Around this time, Jeremiah Tower, at the behest of friend Cecilia Chiang, who had ventured south to open an outpost of her groundbreaking San Francisco Chinese restaurant The Mandarin in Beverly Hills, made a tour of some L.A. hotspots, including West Beach Cafe and chef Michael Roberts’s Trumps, a hypercreative West Hollywood restaurant and late-night industry dining destination. When he tasted the chicken at Michael’s, he burst into the kitchen and demanded, “Who is able to do that!” It was, says Tower, “just the most perfect reproduction of the best effort the French had ever done. . . . I just went, ‘Oh, my.’ It wasn’t a verbal thing; it just hit me like a nine-millimeter soft-nosed bullet.” Years later, R. W. Apple would call Tower’s San Francisco restaurant Stars, launched in 1984, the most democratic restaurant he had ever seen. “But it was only because of that inspiration that came out of L.A.,” says Tower.
Things in Berkeley had changed in the intervening years. Tower had become a gun for hire, teaching at the California Culinary Academy, taking over the kitchens of existing, struggling restaurants such as the Balboa Café. Mark Miller, who had become a cook, and eventually chef, at Chez Panisse, departed the restaurant in September 1979 to pursue his personal passion for world cuisine, especially chiles and spices—turns out you can’t take the anthropologist out of the chef; he had made it his mission to visit two new countries each year and couldn’t fit his developing style into Chez Panisse’s resolutely French construct. When Susie Nelson, Chez Panisse’s manager, felt the restaurant was becoming too snooty and left to open her own place, securing a space on Fourth Street, she invited Miller to join her as partner and chef. He matched her investment, kicking in $35,000, and they launched Fourth Street Grill that October. The restaurant drew a crowd immediately, and Nelson and Miller were repaid their investment in four months. The menu drew on influences from you name it: America, England, Italy, Morocco. Miller kept up old relationships: His old Chez Panisse buddy Jonathan Waxman was a frequent visitor; one of his cooks, David Mahler, also recalls how Miller would sometimes bring his crew to Chez Panisse after hours, let himself into the unlocked kitchen, and fix them a snack.
In December 1980, they opened Santa Fe Bar and Grill in the old Santa Fe railroad station in Berkeley. In his book California Dish, Tower quipped that the location was “an area more comfortable for prostitutes and drug dealers from Oakland than for Volvo and Saab drivers from the upper Berkeley hills.” (That didn’t stop him from dropping by on opening night and offering to lend a hand in the kitchen.) Miller explored the food of the Yucatán at Santa Fe, boasted of being able to sell two hundred orders of Peruvian beef hearts en brochette. But it was too much for him and Nelson, and after five months, he sold out his share to focus on Fourth Street Grill.
“ONE OF THOSE ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME THINGS.”
Back in West Hollywood, Patrick Terrail rang up Ken Frank with a new possibility: “La Rouche is going down in flames, they need a chef partner, and I think you can make a deal.” The restaurant had occupied the former La Guillotine space on the Sunset Strip, with a sous chef and the original maître d’ from L’Ermitage.
“Patrick sat me down and showed me how I could line up twelve investors at $5,000 apiece and pay them back in food,” says Frank.
That October, still just twenty-three years old, Frank launched a restaurant with a name that was as cheffy as it gets—La Toque, a reference to the tall white cylindrical hats worn by chefs in formal kitchens—on the Sunset Strip. (Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, in a sign of the growing interest in food and chefs, invested.) The restaurant was well received, but in spring 1980, says Frank, his partner and maître d’, Henri Fiser, left a candle burning in the dining room, causing a fire. While the restaurant was closed for repairs, Terrail invited Frank to be a part of what might have been the first pop-up: Because Ma Maison’s clientele decamped to Cannes every May, Terrail decided that rather than stay behind pining for the absent Rolls-Royces and movie stars, he’d open a Ma Maison Cannes for the duration of the festival. Terrail, Puck, Frank, and a skeleton crew assumed command of the dining room of Château de La Napoule just outside Cannes, and not coincidentally across the street from Terrail’s North Star: Outhier’s L’Oasis.
In Cannes, Puck—in an early demonstration of his innate versatility—cooked a traditional American dinner, which he knew would be exotic to the predominantly European crowd: “I brought my butcher, Harvey Guss[man], with me, he was cutting the steaks.”
Functioning out-of-house has become a part of every modern chef’s skill set, but for Puck it was uncharted territory, and led to mishaps: “I brought three hundred, or five hundred, avocados but they were way too hard and I freaked out,” he says. “I said, ‘Shit, they are still like stone! What should I do?’ And somebody gave me a stupid idea: They said, ‘Put it out in the sun, they will ripen.’ So I went up to the president of the festival and he had a big balcony. I laid them all out there and they got black and soft. So then I had to go to the farmers’ market in Nice and buy avocados from Kenya or wherever, and then put it with sour cream and caviar. So we served this and then we put our steaks, the New York steaks, which was very hard to get out of customs. Jacques Médecin, the mayor of Nice, helped us to get them through customs, and then we brought baked potatoes. They confiscated them. They didn’t let the potatoes in. And corn on the cob. And then cheesecake for dessert. So it was all new but it was a traditional American dinner. I think they loved it. People never saw a fourteen-ounce steak on a plate in France at that time; you got half of that, maybe.”
Ma Maison’s customers flocked to the temporary outpost. Bob Fosse’s autobiographical fever dream All That Jazz starring Roy Scheider and Jessica Lange showed at the festival, and was feted with a party in its honor for which a local pastry chef, an old friend of Puck’s, created a special cake and a fireworks display was put on over the Gulf of Napoule. “It was an epic party,” says Frank. “One of those once-in-a-lifetime things.”
Terrail rented out the luxurious Château de La Napoule and gave each member of the team his own bedroom. Between and after services, the crew cooked in the château kitchen, dined at Vergé’s Moulin de Mougins, toured a cheese cave, enjoyed local specialties like soupe de poisson cooked for them by friends of Puck’s, and partied at local nightclubs.
It remains a cherished memory for all three men, but it would be one of the last good times for Puck and Terrail.
“HE OFFERED ME A JOB AS A HATCHECK GIRL AND I CRIED.”
As Terrail, Puck, and Frank depart Château la Napoule, we pan across the street to L’Oasis, and into the kitchen, where Puck’s former cook, Susan Feniger, is working a one-year stage under Outhier’s auspices, arranged for her by Terrail himself.
Feniger had been raised in a Midwestern Jewish family that valued good food; mom could cook anything, from noodle kugel to lasagna to fudge brownies, and was uncommonly attuned to the seasons, making vibrant salads in an iceberg wedge era. Feniger’s first kitchen job was at Smith’s Cafeteria in Toledo, Ohio. She loved it, but started college, dropped out, then found herself working for a cabinetmaker in Vermont. Returning to college, this time in California, to study economics, she took a job in the school’s cafeteria, learned rudimentary preparations, and loved the environment. Her boss pulled her aside one day, told her she should be studying cooking. She convinced her economics professor to let her spend her senior year in a customized, independent-study program at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, where Feniger became hopelessly devoted to kitchen life: “I loved the camaraderie of it, I loved wearing uniforms, I loved eating and creating. It fit for me.”
Feniger was the only woman in her class, but didn’t feel the crush of sexism: “Here’s the thing: When I was in high school, I was this total Ayn Rand freak. I was this total libertarian to the fullest. I was studying philosophy and psychology and I was reading Nathaniel Branden and then I ended up reading John Hospers.” The libertarian bent toward self-sufficiency bucked Feniger up against
the chauvinism and harassment of the time: “I probably was in total denial to thinking that was happening. I was, I think, pretty strong and confident. I was a tomboy as a kid. I’m sure it was there. I just didn’t feel it. It clearly still is there but it’s just not one of those things that came into my consciousness.”*
Feniger shifted her attention to cooking. Her family, unlike many of the time, supported it, but her father had one requirement: that she learn the business of running a restaurant. Feniger worked for a hot second at The Quilted Giraffe, a new restaurant in New Paltz, New York, in its formative years, then other jobs in upstate New York and for Gus Riedi’s La Bonne Auberge in Kansas City, and gave up novels and philosophical treatises for cookbooks. After two years, she moved to Chicago and took a job at Le Perroquet, a nouvelle cuisine restaurant and one of Chicago’s finest, where she became the second-ever woman in the kitchen; the first, still there when Feniger arrived, was Mary Sue Milliken.
Milliken grew up the youngest of three sisters in an East Lansing, Michigan, family, discovered cooking during high school in home ec classes and working in a pizzeria and a donut shop. She also had an epiphany when “I met a guy who was a chef in Chicago, a friend of my sister’s, and he cooked dinner in, like, forty-five minutes before my very eyes. I was sixteen, and in that moment, at that dinner, I decided I wanted to be a chef. And I went back to East Lansing, graduated from high school, and moved to Chicago. I really had no idea what kind of a career it was going to be.” She went to what she calls “chef school” in 1976 or 1977 at Washburn Trade School, which she describes as “a trade tech on the South Side with a bunch of plumbers and pipe fitters and auto mechanics.” To ready students for the rigors of the industry, the school was open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. She supplemented her classes with restaurant work at night.
Milliken was, she believes, one of two women in a class of one hundred. “I think when you’re in the middle of that kind of a situation you don’t allow yourself to acknowledge that it’s harder for you than it would be if you were a different gender. So you just barrel through and try to make it happen,” she says. “But in retrospect you look at it and you can see that it was definitely challenging and hard. But I have the kind of personality that likes a challenge and likes to be a little bit of a rebel. So I think it fit me. But I had to go to the tequila bar after school and drink as much as the guys. I had to prove myself in kitchens. I had to lift heavy things. I was trying to really be as competitive as I could on that stage.”
Milliken had heard of Alice Waters, but only vaguely. As with most people east of the Rocky Mountains—and with Californians, for that matter—her attentions were focused on France. She found direction when Madeleine Peter’s Favorite Recipes of the Great Women Chefs of France was published in 1979. “I read it, like, five times. I couldn’t believe it. Finally I’ve found some role models.” This was typical of the time. With scant coverage or even real awareness of chefs, aspirants were hard-pressed for industry knowledge. “There was no Internet. There were very few of us, and chefs in those days, we worked sixteen, eighteen hours a day, every day, day in and day out. And you didn’t read lots of newspapers or magazines. Where were you going to get intel?”
Milliken worked for the Conrad Hilton Hotel, then did a stage at Maxim’s in Paris. Returning to Chicago, she wanted to work for Jovan Trboyevic at Le Perroquet, which had never employed a woman in the kitchen.
“He said, ‘I can’t hire you because you’re a woman and you’d cause havoc in my kitchen,’” says Milliken. “I said, ‘How will I do that?’ He said, ‘You’re too pretty. All the men would go crazy.’ I just couldn’t believe that. He offered me a job as a hatcheck girl and I cried.* And then I started a letter and phone call campaign where I called him every five minutes, wrote him letters. And he finally said, ‘Are you going to sue me?’ I said, ‘No, I just want a job.’ So he said, ‘All right. Come in tomorrow. It’s three twenty-five an hour, minimum wage.’ Of course, now he would get sued over it. But then, you know, there were times when, like, seventeen-year-old boys would be making twelve—I can’t remember, maybe it was eight dollars an hour, and I would be making five fifty, and I was two years older, with four years more experience. But that stuff happened and you just persevered and kept going.”
Feniger arrived about eighteen months after Milliken. “I think he thought he had the best deal on the planet because I was working circles around all the guys in the kitchen and I was so cheap, so he took another,” says Milliken. “I had never worked with anybody who had the same sensibility, the same work ethic. We really enjoyed working together.”
“The chef there at that time was a total asshole to me,” says Feniger. “Complete. But he was a great chef and I felt like I learned a ton from him. It was a totally great restaurant. And it was a great experience, it was the beginning of nouvelle cuisine and they were just doing amazing things. We both learned a ton there.”
Feniger moved to Los Angeles, and Ma Maison, in 1978, and fell right away for the laid-back culture, calling Milliken to breathlessly report: “I can’t believe you can wear tennis shoes here, you don’t have to wear a chef’s hat.” She also shared a detail that amuses Milliken today: “‘You’re not going to believe this weirdo who’s in the kitchen here. He doesn’t even know how to do the ordering. We have three cases of avocados and he orders three more. They’re just going to spoil.’ We chuckle about that, because it was Wolf.”
Around the same time that Feniger pushed off from Ma Maison to work at L’Oasis, Milliken embarked on her own stage under chef Dominique Nahmias at Olympe in Paris. The two kept in touch that year and, when it was over, met up at Milliken’s apartment in Paris’s Fourteenth Arrondissement, killed a few bottles of wine, and as a rainbow appeared in the sky, came to a conclusion: “We decided that we had to open a restaurant together,” says Milliken. “I think being a woman in a man’s field, you kind of quickly learn that if you want to call the shots, you’re going to have to start out small and do your own thing because trying to work your way up through the hierarchy in a male-dominated field is just pretty hard.” (Milliken, along with Lazaroff, New York chefs and restaurateurs Lidia Bastianich and Anne Rozenzweig, Providence’s Johanne Killeen, and California’s Elka Gilmore, helped start Women Chefs & Restaurateurs, spearheaded by chefs Barbara Tropp and Joyce Goldstein, in 1993. A similar organization, the New York Women’s Culinary Alliance, was founded by Sara Moulton and Maria Reuge at Sally Darr’s La Tulipe restaurant in 1981. Both continue to thrive today.)
Both cooks were broke—Milliken had even sold her car to finance her European adventure and lived off her savings overseas—so they went where the short-term money was: Milliken to Chicago and a private chef gig; Feniger back to L.A., where she picked up lunch shifts at Ma Maison. By night she moonlighted, running the kitchen for the owners of an espresso bar located next to their L.A. Eyeworks shop, also on Melrose. It was modest, to say the least, a nine-hundred-square-foot cafe with nine tables, eleven barstools, a pastry case, an espresso machine, and no proper kitchen. The owners, over the novelty of running a food-service business and frustrated by the daily grind, asked Feniger if she’d like to run it. She seized the opportunity, shortcomings of the space be damned, setting up two hibachis, a hot plate, and a prep table in the parking lot out back.
“The first special I ever ran was veal tongue with lobster sauce and sautéed pears. I made it on a hot plate,” said Feniger. “We were two years into it before the health department came by to say we really couldn’t do that.”
Milliken came to L.A. in February 1981, overcame her Midwesterner’s wariness of California—known back home as “the land of fruits and nuts”—went back to Chicago, packed up her things, and by early spring she and Feniger were together in the kitchen at what became City Café, drawing primarily on their French backgrounds, with an emphasis on country over nouvelle: “Confit of duck on a salad with pickled cabbage. Or we would do cold poached salmon with tomatoes a
nd herbs and olive oil and salt. Or we would do grilled turkey. We couldn’t afford veal so we were really into turkey for some reason. We’d slice it thinly and pound it and make turkey escalope with lemon and shallots and brown butter.” Because they had no refrigeration and required a daily delivery, local purveyors didn’t want to service them. Puck, flexing his growing muscle, intervened on their behalf.
Feniger and Milliken found their customers as open-minded as Waxman did, so they began adding organs such as lamb kidneys to the menu. “There was a dialogue and an interchange between the customers and the kitchen,” says Milliken. The interaction was enhanced by the fact that the bathroom was through the kitchen. “Whenever a movie star would come in, we’d tell the busboy, ‘Give them lots of water so they have to come in the bathroom.’” (Highlights: Gilda Radner, Stevie Wonder, and the giraffe-tall Julia Child, who bumped her head on the pots and pans hanging like a mobile over the kitchen.)
“They would ask about the food,” says Milliken. “They’d sit at the bar. They’d look through the window to the kitchen, and we were just bursting with excitement about cooking. We would cook from morning until night, every day, six days a week, and then on Mondays we would just sleep all day. We had so much fun. We’d write the menu on a chalkboard every day. We’d be out there filling the pastry case with homemade desserts. We had a huge pastry menu, too; as soon as I got in the cafe, I was like, ‘We’re not going to buy any desserts from the outside.’ There was a lot of excitement around the food. And I would do things like lamb’s tongue salad that people loved. I was just very impressed. It was an artistic thing, eating in L.A., more so than it was in the Midwest.”
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 11