Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  Meanwhile, in the face of the recession, Charlie Palmer—the former linebacker—pushed forward, realizing his longtime dream of opening his own restaurant at precisely the wrong time. But what was the threat of failure to a kid from Smyrna, New York? “Everybody’s looking at me like, ‘How stupid is this guy? He’s opening a high-end restaurant in the worst economy in twenty-five years.’ And I’m like, what am I going to do? I’m in the middle of this thing. I didn’t give a shit, honestly. I didn’t care. I was twenty-seven. I had no debts. I had no family. I always knew how to live poor.”

  He had considered following the action downtown, partnering with Steven Greenberg, publisher of Fame magazine, owner of the Roxy roller disco, and scene maker, who envisioned the restaurant in a space on Greene Street in SoHo. But Palmer had his heart set on opening what he imagined as “an American Lutèce . . . and to me that meant I wanted a restaurant in a townhouse. I felt at the time, whether right or wrong, that to compete with the great restaurants in New York and be considered in that realm, I had to be between 59th and 72nd Streets and I had to be between Fifth and Lex. That was the criteria.” And so he partnered with Steve Tsolis and Nicola Kotsoni, who had done well partnering with Tuscan Pino Luongo in Il Cantinori and had recently opened their own Greek restaurant, Periyali, and were willing to meet another of his criteria, that he wanted to own the real estate along with them.

  Palmer brought along some key members of his crew from The River Café, including Gerry Hayden and Neil Murphy, put the guys to work on the space and also on the upper floors, creating rentable apartments. After the kitchen was installed, Palmer would walk out onto the street, invite random swells to come in and try the food he and his crew were developing.

  “We called them Sheetrock dinners,” says Palmer. “At the end of the day we’d sweep all the crap in the corner and we’d put a table down and we’d cook.” For Palmer, everything about the scenario typified the times: “We didn’t have anybody telling us this is the way it had to be. You weren’t bound by tradition in any way. It was a no-brainer to be cooking and practicing what you do in an illegal situation and literally bringing people off the street saying, ‘Hey, do you want to taste some food?’ We did that every night. Total strangers. We were not dressed in chef’s clothes but we were just in work clothes. People look at you like you’ve got fricking three heads. Like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And then you explain to them, ‘We’re opening a restaurant. We’re just chefs. Tell us what you think about it.’ They’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, okay.’ They’d be, like, total strangers sitting down like, ‘Hi, I’m Pam.’ ‘I’m George,’ you know, kind of thing, and they would taste food. We always had some wine. We’d get every wine guy coming in there trying to sell me stuff, leave some bottles because we’re going to cook tonight. Half of them were open already.”

  Aureole opened in 1988 and earned two stars from the New York Times.

  Different American schools began to emerge in New York City, and with Waxman temporarily off the grid and Keller and Bouley associated more with France than America, Palmer and Portale were seen as being at the very point of the cutting edge.

  “It got really vibrant,” says Telepan. “And there was a lot being written about it. Restaurants got looser. Danny opened Union Square at the time. At Gotham you could go eat—you’re in a suit and I’m in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. We could eat there together. I guess it was somewhat radical to have a meal like Gotham or Jams, where it was totally casual but the food was really terrific and really well thought out. . . . I think that moment made everybody more comfortable about eating out. So you were getting the sophisticated French cuisines; even Alfred did beurre blancs at that time. All these guys went to work in France. Charlie worked in France. Alfred worked in France. All these guys went out there and they came back and brought their French techniques. And they, of course, were thinking about what was going on in California with Jeremiah. I mean, Alice, her whole thing was based upon France. Her whole cooking was based upon France using California ingredients.

  “You would meet over the years certain people who worked for each guy and the truth is—nothing against Charlie, because obviously Charlie has done very well for himself—but there’s two kinds of cooks, right?” says Telepan. “There’s the kind that love talking about getting crushed and, ‘Oh, my station was in the weeds’ but they don’t talk about food in terms of taste and layers and textures. And that was the great thing about Alfred. You learned. When I came to Alfred’s kitchen as a cook . . . Alfred’s about flavor, flavor, flavor. And the guys that I worked with, that was it. It was about flavors. When Alfred would talk about a dish, it wasn’t like, ‘Throw it on the grill and let’s fucking sear the shit out of it.’ It was all about seasoning correctly.”

  “It was Jean-Jacques Rachou at La Côte Basque, it was Daniel Boulud, and it was Alain Sailhac and three or four chefs who historically trained everybody,” says Geoffrey Zakarian, who worked around New York City during these years. “Then it became Charlie Palmer, then it became Alfred Portale, then it became that school. So the tree grew very rapidly.” These two groups were summed up in a 1993 piece by Trish Hall in the New York Times, remembered to this day by the cooks who worked for Palmer and Portale. (Though the piece focused on Gotham and The River Café, Hall’s primary River Café reference point was Palmer.) “While there are exceptions to every generalization, two characteristics seem to stick,” wrote Hall. “Gotham cooks all make tall food, and The River Café guys (and they are all guys) look like rugby players.”

  “I STARTED TO, WITH HUGE RESISTANCE, UNDERSTAND WHAT HE WAS ABOUT.”

  Despite a seeming burnout, Waxman made a comeback. He returned to California to open the short-lived Table 29 in the Napa Valley, most notable because it put Waxman in place to pass through Yountville, notice that The French Laundry was for sale, and tip off Thomas Keller, who had migrated to Los Angeles and would go on to open there. Waxman returned to New York, opened a succession of restaurants, then settled in at Barbuto in the West Village in 2004. Today, he’s attached to several restaurants around the country, and has emerged as one of the industry’s most beloved elder statesmen.

  In addition to his own phoenix routine, Waxman grew in the estimation of many who worked for him, including several former kitchen skeptics.

  “The funny thing is, I have a lot more perspective now,” says Tom Carlin, who today owns the Gladstone Tavern in New Jersey. “At the time I thought he was a complete fake, phony, and he didn’t really do anything. Of all the chefs I’ve worked with, my style is probably closest to his. So when he told me some things, it really stuck with me. I remember his philosophy well because I’m kind of doing it. I’ve been doing his half chicken since I was there. It’s one of the best things that we do here.”

  “It’s funny,” says Ed Fertig. “Doing things simply, having the great ingredients, I’ve carried that through me, no matter where I’ve been. Even right now, the company I’m with, we have four Irish pubs, but we make everything in-house. We’re known as much for food as our twenty-five beers on tap. And on the specials sheet, I’ll kind of do whatever and it usually works really well. When I was chef at a place in Aspen for years, I did a foie gras dish that was awesome, and it was really simple. Had I not had the Jams experience, it probably would have been a lot more involved and it didn’t need to be. I think you need both—you need that tough French cooking training and then you have something like Jonathan.”

  “That was me in my twenties. My naïveté and my overinflated ego,” says Gerry Hayden. “I look back now and realize what Wolfgang was doing; he had done so much of that cooking, that French, European-style cooking, that he was sick of it. And he was expressing what Wolfgang wanted to cook. Now I get it. Wolfgang was creating his own style. And Jonathan, too, absolutely. He’s a pioneer. If you asked me when I was twenty-one what I thought about Jams, I would have told you it’s an overpriced place where they serve chicken and shoestring fries. Because I was young
and stupid.”

  Perhaps most jaw-dropping is Eric Bromberg’s revelation. Not only did Waxman—who could have had a side career as a chef recruiter during these years, an American Marc Sarrazin—set him up with a job at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, shocking his former employee, but Bromberg—who today presides over the Blue Ribbon restaurant group with his brother Bruce—also came to value his experience at Jams more than he might have imagined possible.

  “I started to, with huge resistance, understand what he was about,” says Bromberg. “Taking all the French knowledge and removing the fluff and bullshit and just cooking well. And just, for instance, the restaurant I worked at in Paris and all the food I learned in cooking school: a pigeon, okay? Take the pigeon, the whole pigeon with the head on. Sear off the skin, put in the mirepoix, put it in the oven, deglaze it with sherry or whatever we did, and then make a butter out of the drippings. Take the bird, present it to the guest, bring it back to the kitchen, cut it off the bone, lay it out, put the vegetables, do this whole composed thing. Six people are involved in making this one dish, including the waiters. And at Jams the squab was cut from the back and butterflied. Take the carcass, take all the center bones out, lay it out, cook skin side down on a grill, season, put it on a plate with a pile of shoestring fries and a little bit of, like, a port glaze.

  “That was it. And it couldn’t be more opposite. So it took me a while, I would say, to get over the resentment and the anger and the restructuring of what my brain thought of as food. At first, I was like, ‘This guy’s an asshole, and what a mess, and why not make this cool presentation of the pigeon? Why do it this way?’ But ultimately, in the long run, that experience had more of an impact on my style of cooking since then than anything. The simplicity of cooking each thing properly and separating out the ingredients, even if they go together on the same plate. You know, the leg and thigh don’t cook the same time as the breast, so why not break it down first and do it separately and then put it back together? Why cook the vegetables for twenty-five minutes or whatever it may be, and do white wine and butter and this, that, and the next thing? Why not just blanch them for a minute and season them with sea salt and a little bit of olive oil or whatever?

  “That kind of spirit of light and quick cooking struck me. And I’d never cooked on a grill to that extent. And keeping a fire on a wood grill going and consistent so you can grill stuff all throughout a night when you have six hours of service and you have to load charcoal, you’re loading wood in while you’re cooking and having enough cooking space to do it. That was a pretty intense learning curve.

  “Had I not had that experience, I would be somewhere in the fancy-food high-end French world now. Experiencing that brought me back to America and brought me to understand what this movement really was and what the point of it was. And I’m not sure I really saw it while it was happening. It took me a while to really grasp it and understand.”

  7

  She’s Not There

  We did the dinner that they served on the Titanic.

  —Andy Pforzheimer

  HOW JEREMIAH TOWER POURED HIS LIFE INTO STARS, CREATING THE AMERICAN BRASSERIE, WHILE—FOR BETTER AND WORSE—NEVER LETTING GO OF THE PAST

  It was New Year’s Eve 1985, and in the Stars kitchen things drew to a standstill just before midnight. The final minutes of 1984, the restaurant’s maiden year, were at hand, and the team—at the behest of their leader—stopped to savor them before they ticked away into the past. Jeremiah Tower popped open a nebuchadnezzar of Dom Pérignon Champagne, strode among the stoves and grill, pouring flutefuls for his chefs and cooks from the fifteen-liter bottles which stood higher than the restaurant’s tables. Stars was just six months old, but had sucked up most of the available oxygen in San Francisco’s dining community. Fashioned after Paris’s La Coupole and credited with birthing the American brasserie, Stars was an immense multilevel space with a piano player, an open kitchen and oyster station, its walls adorned with Art Nouveau posters and historic menus, its entrance set not on Polk Street, where there was a door, but in speakeasy style, on Redwood Alley alongside.

  If the story of the American restaurant chef to this point was the exploration of self and country through food, Stars amped things up with restaurant as autobiography, a seamless, delirious, ostentatious marriage of food and design, service and style, all of it exploding from one man’s life and times. Over the course of its fifteen years, in an industry bubbling over with larger-than-life figures, Tower emerged as the most operatic, scaling the greatest heights, taking the steepest falls, and—seemingly indestructible and indefatigable—capable of repeating the cycle ad infinitum. It was, and remains, quite a ride.

  “HE WOULD SORT OF INFUSE IDEAS INTO US.”

  The facts of Tower’s life are such that he’d be compelling even if he’d never become a chef, or accomplished anything of note. Born into a wealthy family—his father, an abusive man whom he detested, an international managing director of Western Electric, lived impossibly well on his family’s oil fortune—Tower spent his childhood in far-flung locations around the world (London, Sydney, Hawaii), and on ships such as the Queen Elizabeth. He was, he claimed, first turned on to the wonders of food at age six, in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, by an Aborigine named Nick who taught him to drink coconut water from the shell and roast barracuda. The man, in an episode Tower has only ever referred to with abstractions and metaphors, taught him about the birds and the bees, schooling the young boy in what to do with his “lizard.” Whatever happened on that beach, he would forever link food and sex.

  Food became a comfort to Tower, a source of pleasure and nurture, what he called in his memoir California Dish “an escape into a private universe of glorious sensation.” One of the many things that set him apart from his contemporaries was that he didn’t have to discover the best food in the world as an adult; it had always been there for him, savored in the finest restaurants and at sea, as when, in 1950, his family took a trip around the world.

  Following Tower tradition, Jeremiah became a Harvard man, entering the university’s School of Design. An Atlantis obsessive, he drew up plans for “an underwater habitat project” and a bridge-tunnel passageway from England to France, but they were met with skepticism, the faculty directing him toward public housing. He famously created a presentation titled “Champagne While the World Crumbles,” a film loop of a mushroom cloud set to rock and roll and best appreciated with marijuana cookies, which he served.

  Tower hosted dinner parties in college, often extravagantly. He had become a collector and connoisseur of cookbooks and menus, and spent much of his leisure time deepening his connection to food, amassing enough information to rival his architectural education. In 1972, he moved to California and, early the next year—down to his last dollars and desperately in need of employment—had that fateful interview at Chez Panisse.

  In the late 1970s, with Chez Panisse behind him, Tower—though he had no formal training himself—began teaching at the California Culinary Academy. Among his students was Mark Franz, a young cook born in San Francisco in 1952 to a German father and Yugoslavian mother. Franz recalls a tasting class Tower conducted. “It was a tasting class of anything,” says Franz. “Olive oil, vinegar. He taught us how to make vinaigrettes, that kind of stuff. It was my sophomore class and there were twenty-five of us. It was fun because he really had no rules. It was more he said, ‘Okay, you’ve got oil. You’ve got vinegar. You’ve got salt. You’ve got pepper. You’ve got this. You’ve got that.’ And he would give you amounts but he would say, ‘They don’t necessarily mean much because it depends on the salad you’re making, depends on the green that you’re dressing. There’s a million variations.’ He empowered you. When you were done, you knew how to make the vinaigrette. And to this day a lot of people are clueless. So you learned step by step by step by step; he just kind of gave you the big picture.”

  Franz was dazzled by Tower: “He brought passion. Oh, amazing. He was extremely articula
te. And in those days cooks weren’t the sharpest pencil in the deck. So he brought arrogance. He was worldly. He traveled all over the world. The guy knew how to eat. He knew how to cook. He’s a piece of work.”

  Franz remembers his classmates as “all older people reinventing themselves. . . . A lot of them were bikers, or ex-bikers. And they were ex-druggies and ex-this and they were trying to rearrange their lives. When we first started off in my freshman quarter, there were eighty-two people. When I graduated there were fifteen. They all just went by the wayside.”

  At the time, Tower was also heading up the kitchen of the Balboa Café, owned by notorious restaurateur Doyle Moon. At night, Franz and Tower would hit Vanessi’s on Broadway, in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, and do what Franz reverentially refers to as “holding court.” Inevitably, friends of Tower would come by, some flitting through town from Europe. They’d also put away unspeakable amounts of alcohol. “I learned how to drink from that man,” says Franz, who considered Tower a genius, sensed that he was about to change the cooking game in America, and saw his meal ticket, becoming Tower’s sous chef at the academy, running the production kitchen, fulfilling banquet obligations, then—crucially—honed his technical skills working under chef Jacky Robert at Ernie’s.

  Tower, again in conjunction with Doyle Moon, took over Santa Fe Bar and Grill after Mark Miller and Susie Nelson pushed off. The restaurant is remembered as a stopover, a paycheck, but the themes and approaches that would soon define Tower’s career were in evidence. He assembled a group of cooks—headed by Franz, who was quickly solidifying his role as Little John to Tower’s Robin Hood—and they would collaborate, brainstorm ideas over an after-service beer or Champagne (Tower’s favorite) in the restaurant or at a bar. Nothing was off the table, from braising goat with cactus to devising new ways of cooking Dover sole.