Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  “YOU HAD TO GO TO FRANCE. THAT WAS IT.”

  The ultimate immersive experience for a young American at the time was to take the plunge and commit to a stage in France. What became a de rigueur rite of passage for future generations was a novelty at the time, and one that wasn’t easily accessed. The very concept of staging was unique, harkening back to another era, suggesting a quest for knowledge: an unpaid position, undertaken in exchange for the conference of experience and skill.

  Says Thomas Keller: “From 1978 until 1983, it was that quest of trying to get somebody to commit to hiring me. And during that period of time, I amassed an enormous amount of information about France. Articles on Gregory Usher, who ultimately started the Ritz-Carlton cooking program; Robert Noah, who was an influential American over there who would do culinary tours. I wrote Julia Child; she introduced me to [La Varenne founder] Anne Willan.”

  Keller’s big break came when Jean Goutal of the Westbury Hotel, where Keller was sous chef to Daniel Boulud, set him up with a job at a one-star restaurant at the Hôtel de Ville in Arbois.

  “I was to stay there for three months, I think. I got there and I stayed there for three days. I was miserable. The Hôtel de Ville was this restaurant in the basement where my job was to get the coal and fire the ovens at five in the morning. My window was black and I didn’t understand it was black until I went down the next morning, realized that the chimney was next to my window. Lightbulbs hanging from wires from the ceiling. It was like prehistoric, Dark Ages. I don’t know how many Americans they saw over there. It was kind of a one-horse town. Reminded me of something from a Western movie. I was only there for three days. I was terrified because I was in this environment that had nothing. The image of that environment or the reality of that environment was nowhere in my catalog of images. I’m reading about Noah, I’m reading about Anne Willan, I’m reading about Taillevent, I’m reading about all the great restaurants, all the great chefs. And I’ve just come from The Polo. I was like, This is insane. How could this be? I’m in France.”

  Keller called his friend, restaurateur Serge Raoul, owner of an eponymous bistro in SoHo and a Frenchman. His advice? “Go to Paris. Hang out there and see what you can do.”

  “So I actually did what everybody told me to do five years earlier,” says Keller. “‘Just go. Go knock on kitchen doors.’ But I was much better prepared. I was a much better cook. I had much more knowledge. I had much more information. I made some great contacts. And within a couple weeks I was done, for the nine, ten months or twelve months I was there with my stages. I had them all lined up, then floated and got invited back to Taillevent. Everything was just beautiful.”

  “You had to go to France,” says Colicchio. “That was it. For me, it wasn’t about going there and learning dishes. For me, it was going there to understand why, not how. Like, why certain things just made sense. I ended up going to Gascony.”

  Kinch felt a similar pull: “The thing was to get out of New Orleans, a town of five thousand restaurants and five recipes, and get to New York, because New York was like the American epicenter, and work there,” says Kinch. “And the whole point of moving to New York was to find a place that would be a stepping-stone to get to France. At that time I was hearing rumblings about Chez Panisse and the things that were going on in California, but it really didn’t resonate with me at that time; California was another world apart. It’s just, work in France, work in France; stay in France for as long as possible. Learn as much as I can about being a French chef so someday I can apply it and be an American chef. That was everything. That was the mantra.”

  Americans’ reception in France was a mixed bag. Some were welcomed as equals in the kitchen; others were treated as curiosities, or with hostility.

  “I was sort of this novelty to the French chefs in the restaurant,” says Eric Bromberg, who staged at Le Récamier in Paris while attending culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu. “They used to call me George Bush or Ronald Reagan, which is pretty funny. Anyone from America they called Reagan. Ketchup and Coke were the two big insults. They called Coke vin américain [American wine] and at every staff meal they’d put a bottle of ketchup next to me.”

  Des Jardins, encouraged to work in France by mentor Splichal, landed a position working with the Troisgros family in Roanne. There, Des Jardins says she was received “as a freak. I was American. I was a woman. I was nineteen. I was so young and so naïve. If I knew then what I know now, I would have never attempted that. It was insane. I’d never been out of California. I just plunked myself down in the middle of nowhere in France. But I had such drive. . . . So I went to Troisgros. Arrived there, met the family. Michel [Pierre Troisgros’s son, who had spent time at Chez Panisse] was running the kitchen; it was sort of the beginning of his tenure there. Jean died I think the year I started cooking, so in ’83. So this was ’86, so Jean hadn’t been gone for too long. Michel was entering the kitchen with Pierre. Michel was showing me around and walked in the locker room and he’s like, ‘You can’t change here. You have to come to work in your whites because there’s only the boys’ locker room.’ They didn’t know what to do with me.

  “It was tough. I came from being chef poissonier [fish chef] for Joachim to being an apprentice, so I was knocked way down the rung. I was back to cleaning lettuce and chopping herbs. So it was hard. I understood that that was where my place was in the kitchen but I was capable of so much more. And there was no way to show that. That wasn’t a possibility. You didn’t do that kind of thing in those kitchens. It wasn’t the way things worked. So I humbly kept my place in the corner.

  “It was pretty lonely. It was so much more controlled than what we were doing in the States at that point in time. In Michelin three-star restaurants, the same thing happened every day: It was ninety-five covers for lunch, ninety-five covers for dinner, and you got to work at eight and you left the kitchen at three, you came back at five and you worked until twelve and you went out to the discos at night and danced for a few hours then went to the cafe and the boulangerie and had a fresh croissant before you went to bed and you slept for three hours and you got up and did the same thing again and slept in the afternoon.

  “You had one day off every week. And it was so interesting talking to the people that you worked with because these were all French boys who were between seventeen and twenty-three. They were young. A lot of them came from royal culinary families. Their fathers had been Michelin two- or three-star restaurant chefs and they were at Troisgros working for their father’s friend. It wasn’t full of possibility. It was a different world because it was almost like a caste system. These guys were doing this because their fathers and their grandfathers and their grandfathers before them had done it. It didn’t have the same feeling of what we were doing in California, which was the world of possibilities. . . . None of these guys had ever eaten any ethnic food. I mean, Italian food was ethnic to them.”

  “THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE; IT’S JUST A MATTER OF WHEN AND HOW.”

  Whether they achieved it at home, abroad, or both, a funny thing happened to many of those Americans who mastered French cuisine: They quickly developed a desire to move beyond it, to forge their own style, whether a personalized answer to nouvelle cuisine or—in many cases—the development of a distinctly American repertoire founded on the hard-earned techniques they’d picked up from the French.

  As it turned out, what both French and American alike perceived as a weakness—the United States’ lack of a gastronomic tradition—turned out to be a strength: Without eons of history to constrain them, they quickly grew tired of the norm, and eager to imprint their plates with a personality all their own, drawing from regional, cultural, and even familial influences. For Forgione, one of the first to show the way toward an American style, an early revelation came after making that goodwill tour of New York’s great French restaurants. He gathered menus from all of them, even those who dissed him, laid them out next to each other: “Say each menu had twenty things on it,
so if you had six menus, you had the possibility of one hundred twenty things. But there were only about thirty things that were on these six menus.” Just as many of the restaurants featured murals painted by Jean Pages, “everybody had ris de veau chanterelles. Everybody had tournedos—probably not Rossini, but a tournedos dish that they all had. They were very similar menus at the six great restaurants. It was amazing to me that that was going on.”

  In contrast, the sameness of French menus didn’t bother younger cooks like Colameco at the time: “It was such a different world back then. If you could take a snapshot of the menus at La Côte Basque, La Caravelle, Lutèce, Le Cygne, in any given month of any given year, they’re identical. Literally, you could be the saucier at one restaurant one day and move over to another restaurant, because we were cooking from Escoffier. You simply had to know the garnishes and how to make them, but that was still magic for us. Because we didn’t know that.”

  Some, like the Five Couples, leapfrogged classic training; others participated in it. Once that education was completed, though—perhaps owing to something inherent in the American character, or to that generation, or a combination of the two—it was almost inevitable that even the most classically trained cooks began to forge a style all their own.

  “It became obvious to me I was never going to be French, nor did I want to be French,” says Palmer. While working for Rachou, he read about goings-on in American kitchens, foremost among them Forgione’s at The River Café. “I’m not going to change my name, you know? And I thought, too, classical French cooking, all this cream and butter. I would make beurre blanc by the gallon at La Côte Basque. I was buying the butter, and we were buying literally a ton of butter a year. So I thought, This is going to change; it’s just a matter of when and how.” (Palmer’s arc epitomizes the forces of the time in New York City: educated at the CIA, trained under Jean-Jacques Rachou, and referred by Marc Sarrazin to The River Café, where he forged his own muscular American style.)

  Kinch’s revelation came earlier than most. Inspired by Great Chefs of France, he had a crystal-ball epiphany before traveling to France or working for Barry Wine: “My pride was to create a great American restaurant, to be a great American chef and not try to pretend to be French,” he says. “And that was in my mind when I was twenty-one years old. I kept it to myself. If I talked to people about it, they were like, ‘What in the world are you talking about?’”

  What seemed outlandish to Kinch’s friends and coworkers became an accepted evolution in a matter of years. In August 1982, The Culinary Institute of America updated itself yet again in service of its constant mission to keep up with the United States’ quick-shifting dining landscape. To complement the Escoffier Room, a student-run restaurant that served classic French cuisine, a new on-campus eatery was developed by 1977 CIA grad and future institute president Tim Ryan, in tandem with fellow instructor James Heywood, who had graduated the school in its New Haven days. The restaurant’s name doubled as an apt title for the emerging epoch: American Bounty.

  5

  The Stanford Court Gang

  It was the start of something bigger than we envisioned.

  —Bradley Ogden

  HOW ONE EVENING ATOP SAN FRANCISCO’S NOB HILL CHANGED EVERYTHING, AND BROUGHT RISING CHEFS FROM ACROSS THE COUNTRY TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME

  Bradley Ogden calls it “the first gathering . . . the start of the American food movement.” Larry Forgione describes it as “a giant tribal council.” Jimmy Schmidt says, “It went on for decades.”

  “It” was a dinner billed simply as An American Celebration. It was held on May 4, 1983, the day prior to James Beard’s eightieth birthday, at the Stanford Court Hotel, perched high atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill. It was the brainchild of Michael McCarty, Julia Child, and Robert Mondavi, founding members of the American Institute of Wine and Food (AIWF). It was a multicourse, collaborative dinner that would present a sampling of what the new American chefs were up to from coast to coast. There are probably at least two such dinners happening in the United States tonight; at the time, it was unprecedented.

  Most of the chefs, though well known in their home markets, had never met before, and in some cases hadn’t heard of each other. They arrived at the Stanford Court skeptical, strangers; they left realizing they were part of a larger movement, and ready to take their craft, and careers, to the next level.

  “WE WEREN’T CONNECTED AT ALL.”

  “I was Michael’s chef so I was a little bit his bitch, so I became the one who had to organize it,” recalls Jonathan Waxman, who had been chef at Michael’s for three years when McCarty told him of his outlandish plan: to bring chefs from around the country together for one night, have each one contribute a course to be paired with American wines, at a dinner for hundreds of guests at San Francisco’s Stanford Court Hotel.

  Waxman began lining up people, mostly those he knew personally, meaning mostly Californians: Mark Miller, Jeremiah Tower, Alice Waters. He invited his buddy Larry Forgione, but none of New York City’s Five Couples or others who were breaking the mold on the East Coast, such as Lydia Shire and Jasper White in Boston, or Norman Van Aken in Florida. That said, Paul Prudhomme had become famous enough that he made the cut.

  “There wasn’t a real connection amongst all these American chefs at that point,” says Waxman. “Everybody had their little citadels everywhere. You had Paul Prudhomme doing his thing in New Orleans. . . . You had people in Boston doing different stuff, and Miami. Everybody was kind of doing their thing in different places but we weren’t connected at all. We weren’t aware of each other at all.”

  They were so unaware of each other that when Waxman compiled his initial list and somebody (Tower claims credit; McCarty says it was James Beard) suggested adding Kansas City’s Bradley Ogden and Detroit’s Jimmy Schmidt to represent the center of the country, Waxman had no idea who they were talking about.

  Ogden was a Traverse City, Michigan, native who had grown up hanging around his father’s rock-and-roll palace, the Tanz Haus (“Dance House”), and enjoying the natural riches of the Midwest—hunting and fishing for ducks, pheasant, quail, ice-cold brook trout, small- and largemouth bass, perch in the winter. He and his twin brother occasionally spent weeks on his Hungarian grandmother’s farm, learning what to do with those catches and kills—as well as baking pies. It was, says Ogden, “typical Midwest, but English, Hungarian, a little American Indian—the wild side.”

  He and one of his brothers started at the CIA together; the brother dropped out, but Ogden graduated in 1977 and went to work for a restaurant company to which Joe Baum’s group consulted. He took the reins at The American Restaurant in Kansas City, often found himself face-to-face with Baum, including trips to New York, where Baum, Barbara Kafka, and James Beard wined and dined him, showed him what was up in the Big Apple, took him to The Four Seasons. He always came back dazzled and updated his menu. Ogden incorporated local ingredients, developed a distinctly Midwestern style based on his childhood food memories, and became a local celebrity, making regular television appearances.

  Schmidt was doing similar work at the London Chop House in Detroit, but though he also drew on local bounty, he came to his style by way of Europe. Born in 1955 and raised in Champaign, Illinois, the last of five kids on a family farm, he’d always been surrounded by great ingredients, but not great cooking. Dinners out consisted of fried fish sandwiches or a Swedish buffet. He went to college on an engineering scholarship, but followed a quietly rebellious streak, first to New York where he spent time with his sister in the summer, returning to the Midwest decked out in a Nehru jacket and Beatle-ish sunglasses. “That didn’t go over very well,” he remembers.

  In 1973 and 1974, he studied abroad, in Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, where he met legendary chef and teacher Madeleine Kamman. His interest in cooking sprung purely out of practicality. “I took cooking classes because I was a poor student and I wanted to eat. And then I took wine classes.” Richard Olney and Simon
e Beck* were also involved in Kamman’s program, so he met them as well. He hit it off with Kamman, and visited several Michelin two-star restaurants as part of the class.

  He followed Kamman to Boston and her cooking school, Modern Gourmet. His mother thought he was nuts: “When I was moving to Boston, she was like, ‘You’re crazy.’ So I’m living in Boston, and she sends me a little written note in the mail and inside was a book of matches like you used to get at the tobacco store. And inside it says, ‘Learn a career, fix radios.’ She kept sending me books of matches to learn how to fix toasters.”

  After graduation, in 1977, he worked at Kamman’s student-run restaurant for two years, then his mentor introduced him to Lester Gruber (“a tough guy, we banged heads a lot”), who offered him a job. The London Chop House specialized in, says Schmidt, “period food that was French influenced, like veal Oscar and béarnaise sauces and asparagus with hollandaise and clams casino, oysters Rockefeller, and all of those kind of standards. And lobster bisque and some of the other classics, Dover sole, all of which was very foreign food to me because it isn’t really French food.”

  Before long, Schmidt was promoted to chef, based on his sensibility, developed in France, and started drawing on what was available locally, in dishes such as mousseline of pike, “because with the Great Lakes you had all the great fish,” he says. “I was playing around with mixing components together. I played around a lot with spice levels relative to using vanilla and what’s considered dessert spices into entrees, like a breast of pheasant that was cured in vanilla and ginger, that type of direction.”