It wasn’t just the American accent in the food; Wine also eschewed the French tendency toward authoritarianism and abuse as the default style of kitchen leadership. Remembers Tom Colicchio: “It wasn’t about just being a brute and yelling and screaming and carrying on, doing everything by force. This was all about finesse. It was more cerebral.”
Colicchio explains how Wine’s collaborative approach led to distinctly American compositions: “One day, Barry said, ‘I want to do a dish but I want it to be American. What’s really American?’ We were throwing some ideas around. I said, ‘How about a clambake?’ He went, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Now, how do we get that on a dish?’ He didn’t mean a clambake that goes on the dish; how do we turn that idea into a dish? I think we worked it into a lobster ravioli with corn, something like a butter sauce with corn and tarragon. That’s the kind of thing that he would think of.”
Even when The Quilted Giraffe received four stars from the New York Times, Wine got no recognition or encouragement from the top French chefs in town, such as Lutèce’s Soltner or Sailhac, who moved from Le Cygne to Le Cirque in 1978. “They did not come to look,” says Wine. “Some of the French from France actually came to look. Some guys from Lyon, ultimately Paul Bocuse, they all came.” Wine says that even earning high marks from Gault and Millau didn’t break the ice: “When you went to the awards luncheon, still the French chefs wouldn’t give you respect. They’d stand together and speak French.” But he insists that the cold shoulder didn’t sting him in the least. “In fact, it made for competition. It was motivating,” he says.
Even those who worked for Wine felt the French chill toward The Quilted Giraffe. Kinch, who overlapped with Colicchio there, received barbs from not only French cooks, but also Americans who worked in French kitchens, who would chide Kinch and his Quilted Giraffe colleagues if they ended up in the same bar after hours, mocking the restaurant’s four-star status.
“Read ’em and weep,” Kinch would retort, holding four fingers up over his beer.
Tom Carlin says that although he might have sensed the French guard’s indifference toward Wine, it didn’t bother him: “We probably felt that they were old school, the classic French had already peaked and was going down. For us they were passé, so I don’t think it bothered us that we thought they didn’t respect us. I don’t know if we respected them.”
Colicchio believes that Wine’s great appeal to diners of the day, his outside-the-box thinking, was the very thing that turned off the French. “I think that’s why a lot of the chefs didn’t like it. Sometimes that experiment would backfire, like asparagus ice cream and sweetbreads, but Barry was always thinking. He was always looking. He was the first person I know that took a trip to Japan, came back from Tokyo, and said, ‘We’re going to start moving in that direction.’ And a lot of it was very good.”
It didn’t take four stars to get the old guard’s back up. Chef Alfred Portale, a native of Buffalo, New York, remembers the night in 1985 that Gotham Bar and Grill, where he was the chef, earned three stars from the New York Times. When the review broke, “I went to Bud’s and met some friends and I remember there was somebody from The Four Seasons there. They were perturbed. ‘How can they let this punk . . .’ They said something. It was like, ‘How can a restaurant that does this get three stars?’”
Phil Carlson, chef Leslie Revsin’s widower, tells a similar story: One night, he and Revsin were dining at one of the top French restaurants in town, visiting with the chef at the end of the meal. Discussing the influx of Americans into the profession, the chef sneered, “I know. Anybody can be a chef now. Even cab drivers are doing it,” which Carlson took as a not-too-veiled reference to a rising American chef who was known to have driven a taxi at one point.
“When you’re breaking away from either traditional French restaurants like Lutèce or La Côte Basque or what was going on at Le Cirque, there definitely was suspicion, in some cases antipathy, especially if the new kids on the block got a lot of love from a critic,” says Josh Wesson. “And somehow it was perceived to be coming at the expense of the old guard. No doubt about that. But I don’t think the reverse was true. Whether it was the Waltucks or the Wines or Len and Karen [Allison] or David and Susan [Liederman], there was an abiding respect and love for where food had come from, an almost insane amount of respect for what that generation of chefs and restaurateurs had accomplished. It wasn’t that people were breaking away for the sake of innovation or to be different; they were expanding on the culinary traditions and expertise of old-school restaurants and then combining that with new ingredients, access to new foods, techniques that had been developed both in France and in Japan and places like that, and creating something that didn’t exist before. So there was a lot of respect for what was. But it didn’t flow in the other direction from many of the great storied restaurants of the sixties and seventies, handing off the baton to the next generation of really exciting, innovative chefs.”
The resistance to Americans staking a claim as chefs in their own right was nothing new; Larry Forgione had detected the same hostility years earlier at Régine’s. “I wanted to be very respectful to chefs that I felt were important,” says Forgione. “I certainly didn’t think of myself as important. So I went to La Caravelle and the five or six great restaurants of New York. André Soltner was just an incredible human being, friendly and supportive of, at the time maybe it wasn’t of American cuisine, but of a new young chef. Jean-Jacques Rachou [at La Côte Basque] was the same way. Then there were other ones like La Grenouille, where they were basically like, ‘You’re paying homage, now it’s time for you to go.’ I was just coming over to say hello. I was coming over to pay homage, but I didn’t expect to be shown the door after I did it. You didn’t have five minutes to talk to me?”
The same tension created a problem for cooking school grads looking to round out their education: “You came out of the CIA and came to New York in the early eighties and there were eight or nine restaurants to work in,” says Colameco. “That was it.” But most of the great French kitchens in New York City wouldn’t hire Americans.
“I wanted to work at Lutèce,” says Kinch. “I met with André Soltner for about ten minutes. He kind of laughed me off.” (Kinch eventually found a foothold in New York City at the bistro La Petite Ferme, where David Waltuck had cooked in the 1970s.) Being declined by Soltner was essentially a rite of passage in New York City. Most describe his rejection in kinder terms than Kinch, but they all believe he turned them down because they were Americans. (Peter Hoffman says he would have washed dishes at Lutèce; Revsin’s widower Carlson says she would have worked for him even after having been a chef in her own right but he simply told her, “Leslie, I just can’t.” For his part, Soltner insists that he had a small kitchen and a loyal crew and so rarely had open positions; and he’s quick to point out that he did hire a few Americans, such as Bill Peet and Henry Meer.) And getting hired overseas was, generally speaking, even more difficult.
Daniel Boulud, who came to the United States in 1981, insists that anti-Americanism wasn’t to blame for the resistance to employing Americans in French kitchens in New York, but rather that Americans simply lacked the training required to thrive in a French kitchen. “There was a limitation of opportunity for an American to really learn to become a great chef,” says Boulud.
“WHAT SET HIM APART IS HE HIRED AMERICANS.”
Against this backdrop, a network of U.S.-based French and European figures coalesced to connect American prospects with the experience they craved, a sort of culinary Underground Railroad. The three main operatives were CIA instructors like Eugene Bernard and Leon Dhaenens, who had direct ties to French culinary royalty such as Paul Bocuse and Fernand Point; meat purveyor Marc Sarrazin of DeBragga & Spitler; and chef Jean-Jacques Rachou, who was the chef-owner of Le Lavandou and purchased La Côte Basque from Henri Soulé in 1979, and was the first high-profile French chef willing to enlist a predominantly American crew.
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“Jean-Jacques Rachou understood very early on, not that the French were dying, but if you wanted to get on the right bus you needed to get all these young American guys working in your kitchen because those were the people that were going to move up,” says Charlie Palmer.*
In many cases, the Americans were so desperate for opportunity that they took a passive role in their own fate, allowing the elders to pull their strings. Today, Palmer lords over an empire of restaurants and hotels from his home base in Northern California, but in 1979, as a student at the CIA, he was a spectator in his own budding career: One winter day that year, Dhaenens and the young buck headed down to New York City and had lunch at Le Lavandou, a petite bistro on East 61st Street near Lexington Avenue. At the end of the meal, Dhaenens and Rachou spoke in French for about ten minutes, then Rachou turned to Palmer and said, in his trademark mumbled French accent, “Okay, you start March 26.”
“There was no discussion of what you’re going to do,” remembers Palmer. “What you’re going to get paid, if you’re going to get paid. And Dhaenens said, ‘Don’t worry, my boy. Everything is set.’ It was a deal. So that’s what I did. I showed up and that was it.” (Rachou, in need of more cooks, sometimes asked the Americans to recruit their friends, leading Palmer to reach out to his CIA classmate, Philadelphia native Frank Crispo.)
Another hopeful, dispatched by the CIA’s Bernard, was Rick Moonen, a restless, raspy-voiced cook from Flushing, Queens, also sent to Rachou in 1979 as Rachou was preparing to open La Côte Basque. Enshrouded in a black cashmere overcoat borrowed from his father, Moonen showed up for an interview at La Côte Basque, then a construction site. He asked a Frenchman in red flannel outside the storefront if he could point him to Chef “Rahoo,” mangling the name. The man grumbled, led Moonen inside.
“He opens the door, I follow him, he closes the door, locks it behind him. We entered through the men’s room. Now, I didn’t know that’s where Henri Soulé had passed away, but that’s how I first step into La Côte Basque, through the men’s room side door.”
Turns out the Frenchman was Rachou himself, punking the young American.
“He brought me downstairs into the kitchen. I’m following him around for twenty minutes. He doesn’t say a word to me. He stops, he gives somebody some money, talks to another guy, gives some instruction over here, down the stairs, around the corner. Jackhammers. He turns to me, he goes, ‘So you want a job?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He says, ‘Okay.’ That was the interview.
“He said, ‘Come in on Monday.’ He didn’t tell me a time. Nothing. I’m getting dust all over my dad’s overcoat. I’m stressing out over how I’m going to get through this interview, but Eugene Bernard had made the phone call and I was already hired. He just wanted to see me and tell me I had to come in on Monday.” (Palmer, Moonen, and Crispo weren’t the first Yanks Rachou hired. A few had previously worked for him at Le Lavandou.)
Assigning young American cooks hither and yon wasn’t the only way in which their European puppet masters demonstrated their benevolent power. A young cook named David Bouley, who had worked for, among others, Roger Vergé, in France, joined the staff at La Côte Basque shortly after it opened under Rachou, remembers that “Rachou used to give me my mail from Vergé opened all the time.” A few years later, Bouley was working under Sailhac at Le Cirque. Because of Sailhac’s and Le Cirque owner Sirio Maccioni’s ties to France, the restaurant was a frequent stop for the likes of Bocuse when they were in New York. On one such visit, the bosses summoned Bouley to their table.
“I went out in the dining room and I remember Paul Bocuse, Vergé, Craig Claiborne, Pierre Franey, they’re all sitting there,” says Bouley. “And Sirio sat me down at the end of the table. And they told me like they always did, ‘This is what you’re doing next, going back to Vergé and opening in San Francisco.’* There’s no discussion. ‘This is what you’re going to do. This is going to be the best thing for you and you’re going to have a good time. You’re going to like it.’”
“When we first opened up we were making these chicken breasts that were hollowed out and stuffed with a chicken mousse and truffles,” remembers Moonen. “It was a very big deal. It was poached and sliced and circled with a morel sauce. These are my formative years so these things are ingrained deeply in my taste memory, the smell of the restaurant, the sounds of it, the feel of it. Every living thing about it I remember as if it was yesterday.”
In keeping with a trend of the day, the food was served on the Villeroy & Boch basket weave plate, also admired and used by Barry Wine at The Quilted Giraffe and Jean Bertranou at L’Ermitage in Los Angeles.
Rachou, who was perennially hunched over, could come off as gruff and introverted. “But he had a sense of humor,” says Moonen. “And he loved my sense of humor and Charlie Palmer’s sense of humor. He had a love of what he did. He was an amazing artist. But he was very quiet.”
According to Moonen, Rachou had moved on from the minutiae of kitchen work and was more concerned with building his empire, carving meats on guéridons in the dining room, especially in the VIP section.
“He wasn’t an instructor. He wasn’t a mentor, where he would take you and show you. He would say, ‘I’ll show you tomorrow.’ And he never showed you tomorrow. He trusted that you were going to do it on your own. And we did figure it out.”
Echoes Palmer: “We could relate to him but he honestly didn’t teach us much. We were taught by some of the senior sous chefs in the beginning. And Rachou was—I don’t want to say a ‘figurehead’—he was always at the restaurant, but he wasn’t really in the kitchen cooking with us besides tasting something, and saying, ‘Hey, stupid, it’s . . .’”
So Americans had to do their homework to fill in the gaps left by cooking school: “I had to make a cassoulet. I didn’t know what a cassoulet was,” says Moonen. “Fuck, man, I didn’t learn that at school. I’m not French. But I’m the saucier, so I’m in charge of making the cassoulet. Cassoulet is many different layers. He said, ‘You make a lamb shoe, you take a confit, you make the sauces and . . .’ He’s saying all these things. I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. You make a lamb shoe?” Moonen would furiously scribble down whatever flowed from Rachou’s mouth, then scurry home and hit the books. “I’m looking up shoe. In cookbooks. We didn’t have the Internet. We didn’t have Google.” He finally realized that the chef meant lamb stew. “The French can’t say S-T,” says Moonen.
There was also the matter of Rachou’s patois, French accented and marble mouthed. “He mumbled like crazy,” says Moonen. “I learned how to answer people by inflection.” If Rachou’s unintelligible statement went up at the end, “that was a question. You had to take a chance. ‘Oui, Chef’ was mostly the correct answer.” If, on the other hand, Rachou furrowed his brow, Moonen guessed that the right reply was “No, no, no, Chef. No, no. Absolutely no.”
For quick reference in La Côte Basque and other kitchens, another book became indispensable: Louis Saulnier’s Le Répertoire de La Cuisine, a pocket guide to six thousand preparations. Though published in hardcover, the skinny trim size made it possible for cooks to keep it in their back pockets.
Why was Rachou so open to hiring “the Other”? Colameco offers this perspective: “Rachou was an orphan, he was adopted. His life was very abusive. Whoever his adoptive parents were treated him like chattel. He slept in the barn. He took care of the animals. He had no rights. He wasn’t their kid. So at the age of twelve or thirteen he got a job in a restaurant where he actually got to sleep indoors in a bunk with a bunch of other kids. He got to eat. It was paradise. And he couldn’t read. He’s illiterate. So he comes here to the States, married, had been working in the Caribbean and funky places. And he can’t read. So his wife has to read the leases to him, has to read the agreements to him. So he gets what it’s like to be the underdog. His whole fucking life he’s been the underdog.”
“What set him apart is he hired Americans,” says Moonen. “He was chastised for it
. How did I hear that? I don’t know if it was discussions I had with him, or if it was confirmed with other people that were involved with the Vatel Club. It was exclusively run by the French mafia in the beginning, and he was chastised by his peers because he supported Americans. They were wondering why he wasn’t being more nationalistic and hiring only the French.” (Moonen is quick to point out that the front of the house at La Côte Basque was entirely French, specifically from Brittany, or at least French speaking.) “He got tomatoes thrown at him in Vatel meetings. I don’t know literally, but figuratively for sure. He got beat up. He believed that Americans were hardworking and were hungry.”
“Rachou one time admitted that he liked working with American cooks better than French,” says Crispo. “Because they were easier to deal with. And he got huge criticism from all his Frenchie chef friends. Because he was telling the truth.”
“I don’t know if this is a fact. I don’t know if you can even check it, but for a time, they threw him out of the Vatel Club,” says Colameco. “It was the idea that he had crossed this line, and that was considered indefensible. And Rachou said to me, ‘You know, I looked at these young American cooks and I watched them work and I thought, They’re as good as the French guys. Equals. Maybe better. Why don’t I give them a chance?’ He was the guy that broke the ice. Before Rachou, you couldn’t have gotten a job in those kitchens.”
As the 1980s unspooled, more kitchen opportunities presented themselves to Americans in New York City, but Rachou’s pro-American attitude was a rarity. In most brigades, there was an anti-American sentiment; Americans and French worked together but the relationship ended at the stoves.
“We didn’t hang out with the French guys that much,” says Palmer. “Xavier Leroux was with us. And he was a really nice guy and taught us a lot and was really a good partner with us in the kitchen but we never hung out with Xavier outside of the kitchen.” (Bill Yosses, a pastry chef who came up around this time, charitably suggests that part of the reason might have been that many Frenchmen were self-conscious about their English.)
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