Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  Gruber knew Beard, so Schmidt got to know him as well. “He was pretty dry but he was like a walking encyclopedia. If you’d say, ‘Hey, what’s the deal about a triple lamb chop, loin chop? Where did it come from?’ You could get a lot of information out of him. And he was very forthcoming with it, too. I had a million questions. How many different varieties of tarragon are there? What’s the difference between the French stuff and the American stuff? He was very calm, really dry, very interested in everything that was going on. Obviously, he was very interested in Larry Forgione with An American Place; he actually told me about Larry’s opening.”

  Gruber also visited France a few times a year, occasionally bringing Schmidt along. Desperate for first-rate product, Schmidt returned from those sojourns with seeds for red peppers, arugula, and herbs, then convinced local farmers’ kids to grow them for him, paying them for the harvests in cash. He also introduced a bread program to the Chop House, ordering cookbooks from Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York and other specialty stores, and baking it fresh twice a day.

  “PEOPLE HADN’T CONSIDERED THE IDEA OF A REGIONAL CUISINE AS HE HAD PRESENTED IT.”

  Prudhomme was, paradoxically, at the time the most famous of the group present for the dinner and unquestionably the outlier, a chef who had developed independent of many of the cultural forces that had led many of his professional contemporaries into the kitchen.

  Born July 13, 1940, Prudhomme was the youngest of thirteen children in a poor sharecropping family who lived on their farm outside Opelousas, Louisiana. The name Paul was entered on his birth certificate by a priest who insisted he have a saint’s name, but he wouldn’t learn that until years later: Instead he went by Gene Autry Prudhomme.

  Since Prudhomme came from a destitute family, his initial impressions of the professional cooking trade were the very opposite of many of those who wandered into the kitchen from middle-class backgrounds; it seemed positively regal to him: In 1949, at age nine, he had heard of a cousin who worked in a New Orleans hotel and earned $150 per week. “It seemed like an awesome amount of money to cook,” he said. “I mean, to be a cook, which was fun, and to get paid that much money and be all dressed in white just seemed like a wonderful thing.”

  When his sisters left home, he helped his mother cook, leading him, as a young adult, to his first forays into the professional kitchen. His inaugural attempt at entrepreneurship was a disaster: In 1957, at age seventeen, he opened a drive-in burger joint, Big Daddy O’s Patio, in Opelousas, Louisiana. In less than a year, the restaurant, and Prudhomme’s first marriage, had gone belly-up; he tried his hand at three other restaurants and each of them went under as well.

  He took to selling magazines, then knocked around the West Coast, mostly in Colorado, cooking in restaurant kitchens. It was at the Elkhorn Lodge in Estes Park, where he had his version of the epiphany that so many of his peers had when he got his hands on some small, store-bought red potatoes. They were a favorite of his, but no matter how he dolled them up, he couldn’t reproduce the sensuousness of the ones his mother had cooked for him as a boy. Then it hit him: “I remembered that the first thing we did was we went out to the field and we dug them up. I recognized at that point how important it is to have fresh ingredients,” he said.

  In 1970, he returned to New Orleans. He did time at two hotels—as sous chef at Le Pavillon, and then at Maison Dupuy, where he began experimenting with Cajun food—and in 1975, he became the first American-born executive chef of Commander’s Palace, where he was initially hired as the lunch chef, but took over the entire restaurant within a week. He transitioned the menu to his evolving roster of Cajun specialties such as chicken and andouille gumbo. “The gumbo I did at Commander’s was a roux gumbo,” said Prudhomme. “To my knowledge it has never been before. . . . It became a staple. It was chicken and andouille gumbo. It was down-and-dirty Cajun. It was what Mama used to do. I’d go into the country and buy the andouille from the guy I’d known since I was a kid. We didn’t have andouille in New Orleans until later.” He also introduced culinary flights of fancy such as “Cajun popcorn,” a real novelty at the time.

  Run by the Brennan family, led by matriarch Ella Brennan, Commander’s Palace, following the French lead, began touting Prudhomme’s food as nouvelle Creole. (They had a point; Cajun food was the marriage of French technique and Louisiana product and soul.)

  Prudhomme began to catch the attention of writers, such as James Villas, who profiled him in a cover story for Bon Appétit, a rare, Bocuse-worthy bit of publicity for an American toque.

  In 1979, Prudhomme and second wife K Hinrichs, a former waitress he’d met when they both worked at Maison Dupuy, opened K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen on Chartres Street, in the New Orleans French Quarter. The restaurant was cash-only and had only sixty-four seats. It was also a money machine: costing only fifty dollars per month in rent (which included tables, chairs, a counter, bar, and full kitchen) and turning the tables four or five times per night.

  Prudhomme continued to work at Commander’s Palace, enlisting Frank Brigtsen, a former Louisiana State University student and apprentice from Commander’s Palace, to be his chef. There were no recipes; menus were created in late-night confabs and by phone during the day, when Prudhomme would call Brigtsen and describe something as radical as crabmeat hollandaise with enough lusty detail that the latter could successfully whip it up on the fly.

  Having the chef from Commander’s Palace, one of the fancier places in town, running one of the most casual (dinner ran a mere five or six bucks) was cause for a double take. Brigtsen believed Prudhomme did it for love, and also to create a place where his family could feel comfortable when they came to town. (Eventually, he left Commander’s but not until they found a young, unheralded chef named Emeril Lagasse to take his place.)

  K-Paul’s was, in Prudhomme’s own words, a dump. It had communal seating, wobbly chairs and tables, and blue-plate specials.

  K was a character and the restaurant was run in her image: “No reservations. No credit cards. No wine list. If you wanted the food, you’d wait in line and pay cash for it. And if you didn’t finish your plate, you were probably going to get yelled at,” remembered Brigtsen.

  “Chef was the cook,” said Mary Sonnier, a former K-Paul’s cook, “but it was her restaurant. I don’t care what anyone tells you. . . . The kitchen was his but the restaurant was hers.”

  The demand for tables was enormous—one hundred people would be queued up at opening time, and they’d seat sixty people at once, get slammed.

  Prudhomme was a true original: Though he hewed to principles of Cajun cooking, the restaurant’s repertoire was distinctly his. Both were noteworthy. “People hadn’t considered the idea of a regional cuisine as he was presenting it,” said Michael Batterberry, founding editor of Food & Wine, which brought Prudhomme to that Tavern on the Green event in New York City where he met Alice Waters in 1979.

  Prudhomme’s insistence on fresh ingredients was also new and drew purveyors his way. Farmers from as far away as Mississippi brought livestock and produce to his door. One, Dan Crutchfield, arrived with everything from fresh rabbits to peanuts to edible flowers. Prudhomme’s cooking elevated ingredients like tasso and boudin to national attention.

  When Prudhomme went on Today for the first time, he demonstrated how to make jambalaya. One of his brothers was outraged, called him to ask how he could cook “trash food” on national television. Cajun food at that time wasn’t a source of pride; it was the shameful food of the poor, though Prudhomme was rapidly changing that.

  In March 1980 Prudhomme introduced one of the first of what would become known as “signature” dishes to America’s culinary lexicon: blackened redfish, made by dipping fillets in butter, coating them with a mixture of cayenne and dried herbs, and searing them in a skillet. (The dish’s popularity literally threatened the population of redfish in the Gulf of Mexico, prompting Prudhomme to eventually limit the number of orders per table at K-Paul’s.) A prototype of t
he dish was born at Commander’s Palace when somebody’s offhand reference to campfire-cooked fish led Prudhomme to experiment, greasing redfish with butter, seasoning it, and cooking it on the flattop used to keep large pots warm. He wanted to put it on the menu, but Ella Brennan insisted on a grilled version, not blackened. At K-Paul’s he did the fish in a cast-iron skillet, and it became a sensation.

  Prudhomme became a national celebrity, and his gregarious personality and imposing physical stature (he was exceptionally hefty and bore more than a passing resemblance to the comic actor Dom DeLuise, a major star of the day) made him a television natural. The summer following the AIWF Stanford Court dinner, he would take his show on the road, like the Ma Maison Cannes experiment years earlier. It was yet another ahead-of-its-time iteration of the pop-up concept, in San Francisco, in a kitchen-outfitted nightclub arranged by concert promoter Bill Graham. The promotion sold out its entire four-week run, despite the fact that it didn’t take reservations; people waited in line for up to twelve hours for a table.* And the year following the dinner, in 1984, long before it was an expected step for an American chef, Prudhomme published his first cookbook, Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen, and would go on to create and market a Magic Seasoning Blends line of spices that required a thirty-thousand-square-foot plant to meet the worldwide demand for the product.

  “CAN’T YOU GET LAMB IN CALIFORNIA?”

  An American Celebration was perhaps the purest distillation and greatest expression of Michael McCarty, who summoned all his producer-like powers to will it into existence, creating an unprecedented happening: an eight-course tasting dinner, each course prepared by a different chef, and—perhaps even more audaciously—paired exclusively with wines from American vineyards. The goal was nothing less than to announce to the world that American food had arrived and to underscore the continued development of wine production in the United States since the “Judgment of Paris”* seven years prior.

  “Finding Jimmy Schmidt at the London Chop House, that was through James Beard, because this guy named Lester Gruber owned the London Chop House and he was really into American food,” recalls McCarty. “Hallmark had a restaurant called Harvest or American Café or something in their headquarters; it’s still there I think as a restaurant. Bradley Ogden was the chef there [before The American Restaurant]. We only knew Prudhomme by his reputation, of him doing blackened redfish—that was me reading about this guy who was changing Creole and Cajun food and making it modern.

  “Who in Northern California is creating modern American food?” says McCarty. “Okay. Alice, at this time, was beginning to shift. You had to do Chez Panisse; she was a big part of us. Jeremiah Tower had his Sante Fe Bar and Grill. Mark Miller had Fourth Street; he was doing the first of Latin, of Southwest. He was the first guy to really begin to use peppers, jalapeños and all that stuff. Those were the three from Northern California. Jonathan and me in L.A. Wolfgang because he had just opened Spago and pizzas were a big deal.”

  Of course, some of the chefs already knew each other: Waxman and Forgione had met at brunch at The River Café. Waters had been to The River Café, and Waters and Prudhomme had bonded at that Food & Wine event at Tavern on the Green. “Prior to that dinner, Alice, Paul Prudhomme, and myself kind of had a little alliance amongst ourselves,” says Forgione. “We did talk regularly. We shared a couple of things.”

  Things were so disconnected at this time that Schmidt didn’t even know his closest geographic colleague, Ogden, with whom he was to collaborate on a course. So they connected by phone to begin planning their dish: “Okay, we’ve got to do a bunch of Midwestern stuff. And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m from Michigan.’ And it was right at that time of year in May—it’s like, ‘Hey, we can get morels; we can do lamb.’ And I said, ‘I’ve got a great source of lamb, this guy who raises lamb in Michigan; he raises petits pois for the Green Giant.’ The lamb would clean all the fields, so it’s really sweet lamb. He said, ‘That’s cool.’ So I sourced the ramps and the morels and all those ingredients and shipped them out. And then Bradley and I got together and did all the prep work together and knocked it out.

  “We shipped everything on the plane to get it there. And obviously, that’s a hell of a lot of lamb. So we were schlepping all this stuff around trying to pile it into cars at the airport. And they’re, like, ‘What’s in the box?’ ‘It’s lamb.’ ‘Can’t you get lamb in California?’ I thought it was really cool, because using the local, indigenous ingredients from Michigan made a lot of sense. And that was kind of the direction my food was going, using all these local things that I’d seen in France and formulating how I was cooking and what the guests were eating based on foods in season, that taste the best, that are the best for you, probably instinctually what you crave anyway. So we got out there, worked through the Stanford Court—that’s like one big mother operation type of thing.”

  The Stanford Court held a special place in the emerging culture of American gastronomy. The hotel’s founder, Jim Nassikas, and his lieutenant, Bill Wilkinson, were known as patrons of the culinary arts. “Jim Nassikas was a founding board member of the AIWF and that’s why it was with Robert Mondavi, and that’s why it was held at the Stanford Court, because it was a close relationship with the Mondavis and the hotel,” says the hotel’s longtime pastry chef Jim Dodge, now director of specialty culinary programs for Bon Appétit Management Company. “That’s where all the chefs would stay for their culinary events coming into San Francisco.” Beard also regularly stayed there when visiting the Bay Area.

  If creating Michael’s was a caper movie, this event was a heist picture: Every month for a year, McCarty flew to San Francisco for an AIWF board meeting and to plan the dinner. To accompany the food and wine, McCarty enlisted his friend, Paul Gurian (producer of Cutter’s Way and other films and a frequent dining companion) to work with him on a series of videos introducing the chefs, and in many cases their dishes, to the audience.

  “One thing that impressed me right from the beginning,” says Forgione, “was that I had a sense that this was going to be a spectacular evening by the fact that [Paul Gurian] was producing the video that went along with it, that they were going to such lengths to capture the chef and his surroundings. And we were going to be staying in a world-class hotel. We were going to be cooking for the Julia Childs, the Bob Mondavis, the Dick Graffs, all the people that you had heard about and read about and met through your restaurants. You just knew that all the people in this event, whether they were cooking, serving, or dining, were all in a community together.”

  In a cosmic coincidence, that same month Food & Wine published what it dubbed “The Honor Roll of American Chefs,” a hall of fame of Americans in pro kitchens who were changing the industry, one of the first such lists ever published, which included the Stanford Court’s own Jim Dodge, and most of the chefs participating in the dinner. (Mark Miller was relegated to the “Also Noteworthy” category along with Susan Feniger, Mary Sue Milliken, and Leslie Revsin, who was listed as a “Chef in Transition.”) It also featured Ken Frank, who was by then ensconced at La Toque on Sunset Boulevard, but there was no mention of the reclusive Bruce Marder. In a public relations coup, the issue also featured recipes from Heywood and Ryan’s menus at American Bounty at The Culinary Institute of America.

  The Honor Roll remains a fascinating document that illustrates how quickly people cycle through the industry. It’s also a tribute to the power of celebrity: Most of the chefs who didn’t participate in the dinner have faded into obscurity, though a few remain in the national—even international—consciousness.

  To Waxman’s point about people having the same experience around the country, each in their own way, many of the honorees’ stories mirrored those of the AIWF participants.

  Among several others, there was Patrick O'Connell, who had opened his Inn at Little Washington in Washington, Virginia. There was Robert Kinkead, then working at Harvest restaurant in Cambridge. There were Jasper White and Lydia Shire, listed a
s a team, at Seasons Restaurant near Boston's Faneuil Hall. From Los Angeles there were Michael Roberts and Le St. Germain’s Patrick Healy.

  For all his success and influence, Wolfgang Puck, born in Austria, wasn’t included on the Honor Roll. Neither was McCarty, who, alas, wasn’t a chef.

  “IT’S HAPPENING. WE’RE DOING IT.”

  The dinner was set for May 4, 1983, a Wednesday. The chefs started arriving the day prior. The hotel, no stranger to hosting industry heavy hitters and ambitious events, nonetheless hummed with anticipation.

  “I remember the planning and the detail,” says Dodge. “It was extremely exciting. However, none of us in the kitchen really understood exactly what was going to happen to have that many visiting chefs in that kitchen, which was a good-sized kitchen. We always had a big staff because of the focus on the service and the quality of food we served. But to have twenty or thirty extra bodies in that kitchen and have camera cables throughout the kitchen, and big cameras, it was amazing. Absolutely amazing.”

  “Jim Nassikas was one of the greatest hosts in America,” says Forgione, who thinks the trip might have been his first to California. “Anything he was involved with was done over the top.”

  Not only had most of the chefs never met; many of them didn’t know anything about the others’ food. As they materialized, in addition to sniffing each other out, they also marveled at what the others were cooking.

  “As each person arrived, they were bringing food with them,” remembers Forgione, who prepared his “Terrine of 3 American Smoked Fish with Their Respective Caviars” in New York and flew it in, leaving only the sauce to be made in San Francisco. “So you would be there checking your stuff and rewrapping it and getting it put away, and next thing you know, Jeremiah would be floating down and then somebody else would come down.”

  “I was picking up techniques and seeing what other people were doing,” says Schmidt.