Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  Tingle found the food lacked the “elegant twist that Michael’s had; it was more stripped down, more organic,” which he attributes to Waxman’s time at Chez Panisse. Accordingly, he was knocked out by the ingredients Waxman was able to secure: “It was the first time I’d seen vegetables coming in from these organic farms, like baby carrots, and they were rock-solid fantastic. We had chickens coming in with rigor mortis, with the feet on and the head on. Jonathan was a pretty good forager. He was finding some pretty unique things to bring into the restaurant. And how we treated them was pretty darn simple and straightforward. We weren’t making coq au vin through marinades or sauces or whatnot; we were taking this chicken that’s beautiful, organic, fresh, and grilling it and putting a little rosemary on it.” Tingle, charged with ensuring certain standards, like a crispy skin on the chicken, understood the inherent risk in Waxman’s approach: Simplicity leaves “nothing to hide behind so you really have to do a good job with it.”

  “The grill was hot as shit,” remembers future Quilted Giraffe cook Tom Carlin, who came to Jams from 40 Main Street, a contemporary American restaurant in Millburn, New Jersey, where Tom Colicchio also worked early in his career. “It was like working in a coal mine. I’d come home and blow my nose and it’d be black. And if you were standing in front of the grill and then moved your arms forward and your chef’s coat hit your back, it would burn you.” The minimalist kitchen called for unconventional techniques: The fries were made in a pot on the grill, rather than in a fryolator; the oil sometimes bubbled over, causing fires.

  The laid-back vibe extended to the plating. “He didn’t want to arrange the food,” says Carlin. “His words were ‘Don’t move things around. I want it to look like it just fell from the sky and landed gently on the plate.’” The price tag for such simplicity raised eyebrows: The chicken and fries were $20 on opening day. (For comparison, it debuted at just $29 thirty-one years later at a poorly received Jams reboot.)

  Waxman changed the menu weekly, sometimes daily—an ongoing, unpredictable Jams session by the onetime musician and innate improviser, the only problem being that the maestro operated on his own wavelength, sometimes changing up the setlist at the last possible second. Fertig remembers it as a “free-for-all”; one morning, Waxman blew into the kitchen minutes before lunch service and proclaimed, “It’s Beaujolais Nouveau Day, everything has Beaujolais in it!” Never mind that all the food for the planned menu had already been prepped and guests would be filing in any minute. Sometimes Waxman went too far, like the time he tried grilling live lobsters; they (understandably) began crawling off the grate, requiring the cooks to cage them.

  Some found the spontaneity stimulating, others maddening. Eric Bromberg, who became chef of Jams during its run, remembers that at the outset of each week, Waxman gave him a typed menu to realize by Friday. Often, it was a puzzle to be solved: “There was no description on anything. Just the names of the dish and a couple of cryptic, sort of weird things. One of them was Onion Surprise. That’s how it was written. ‘Here’s the menu, go make all the food and start the new menu on Friday.’ It’s, like, three days out, and I have no idea what he has in mind.”*

  Chardack, who took over the kitchen a few months after opening when Tingle left, says, “Jonathan used to write up a menu every day and we would get it all prepped, and forty-five minutes before service began, he would change it. It was painful. I would tell the cooks, ‘Even if you’re not ready, look like you’re ready.’ Because it was an open kitchen.” (Incidentally, in these days, a sous chef might have been more akin to what is, at the time of this writing, considered a chef de cuisine, the person who ran the kitchen day to day and/or during service. Tingle and Chardack would have been considered sous chefs in most kitchens at the time, but not at Jams. “Jonathan was not hung up on titles,” says Chardack. “He’s from California.” That said, Chardack did have an unofficial designation: “I was Grill Queen, who controlled the rest of the kitchen, because all the entrees came off the grill.”)

  “My take on Jonathan is that he’s first and foremost an artist,” says Lyness. “I feel like he might have been a painter. He might have been a sculptor.”

  Waxman himself frequently speaks of food in musical terms: Of the evolution of his style, he says: “It’s a little bit like musicians, learning the scales like they did four hundred years ago. What you do with them, well, it’s up to you, you know?”

  “Jonathan’s a jazz musician and he thrives a little bit on chaos,” says Chardack. “If you can just go with the flow with him, then everything would be just fine.”

  “IS THIS A MOVEMENT? I DON’T KNOW.”

  Food as conversation piece, an American chef of burgeoning celebrity, the cachet of California. It was a perfect storm. Savvy diners flocked to the restaurant to experience California cuisine with a curiosity comparable to that of those who visited Wylie Dufresne’s wd~50 decades later to lose their molecular virginity.

  “All of a sudden the restaurant was so full it was crazy,” says Waxman. Before long, Steve Martin (at the height of his movie and stand-up-comedy careers), Paul Newman (late-career peaking, between The Verdict and The Color of Money), and Mick Jagger (still firmly in the Rolling Stones) were showing up, sometimes simultaneously, as did food titans like James Beard and Paul Bocuse. Being the “it” spot meant there was no end to what Master could get away with, like crowding six to eight people around a four-top, or euphemizing the bathroom-adjacent table as “the kitchen table.” Rather than be turned away, Princess Stéphanie of Monaco, Dodi Fayed, and friends deigned to dine in the restaurant’s ramshackle office one night. Wine storage was improvised—some bottles went into the fridge, others to the basement, which doubled as the coat check; mink coats were scattered about, slung over stockpots, occasionally finding their way into the soup.

  By March, the New York Times’s Marian Burros had chimed in with a two-star review: “Cognoscenti and would-be cognoscenti have been flocking to Jams on the Upper East Side . . . eager to be among the first to sample the California cuisine they have heard so much about,” opens the review. She goes on: “For the untutored, New York’s first restaurant to offer this minimalist style of cooking in a minimalist setting may come as something of a shock.” (On one of her four visits, the ventilation system went wonky, allowing smoke to waft into the dining room; by the fall, the owners had spent $22,000 to improve it.) Gael Greene held her judgment until September, then mostly rhapsodized over the food but related a conversation with a friend who tried to sell her on it being “California relaxed elegance.” “To me, it looks rather tentative, undone, the exposed kitchen its only dramatic statement, though borrowed canvases and tailored blinds have brought it all together,” she wrote. Greene also noted Waxman’s use of purslane, common in kitchens today, calling it “an odd herb.”

  Despite the buzz, many New York cooks disdained the California school and the bohemian chef who personified it. “Jonathan was the devil to me,” remembers Bromberg. “I worshipped French cooking. And he was spitting in its face.” Bromberg found his Jams indoctrination cultish: “It’s California cuisine, which I can’t even put together in my mind what that actually even means. Stephanie would use that term: ‘We do California cuisine here.’ And Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan. Jonathan was the deity to everybody. It was Jonathan and Melvyn. And they were having a pretty good time. But they made things totally differently than I had learned how to make things. And so for probably the first two and a half months, I tried to make specials. And I’d make classic French dishes. And that was going fine and then Jonathan showed up; he just walked in the kitchen. He was like, ‘Hey.’ I don’t even know if he looked at me. He looked at this dish that I’d just made. I don’t exactly remember what it was, but I know there were tomatoes in it. And he looked at it and he goes—I don’t know if he said, ‘What the fuck is this?’ or ‘What the hell is this?’ And I turned around and I’m like, ‘This is blah, blah, blah,’ whatever I said it was. And
he said, ‘We don’t make that here.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean you don’t make that here?’ And he said, ‘We don’t make that here. We don’t cook tomatoes,’ or something like that. And I was like, ‘Oh.’ He was in my world and shocked the shit out of me. I just kind of stood there. And he said, ‘You know why I don’t cook tomatoes? It makes me fart.’ And he turned around and walked out.”

  “It was really a change to work for Jonathan after this hard-core French stuff,” says Tingle, who had done time in France between California and Le Cirque. “It was kind of a shock to the system in some ways, and hard to wrap myself around at first, but after a while I began to appreciate the honesty of it.”

  “We looked at the food and just thought, What is this shit?” remembers Mike Colameco, who was working as sous chef to Frenchman Christian Delouvrier at Maurice restaurant in the Hotel Parker Meridien at the time. “‘Where’s the technique?’ All the stuff that we valued so much was nonexistent in that kitchen. Back in the day, one of the great jobs was to be a saucier in a restaurant because it was a huge responsibility. You were the alchemist; you created these wonderful things. And then you get to Jams and we used to joke that the saucier makes vinaigrettes. The saucier there worked with a whisk and a couple of mixing bowls and a couple of olive oils and vinegar. What the fuck?”

  “The difference was we were trying to create food that was generated from the idea of braising, roasting, sautéing,” says Gerry Hayden, at The River Café under Charlie Palmer at the time. “What they said in California about the produce being spectacular: It can be spectacular. It doesn’t mean you can’t still do spectacular things with it.”

  “When I went to Jams, I was like, ‘Yeah, it is kind of what I expected. It’s real simple and lots of vegetables,’” remembers Chanterelle’s David Waltuck. “Is this a movement? I don’t know.”

  “I’m sure that I visited most, if not all, of those restaurants,” says Josh Wesson, working at Huberts when Jams opened. “But that was a moment, not a movement. I don’t have any specific [recollections], just sort of a fuzzy awareness that I went to those restaurants and can’t remember a thing about them.”

  “I THINK IT’S A SILLY TERM.”

  Waxman was the first to introduce California cuisine to New York City, but only by a hair, as it turned out. In his wake, and within a year or so, came Wolfgang Puck protégé Richard Krause, first at Batons and then at Melrose in Manhattan, and Michael’s and Spago alums Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton, whom Mervyn LeRoy recruited to take over the kitchen at his Maxwell’s Plum, an American restaurant with a legendary hookup scene—“singles bar” in the patois of the time.

  The concentrated influx of California chefs to New York City during these years is Exhibit A for those who believe most credit for the American food revolution belongs to the West Coast. Initially, at least publicly, Waxman expressed discomfort with the California cuisine designation: In December 1983, just weeks before Jams opened, he quipped to the New York Times: “What’s California food—food served on a surf board with sand on it?”

  It’s a good question: Just what is California cuisine? The term has been used so loosely, even by those most associated with it, that it doesn’t have much meaning beyond the sketchiest: a preponderance of vegetables, especially baby vegetables; a scarcity of sauce; the use of a wood-fired grill; salsas, pastas, and pizzas.

  Like most such categories, California cuisine was coined by journalists rather than chefs. As with nouvelle cuisine, California cuisine was created as a convenience, most likely by Gourmet’s Caroline Bates, as a hook with which to corral a group of disparate chefs operating on the left coast, to facilitate headlines and reference points. Like most such groupings—molecular gastronomy is a more recent example—the terminology ultimately fails, especially in this case because it implies the most populous state in the union is monolithic. But anybody who has been to both Los Angeles and San Francisco knows that the two cities, almost four hundred miles apart, have little in common: L.A. is Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, and the beach; San Francisco boasts a more intellectual bent, with wine country nearby, and the bohemia of Berkeley alongside. Joyce Goldstein, former chef-owner of San Francisco’s Square One and a historian of this era, says, “They were two different planets.”

  Though many were all too happy to capitalize on it at the time, even the most famous practitioners of California cuisine take issue with the phrase. “When Caroline Bates wrote that Alice and I were doing California cuisine, we talked about it. We didn’t have any idea what she was talking about. We just did what we felt like doing,” says Narsai David. “Joyce Goldstein and Alice Waters and I just sort of laughed. We were doing what we felt like doing. Now, Alice, of course, has gone far beyond that, demanding that everything be as local as possible. Of course, I chuckle when I think of the exceptions she makes for things like peaches, which must come from three hundred miles away because she likes the farmer. But I can tease her about that a little bit.”

  “I think it’s a silly term,” says Goldstein. “I call it the food revolution. It was a revolution about ingredients. It was a revolution about wine. It was a revolution in restaurant design. You put in an open kitchen, the hushed dining room goes away. No one is tiptoeing or whispering anymore because the stage is happening. And you put in an open kitchen and things can never be as formal again and yet your staff has to be professional. We changed our menu every day. That meant we had briefings with our staff every day and they tasted food every day. In the old days the menus never changed. They hardly ever had briefings. Now everybody has the briefing. Well, that started here. There’s so many things that started here because of the kinds of changes that we made.”

  California cuisine, says Goldstein, “is undefinable. What it really means is fresh, seasonal, local, preferably grown by people you know.”

  “For me, a cuisine takes the test of time,” says Alice Waters. “When you talk about Chinese cuisine or even Italian cuisine, we’re talking hundreds, thousands of years. It’s sort of presumptuous to think that we could define a kind of cooking in California that has these qualities about it that are enduring. I think what I was thinking about, that’s been confused with California cuisine, is a philosophy of food. And that’s what is enduring, and that is what certainly we’ve tried to express. It’s about what is found locally, what is cooked simply, what is seasonal and ripe, what is pure and grown correctly—that’s all part of a philosophy of food and can be applied to any food.

  “But cuisine, I think there are characteristics of cooking in California that can be talked about because it’s warm here and we can be outside and we can make fires and cook over a fire, and we have a warm climate that has fruits, and we grow a lot of vegetables. Those are undoubtedly going to be part of any cuisine that comes into being. And we’re close to the sea. We’re going to have fish. We have influences from Mexico and Japan, and those are going to be part of what’s happening without any question. They were just absorbed into it.”

  “California cuisine is not the right term because it wasn’t a cuisine; it was a mind-set which was the only one I knew because I grew up in Europe, which is that the menu is done from the marketplace,” echoes Jeremiah Tower. “You have to understand that in 1973, when I started, there was nothing. There were no fresh herbs to buy commercially or wholesale. There was olive oil from the one Italian delicatessen in Oakland. The fish, I would go to the fishing boats in Chinatown and all that. I mean, talk about foraging. It took three or four hours for me every morning before going in to cook lunch. So it was really restating what was completely obvious to every French grandmother for the last five hundred years. It was an approach to cooking.”

  Ironically, Spago’s menu cover notwithstanding, the first true California cuisine might have been put forth in New York, at Jams, where Waxman and Master made a self-conscious decision to bring that style of food, and restaurant, to New York City.

  “He was really taking what he learned from cooking in California
and applied it to what was available to him in New York,” says Waters. “And he made—if such a thing exists—California cuisine.”

  “IT WAS ALMOST LIKE A DREAM.”

  Jams hit New York City when the 1980s were peaking, the high-flying, cocaine-dusted, preposterously prosperous days immortalized by Jay McInerney, whose novel Bright Lights, Big City featured a rendering of The Odeon’s facade on its cover, and Tom Wolfe.

  “That’s why I think the whole L.A. movement was so important, because it created a media buzz around these chefs,” says Tom Colicchio. “After the seventies and Studio 54, people just finally woke up from that cocaine age and said, ‘What are we going to do now?’ Restaurants became the place where people would go, and that was the evening. It wasn’t about going to a club anymore. That was over and it was done. People were just looking for something new, and there were people who wanted to understand the personalities behind the food.”

  Jams was made for the moment—tables were hot commodities, signifying status and access. “People wanted to be part of the scene. It was a scene. Which is why I say it was a party. They had a real small bar up front and no one was sweating bullets over the fact that people were crowding around it, waiting for the next seating, or coming in or whatever. Because that kind of heat that it generated, of mingling, was part of the whole world,” says Chardack.

  Amping things up, Waxman and Master were themselves becoming celebrities—appearing in Life magazine, and on the cover of Esquire. Waxman also famously posed for a New York Daily News magazine cover in silk pajamas. Before long, they were breaking the same rules as McCarty, blurring the line between employer and employee, partying with their crew after hours, maybe chowing down ’round midnight across Central Park at Lynn Wagenknecht and Keith McNally’s bistros Café Luxembourg on West 70th Street or The Odeon in the depths of Tribeca. “Café Luxembourg was the loudest restaurant on the planet, I think,” says Tingle. “Jonathan would bring a truffle in his pocket and shave some onto the plain risotto.” They drank Cristal for breakfast and had no trouble running up $10,000 in lunch bills in a month at La Goulue. “Waxman was wild,” says Tingle. “He was in and out of the restaurant, and he’d let you hang a little bit. He was just kind of everywhere. He’d be out partying. He was a little aloof.”