McCarty hired Ken Frank as head chef, though he remembers fellow restaurateurs waving him off. “He had a notorious reputation for getting into fights all the time,” says McCarty. “Everybody said, ‘Don’t even talk about it with him, it’s a waste of time, he’s just a problem, blah, blah, blah, and he only wants to do his stuff.’” McCarty pursued Frank anyway because he had a utopian vision of the key kitchen staff collaborating on the menu, which he refers to today as “the laboratory.”
“I believed that assembling a team was the only way we could do this correctly,” he says.
Frank was a controversial character in 1970s L.A., but also an unmistakable talent with greater chops than his American contemporaries because he had committed to the pro kitchen earlier than most. A child of the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles, Frank was the oldest of five children in a family with farming and food roots: His paternal grandfather owned a butcher shop; his maternal one, a dairy business. There were no great cooks in the house, but everybody prized good ingredients. Even as a kid, Frank was drawn to the kitchen: He made flapjacks, grew obsessed with perfecting the art of flipping the disks in the air; grilled burgers by age ten; improvised pizzas with bread, grated mozzarella, and ketchup.
His father, a teacher, won a grant that enabled him to work in Europe for two years, so he relocated the family to Yvoire, a fishing village on the French side of Lake Geneva. Frank went to a local school, hooked up with a French girlfriend, and fell in love with French food. Even at school, lunches were sophisticated, if rustic: stews, sausages, roasts, fresh pasta, an occasional cheese course. He turned sixteen there, had zero interest in returning to California and “seven hamburgers a week.” His father told him if he could find a family to host him, and a job, he could stick around. This is how it began in this transformative era. Though he couldn’t have known where it would lead, Frank secured both that very day, and was on his way. He started as a dishwasher in a local hotel, then moved to the kitchen. “I learned kitchen French, learned some knife skills, and learned how to work my ass off,” he says. Back in the States, he landed a job in the kitchen of a local ski resort, earning the nickname “Frenchie,” then toggled back and forth between France and Pasadena, where the chef at Chez Paul restaurant took him under his wing.
Even after all of that, stuck in the tractor beam of conventional thinking, he matriculated at UC Irvine, on a premed pathway, but within three months he was miserable. “I realized I hated school. I hated premed. I hated the kids who wanted to be doctors and be rich. But I was really liking this cooking thing.” So Frank moved to L.A. intent on becoming nothing less than the first great American chef, a Yankee Doodle Paul Bocuse. In this way Frank was prescient, leapfrogging the college and backpacking steps undertaken by many contemporaries before finding the vision or courage to dive headlong into the kitchen. He cooked at Ambrosia, a French restaurant in Orange County’s Newport Beach, then Perino’s, also in Newport Beach, then La Chaumière, where Bertranou had worked before L’Ermitage, though Frank never worked for the budding legend. In 1976, at twenty-one, he assumed command of his own kitchen for the first time at the archly named La Guillotine. He became the city’s first famous homegrown toque of the nouvelle era, partially on the strength of two compositions that broke away from the Escoffier repertoire (duck with apples, and a sweetbreads dish)—such a rare move that the menu required asterisks alongside the dish names; a footnote explained to confused diners that those entrees were the chef’s original compositions.
Frank’s food also evolved at Club Élysée, where he worked immediately after La Guillotine, in part thanks to actor Gene Wilder, on top of his game in fellow food-fan Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. “You know, Ken, your food is so good, you shouldn’t put the same vegetables with every dish,” Wilder told him one day. “You should really figure out what vegetables go best with each dish and do something specific to each plate.”
Frank decided that Wilder was right. “That was when I moved the protein to the center of the plate and started doing vegetables that were specific to each dish,” he says.
In addition to his nationality, youth, and talent, Frank became known as a sort of beta version of the rebel rock-and-roll chef that would soon become emblematic. Wrote Ruth Reichl in the Los Angeles Times: “He bragged about driving his Lotus under garage gates at a cool 50 m.p.h., bought his pastry weights in head shops and devoured sushi while others still shuddered at the sight of raw fish. He was the bad boy of the kitchen brigade.” He earned the nickname “The Sinatra of the Stockpots,” and loved every notorious second of it. “It was awesome,” says Frank. “I was driving a Lotus. I was making good money. I was meeting famous people all the time. People were writing great things about me in the newspaper. It’s not any healthier for me than it is for Lindsay Lohan or Miley Cyrus. When you’re in your early twenties that kind of attention goes to your head; there’s just no two ways about it. I don’t regret it. It is what it is, but you have to grow out of it.” Frank sums up his 1970s attitude as: “I’m the chef. I’m doing things my way. Fuck you.”
“I am not an asshole,” says Frank today. “But I used to be. I made Gordon Ramsay seem like a nice guy.”
Frank was famous, but he wasn’t popular. He blames his enfant terrible reputation on an article published after he departed La Guillotine, where he had unsuccessfully lobbied the owners to reduce the number of covers (meals served) so he could cook more consistent food. As a parting shot, he gave an interview to Bruce David Colen of Los Angeles magazine, in which he discussed his “heartburn with the restaurant status quo in L.A., my reasons for leaving, my passion for doing it my way, which is quality and ingredient-driven or I’m not interested. I don’t just need the money. But I made the mistake of talking about labor practices and truth-in-menu practices—calling things fresh when they were frozen. Or, in more blatant cases, actually substituting things and not being honest about it, and the public really didn’t know any better. ‘House-made’ when it wasn’t, or restaurants would soak pork in milk and try to pass it off as veal because it was cheaper. Never any places where I had worked but I knew of it. It was rampant. Fresh-caught today? Go get another one out of the freezer. Fresh duck? It was all frozen, with very, very few exceptions. The restaurant industry was pretty dishonest; not all of them, but there was a lot of that. That made me a lot of enemies in the restaurant business, especially those that I had talked about for their unsavory practices. And that’s where a lot of the enfant terrible came from, my willingness to speak out against what I saw as terrible wrongs.”*
There was another reason Frank believes the establishment had their knives out for him, one that foretold the coming power shift: “The path I was advocating, which was chef-driven restaurants . . .”
“CHEF IN FRENCH MEANS THE CHIEF. AND THAT I WAS. I WILL ALWAYS BE THAT.”
When Frank came on board, McCarty already had a direction in mind for the Michael’s menu. According to Frank, “It was the ingredients and the fact that it was very much French food at the time but in English with local ingredients. The first menu was very much what Michael wanted it to be. He had some young chefs that he had met in Paris that he idolized that he brought some dishes from. A lot of it was from L’Ermitage. Some of it was from me. The opening menu was pretty well written by Michael and me—mostly by Michael—because he knew what he wanted it to be and I was okay with it.”
In the months before Michael’s opened, the laboratory mind-set was in full flow: The kitchen crew tasted samples from various fish and meat purveyors, tested recipes, and conferred with McCarty. In the background, a young Ruth Reichl, reporting for New West magazine, stood with notebook and pen, documenting the goings-on. (Construction was so prolonged, she ended up spending about a year on the story.)* McCarty owned a house in Malibu where he, Reich, Waxman, Clarke, and sometimes Reichl lived. “It was crazy,” says McCarty. “We would use Waxman’s van to go to work every day. And right at the same month that we
opened the restaurant, the Pacific Coast Highway closed. A huge landslide. It was even funnier because you would drive to one end of the slide, get out of the car. I’d put mine on the other side of the slide. We would all walk through the slide on the PCH and get in the van and go to work in Jonathan’s crazy van.”
Today, McCarty freely admits that while the menu was largely his creation, he never worked on the line during service. “I didn’t want to be in the kitchen, be the fucking chef on the line. Ever.” Yet in a famous preopening black-and-white photograph circulated by publicist Burks Hamner, McCarty is grouped along with Frank, Peel, and Waxman, in full kitchen regalia.*
There are those, like veteran L.A. diners Manny and Willette Klausner, who don’t recall Michael selling himself as the chef, but some Michael’s veterans make a point of telling me he didn’t cook—as if righting the historical record, some explicitly so. “For so many years, he called himself the chef,” says Peel. “When I was there for the first year and a half, Michael did not cook once. But I understand why he would want to do that.”
“Michael, you should know, was never in the kitchen,” volunteers Frank. (Reichl supports all of this: “He was not in the kitchen. I spent most of my time with Jonathan. I spent very little time with Ken. I don’t know why. Jonathan was just really nice to me. Even though Ken was the chef, Jonathan was the one who seemed to be spending a lot of time playing around in the kitchen. Michael was dealing with the furniture, with the carpenters, with the digital guys, with supplying, but I never saw him do one thing in the kitchen.”)
McCarty’s take? “Chef in French means ‘the chief.’ And that I was. I will always be that.”
McCarty doesn’t volunteer this today, but Reichl remembered that he considered it a coup to have Frank on board, even as he—perhaps sensing the industry’s ground shifting beneath his feet toward a chef-centric template—worried that the restaurant would become known as Ken Frank’s place.
“I THINK HIS NAME SHOULD BE ABOVE MA MAISON.”
Things had plateaued between Puck and Terrail at Ma Maison. Yet, were it not for a chance encounter between Puck and Barbara Lazaroff, a Bronx-born premed student, they might have lasted longer than they did.
Lazaroff, the middle child and only girl in her family, refers to her young self as a “hippy without the drugs.” Nicknamed “The Bohemian” by her mother, she dressed to her own beat, but liked to be in control. She attended Woodstock in 1969. “I remember everything. I didn’t have a camera then. But the pictures are in my head. Everybody was so stoned.”
She came to Los Angeles for love. The relationship cooled once she arrived, but she took to the city, especially the weather. “I was always a little sad in New York because I’m one of those people that is affected by lack of light,” she says. “It’s very hard for me because I’m a visual person. My house is full of color. I love gardens. I grew up very poor. I didn’t have an opportunity to have any pets, gardens, or anything. I have four hundred rosebushes on the other side of the house, there from 1927. When they bloom, I’m in ecstasy. I love art. All of that.”
Lazaroff wasn’t immune to the wanderlust that connected her generation’s dots, but couldn’t afford to travel, so she settled for New York University, a microcosm of everything that turned her on, especially the arts and theater. When her mother learned that she had only applied to NYU, she chastised her, chasing her around with a rolled-up newspaper. “She never hit me, but she bopped me on the head: How can you do this?” Mama Lazaroff didn’t yet realize her daughter’s powers of self-realization: “I said, ‘I’m getting in and I’m getting a scholarship!’ And I did.”
Lazaroff initially planned to study theater design at NYU. She took courses in puppetry, criticism, lighting design. She painted stages. She designed sets and did makeup. She even acted. But she switched to the more dependably lucrative field of medicine, in part to ensure she could finance a life of travel and adventure, continuing to study at NYU, then Hunter College, then Berkeley, then came to L.A. with plans to finish her studies and become a physician.
In L.A., Lazaroff belonged to a gym, lugging along a massive organic chemistry book and studying between sets. A statuesque strawberry-blond Frenchwoman, Gabrielle, found the Gilda Radner–like spectacle unbearably sad and invited Lazaroff to a private party at a local club. When a French gigolo art forger (Lazaroff’s description) hit on her, she turned to his diminutive friend and asked him if he’d like to dance. It was Puck.
Breaking with his newly adopted MO, Puck revealed himself to Lazaroff as a chef, asked her if she liked to cook, and invited her to his class at Ma Cuisine. He was mid-demo when she arrived, late, and the sight of her caused him to drop his butter on the floor. Next, she came to lunch at Ma Maison decked out in a stretchy white suit and purple blouse but wouldn’t let him hold her hand because she was still with her boyfriend. (Puck was technically still married at the time, to Marie France Trouillot, an old love from France who had joined him in L.A., but both relationships were on life support.)
Hand-holding or not, they entered into a courtship. Within a week and a half, Lazaroff was helping Puck write Modern French Cooking for the American Kitchen, a planned Ma Maison cookbook to be published by Houghton Mifflin. Presented with a rendering of the cover at a creative meeting, she insisted, “You know, I think his name should be above Ma Maison, because he’s leaving Ma Maison. He’s going to be more important than Ma Maison, and this is his book.” Puck kicked her under the table. After the meeting, he fretted aloud that they wouldn’t publish. “Oh, don’t be silly,” she told him. (Told the story, Reichl says: “I think that is a perfect example of the two of them then. She was just, You are going to be famous and I’m going to make this happen any way I can.”)
Lazaroff was right: The book came out with Puck’s name inscribed in script above, and larger than, the title. The subtitle, lodged beneath a David Hockney watercolor drawing of the restaurant, was Recipes from the Cuisine of Ma Maison. And Lazaroff was right about something else: By the time the book hit store shelves, Puck was gone from Ma Maison.
“YOU WEREN’T THERE IF YOU CAN REMEMBER IT.”
Michael’s opened in April 1979 to mixed reviews; Los Angeles magazine’s Bruce David Colen savaged the restaurant, directing his rage primarily on McCarty, whom he found insufferably haughty and insincere on his first visit. When Reichl’s New West piece broke, she quoted McCarty saying, “I’m not a fifty-year-old Frenchman who owns the restaurant and is mean.” Referring to his kitchen team and why they came to him, he said, “They’ve all been working with these crusty old bastards who treat them like assholes and won’t let them do anything creative.” McCarty, fearful of offending Bertranou, called Colman Andrews demanding a retraction, but Reichl had it all on tape, so New West refused.
“Michael’s was a very magical place,” remembers John Sedlar, who checked it out with fellow L’Ermitage cook Roy Yamaguchi, who now presides over a chain of more than twenty Roy’s restaurants around the United States. “It was brash and he was sassy and he had modern art and great wine. It was a party. It was youthful. Everything was European up until that time, and this was something Californian.”
(Kleiman delineates the subtle differences between California native Marder and East Coast transplant McCarty: “They were both very, very attached to the whole art scene, but I saw Bruce as being more outsider, more edgy. Because the hippy thing has ended. The disco thing hasn’t quite started yet. So there’s this period of time where it’s, like, who are the edgy people? Well, they’re the artists. Michael’s, that space was just so thought out and so slick and yet it had this huge patio in the middle of it. It had all this amazing art on the walls. It was filled with light. They were both very prescient at the time.”)
For all the bonhomie in the dining room, behind the scenes tension between Frank and McCarty was growing. One early incident that rankled Frank had to do with a duck farm that McCarty said he and Bertranou had started in Acton, just north of the San Ga
briel Mountains. McCarty promoted it in the press, including in the New York Times, but according to Frank, he misrepresented it.
“Michael is very loose with the truth,” says Frank. “I remember sitting in an interview with Lois Dwan from the Los Angeles Times and Michael was telling her about the ducks he was raising, and the partnership and the farm, and it was just a flat-out lie. . . . They never succeeded in producing foie gras and they never succeeded in having a very viable duck farming operation. Michael would claim of course that he was a partner in this, and he would claim of course when we were at Michael’s we were serving ducks that were grown on his farm, but in fact we were buying the same frozen ducks from Harvey Gussman at Guss Meat Company that Jean Bertranou was buying for L’Ermitage, which was a particularly good Pekin duck with a large breast; it was a particular breed from a particular farm that we all decided was the best.”
When the two sat for an interview with W’s Mary Rourke, says Frank, McCarty spoke of an illegal restaurant he’d owned in Paris and was forced to close, and of how he longed to return to France and try again someday. “And of course, he had never owned a building in Paris, or had a restaurant in Paris,” says Frank.
Many interview subjects expressed skepticism about that duck farm, and Colen, in his Los Angeles magazine review of the restaurant, wrote: “McCarty claims [italics mine] to be partners with Bertranou in the duck farm the latter underwrote several years ago.” Terrail helpfully explained to me that he bought the ducks for Ma Maison, but that they were too small to use—but neither McCarty’s involvement in the farm, its success in breeding usable ducks, nor McCarty’s other possible acts of self-mythology seem to rankle anybody the way they do Frank. The prevailing affection for McCarty is summed up by Melvyn Master, a British-born wine expert, marketer, and restaurateur who knew McCarty in his Denver days: “Michael was a great marketing guy. He was passionate about food. He talked the talk. He was the real deal. There was a lot of BS to Michael but it was genuine BS, if you will.”
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 9