Frank didn’t share the charitable view of McCarty, nor did he socialize with him or the rest of the Michael’s crowd at his Malibu house, which he found “incestuous.”
“They’d ride to work together, go home together, stay up at night, get high, talk about food, and hang out,” says Frank. “And I went home to my house after work.”
Like Terrail and Puck, McCarty and Frank had much in common: both among the very few in their generation who committed early to a life in restaurants. And both were American, both Francophiles. But they couldn’t get along, largely because both craved credit, and dominance. Another gem from Colen’s review: “The official billing in the PR program notes read, ‘Chef owner: Michael McCarty. Assisted by Ken Frank.’ Given the egos of both men, I wonder how long that association will last. For the present, at least, McCarty seems content to do his mixing out front.” McCarty denies it, but Frank says that he was eventually banned from the Michael’s dining room because he knew so many customers from past gigs. (Similarly, Puck recalls that when he began to get over his shyness at Ma Maison, “If I talked to a customer, Patrick went right away there, too, to talk to them.”)
Frank departed Michael’s, after just four months, but deciphering the reason why is a quandary for which the word Rashomon seems to have been created.
Remembers Waxman: “After about two months of this, Ken goes, ‘I don’t want to be the head chef anymore; I want you to be the head chef. I am going to open my own restaurant but I can’t afford to leave right now, so can I be the sous chef and you can be the head chef?’ So we switched. And I became the head chef.”
“That’s a flat-out lie,” says Frank. “A figment of his imagination. I got fired from Michael’s because I was tired of taking shit and didn’t take shit anymore and knew I had this other deal working. I got fired from Michael’s and I can tell you the date. You can go look it up in the employment records. It was August 5. It was because Michael was charging us; he had a manager named Carl who was counting the number of espressos we drank in the kitchen so he could deduct the cost of the espressos from our paycheck and I said it was bullshit. If I’m working fourteen hours a day and you are going to charge me for the espresso I drink to stay up, fuck you. And I probably told it to him just like that.
“That is specifically what triggered it. But the restaurant was broke when it first opened and he missed a number of payrolls. He finally got them caught up because he was busy paying money for other things. He very much took advantage of his cooks. So I called him on that, too, and he didn’t like that either.”
“That I have no recollection of,” laughs McCarty of the espresso charge. But he does offer: “It was a madhouse and if anything, so many fundamentals were broken in those days. For example, I would take them all out to dinner. We would have the wildest times. Everything about that first year, even the first ten years, are fundamental rules that you do not break between employer and employee. Lines were blurred. I mean, the stories in my restaurant at two o’clock in the morning, what was going on in the walk-ins. Remember, blow was in the eighties. Blow was a big deal, and a big deal amongst our clients. And it was a raucous time. So if you are going to hear different stories you are going to hear different stories. As they used to say, ‘You weren’t there if you can remember it,’ and it was true.” McCarty also blames Frank for terminating his tip pool. “A labor department person came to my restaurant a year plus one day after he left and said this complaint was filed saying that he didn’t get paid what he was supposed to get paid. And I said, ‘Well, I have a computerized payroll system; here’s all of his records.’”
“I think Michael actually fired him after six months,” says Peel, who doesn’t remember Frank being banned from the dining room, but says that it rings true and imagines the espresso contretemps “was a symbol for Ken of diminished stature. Thinking about it now, with years behind me, thinking about it from Michael’s perspective, I do understand that. Here he had put in a lot of his own money, his reputation on the line opening this place—the restaurant cannot hinge on the chef because if the chef leaves it’s like sticking a pin in a balloon.”
With Frank gone, Waxman was elevated to chef. He introduced what would become a signature dish for decades—a half chicken with fries and tarragon butter—and changed the menu regularly, experimenting. He found the Los Angeles dining public remarkably open to new ideas, even unsuccessful ones: “They were the most enthusiastic audience you could ever imagine,” says Waxman. “They were so enthusiastic they were overly enthusiastic. They loved everything. They tolerated the mistakes. I knew they were mistakes as soon as they went out of the kitchen, but they weren’t horrible mistakes; they were mistakes of youth.” The freedom was intoxicating: “I remember going to see Wolfgang Puck for the first time at lunch at Ma Maison. He had worked at all these famous restaurants in Paris, more classically trained than anybody I knew at that point except for Jean-Pierre Moullé at Chez Panisse. He looked at me and it was like, ‘This is great, right? This is cool, right? We get to do what we want now. We get to be the chef. There aren’t any rules anymore.’”
But an excess of anything, even enthusiasm, can backfire. Once, when Waxman was away on vacation, Peel ran sixteen specials: four cold appetizers, four hot appetizers, four meat main courses, and four fish dishes. Just reciting them caused delays on the service floor. “I had all of these things I wanted to do, so I just did all of them,” says Peel. “I had to promise the waiters I would never do that again.”
The restaurant became a beacon for young American talent, though many, according to Peel, “left after a little while because they got sick of the turmoil. It was not a buttoned-down kitchen. At all. It got a little crazy sometimes. After the restaurant closed, people would stay up and drink Champagne and talk and do cocaine.”
One of those drawn to McCarty’s flame was Nancy Silverton, a young cook who had grown up one of two daughters of an attorney (father) and writer (mother) in Los Angeles. She first entered the kitchen pursuing a flirtation at Sonoma State University.
“I bought a cookbook and I started cooking out of it. It was quite early on in following these recipes and realizing how much I enjoyed, first of all, just kind of being by myself, but also how much I felt comfortable and enjoyed using my hands. And it was that first semester that it was like a lightbulb went off. It was that memory of standing behind the stainless-steel double-shelved worktable where it hit me that this is what I want to do. This is what I want to be when I grow up. I don’t know if I thought chef, but probably I thought cook.” That was 1974.
Silverton, who initially thought she’d follow her beloved dad’s footsteps into the law, changed majors a few times, then shifted to Sonoma State’s Hutchins liberal arts college. She spent her summer breaks in kitchens, where she was often the lone white girl amongst a crew of Latino career cooks just there for the paycheck. A watershed moment came in 1976, her senior year. “I was studying for my finals and I was having a very hard time focusing and I didn’t want to take the test that I was studying for. Didn’t want to write the papers I was writing because I knew that there was nothing I was going to be doing with a degree. I called my parents up and I said, ‘I’m dropping out of school. I want to cook.’” Unlike most parents of the day, hers were supportive.
She spent a year cooking at 464 Magnolia, a chef-owned restaurant in Marin County populated, like Chez Panisse, by charter members of a new generation of California cooks, college-educated Francophiles who worked from recipes out of books by Julia Child, concert-pianist-turned-cookbook-author Michael Field, Frenchman (and nouvelle cuisine loather) Raymond Oliver. It was also a distinctly California kitchen where gender dynamics were concerned: “It was a very supportive kitchen. People ask me what are my horror stories of being a young woman on her way up in a kitchen, and I had none of those experiences,” says Silverton, who recalls an idyllic environment where she talked movies, books, and politics with her coworkers.
In 1977, at her fat
her’s insistence, she matriculated at Le Cordon Bleu in London, then returned to L.A., where she dined at Michael’s with her parents shortly after it opened.
“The place was busy and vibrant, with beautiful people, and there was great art on the walls. Michael was running around very well dressed but casual, kissing and hugging. You knew that you were in a place to be, and to be seen. The dining room of 464 Magnolia and the dining room of Chez Panisse were much more subdued in a Northern California way. This was Hollywood.”
Silverton, touting her Le Cordon Bleu credentials, hit McCarty up for a job. She wanted in so badly that she settled for a position managing the restaurant’s computerized program during lunch.
“I was so terrible at it,” says Silverton. “And the cooks were so angry with me because I would very often put in the wrong order and I didn’t know how to do all the things you do on a computer. Well, Jonathan found out somehow that that’s not what I was there for; I think he was relieved because he couldn’t believe someone as incompetent as me had that job—I probably did it for three weeks. He found out that I wanted to be in the kitchen and so he approached me and he said, ‘Look, I don’t have anything on the hot side’—because that’s what I applied for—‘but our pastry chef, Jimmy, is about to walk out the door. I need you to go in there and learn every single recipe you can.’”
Jimmy Brinkley had what Silverton calls “a very fragile temperament.” Because his assistant, a friend of Ken Frank’s, had departed with him, Brinkley was flying solo and not happy about it.
Again, Silverton accepted a suboptimal assignment, even though she describes herself as having been “less than a C student” in pastry at Le Cordon Bleu, where she found the adherence to dogma suffocating: “There was no flexibility, no humor, no smiles. You did it by the book and you didn’t ask questions. Whatever I made just didn’t come out because I felt I was so constricted by the precision of it, because they said, ‘No, nothing will work unless you do it exactly that way.’”
Pastry was also scarcely a consideration for a young cook in the United States. “It was a time in Los Angeles and possibly the country where it wasn’t a given that all restaurants of a certain level had a pastry chef,” says Silverton. “In Los Angeles especially, most of the restaurants bought their pastries from two people: One was La Mousse, so you had a frozen mousse cake with all different flavors as a choice, and another was I think called L.A. Desserts or something, and you had a choice of pecan pie and apple pie and things like that, and everybody had the same menu. The few restaurants that made their desserts in-house only made desserts that had French names: chocolate mousse, apple tart, crêpes Suzette. Things like that. So L’Ermitage was one of the first restaurants that not only had a beautiful dessert table, but the desserts did not have classic names; Jimmy brought that over to Michael’s.”
Under Brinkley, Silverton found a new world of pastry open to her: “As I watched and learned from Jimmy, I saw how the pastry world was not restrictive, that there were certain scientific principles you had to adhere to. If you pour boiling milk all at once over eggs, they are going to scramble. If you cook something at six hundred degrees, it’s going to burn. Things like that. But as long as you stay within those guidelines there’s a lot of room for creativity. So not only did I just find that so exciting, it was the first time I saw somebody in the dessert world actually taste things and change as you taste. That was really eye opening. I also loved the fact that we had our own little corner of the kitchen and we would come in at four in the morning when nobody was there and we would leave by lunch service. I don’t have to tell you that that’s the part of the kitchen that I became the most happy at. I didn’t want to do anything more to the hot side.”
Silverton was fond of a chocolate-caramel tart that Brinkley created, based on the flavors of a Heath Bar, and of a chocolate-raspberry mousse cake, which she loved for its unconventional pairing. Like his L’Ermitage repertoire, Brinkley’s Michael’s desserts didn’t have names, which Silverton found thrilling. “You weren’t making pecan pie. And all the desserts on the menu were named by the ingredients in the dessert.”
Though Silverton doesn’t remember it, McCarty vividly recalls encouraging her to bring a boldness to her desserts; specifically he remembers whipping cream aggressively to produce a superfluffy result—he considered the effect to be distinctly American.
Brinkley didn’t leave Michael’s, as was feared, and Waxman and McCarty sent Silverton to France for six months to deepen her pastry knowledge at Gaston Lenôtre’s school in Plaisir, and to work in a bakery. “I came back with so many ideas and I started to make them for Michael, the things that I had learned and really impressed me. And Michael didn’t like them. He thought they were too French. His flavor preference was some of the things that Jimmy was making that in truth were much more flavorful. They were much more condensed. So I’d take that chocolate-raspberry mousse cake and I’d say, ‘I know how to lighten that. I could take that and if I add more egg whites it’ll be just like foam, right?’ I mean, egg whites don’t have any flavor, so I’m sacrificing flavor for an airiness. And Michael was very gentle in his critique of what I had brought back. And he was right. And I think my success, maybe, was the influence and the technique that I learned in France merging with Jimmy’s great knack for making flavorful things, and the two became my style.”
Ironically, despite McCarty’s redirection, Silverton believes that one of her key contributions to the evolution of restaurant desserts in America was the importing of French techniques that weren’t common in the United States at the time, “whether it was certain chocolates that I brought back or certain ways of whipping cream or making a buttercream or making a pâte sucrée*—then people would go work somewhere else and they would take my recipes. That’s just the way the food world works.”
George Barber, a Scottish actor and front-of-house man who had worked at restaurants in London and Paris, found his way to L.A. in a “drug-and-alcohol-infused” period in his life, went to work at L’Orangerie, then migrated to Michael’s in 1980, at age thirty. “They were young Turks,” he says of McCarty, Waxman, and company. “They were hot, they were on fire.”
For Barber, McCarty’s dining room was a world apart from others he’d worked in. He remembers McCarty drilling him on food during his interview, which surprised and impressed him because waiting tables was largely seen as a rent-paying enterprise for actors and other creatives.
“Listen,” McCarty told him. “I’m only hiring people that are really interested in what we’re doing. I’m not interested in bullshit.”
Despite his experience, Barber took a job as a busboy because McCarty insisted all staff work their way up the chain. Barber was also impressed that the Armani-clad McCarty trained him personally. “He took me through that restaurant from the color of the paint on the front door, to the telephone lines on the side, to literally everything. The data and information that he gave me as we went along was just mind blowing. Mind blowing. Then he went into the art. And of course you know the whole story about the art: ‘This is Richard Diebenkorn. This is his playing card series.’ Then we got into the food, then we got into the service.
“One of the things that I learned about from Michael is that he’s so thorough. He was so into what he was doing. But it was a total involvement of everybody. Everybody was connected. And I have to say it was my first real experience with really great integrity of what we were doing, that we were elevating the dining experience. But we were also putting the edge on it, the California edge. Have you seen The Player? You know that scene where they’re like, ‘I’ll have my Pellegrino, two blocks of ice with lemon on the side, please.’ This is California. Now, we’re talking about the top restaurants in California that I worked at where people were mollycoddled. They got what they wanted. There was no question. And they would alter the menu. They were very used to dismantling a menu and saying, ‘I’ll have this, I’ll have this, I’ll have this.’ Michael wouldn’t do it
. He would encourage them and say, ‘You’ve got to try this.’”
McCarty was also willing to back his team, dramatically if necessary. Remembers Barber: “Once I had these people in the terrace and they were real Hollywood assholes, spoiled people. And we were used to reporting to each other what was going on so everyone knew what this table was like. So you know, of course there’s all that ‘the customer’s always right,’ you want to break through and make them happy, so you’ve accomplished something with them. And finally he says to me, ‘Okay, George. I’ll take over, dude.’ He goes over to the table. By this time they’re on their second bottle of Montrachet. Some big wine. They had the apps and it was just going nowhere. So he went up to them, he said, ‘Look. Everything that you have consumed and drunk up until now is on me. We can’t help you anymore. We can’t make you happy. We’re never going to be able to make you happy tonight. So good night. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. No hard feelings. Bye.’ And he goes, ‘Clear this table.’ And that was the end of that. Might be [a] $400, $500 bill, thirty years ago. I thought, Wow. I’d never seen that happen before. It impressed me because he really stood by what he said and felt. It’s not that I’d kick anybody out of anywhere. I’m not an employer. But it gave me something to stand by, like a value, that what I’m doing is very right.”
McCarty also pioneered a practice that is now de rigueur in restaurants, the nightly staff meeting. “Now that’s a given. That was new,” says Barber. “Michael would be there. Jonathan would be there. Everybody was there. It took place at five, in the dining room. Dishes would be brought out. We’d be tasting. We were discussing it. It was a really involved part of the night. And that was a new thing.”
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 10