Peel was living out one of the truisms of the chef’s life, working while others are celebrating. He was also a metaphor for one of the themes of this era: Those forging this new world were often so consumed by their work that they didn’t realize how far they’d come until well after they’d arrived.
6
California Dreaming?
I like to see a little cooking for my money.
—Alan King
HOW JONATHAN WAXMAN BROUGHT CALIFORNIA CUISINE, IF THERE IS SUCH A THING, TO NEW YORK CITY, DRIVING A STAKE INTO THE HEART OF DINERS’ EXPECTATIONS, WHILE EAST COASTERS FORGED THEIR OWN NEW AMERICAN STYLE, CONFUSING, THEN ERASING, DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN EAST AND WEST
You’re not supposed to light a Weber grill indoors, but there was Melvyn Master, firing two of them up in the open kitchen of his restaurant on East 79th Street on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side. It was only a few weeks into 1984, and Master and his chef-partner Jonathan Waxman were all set to introduce California cuisine to New York City at their hotly anticipated Jams, starting with a preview benefit for Citymeals on Wheels. The party was just hours away but the Montague grill Waxman had specially ordered* had been stalled by a snowstorm in Pennsylvania. No grill meant no California, hence the Webers. Master positioned them under the ventilation hood, loaded them with mesquite, lit them. Within an hour, Waxman and his cooks were pumping out passed hors d’oeuvres. Everything went swimmingly, until the extractor fan gave out. “The room filled with smoke and people’s contact lenses were bulging out of their eyes,” recalls the British-born Master. “Finally, we got it under control and everyone was fine. That was the birth of Jams.”
Improvising had always worked wonders for Waxman and Master. And it would continue to work for them. Until it didn’t. Though short-lived, Jams left a deep footprint, exporting California cuisine, and a California management style, to New York City. Along with a handful of other chefs who came east in the mid-1980s, and a smattering of Manhattan restaurants created in the California vein during the same period, the moment would forever blur the distinctions between chefs on different sides of the country.
“THERE WAS NOTHING LIKE IT IN NEW YORK.”
Did it all start in the fall of 1979? As Waxman might say with a weary sigh, “Who the fuck knows?” Master thinks it did. As sales director of Sonoma’s Jordan Winery, he enlisted Michael McCarty to put on a guest dinner at the vineyard, flying up McCarty, his chef Waxman, and sommelier Phil Reich.
Master and his wife, Janie, high school sweethearts from across the pond, had known McCarty when they all ran restaurants in Denver in the mid-1970s, but it wasn’t until Michael’s that they met and became friendly with Waxman. Both guys were, says Master, “party boys, and we were all doing that kind of stuff that we all did back then.” The Jordan dinner was such an A-list affair that People magazine was on hand to document every sip and nibble. Waxman gave hostess Sally Jordan fits: When she asked to see a menu that morning, he told her his muse wouldn’t clock in until after lunch and a few glasses of wine. Properly lubricated, Waxman began cooking that afternoon, while McCarty—taking charge, as usual—gave the winery’s staff, Mexican women costumed in frilly French-style black-and-white maid’s uniforms, their hair hugged by bonnets, a crash course in front-of-house elegance. The evening was a triumph, betraying none of the haste of its preparation, or maybe because of it.
(McCarty didn’t revere top food writers the way many of his California peers did, as evidenced by an incident that took place during dinner prep: “Sally Jordan comes up to me and says, ‘Mike, there’s someone on the phone for you,’” recalls McCarty. He took the phone and the caller introduced herself: “‘This is M. F. K. Fisher.* Would you guys like to come over for lunch?’ I had no idea who M. F. K. Fisher was. I thought it was just one of the crazy rich people up there. I said, ‘Listen, we’re really busy, we have this big party tonight. I’m really sorry but we just don’t have time. Good-bye.’ Boom.” [pantomimes hanging up the phone] “She lived right around the corner.”)
The Masters and Waxman grew close over the ensuing years, dining around the States, traveling to Paris. Waxman was one of those chefs who left the AIWF dinner at the Stanford Court Hotel itching to strike out on his own. California was home, but New York City fascinated him, especially Lutèce, which he still had a crush on after all these years. He almost doubled down on McCarty, who was eager to open a Michael’s in New York City, with Waxman on board as his bicoastal chef, possibly even a partner, but McCarty—who insisted on a backyard garden to conjure the California spirit—couldn’t secure his dream space, on West 55th Street in Midtown Manhattan.*
Meanwhile, the Masters, who owned a stately home outside Litchfield, Connecticut, planned a gargantuan New Haven seafood restaurant to be christened Billingsgate, after the London fish market, but couldn’t cobble together the backing. Mel found himself on the phone with Waxman—never lacking for an opinion—who told him New Haven was crazy, they should open a restaurant in New York City. Intrigued, Master invited Waxman to come on board.
Timing is everything. With the McCarty deal stagnating, Waxman said, “Fuck it,” and decided to partner with the Masters. And so was conceived one of the seminal American restaurants of the 1980s.
Evolution was swift: The fish eatery mutated into a shared vision of a restaurant that would package light, leafy California cuisine in a bleached-white box and plop it down, incongruously, into the concrete canyons of Manhattan. Billingsgate was shed in favor of the name Jams, an Americanization of confitures, as well as shorthand for “Jonathan and Melvyn’s” (“or Janie and Melvyn’s,” semijokes the other Master). The idea, says Master, was “to bring a Michael’s-type restaurant, Jonathan’s food, California cuisine to New York City.” For good measure, they poached Michael’s pastry chef James Brinkley.
Waxman had a vision for the kitchen and the food: Not unlike Puck, he would eschew the European model that dominated New York City, the chef’s toque towering like a skyscraper, knotted neckerchiefs, a cacophony of whirring blades throughout the prep day, clanging oven doors and pans during service. Those tradition-bound restaurants were fundamentally concerned with transforming ingredients; the California school preferred to fetishize their natural state, or as close to it as could reasonably be sold in a restaurant, and the kitchen would reflect that: “I wanted to have a wood-burning grill, which I never had before,” says Waxman. “And I wanted to have no machinery. I had no Robot Coupes or Cuisinarts. I wanted that rusticity.”
As for the food, Waxman planned to draw heavily on his menu from Michael’s, a document whose DNA included genomes from McCarty’s time ghosting Jean Bertranou. Not going anywhere was the chicken: “I wanted to make my own french fries the way I had learned in France. And I wanted to buy the best chicken I could possibly get.” (Buddy Larry Forgione, by this time at An American Place, put Waxman onto Paul Kaiser’s free-range chickens, and to so many other purveyors that Waxman joked that Jams should have been called Another American Place.)
Master was in perfect sync with his partner. “There was nothing like it in New York,” says Master. “No one had mesquite grills. No one had open kitchens. No one had baby vegetables.”
The Masters and Waxman rented a $400-a-month one-bedroom apartment in the West Village. Waxman, who’d come to town with a Ferrari, a wardrobe, and nothing else, crashed on the sofa. The trio beat the pavement looking for a space until, driving across East 79th Street one day, they spotted one for lease: a restaurant on the lower two floors of a townhouse. An extracted pipe left a three-foot sag in the dining room, but they would’ve accepted a dirt floor because there was no down payment required. “We didn’t have any money,” says Waxman. Master summoned an old friend from the L.A. restaurant scene—Larry Shupnick—who in turn corralled Marvin Zeidler, who would go on to become Bruce Marder’s partner in Santa Monica’s Broadway Deli and other ventures. The two came to New York City, saw the space, and said, “You’re both insane but we’ll back you.”
“THOSE WERE THE LITTLE IDEAS THAT I HAD IN MY HEAD.”
Like so many chefs of his generation, Waxman had taken his sweet time finding himself, and the professional kitchen. Trained as a trombone player, he had chops enough to earn a scholarship to the University of Nevada, and gig with the likes of Sammy Davis Jr.
But food was always in the background. In the late 1960s, after returning from Nevada to his hometown area of Berkeley, he moved in with a woman whose parents were passionate foodniks and treated the young lovers to expensive dinners. Waxman left the relationship with a foundation in fine dining that complemented an innate weakness for luxury.
He joined a band in 1970. Rather than eat in crap restaurants on the road, the musicians threw spontaneous dinner parties that descended into bacchanals, cooking out of a copy of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, passed down to Waxman by his mother. Like many contemporaries, Waxman had discovered food, in large part, thanks to Child, Graham Kerr, and Gourmet magazine. Back in Berkeley, Waxman took, and loved, a class with Le Cordon Bleu’s Richard Grausman at a local department store before moving to Maui to study politics at the University of Hawaii. After dropping out of school and a quick stint with yet another band, he found himself stranded far from home and penniless.
“There are two things you can do,” counseled a friend. “Sell drugs or work in a restaurant.”
Waxman chose the latter, securing a job on Ka’anapali Beach. “It was one of these restaurants with a huge bar that served daiquiri cocktails in snifter glasses and the cocktail waitresses wore basically nothing,” says Waxman. “It was right on the beach, open air with a canopy above. People grilled their own steaks and swordfish. My job was to prep all the meats in the morning and bus tables at night. Within six months, I was the manager because I smoked less pot than everyone else.”
Returning to Berkeley in 1972, Waxman led a triple life: By day he donned a pair of Gucci loafers and sold Ferraris and Alfa Romeos; by night he played in a jazz band and tended bar. Between customers at the auto dealership, Waxman gabbed about food, prompting the owner’s wife—a food lover—to recommend her friend Mary Risley’s San Francisco cooking class. This being Berkeley, the shop’s head auto mechanic matriculated with Waxman, who proved a natural.
After the last day of class, Risley approached him, asked what he was doing with his life.
“I don’t know,” said Waxman, then twenty-five.
“Why don’t you think about going to cooking school to become a chef?” she asked.
The thought had never occurred to him, but it made perfect sense. Risley secured him a spot at Paris’s La Varenne. His parents put up the tuition, and on his birthday, November 15, 1976, he touched down in Paris. He can still taste the duck confit and garlic potatoes he ate on arrival. A Paris virgin, he spent six weeks learning French at Alliance Française, befriended a fellow student—a photographer—and ended up rooming with the shutterbug, a colleague of his, and two fashion models. Then he dove into cooking school, compares it to “dropping acid”; he couldn’t get enough. Instructors and the French media were obsessed with the kings of nouvelle cuisine and Waxman lapped it up. He and some friends rented a dilapidated Opel and made a gustatory tour, dining at Troisgros, Bocuse, and other Michelin starlets. The zeitgeist prompted a barstool epiphany: What if we took all the sort of classic regional foods of America and did what they did in France? he thought. Lighten them up? Make them more accessible? Make them different somehow? “I didn’t know what that meant really,” he says. “What if instead of having a big slab of abalone cooked in butter and flour and put on a plate with more butter, you took that abalone and cut it into strips and deep-fried it and tossed it into a salad to wilt the salad? Those were the little ideas that I had in my head. Those were the things I tried at Michael’s.”
“IT WOULD BE AN HONOR AND A PRIVILEGE FOR YOU TO WORK FOR ME.”
In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, released in 1977, protagonist Alvy Singer, a New Yorker, orders “alfalfa sprouts and a plate of mashed yeast” at an outdoor L.A. cafe. Gothamites erupted into peals of laughter at the line—a bite-sized summation of the East Coast’s perception of the California diet. How things had changed in seven years: New York food writers and diners anticipated Jams with “the-circus-is-coming” giddiness, and many young cooks, most of them trained in French kitchens, wanted to work there. In an era when there was scant national coverage of chefs, their reputations and legends grew like gunslingers’—by word of mouth—and Waxman’s had already swelled to tall-tale status. Forgione, now at his own An American Place, sent his former cook Helen Chardack there to meet “his buddy from California.” She interviewed in the unfinished space: “It had wires and lightbulbs and the toilet was sitting in the middle of the room and it was completely undone, but he was going ahead and he was going to open anyway,” says Chardack, who, having done time in California, saw through the clutter: “I knew exactly what he was doing with that grill. I knew exactly what he was doing with his food.” Ralph Tingle, who’d cooked for Wolfgang Puck at Ma Maison before coming to New York, and had admired Waxman’s work at Michael’s, had left Le Cirque after a tiff with Alain Sailhac; he strolled into the Jams space one day, asked Waxman for a job, got hired on as sous chef. Ed Fertig, another River Café grad, also interviewed at the construction site. Waxman ended the tête-à-tête saying, “It would be an honor and a privilege for you to work for me.” Fertig found it pompous, but figured there had to be talent behind the bluster. The legend grew before he’d served a morsel of food in Manhattan.
Journalists, too, wanted a piece of the action: New York magazine’s Gael Greene contacted Master about a preopening piece, insisting on a photograph. The restaurant was still under construction, so it was improvisation time: “Janie goes next door to [Rosedale] Fish Market,” says Master. “She buys some scallops, Jonathan buys some greens, brings them back, Janie takes her eyebrow pencil out, paints black lines on the scallop to look as if it’d been on the grill. Jonathan does his magic putting the things around it, and—voilà!—we have what looks like amazing grilled scallops with little baby greens. That was the photo that went into New York magazine.”
In January 1984, the month before the restaurant opened, Marian Burros penned a New York Times piece titled “Food Accent for the 80’s Is Decidedly American,” a summation of the action to date: the emphasis on fresh ingredients, the rediscovery and reinterpretation of American dishes, the proliferation of chef-farmer relationships, and the transmission of inspiration from major market to major market. She also traced the movement’s echo in the fast-food and supermarket realms, and predicted an uptick in “Oriental” and Mexican influence. In the piece, she observed that chefs were opening “their own restaurants instead of going to work for others,” citing An American Place’s Forgione and Waxman, with his about-to-launch Jams, as role models.
When the restaurant finally opened in February, the dining room could have been plucked right from Santa Monica: a minimalist space with chalk-white walls hung with outsized modern paintings procured by Waxman, and floral arrangements created daily by Janie Master. There was a petite freestanding antique zinc-topped Parisian bistro bar with a walnut facade. Tables were set with blue-rimmed white Ginori china. The kitchen was—of course—open, barely set off from the dining room by a butcher block–covered Traulsen pass-through refrigerator that served as the pass. To avoid a Siberian stigma, the upstairs was decorated to evoke a clubby setting, an exclusivity Master would offer the anticipated celebrity guests. Ironically, given Master’s wine acumen, they had yet to secure a liquor license, requiring customers to bring their own in the restaurant’s first days.
The food was everything people had been primed to expect, and more. There was, of course, the chicken. There was a shiitake and oyster mushroom salad with pine nuts and Smithfield ham. There was sautéed foie gras with deep-fried spinach. There was swordfish with blood orange and shallots, and veal with veal stock and limes.
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bsp; There were also Californians; several West Coast peers were in town around the opening, including Puck himself, who dropped in for lunch.
The restaurant took off fast, despite some good ol’ fashioned New York attitude. George Barber, former front-of-house man at Michael’s, came to New York City, ran into Waxman on the street, and took a job at Jams. “There was a stay-in-California thing among these tough New Yorkers,” remembers Barber. “New York was different in the eighties. It was a lot more cynical. It was a lot more territorial as well. They did a big thing coming from California.”
Waxman picked up on it, too: “New York had no idea what I was doing,” he says. “So when I opened up they were like, ‘What the fuck is this? Where does he get off grilling chicken and serving it with french fries? Where does he get off serving sweetbread salad? Where does he get off serving wilted mushrooms?’ They all kind of loved it and they were kind of confused by it at the same time. But everybody seemed to take it in stride.”
“I think Gael Greene legitimized a lot of it,” says Barber. “She started Citymeals on Wheels, and I think Jonathan was the first one that really helped her and he got a lot of cachet from that.”
With Waxman plying his trade in New York City, the legend went full supernova: “Jonathan would come into the kitchen and gather up these ingredients and create this plate. It was almost like he was dancing,” remembers Stephanie Lyness, who cooked at Jams. “And that’s the way the food was. It was very fresh, simple, alive feeling, and certainly à la minute. Everything was just coming off the grill.”
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 29