was no light at the end of the tunnel—like, why we are doing this?—they were just passionate about it. . . . I think, honestly, it is probably the most important thing that happened. Chez Panisse in the early seventies, Alice, Jeremiah, that collaboration. I think it is everything.”*
Chez Panisse’s reputation grew, garnering national attention and drawing a more and more fashionable crowd, to the horror of many of its founders and early customers.
October 7, 1976, brought a seminal event in the life of the restaurant, and of American chefdom and cuisine: Tower conceived and prepared a Northern California Regional Dinner, treating American ingredients and preparations with the same reverence usually reserved for French food. The eight-course menu featured Spenger’s Tomales Bay bluepoint oysters; cream of fresh corn soup with crayfish butter; Big Sur Garrapata Creek smoked trout steamed over California bay leaves; Monterey Bay prawns sautéed with garlic, parsley, and butter; preserved California-grown geese from Sebastopol; Monterey Jack cheese; caramelized figs; and nuts and pears from the San Francisco Farmers’ Market. It was a smash success.
“Jeremiah was able to be creative with menus,” says Waxman. “Alice was much more of a scholar in terms of cookbooks, not that Jeremiah wasn’t a scholar, he actually was, but he would take liberties with that and push the envelope. You know, injecting tangerine juice in a leg of lamb, that is pretty far out there for 1973 or ’74 in California. But the two of them in that collaboration—I remember the menu had to change every day, five days a week. It was so amazingly provocative that it was incendiary, it was explosive.”
Tower, in a revelation that would repeat throughout the 1970s and ’80s around the country, realized, “We didn’t know what you’re not supposed to do. This is how you open a restaurant. This is how you run a restaurant. None of us knew. So we did the best we could, what we wanted to do. And as it turned out, it wasn’t that bad. Let me tell you a story about Jean Troisgros: He came into Chez Panisse in ’74 or 5 or something like that. And he came and ate in the dining room and came into the kitchen and said, you know, ‘I really want to meet you.’ . . . And he walked in and I nearly fell through the floor into a dead faint. My one hero who was not American. And he said to me, ‘Boy, I really envy you.’ And I think my heart nearly stopped. I said to him, ‘You envy me? I mean, Jean, for God's sake. It’s so much the other way around.’ He said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. You have the freedom to do whatever you want, and I have a three-star restaurant. I can’t do anything I want.’ And he said, ‘Would you please let me send my nephew Michel to come and do a stage* here?’ I said, ‘Well, Jean, that’s going to make bloody history.’ No one’s ever come from France, let alone from a three-star restaurant to do a stage in America, let alone in Berkeley. And he did. . . . When Michel Troisgros arrived, he was just going to do beurre blanc sauces. That’s it. And I’d say, ‘No, we’re not.’ He would make the beurre blanc anyway, and ‘We’re going to put it on’—‘No, Michel, we’re not.’ He couldn’t believe it. So there was a strength in not knowing what you’re supposed to do.”
It was a lesson that was repeated more than once. Says Tower: “Jean-Pierre Moullé—French-trained from France—came to California, and he was my sous chef with Willy Bishop. There were three of us. And for the first whatever period, Jean-Pierre will tell you, he would just look at me like, ‘Mmm, that’s not done.’ I’d say, ‘Well, this is a menu we’re going to do.’ And he was looking for what he thought everybody in France at the time thought: If you had a great restaurant, you had to have a great menu, meaning great ingredients—foie gras, duck breast. Certain marks you had to hit. So he was polite but very resistant for a few months before he finally . . . Then whatever food we were cooking, people would be always piling into the kitchen. And when they started to say—in those days they had been to France and come back—once a week at least somebody would come in and say, ‘We just ate at blah, blah, blah in Paris, and this is much better.’ And Jean-Pierre heard that a few times and started to come around.”
Says Waters, “Well, at the beginning it was the greatest collaboration. I mean, really, really wonderful. Because I think in some ways it put Jeremiah in a position of having to think about one menu, and to do it in a certain, if you will, Berkeley way, which was not his inclination, really, at all. But it helped us. It lifted us up to—or me particularly—into just worlds of food that I hadn’t thought about. And it was great. It was really, really great. It was a period. Who knows whether it could have endured?
“What was great about it is that we were both—I think of ourselves as being intellectual cooks, and that we just went into every cookbook. He would say, ‘Oh, well, should we do pâté en croûte?’ I’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, do that!’ And I’d bring it out to the dining room and just sell it to the people who ate it. . . . And we did all of those dinners for winemakers. We were in a real adventure of experimentation. You know, I’m kind of an olive oil person but I sure made a lot of beurre blancs. It was an edible education for Chez Panisse.”
Tower left Chez Panisse in January 1977, returning briefly in 1978 to help out Waters when she left for vacation. Many who were there from the restaurant’s inception were delighted to see him go, allowing the restaurant to reclaim its original path. “There are two camps,” said Tower. “There’s someone like Darrell Corti [the Sacramento wine expert and gourmet-foods-shop owner] who sent a Sicilian Mafia funeral wreath when I did the week of Escoffier menus, saying, ‘This is the end, Chez Panisse can never be greater than this.’ And the other camp is I destroyed the little Pagnol-movie neighborhood thing. And the truth is, you know, both.”
The Tower years at Chez Panisse foretold, though didn’t necessarily influence, similar narratives throughout the United States: An American chef had found his way to center stage, and more would soon follow. Often drowned out by the opera of the Tower-Waters relationship—which would soon turn as sour as past-date milk—is that for all the interpersonal layers, at one level, it was a conflict between owner-founder and chef, another theme that would play out not just at Chez Panisse, but across the industry and the country.
1
New World Order
No, it might happen pretty easily—but the dream isn’t big enough.
—Norman Maine (James Mason), A Star Is Born (1954)
HOW WOLFGANG PUCK LED THE RESTAURANT REFORMATION, CREATING A NEW
INDUSTRY TEMPLATE BY PUTTING THE CHEF FRONT AND CENTER, WHILE A DISPARATE GROUP OF EXPRESSIVE YOUNG LOS ANGELES COOKS WENT THEIR OWN WAY AND INTO BUSINESS FOR THEMSELVES
In 1975, not long after he moved to Los Angeles and took over the kitchen at the flagging French restaurant Ma Maison, a young, unknown chef named Wolfgang Puck hit a nightclub with Formula One racecar superstar and fellow Austrian Niki Lauda. Puck found himself slow dancing with a stranger. Who knows what the song was: maybe Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way,” or another recent chart topper, Johnny Mathis’s “Feelings.” Whispering small talk, he told the woman what he did for a living, which so failed to impress her that the moment the song ended, she bolted without a word, leaving him alone on the floor.
“I said, I’m not going to say I’m a cook anymore; I’m going to say I’m a racecar driver,” remembers Puck, whose voice, four decades later, retains its Austrian severity.
Patrick Terrail, Ma Maison’s aristocratic playboy proprietor, wasn’t burdened by such insecurities, not anymore. With Puck in the kitchen, his restaurant found its footing and his stock was ascending. Studio executives, agents, producers, and other members of the sunglass set were discovering Ma Maison in droves, making it their new canteen, a shabby-chic alternative to The Bistro, Chasen’s, Musso and Frank, and Scandia, one of which had been around since the silent film era.
The diametrically opposed existences that Terrail and Puck experienced under the same professional roof weren’t unusual: Owner-impresarios had always been the face of their restaurants, the ones who’d put their money on the line, and to whom fame and fortune accrued; chefs were the anonymous workhorses who toiled behind the swinging doors, rarely ventured into the dining room, and who, it was generally believed, were replaceable. But winds of change were blowing through the industry in 1970s Los Angeles. Thanks in part to the influence of nouvelle cuisine, food was shedding its uniformity, chefs were attaining prominence, and a growing population of what would in time become known as “foodies” knew who was in the kitchen, and wanted to be known by them. Eventually the old model toppled, most spectacularly at Ma Maison, but also in a handful of restaurants where the traditional power structure was turned on its head, leaving owners stunned and chefs on top of the world.
“I DON’T CARE WHO YOU ARE, BECAUSE MY FATHER’S VERY RICH.”
Patrick Terrail was born into a world where restaurant proprietors were king. His family was industry nobility: Uncle Claude owned the venerable La Tour d’Argent in Paris. His great-grandfather Claudius Burdel had owned and operated Café Anglais, where he hosted Czar Alexander II and Kaiser Wilhelm in the fabled Great Sixteen, an opulent private dining room. His grandfather André, a pal of Henri Soulé who would go on to open New York City’s Le Pavilion, bridged the generations, relocating the wines of Café Anglais to La Tour d’Argent, of which he became the proprietor in 1910. In 1960, young Patrick, freighted with the great expectations of his lineage, came to the United States to matriculate at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca, New York. Hospitality coursed through his veins, but the restaurateur within was first awakened at thirty thousand feet when he spent a summer globetrotting as a Pan Am steward: The airline’s caterer of record was Paris’s Art Nouveau gastronomic temple Maxim’s, and Terrail prepared everything from caviar and Champagne to filet mignon and duck à l’orange. “It’s not like today,” he says of in-flight service. “It was very, very elegant.” He went to work for Joe Baum’s Restaurant Associates as assistant food and beverage manager at the landmark Four Seasons restaurant* in New York City, where he absorbed Baum’s vision and ambition. He was especially impressed that “people ate there every damn day.” And not just any people, but captains of industry and a who’s who of the entertainment trade. James Beard, whose consultation had helped define the restaurant, regularly threw dinners at The Four Seasons; President Kennedy celebrated his birthday there, just before speeding off to Madison Square Garden, where Marilyn Monroe serenaded him with history’s most famous rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
A few professional dalliances followed: Terrail owned an events business in New York, then managed a fifty-room hotel in Tahiti, dividing his time between the South Pacific and Los Angeles. In 1970, he settled in L.A.: The weather recalled Greece, where he’d spent his high school years, shopping the open-air markets with his mother and developing his intuition for fresh fish, meats, and vegetables. L.A., the scent of reefer everywhere, felt open, free, and Terrail made friends at a time when intimacy came easy: At a future studio chief’s party, amyl nitrate and ’ludes were set out in bowls like chips and salsa. He arrived at another gathering, off Mulholland Drive, to find “everybody half-naked in the pool.” Much of this shocked him, but he was no innocent; for fun, he’d go to the farmers’ market at the corner of West 3rd Street and Fairfax and pick up women by milking his French accent, convincing them he was a fashion photographer.
Terrail started down the restaurant rabbit hole following a perceived opportunity: There was no patio dining to exploit Los Angeles’s year-round sunshine, as there was in the South of France. He acquired and converted a carpet warehouse on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. For the menu, he planned to rip off an Upper East Side New York City restaurant, Martell’s, which served a variety of brochettes.* Terrail christened the restaurant Ma Maison, meaning “My House,” wanting it to have the feeling of a home. It was as casual as a restaurant could be, largely owing to his limited budget, with Astroturf flooring outside, Ricard umbrellas shading the tables, cheap plates, and plastic ducks and geese that lit up at night scattered about. The restaurant opened in October 1973 with no chef, just a menu devised by Terrail, then twenty-six, to be executed by a team of cooks.
He made an accidental splash after arranging lunch with the Los Angeles Times food writer Lois Dwan at the venerable Scandia on Sunset Boulevard. His sales pitch for the new spot was so convincing that she surprised him the next day with an article expressing her excitement for a restaurant she believed would be unique in a city dominated at the time by those showbiz dowagers.
Terrail was unprepared for his close-up. Not having a proper chef, he says, revealed his stupidity and ignorance, and the inaugural months were a disaster, exacerbated by arrogance: If a customer felt his standing entitled him to a better table, a common Hollywood sentiment, Terrail was apt to reply, “I don’t care who you are, because my father’s very rich.” Though he had begun to attract some industry clientele, with smash-cut suddenness Ma Maison was failing so badly that he’d lie awake in the dead of night sobbing, thinking about killing himself.
Los Angeles magazine’s George Christy saved him the trouble, figuratively speaking, penning a review so brutal that Terrail retreated to France, seeking a chef. He consulted with Yanou Collart, famed publicist to nouvelle cuisine’s superstars and to his old Pan Am connections at Maxim’s. The trail led him to Louis Outhier’s Restaurant L’Oasis in La Napoule, near Cannes, where he spent three days licking his wounds, soaking up inspiration: The elegant experience, the seamless blend of haute and contemporary, the commitment to the guest’s pleasure, and Outhier’s personal passion—the visit was an extended epiphany that altered Terrail’s understanding of the possibilities of a modern restaurant. (Freudians might be amused to know that the self-made Outhier was one of very few Michelin three-starred chefs who didn’t hail from a restaurant family.)
Today, Terrail lives in Hogansville, Georgia, a small city (population 3,000) fifty miles outside Atlanta, where he publishes the lifestyle magazine 85 South Out and About, named for the nearby interstate. He’s married to Jackie Lloyd, an American woman decades his junior, and the two have a young son. I meet him on an Easter Sunday, but because my flight is late he directs me to rendezvous at a barbecue at a friend’s house. There, in Southern suburbia, I first encounter the man I’ve seen in photographs cozying up to, and yukking it up with, everybody from Jack Lemmon to Kelly LeBrock to Joan Collins to Michael Caine at the epicenter of 1970s
Hollywood. There’s a whiff of witness protection about this second act, this still-elegant Frenchman a sore thumb among the polo shirts and strip malls.
Terrail and I break away from the party and drive to the Victorian house where he and Jackie live. As with many homes I visited while writing this book, certain rooms and passageways double as shrines to the owner’s glory days, festooned with photographs and framed letters from celebrity clientele. We climb a flight of stairs to his cluttered office and sit across his desk from each other. Terrail has a gravelly, purring voice and gangster’s eyes. He’s an interviewer’s dream, an open book, unruffled by any question and generous with his contacts, even offering an email address for his friend Robin Leach, bombastic British host of the 1980s and ’90s syndicated TV series Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. We talk for almost five hours as he paints me a picture of his life and of Ma Maison, including that crossroads that took him to the French Riviera.
“I realized that the future was not in me, but in who was going to be cooking,” he says of that time with Outhier. “I may be the gallery, but the gallery is only as good as the art.” He always knew that on a gut level, as well as the fact that retaining a good chef meant making him some kind of partner, but his family’s outdated attitude retarded his thinking. “My uncle was totally against that,” says Terrail. “And he hated Paul Bocuse. He said, ‘Paul Bocuse is not a restaurateur; he’s a cook that’s going in the dining room.’”
At Maxim’s, says Terrail, somebody gave him a name: Wolfgang Puck, an alum of the restaurant who had also cooked at L’Oustau de Baumanière in Provence and was now at the Arco Towers, in downtown L.A. Returning to Los Angeles, Terrail tracked him down. Puck was living in a decidedly unfashionable hotel, a poster of Just Jaeckin’s softcore flick Emmanuelle pinned to the wall, sheets serving as curtains, and just one bed, shared (platonically), says Terrail, by Puck and his co-chef, Guy Leroy—a professional wingman who had shadowed him in his prior jobs. Terrail couldn’t afford to employ either Puck or Leroy full-time, so he contracted them both, for twenty hours per week each, to do four-hour shifts in tandem with their other jobs, and gave them a car to shuttle themselves back and forth. Puck soon distinguished himself as the better cook, so Terrail assigned him the dinner shifts.
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 6