How in the world do you reconcile this confident, impossibly successful, preternaturally positive mogul with that kid standing on the bridge in Villach, with the young cook being exploited by Terrail, whose benevolent memories are alternate-universe versions of Puck’s? Yes, he went on Dining with Patrick Terrail, says Puck, and yes, Terrail did the talking, but Puck feels he could have performed just fine. “I hated it, because I couldn’t talk. I felt like an idiot: I was cooking and he was explaining.”
Puck also believes Terrail went out of his way to deny him other opportunities: “When Los Angeles magazine was doing Orson Welles for the cover of the dining guide, they were supposed to take a picture of Orson Welles, me, and Patrick. And Patrick gave me two days off when they were shooting. I think he never admitted it was on purpose.”
Then there was the time Dinah Shore, hostess of Dinah!, a syndicated daytime television show, asked Puck why he never came on her program. Puck told her all she had to do was invite him.
“Patrick, that son of a bitch!” said Shore. “He said you don’t want to do TV.”
“THE ELECTRICITY IN THE ROOM JUST WENT STRAIGHT UP.”
The same year that Wolfgang Puck arrived in Los Angeles, a brash, moneyed maverick from the East Coast blew into town. But unlike Puck, who came for work and was happy to do it anonymously, Michael McCarty parachuted in with big dreams and the confidence, sense of entitlement, and vision to realize them.
McCarty grew up in Briarcliff Manor, New York, a Westchester suburb about thirty miles north of New York City, in what he describes as a Mad Men existence: dad was a GE exec; mom raised the kids; the family summered near Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Westchester was bereft of quality restaurants, so McCarty’s entertaining instincts were founded on the stream of parties thrown by his family and their friends, on accessible food, and the conviviality of the table. At sixteen, McCarty—already smitten with gastronomy—spent his junior year of high school in Brittany, cementing his decision to pursue a life in hospitality. He learned to cook at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, then like Terrail matriculated at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, before lighting out for Colorado, where he earned BAs in business and art of gastronomy from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
McCarty loved food, but was fascinated as well by hospitality. In particular, he was mesmerized by front-of-house men, the impresarios charged with ensuring everybody’s good time, floating amongst the tables, monitoring comfort levels, regaling guests with a quick story. He often relives a September 1969 dinner at Laurent, in Midtown Manhattan, the night before he decamped for the Andover-Exeter School Year Abroad at the University of Rennes in Brittany: “In walks the owner to work the floor, and it was like a dimmer, the electricity in the room just went straight up,” says McCarty. “It got more intense, people got more excited, it was a very exciting moment, and it was very reminiscent of the feeling I felt as I watched my parents entertain.” McCarty calls the dinner an epiphany, centered on the notion of “throwing a party every night and having [the customers] pay for it.”
In December 1975, after his year in Europe and time in Denver, where he also consulted and taught cooking classes, McCarty moved to Los Angeles, which he considered a corrective to the snootiness of his home region and that other West Coast food town up north: “San Francisco abhorred Sodom and Gomorrah (L.A.). San Francisco was like an East Coast, Boston, New York kind of a town. Very preppy. Very uptight. Very sophisticated in their minds. L.A. was the exact opposite. It was full metal jacket. It was crazy. Los Angeles really didn’t start until ’65, culturally speaking. So it was always considered a backwater by Northern California and everyone else. La-La Land.”
Like Terrail before him, McCarty rang up Lois Dwan, asked her to point him toward the epicenter of Los Angeles dining. She named Jean Bertranou, chef-owner of L’Ermitage on North La Cienega Boulevard. McCarty beelined for West Hollywood, introduced himself to Bertranou, hung around L’Ermitage, and before long the two had become best of friends and a bit of an odd couple: American McCarty in his early twenties, a well-dressed, energetic prepster eager to make his dent in the universe; Bertranou in his late forties, French, and established. He’s also one of the figures in this story who was doubly cursed, historically speaking—Bertranou died at age fifty from brain cancer, long before the Google era, and so faded away, unable to extend and promote his legacy. But for anybody who cooked professionally in Los Angeles in the 1970s, he was a barrier breaker and guiding light.
“L’Ermitage was the most important restaurant to open in California in the seventies, period,” says Ken Frank, one of the first young Americans to chef around Los Angeles during that decade, and whose fate would soon intersect with McCarty’s. “Bertranou was the first chef that opened a restaurant that was a chef’s restaurant with a personalized menu that reflected his style of cooking,” says Frank. “He was the first one to embrace nouvelle cuisine, the first one to bring seeds from France and plant real haricots verts instead of settling for little tiny green beans that were just picked early. He tried to breed ducks that would be the right ducks. He was flying in fresh fish from France, damn the price. He invited Bocuse and Vergé to come cook at L’Ermitage and he inspired a whole generation of cooks.”
“He was the benchmark,” says Peel.
Even Puck looked up to Bertranou, whom—though less famous than, say, André Soltner at Lutèce in New York City or Jean Banchet at Le Français outside Chicago—he considered the best chef working in the United States at the time. “Jean Banchet was on the cover of Bon Appétit magazine and stuff like that, and Jean Bertranou never got that because he was shy, maybe? Maybe it was not the right time. I think he was a little early, too, in the seventies.”
“This was the revolution,” says John Sedlar, a young cook from Santa Fe, New Mexico, who worked for Bertranou at L’Ermitage, and was impressed by his devotion to not only nouvelle cuisine but also state-of-the-art kitchen technology, which could be expensive, such as a refrigerated marble tabletop or a $3,000 sorbet machine. “Preposterous! You’re going to spend $3,000 to turn your sorbets? Do you really need a refrigerated marble tabletop? He was buying wines first growth, and futures where you had all the first growth, the Haut-Brions, the Margaux, the Latours, all six cases deep. He got me in a lot of trouble because he would change his china with the season. When I began working there, he had the basket pattern,* which was very nouvelle. I was garde-manger* and I had colorful fruits and lettuces, and the most magnificent red salmon would go on these. They were gorgeous, and they were geometric and architectural, and they had to be placed a certain way. And he had silver cassoulets lined up above the pickup pass-through.”
In the incestuous L.A. chef community of the time, McCarty’s fast friendship with Bertranou rubbed some people, like Ken Frank, the wrong way. “McCarty was like a barnacle at L’Ermitage,” says Frank.
“BEING FROM CALIFORNIA, RATHER THAN FRENCH, I DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY.”
When Bruce Marder first saw the space that would become home to his West Beach Cafe, he took it as a sign. The restaurant there had been Casablanca Café des Artistes, a connection to his formative days in Morocco, where he’d spent that fateful Christmas in 1972.
After Europe, Marder began his formal education under chef John Snowden at Dumas Père School of French Cooking near Chicago, Illinois, where he developed his sense of where food was headed: “Well, first of all, being from California, rather than French, I didn’t have to be that way,” says Marder of the classic French style. “I could do whatever I wanted. But I picked a certain part of that. Classic French cooking, in reality, is based upon serving a lot of people versus serving a person. You walk into wherever they ate in the castle and they were serving everybody. That’s where roux* came from and all of that. Extending everything out in flavor. This is where I kind of got the realization: You cook a steak, you take it out of the pan, you put some shallots and red wine in, you deglaze the pan, you put some butter in, and yo
u pour it over the steak, or you can put a little stock in. But essentially you’re eliminating this mass thing and you’re cooking to order. If you think about it, that’s basically what ended up being nouvelle cuisine, or the beginning of it. You can poach a piece of fish in some white wine, put a little cream in, reduce the cream, and pour it over the fish. That was the beginning of all the froufrou nouvelle stuff. And then I just decided that I didn’t need to make sauces and whatever it is. And not knowing anything about anything, I just decided that was the best way to go.”**
Marder returned to L.A., worked a year and a half at the Beverly Hills Hotel, then did a brief stint at L’Ermitage, where his time was cut short when some fellow cooks sabotaged him. He worked as a private chef to Richard Perry, album producer for Carly Simon, Barbra Streisand, and others, then took over the kitchen at Carol Lorenz’s restaurant Fatherees on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, but found the rest of the team unserious, left, then returned when Lorenz begged him to come back. They changed the name of the restaurant to Café California and Marder began cooking according to his “sauté-reduction” principle, doing double duty as chef and waiter. He made his customers an offer some found irresistible: If they had any special requests, he’d happily accommodate them. There were takers, like the man who told him he’d return the next night if Marder would make him veal scaloppine. He also staged special dinners, like an Indian feast complete with sitar player, only rather than cooking, say, lamb in vindaloo sauce, he spooned the sauce over a rack of lamb. “That’s like nouvelle cuisine, really,” says Marder. “It’s really fucking around with food.”
Marder grew tired of partnering with Lorenz. “She wanted to put yellow-checkered tablecloths and place mats on the table,” he said. “She always wore muumuus, homemade dresses, things like that. It wasn’t working for me.” When he told her he wanted to strike out on his own, she was infuriated and bought him out. He set his sights on Venice, desolate at the time, where real estate was dirt cheap. He raised $25,000 in one day from artists and other friends and became partners with Werner Scharff, a German immigrant who owned the Casablanca space, a block from the sands of Venice Beach.
Marder didn’t have much to work with. The space was little more than a cinder-block shoebox with gray carpet, so he started borrowing art from whomever he could. Venice was an art hub, with the L.A. Louver gallery just across North Venice Boulevard. Before long, Marder was ensconced in the scene, palling around with architects, hiring a curator for the restaurant, displaying early Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Donald Judd on the walls. All of this—the minimalist space, modern artwork, and Marder’s stripped-down menu—was groundbreaking, and the West Beach drew a devoted following, for both the regular menu and his Mexican breakfast (he also integrated his take on Mexican dishes into the main menu on “Mexican Monday” nights).* Says Kazuto Matsusaka, who cooked for Puck at Ma Maison, “[Marder] was an oddball. He never blended into the chef circle. But he’s a very interesting guy. He does it his way and he can get away with it. All the restaurant people used to go there because he was doing something different.”
“Oh my God. The best Mexican breakfast ever,” recalls Evan Kleiman. “It was just really clear, clean, vibrant flavors. There was no muddiness. There were no extraneous sauces. There was a lot of grilling. Bruce was looking more south. Everybody went. There was a real chile for the chile relleno. It wasn’t a canned Ortega chile. Everything about that place was notable. And also the light. The fact that it’s also a period of time where the architecture is starting to change, so instead of having these restaurants where you walk in through a door and you’re in a completely dark space, very continental, very European, all of a sudden now things are starting to be created for the life we live in California. So there’s glass. And especially West Beach. I mean, he’s on the beach. So you’d go there on a Sunday morning and there would be light wood and the light would be streaming in and you’d have an amazing cup of coffee and just a killer breakfast. And you would feel like you were at the center of some brand-new thing.”
“It was the only truly local restaurant of any interest,” says filmmaker Tony Bill, producer of The Sting, who went on to open the Venice restaurant 72 Market Street in partnership with comic actor Dudley Moore, with former West Beach cook Leonard Schwartz as chef. “Anything else in Venice that I can remember was cookie cutter; it was so good that it didn’t wear out its welcome. It wasn’t stuffy, and it was personable.”
“He wasn’t flashy, his food was just good, it was just tasty,” says Sedlar. “If it’d be a bean puree for huevos rancheros in the morning, it was a very good bean puree with good cooked eggs and some good salsas that his dishwasher probably made. Bruce was one of the first chefs to ever serve a tortilla in an upscale restaurant. These tortillas came and it was like, Tortillas? In this übercool Hollywood-crowd, high-quality restaurant? It threw me. And then all of a sudden I had a duck taco there and nobody had served a duck taco. Bruce has a very intuitive sense about food and cooking, and it was always very, very good.”
“IT WAS LIKE A CAPER MOVIE.”
Another early and devoted customer of West Beach Cafe was Michael McCarty, who frequented lunch when there was a buffet served at the bar. After about two years of California and Bertranou, the restaurant muse had descended on McCarty, who envisioned a place of his own—Michael’s—and his quest for the right space kept “creeping west,” until he ended up in Santa Monica, “a ghost town” in those days, and The Brigadoon, a shuttered Third Street bungalow bar in a 1930s pink stucco house. McCarty planned to create a restaurant unlike any other: alive with flower arrangements, half-outdoors to emphasize the California climate. It would be a stark contrast to West Beach Cafe with one exception: He had by this time met and married artist Kim Lieberman and planned to adorn his restaurant with artwork, which also made him a regular at L.A. Louver.
Though he was an unabashed Francophile, McCarty was hell-bent on creating a “modern American” restaurant rather than an “old French” one. Michael’s would have Americans in the kitchen and on the service floor, and the food would sing with an American spirit.
Hoping to avoid partners, McCarty approached twelve banks for a Small Business Administration loan, got turned down by eleven. At the twelfth, he found a sympathetic food enthusiast loan officer who requested the recipes that would produce the dishes in McCarty’s sample menus. McCarty pointed him to the best purveyors in town, became his cooking coach, wined and dined him at the reigning French restaurants, introduced him to Bertranou. The bank was just two blocks from The Brigadoon and McCarty brought him there as part of the seduction, painting a verbal picture of his fantasy restaurant. The bank turned down the application, citing the vicissitudes of the hospitality industry, but McCarty begged his go-between to replead his case. Miraculously, he came back with a $275,000 loan.
Construction began in the early fall of 1978. As the restaurant was spruced up, the garden planted, the walls painted a rosy cream, McCarty plotted every detail. Friend Jerry Magnin, whose family owned the I. Magnin stores, put him onto Ralph Lauren, still relatively unknown (though he had designed the costumes for the 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby). At Magnin’s Rodeo Drive boutique, McCarty put together pink and green ensembles for the service team, a clean break from tuxedos—a literal shift from black-and-white to color.
McCarty, only in his midtwenties, was made for Los Angeles. Like the producers in his midst, he was brimming with outside-the-box ideas and the pluck and tenaciousness to realize them. He, too, adored the Villeroy & Boch basket weave plate favored by Bertranou, but not for the pattern. It was the size—twelve inches, as opposed to the standard nine-inch plate available in the States—the perfect, audacious frame for the food he had in mind. To get it, he traveled to France, asked Villeroy & Boch to sell him the plates before decaling them. They refused because the decals covered imperfections, enabling them to use almost every plate they manufactured. McCarty explained that he didn’t care.
He’d even take the most imperfect plates; the food, with the sauce under the protein after the example of nouvelle cuisine, would mask any flaws. Eventually a deal was struck. “There are hundreds of those kinds of stories about this restaurant,” says McCarty. (His wine director, Phil Reich, was instrumental in developing what most believe was the industry’s first computerized wine inventory system, and McCarty was also among the first to institute a tip pool that included the cashier.)
Of course, to make the food, McCarty needed cooks. Word of the project spread so quickly through the small society of young American whisks that while he was sleuthing out contact information for rising West Coast talent, they were hearing about him, showing up like mercenaries at his door. McCarty admits that his memory may be seventies-impaired, but remembers the staffing up as a Dirty Dozen–type affair. “It was like a caper movie,” he says. “People just sort of walked through the door. Even though I didn’t know any of these guys, I knew it was right. I got a vibe that said yeah, yeah. They were exactly who I was looking for. Four Americans who wanted to be cooks, wanted to be chefs, didn’t want to do what they did wherever they had worked, for the Frenchies.”
When a young bohemian named Jonathan Waxman, fresh from a stint at Chez Panisse and en route to New York City with dreams of working for André Soltner at Lutèce, showed up at his job site, McCarty exclaimed, “I have been looking for you.” Seeking candidates, McCarty had called La Varenne culinary school in Paris, where Waxman had trained, and they had coughed up his name. McCarty enlisted him as a sous chef. Mark Peel, tipped off to the opportunity by a Ma Maison bartender, joined the squad as broiler man. There were also Billy Pflug and pastry chef Jimmy Brinkley, who had been at L’Ermitage. And McCarty also recruited an old pal from his Cordon Bleu days, Brit Sally Clarke.
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 8