Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  And there they were: the emerging titans of a new American cuisine, gathered in one room—a kitchen, no less—for the first time: Larry Forgione, Mark Miller, Bradley Ogden, Jimmy Schmidt, Jeremiah Tower, Alice Waters, Jonathan Waxman. (Also present, if somewhat incongruent, was restaurant consultant Barbara Kafka, whom McCarty had invited to participate at James Beard’s request; she prepared tripe gumbo for the after-party.)

  “Before you knew it, you were having a party in the kitchen,” says Forgione.

  Wolfgang Puck, the biggest chef of the moment, was absent; at least two major historical accounts place him at the dinner, but he wasn’t there. Remembers Mark Peel, who attended on his behalf: “Spago was not given a course at the dinner. We were doing the pizza at the after-party. And Wolfgang was pissed. I think it was because—now Michael [McCarty] may deny this—but my feeling was that Spago was the big, hot ticket in L.A. at the time and Michael was a little pissed about it. So it was like him saying, ‘Yeah, you make pizza.’ So Wolfgang was annoyed, but he wanted to be involved in the dinner so he sent Ed LaDou and myself and we made pizza for the after-party.” (Video of the event shows Peel and LaDou representing Spago to Julia Child on camera during a post-dinner kitchen curtain call.)* I thought perhaps the reason might be that Puck wasn’t American, but when I emailed McCarty to ask why the pizzas were relegated to the after-party, he wrote back, simply, “wanted to have something really easy, casual, and fun after the big meal!”

  Schmidt remembers his first impressions of the group: Waxman was “earthy, Berkeley, laid-back,” even in the kitchen; Forgione was “serious”; Ogden was impressed with his skill and, as a fellow Midwesterner, was the closest temperamentally to Schmidt; Miller was “spicy, very effervescent, he’s just bubbling and he’s got ten million ideas going one hundred miles an hour”; Tower was “theatrical, very well spoken, very high society,” even in the kitchen, and already had the disposition of a star; Waters was “granola, laid-back, really about the ingredients, really very focused, but not overly animated.” Even at that point, Schmidt described her as “iconic, at least in my mind.”

  And Schmidt’s impression of McCarty? He sums it up in one word: “Armani.”

  AN AMERICAN CELEBRATION

  DINNER MENU

  4 May 1983

  The Stanford Court

  SAN FRANCISCO

  Reception

  CULTURED OLYMPIA OYSTERS FROM PUGET SOUND, WASHINGTON

  BELON OYSTERS FROM TOMALES BAY, CALIFORNIA

  PORTUGUESE OYSTERS FROM VANCOUVER ISLAND, B.C.

  Schramsberg Vineyards 1977 Reserve Napa Valley Champagne

  *

  TERRINE OF 3 AMERICAN SMOKED FISH WITH THEIR RESPECTIVE CAVIARS

  LARRY FORGIONE, River Café, Brooklyn

  Jordan Vineyard & Winery 1981 Estate Bottled Chardonnay

  RED PEPPER PASTA WITH GRILLED SCALLOPS

  JONATHAN WAXMAN, Michael’s, Santa Monica

  Chalone Vineyard 1981 Estate Bottled Chardonnay

  GARDEN SALAD

  ALICE WATERS, Chez Panisse, Berkeley

  Sanford Vineyards 1982 Vin Gris

  BLACKENED REDFISH

  PAUL PRUDHOMME, K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, New Orleans

  Beringer Vineyards 1980 Private Reserve Chardonnay

  MARINATED GRILLED QUAIL WITH POBLANO CHILE, CILANTRO & LIME SAUCE

  MARK MILLER, Fourth Street Grill, Berkeley

  Iron Horse Vineyards 1982 Sauvignon Blanc

  ROASTED RACK OF LAMB

  STUFFED WITH MISSOURI GREENS & HAZELNUTS

  GRATIN OF WILD ROOT VEGETABLES, FIDDLEHEAD FERNS & CATTAIL SPROUTS

  BRADLEY OGDEN, American Café, Kansas City

  JIMMY SCHMIDT, London Chop House, Detroit

  Acacia Winery 1980 Pinot Noir St. Clair Vineyard

  AMERICAN CHEESE SELECTIONS

  Robert Mondavi Winery 1974 Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon

  PECAN PASTRY WITH CHOCOLATE & SABAYON SAUCE

  JEREMIAH TOWER, Santa Fe Bar & Grill, Berkeley

  Balboa Café, San Francisco

  Joseph Phelps Vineyards 1981 Scheurebe ‘Late Harvest’

  *

  After-Hours Party

  SPAGO PIZZA

  WOLFGANG PUCK, Spago, Los Angeles

  Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noir

  TRIPE GUMBO

  BARBARA KAFKA, Star Spangled Foods, New York

  Christian Brothers Private Reserve Centennial Sherry

  An American Celebration was a service like no other.

  When the night of the dinner arrived, McCarty, the ringmaster and master showman, gathered the chefs in an ancillary room and ran through the logistics with them. He was brimming with pride at every aspect of the evening, even the fact that computers were used to check people in: “We were trying to accomplish many different things at the same time,” says McCarty, still underscoring the then-novelty of a computerized check-in system that allowed staff to print table assignments by keying guests’ names into their system. “Each table was a ten-top. Molly Chappellet did the floral arrangements. They weren’t flowers; they were fruit. Absolutely spectacular what she did.”

  “She has a degree in art,” says Dodge of Chappellet, who designed special flourishes for culinary events at the Stanford Court. “So what she did at her home in the winery—because she’s a phenomenal gardener as well—she liked to bring the outdoors inside. So for table arrangements she would bring in a head of cabbage and peel back the leaves and create it so that it was a beautiful arrangement. And she did that at that event. On every table there was a vegetable that she arranged in an artistic form. Alice was just absolutely amazed. She said to her, ‘I’ve always thought these things were in themselves beautiful, this produce, but I just didn’t know how to incorporate them onto the table like that.’”

  A few hundred food aficionados gathered in the dining room to see and taste for themselves what was transpiring in restaurants around the country.

  In the moments before the dinner, distractions mounted along with the pressure. There were journalists on hand, and many of them made their way through the kitchen during prep, prompting Schmidt to think, “We’re going to get our asses kicked. I just said, ‘It’s time to put our heads down and get this thing done. Because we’re not going to get all this lamb through all these ovens.’ . . . I think it’s very flattering. But I’ve always been of the mind of ‘Put it on the plate; let the food talk.’”

  After the kitchen work was done, plates were shuttled to four production tables in the dining room, where they’d be finished, then shuttled to guests by the service staff.

  Between courses, the videos were shown. The shorts are cheesy, but charming, and capture—in many cases forecast—the iconic images these chefs would attain: Alice Waters is depicted strolling her garden, gathering greens for a salad; Jonathan Waxman, dressed in a wooly sweater, grills scallops on a mountaintop while—no joke—Chalone Vineyards’ Dick Graff flies in and lands a small aircraft within shouting distance of him.

  “What are you doing?” Graff asks Waxman from the cockpit.

  “I’m grilling scallops for my scallops and red pepper pasta dish,” says the chef.

  “I’ve got just the thing to drink with it,” says Graff, holding a bottle of his vineyard’s Chardonnay aloft.*

  Since his services weren’t required until the after-party, Peel was free to act as a floater, working with the other chefs, getting a firsthand knowledge of their food by helping them prep it. “Alice’s course was salads, so I got to plate all of the salads. I got to do blackened redfish with Paul Prudhomme. We had all of these big charcoal grills out on a fire escape. They had prealerted the fire department that billows of smoke were going to be coming from the Stanford Court. They didn’t want people calling in. We had to put the cast-iron skillets right on the coals to get white hot and they double-dipped the redfish in clarified butter and then this heavy, heavy spice goes on it, then it gets dipped again, then it goes into this whit
e-hot skillet, and I was nearly poisoned from these billows of smoke.”

  “Paul Prudhomme was larger than life,” remembers Schmidt. “And he was doing blackened redfish, which was the big craze in the world at that time. And he was cooking it outside on this balcony thing and I thought that was pretty cool, because he was dipping the fish in butter and the fish was cold, so the butter would congeal and he would hit it in the spices and do it.”

  “He almost burned up the joint,” says Ogden.

  The chefs learned almost as much as the diners: “It was just surreal,” says Forgione. “I remember how hard everybody worked and how much everybody helped each other. It wasn’t, ‘My course is done, I’m going to go get a glass of wine.’” (Waxman provided extra support to Barbara Kafka of Star Spangled Foods, who was recovering from meningitis. “I said, ‘Barbara, I have your back,’” says Waxman. “‘Whatever you need, I will take care of it.’ She was literally on my shoulder the whole night. I said, ‘Don’t worry, I will do all of the heavy lifting for you. You just look good, girl.’ That was my job. It was very special.”)

  “We all cooked together that whole dinner,” says Waxman. “Every course, we cooked with each other. It was the coolest thing in the world. We saw what each of us were doing. It was all different, which was the coolest thing. Some were more classic than others, and some were more crazy than others. That was the sort of culminating moment when we knew that it was a codified American food scene. What that meant, we had no clue, but we knew that even though we were all from different parts of the country we had this very strong bond. We were all trying to change the landscape of what we do.”

  “I think that was, bar none, where American food started,” says Ogden. “It was really acknowledging that we have good cooks in America. And to represent America, represent our sort of history, where we were up to that point in our culinary works. It was the start of something bigger than we envisioned. We had no idea. We were just cooking.”

  Not everybody was enchanted. “Well, I mean, we accomplished something,” says Waters. “That we did. But it was a lot of cameras and lights. It felt very Hollywood to me. It felt a little surreal. I just don’t feel sentimental about it. Although I felt like I was always cared for by this group of chefs. They’ve always been my friends. I love that. I was the only woman, but I was their pal. And I loved that they sort of took care of me. I felt like I could count on them.”

  One of the journalists on hand was the omnipresent Ruth Reichl, who says of the evening: “I was back in the kitchen. And even my editors, when I pitched it to them, it was like, ‘Oh, come on. You can’t get a bunch of chefs together. It’s going to be a nightmare.’ We all thought it would be. I mean today, it’s so obvious. Of course these chefs all work together. Nobody had ever done anything like that. I just remember it was lighthearted in a way. And the AIWF wasn’t lighthearted; every program had been very serious. And so to me it was the chefs taking over from the Bob Mondavis, Julia Childs, the Jim Nassikases, and this young spirit coming in. Because people were still thinking of the food business as people who were in competition with each other, nobody thought that this was going to work in any way. And the spirit of camaraderie. I mean, it could have been a nightmare, and it wasn’t. It was at the Stanford Court, which was very proper. And it was just an event that was not like anything anybody had done before in that sense of how much fun it was, how lighthearted it ended up being.”

  The de facto main course, the meat course, came up: Ogden and Schmidt’s collaboration, which was ambitious enough without the added burden of putting out several hundred dishes.

  “We were struggling just to get it all pushed through, all that lamb,” says Schmidt. “And it was new for Bradley and me to work together. So it was kind of just like, ‘Let’s figure this out. Let’s show them what we can do here.’ And we did. There were plenty of steps in the dish: We had taken all these herbs and stuff and turned it into a stuffing and put it inside the morels. There were multilayers of flavors and au gratin potatoes and reductions.”

  In the heat of the moment, Schmidt looked up to see Waters, Tower, and other new friends arranging his and Ogden’s food on plates, bringing their dish to life: “Everyone teamed up. There was a whole sense of, not competitiveness, but actually camaraderie, working together and everybody plating food together. We really hadn’t seen that before, with people you had just met. It was amazing how it just all accumulated.”

  Once he and Ogden got the last lamb dish out, Schmidt—who had only really tasted a few canapés and Prudhomme’s blackened redfish—stood back and took it all in.

  “The quality, the plates that were coming up, the dishes that were being made, was world class. The meal was fabulous, compared to sitting in a three-star restaurant in France. You didn’t have to be over there anymore to have that experience. That’s what my take-away was, that what was going on those plates, the quality of the ingredients, the style, the culinary technique, the shared philosophies of people working together, was world class. We had entered having a cuisine that could actually be deemed powerful enough to represent the country and not feel ashamed that we’re a second-class food [nation].”

  It’s happening, Schmidt thought to himself. We’re doing it.

  At the end of the meal, an ebullient Julia Child interviewed the chefs for the camera. Then came what has become a de rigueur element of any chef-fueled charity event—the after-party.

  “It’s a really wide range of personalities,” says Schmidt. “The foundation, or the glue, was that that group of people had reached these conclusions of cooking in a certain direction with American ingredients almost separately. We kind of came to the same place. And we also, funny enough, did it not because we were going to get our name in the paper. We did it for the purity or the value.”

  And there was an added benefit: “We put out the dinner and then it was party like crazy,” says Schmidt.

  “After everybody left there was another room that was set up,” says Forgione. “For the chefs. If I remember correctly, it was basically the whole party came into the after-party, or a good portion of them; certainly the people that were also serving wines at these dinners or donated food or were producers of the food.”

  “We had the best fucking time,” says Waxman. “We were drinking Champagne out of the bottle. We were laughing our heads off.”

  “That whole [two days were] just celebratory,” says Forgione. “We were truly celebrating American food, American drink.”

  During the postservice release, the chefs also had time to absorb the night, to replay the food they’d witnessed and helped each other prepare, to realize the magnitude of what had happened.

  “You felt like you were part of a history-making dinner, that this was going to begin something,” says Forgione. “This was going to begin a tremendous movement. I think it reinforced what everybody was doing by seeing everybody else that was doing it. And it wasn’t that you were doing it better than somebody else; it was just that we were all doing it. We all loved what we were doing. It was so exciting. We all wanted to work together.

  “You feel like now there’s other people to talk to,” says Forgione. “There’s people who want to know about your free-range chickens and I want to know about Paul’s soft-shell crawfish, and the bounty of things that are in California.”

  Ogden gravitated to some chefs more than others. In Forgione, he saw a kindred spirit, “shy, sort of like I was. . . . We just hit it off. When I got talking to him, he sort of had the same background as me a little bit, even though he came from the New York area. And his style is more French than my style. Mine is more American because it’s the way I was trained. That’s the way I grew up. But we became the best of friends.”

  Seeing what each other was up to was an empowering moment for these chefs. The crowd was split between chef-owners such as Prudhomme, the absent Puck and wife-partner Barbara Lazaroff, and Tower, who was already hard at work on his new restaurant, Stars. The others all
were essentially employees, but they began to see in that weekend a blueprint for the future, a time when chefs could call their own shots, perhaps own their own restaurants.

  “I realized that it was time for me,” says Waxman. “I was done working for someone else. It was time for me to go and be my own chef. Stake my little claim.” The dinner also changed the trajectory of Ogden’s career, leading to talks with Campton Place Hotel’s Bill Wilkinson that would bring him from Kansas City to San Francisco.

  “That day was the beginning of so many careers,” says Ogden.

  “It was time for me to get out of Detroit,” says Schmidt, who ended up partnering with McCarty on The Rattlesnake Club in Denver, Colorado. “He was looking for a chef and I said, ‘I’ll do it.’”

  Moreover, the chefs were keen to stay in touch, to collaborate again, and—whether it was stated or not—to take advantage of the power inherent in their numbers.

  Chemistry played a huge role in the evening’s impact: Though the group comprised people of different economic, geographic, and social backgrounds—a sort of culinary version of The Avengers—somehow they meshed.

  “We could have hated each other,” says Waxman. “We could have been what chefs used to be—standoffish and secretive and protective.”

  Everything the dinner foretold came to pass: The chefs became the core group that represented and lorded over the industry for years to come, the go-to interview subjects for the proliferation of national articles on New American Cuisine and the people who were creating it, as well as the nucleus of large-scale fund-raising events. An early example that endures to this day is Citymeals on Wheels, a charity created by Gael Greene and James Beard to deliver meals to homebound elderly in New York City. Many of the chefs also participated in Wolfgang Puck’s (unrelated) Meals on Wheels charity fund-raiser in Los Angeles. “I did thirty years of those dinners with Wolfgang,” says Schmidt. “I was there from the first year out; I didn’t piss anybody off so I got through it.”

  Before leaving the Stanford Court, though, spare a thought for Mark Peel: “I had a different experience because I was helping everyone during the day and during the service,” he says. “The after-party was when I was working my fucking ass off. Everybody else was partying and drinking their Champagne, but I was turning out pizzas like a machine gun. I didn’t have the luxury of time to gaze out over the crowd and have this epiphany.”