“It wasn’t a competitive environment,” remembers Steve Vranian, who cooked for Tower back in California and was a frequent aide-de-camp on the road. “I think now it might be a lot more competitive amongst chefs, but back then it was just a bunch of cowboys going out to get drunk.”
The day after the first Citymeals event, as night descended on the Hamptons, Puck, Miller, and a few other chefs biked down to the beach to watch the sunset, forgetting for a moment that they weren’t in California anymore, and that they were looking east, not west, over the wrong ocean. But darkness came all the same.
“THEY OPENED IT WITHOUT A FLOOR.”
Waxman and Master evolved according to the Puck-Lazaroff model, branching off into new concepts. First up was a Southwestern follow-up to Jams. They landed a space on the far side of Central Park, at Columbus Avenue and 77th Street, naming it Bud’s, after their mutual term of endearment.
The Southwestern focus was a sign of the times, of the blurring of lines from coast to coast, and of the prominence attaching to Waxman and his peers. Freshly minted chefs in other regions were beginning to take their cue from the Stanford Court Gang and their contemporaries, none more so than a small cadre of chefs operating in the Southwestern mode. Two of the earliest pioneers, ironically, flowered in California: Mark Miller, still at Berkeley’s Fourth Street Grill, and John Sedlar, who had worked for Bertranou and others in Los Angeles. In 1981, Sedlar, financed by loans from family and friends, had opened Saint Estèphe—a nouvelle cuisine restaurant in Manhattan Village, a shopping development in Manhattan Beach. (The loans barely got him to the finish line; with no money for a sign, he wrote one on cardboard, rested it on a chair outside the front door.) Sedlar, reared on a steady diet of Hispanic food in Santa Fe, New Mexico, had grown up ashamed of his ancestral cuisine; if walking down the street with, say, a burrito, his mom, a Latina, would caution him to conceal it. Saint Estèphe, which debuted with a French menu, was failing; as a Hail Mary, Sedlar began applying the technique and plating he’d learned from Bertranou to ingredients and recipes from his childhood: “I realized the food had a lot of value, so I started shipping chiles to Los Angeles and I started shipping blue cornmeal and blue corn tortillas and I started what was a fusion of Southwestern food and French haute cuisine. We’d serve caviar and lobster and smoked salmon on little small blue corn tortillas with crème fraîche and Bermuda onion, and we would do salmon mousse tamales with a little bit of masa.”
Word of these developments reached Texas, driving some homegrown toques to mine their native cuisine after the fashion of Miller, Sedlar, and—closer to home—Prudhomme. Dean Fearing forged a fancified Southwestern style at Agnew’s, then at The Verandah Club at the Loews Anatole Hotel in Dallas. When he became chef of the Mansion on Turtle Creek in 1985, he went all in. Stephan Pyles, a musician turned chef, had picked up his trade at his family’s truck stop, and began evolving to a higher style at Dallas’s Routh Street Café, shoring up his efforts with stages in France. Robert Del Grande, trained as a biochemist, followed a similar MO at Houston’s Café Annie. This community followed a staggered, slightly altered version of the path forged by their predecessors in New York, California, and Louisiana: They revered food writers, only instead of the French explorations of Olney and David they obsessed over Diana Kennedy’s Mexican cookbooks and the writings of Patricia Quintana. And in place of Michael McCarty, they had Anne Lindsay Greer, who was consulting to the Loews Anatole Hotel in the early 1980s, and named the emerging style “Southwestern.” (She also arranged for guest chefs such as Forgione, Ogden, and Puck to visit the hotel to cook wine dinners, giving the Texas chefs a prized chance to meet them.) In August 1984, Greer organized a gathering to bring this emerging group together. Known today as the “Pot Luck,” they gathered together, each showing off their own dishes, talking over ingredients, techniques, and inspirations. Greer understood the value of press and invited Michael Bauer, then editor of the gourmet section of the Dallas Times Herald, who was the first to write about the movement, comparing it to the California school. In 1984 and ’85, the Great Chefs television series aired a twenty-six-part arc called Great Chefs of the West. In April 1986, many of the chefs began cooking for the Hill Country Festival in Austin, and were being welcomed into the national fold at Puck and Lazaroff’s Meals on Wheels benefit in Los Angeles and the Citymeals on Wheels summer fund-raiser in New York City. Miller would open his own seminal Southwestern restaurant, Coyote Café, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1987, following it, in 1991, with Red Sage in Washington, D.C.
Another sign of increased cross-pollination: Back in New York City, with Bud’s slated for a September opening, Master and Waxman—who’d brought California cuisine to town—struck a deal for Paul Prudhomme to make the space his home for the summer, importing his K-Paul road show and New Orleans food to New York, as he’d done two years prior in San Francisco. (Pop-up wasn’t yet in the vernacular; the participants referred to the residency as an “instant restaurant.”) Prudhomme kicked off the five-week stint with a party, then—because a city official who had attended the opening observed exposed wires, flies, improper meat storage and oven ventilation, and no operating permit—the health department ordered a shutdown. Waxman claimed to the New York Times that his team had reached out to the mayor’s office. “We’ll see who’s more powerful,” said an increasingly cocky Waxman. “The Mayor or his Health Commissioner.” With notices posted on the door, two hundred fifty people queued up along Columbus Avenue—drinking beer and wine in anticipation of blackened redfish, Cajun jambalaya, shrimp remoulade, sweet potato–pecan pie, and bread pudding.
The city official who ratted out Waxman and Master also observed “unfinished floors” at Bud’s. One former waiter remembers those floors, considered them a sign of burgeoning hubris: “They opened it without a floor, just cement. It was kind of an important time where I think they thought they could do anything, Melvyn and Jonathan; they thought their shit was just gold. Every day we’d go into work, we’d have to move the tiles that hadn’t been set to a different area and then bring it back in so the tile setters could set it the next day.”
Regardless, Bud’s scored, earning a two-star review in the New York Times. Bryan Miller contrasted the “simplicity and freshness” with the Upper West Side’s “quiche belt,” commenting that “it’s no wonder the locals are rushing to Bud’s like surfers to 10-foot swells.”
One of the cooks in the kitchen at Bud’s was a young, carrot-topped Bobby Flay, a self-described “knockaround” kid and corner boy from the Upper East Side who had dropped out of high school, discovered the kitchen around 1981 when his father got him a job at the Theater District mainstay Joe Allen. Flay had always been attracted to cooking—early memories focus on the alchemy of the kitchen: making deviled eggs, or stirring My-T-Fine pudding mix until it thickened. Flay wasn’t attuned to the uptick in American cuisine, didn’t read the Times or New York magazine, wasn’t privy to the revolution, hadn’t heard of Forgione or Wine or the Waltucks, let alone anything happening out West. But six months into his time at Joe Allen, he woke up one morning, stared up at the ceiling, and thought to himself, I cannot wait to go to work today. “I’d never felt that before.”
Flay’s first inkling of the possibilities of the profession came when managers returned from Joe Allen’s Los Angeles outpost, with menus from Spago in hand. “To me, Wolfgang had it all: He was a great chef, and he had the environment: He had Hollywood. What do they do in Hollywood? They make people stars. That was the first time I had heard of somebody being known for their cooking in this other way, in this star way. That might sound trivial at this point, but we really didn’t know the name of the chefs in the restaurants. That was the first time I became aware of it.”
In 1984, Joe Allen himself ponied up the $6,800 tuition for Flay to attend a new culinary school based in New York City, the French Culinary Institute (see footnote). Flay was one of nine inaugural students at the SoHo-based school, still under construction
when he started. He was the youngest by five or six years, and one of the few people that wasn’t on a second career or recovering from divorce. The AIDS epidemic was in full force and claimed about a third of his class within a few years, along with many of his coworkers from Joe Allen. “People would get a cough and be in the hospital, be dead in six weeks,” he remembers.
After the six-month program, Flay took a job as sous chef at Brighton Grill, a new Upper East Side restaurant by a first-time restaurateur, socialite Stephanie Guest. The chef, says Flay, had a multitude of issues: “He would sleep on the dirty laundry in the restaurant all night. He liked tequila and a lot of it. That lasted a week. I was standing there [so was promoted to chef]. I just used my ability from hanging out in the streets to fucking get it done. But I was completely overwhelmed, insecure. I wouldn’t hire people who were too good, or better than me, because I’d be exposed. I was insane. I’d go to the Fulton Fish Market every morning. I got the restaurant under control and we had good business, but after a year I could not stand up. I said, ‘I cannot do this anymore.’”
The next job he landed was at Bud’s. “I walked into this kitchen, I didn’t know this world existed,” says Flay. “If there were ten cooks there, everybody was Michael Jordan. One person after another was a fucking amazing cook. Jonathan wasn’t in the kitchen a lot, so we all sort of learned from each other.” Flay lacked expertise, but was faster than anybody, made himself invaluable by helping the kitchen keep pace with the never-ending rush of orders.
“Fire up the grill wasn’t turning some buttons; we had mesquite wood. We made beurre blancs in every color of the rainbow—blood orange, chive. It was butter and cream sauces and vinaigrettes that were sauces as well. Lots of relishes and sauces, because it was a Southwestern restaurant. I remember watching this girl taking corn off the cob and thinking, That’s how it’s done.”
Flay was taken with the Southwestern palate of the restaurant, and on several levels: He found it shrewd because it dovetailed with the American love for “bastardized” Mexican food and the attendant tequila—a surefire revenue generator—at its apex in 1980s New York City. And he found the ingredients exotic: “Blue corn didn’t come as a tortilla chip in a bag, we had blue cornmeal. We had all these fresh and dried chiles, all these different beans. These things had never come to the East Coast in this form before. Never.”
As Massachusetts native Mark Miller had before him, Flay—who would found his career on the style—gravitated to Southwestern flavors, even though he came from the East Coast: “When I think about it, those flavors meld very well with my personality. My first cookbook was Bold American Food. It meant not only the ingredients but also an approach. Those ingredients at that point in my life made perfect sense for me. I needed ingredients with attitude. I was seduced by the idea, went from Brighton Grill, a neighborhood restaurant, just feeding people, to this other world I didn’t know existed.”
Like so many fellow cooks at the time, Flay was fully immersed in food. Waxman and Master opened a third restaurant, Hulot’s, in summer 1986, and Flay and other cooks—many of whom bounced around among the growing empire’s restaurants—would go in on Sunday, when it was closed, and work on slow-cooking preparations.
Most intoxicatingly, the burgeoning American chef society was literally paraded in front of Flay at Bud’s: “Our kitchen was open, you’d go downstairs, off the dining room, like three or four steps—you had to go through there to get to the bathroom. So I’d be cooking and all of a sudden Mark Miller would be eating my mise en place, or Wolfgang Puck would come in. During the Citymeals on Wheels week they were all here. Dean Fearing and Stephan Pyles, and Alice Waters. I was like, What the fuck is going on here? This is like Disney World. Now I know who they are. I’m paying attention to food. I’m like, These are the American gods of food and they’re eating my corn relish off my mise en place. And that’s the power of Jonathan; he’s part of this situation.”
The Southwestern presence, and the California influx, in New York City deepened at the hands of Clark Wolf, who had found his way to Manhattan and was functioning as a consultant to Sign of the Dove owner Joseph Santo. Wolf recruited Brendan Walsh back from San Francisco. He also enlisted Judy Rodgers—a Chez Panisse alumna who would go on to take over the kitchen at San Francisco’s Zuni Café and turn it into a classic—as consulting chef at Yellow Fingers in the same building. Walsh says he picked up “a little bit of that anti-structure, the change in the French model of the kitchen” from San Francisco. “When I come back to do Arizona 206, everybody’s involved in the menu, collaborative. I had fifty percent women, fifty percent men. Because of that environment, I think that’s why the food was so much fun.”
New York City had become a magnet, and not just for Americans. Brother and sister Gilbert and Maguy Le Coze imported their fashionable, cutting-edge fish temple Le Bernardin from Paris, opening on West 51st Street in 1986. That same year, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, an alum of the kitchens of Paul Haeberlin, Bocuse, and Outhier, came to Lafayette in Swissôtel The Drake, bringing with him a distinct marriage of French finesse and Asian influence picked up in stints in Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Though French, these chefs were definitely of a new guard, both on the plate and in their attitude toward Americans; years later, Vongerichten would enshrine Barry Wine’s pizza on his menu at Mercer Kitchen.
“THE GENERAL PUBLIC WAS BECOMING INTERESTED.”
These years saw an uptick in media coverage and business opportunities for chefs in the United States. Profiles and lifestyle features proliferated in local and national newspapers and magazines, and more powerfully on television, where the ability to perform a cooking demonstration choreographed for studio cameras and timed to meet a producer’s specs became a requirement for any self-respecting chef, many of whom began enlisting media trainers; an early and prestigious television series was PBS’s Great Chefs, which debuted in 1982, and focused on the chefs of particular cities, countries, and regions.
“There was a confluence of two circumstances,” says David Kratz, who launched a successful chef and restaurant public relations firm in New York City starting in the mid-1980s, when such a specialization was novel, and signed the Gotham Bar and Grill as a client immediately after Portale was hired to be the chef. “One was this American cuisine explosion; the other was a media explosion. It was right at the time when cable TV was just coming online. There weren’t thousands of channels. That was a big wave. All of a sudden there became a need for people who were really professional at understanding media outlets and the difference between them and what they would be interested in and how to navigate them and how to talk to different ones. . . . Chefs started to become interesting in other ways because these guys were young and attractive and well spoken and standard bearers for a new type of style. New Yorkers had started generally to become proud of the fact that there were these good restaurants. They were New York restaurants and they were American. New York had always had famous old restaurants, but even then you probably wouldn’t have known who the chefs were particularly. They were just famous as these fancy restaurants. Other types of media also started to become interested because culturally it was shifting and the general public was becoming interested.”
In another shift, the industry began giving itself awards, staging events that combined the pomp and grandeur of the Stanford Court dinner and charity tasting events with the aggrandizement of the Food & Wine Honor Roll of American Chefs and the Great Chefs television series. In 1984, Cook’s Magazine introduced its “Who’s Who in American Cooking,” which became an annual happening in New York City.
“Hollywood has its Oscars. The television profession gives Emmys. Now the food world in this country has begun to honor its producers, chefs, vintners, writers and restaurateurs,” wrote Margaret Engel in the Washington Post in 1985.
“Last year everyone was talking about new American cooking,” said Cook’s Magazine’s Christopher Kimball on the occasion of the second annual awa
rds, held at the cavernous Palladium nightclub in downtown Manhattan. “Now the awareness has grown that it’s not just a trend and people simply refer to it as American cooking. . . . It’s taken this country a long time to recognize its roots, but now that it has, the cuisine is flourishing.”
The second annual Who’s Who awards were held in October 1985. James Beard had died earlier that year and the James Beard Award for Special Achievement was introduced; it went to Alice Waters. The awards spoke to the still-relative paucity of noteworthy chefs around the country as the number of honorees was reduced from fifty in 1984 to twenty-five.
That same year, Harper & Row published Ellen Brown’s book Cooking with the New American Chefs, the latest attempt to corral and chronicle the emerging chef community from across the country. Brown’s book includes non-Americans like Wolfgang Puck and the legendary Jean-Louis Palladin, a native of Condom, in France’s Gascony region, who had come from two-Michelin-star success in France to open Jean-Louis at the Watergate in Washington, D.C., in 1979, and became a heroic figure to many East Coast chefs for his larger-than-life personality, mad natural talent, willingness to hire Americans, and tireless efforts to help establish a network of sources by deepening the relationship between chefs and farmers and purveyors. He also embraced traditionally American ingredients like corn and crawfish and eschewed the term nouvelle cuisine in favor of the more approachable free cooking.
“For me, he was one of the most inspiring chefs that I felt played a role at the time that he worked here in America,” says Thomas Keller, who made regular pilgrimages to Jean-Louis at the Watergate to see what the genius chef was up to. “He was super dynamic. Here was a guy who would change his menu every day. He’d have four different menus every day. So I look back on what I was doing, and he truly inspired what I was doing. There was repetition in the menu, but still, it was four different menus every day, four different prices. He would handwrite it. It was all about the product coming in. Where was the product coming from? That drove his menu. And they were changing it right up to the moment service started. It was extraordinarily presented in a refined atmosphere with great service, great wine. This was everything I wanted to do. And so for me he was truly inspiring. You look around and I think a lot of people would point back to Jean-Louis as one of those first individuals who really changed the way we cook, the way we think about cooking in a holistic way.”
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 33