* Marder would go on to open Rebecca’s, a Mexican restaurant, just down the block from West Beach Cafe, and stunningly designed by architect Frank Gehry.
* While the article does quote Frank’s reasons for leaving La Guillotine, it does not explicitly detail his opinions of dishonesty about ingredients throughout the industry.
* I’ve often wondered why so much of the general public assumes that the chef and food revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s belong exclusively to California. A theory: Reichl’s coverage of the key players in New West magazine (often assigned by Colman Andrews) and the Los Angeles Times profiled chefs and restaurateurs in a way that’s common today, but was prescient at the time, showing these characters in ways that nobody thought to in other cities. Imagine if John McPhee’s “Brigade de Cuisine” piece in The New Yorker, described in the next chapter, were one of a series of such pieces rather than a one-off, and what the effect of that balance might have been. “Ruth made everything happen,” says Evan Kleiman.
* Of the photograph, featured on the cover of this book, Peel says, “It looks like The Band. Michael looks just like Mick Jagger. And Ken Frank looks like very early Eric Clapton. I’m the bass player nobody can quite remember the name of. Jonathan Waxman looks like the drummer that is going to overdose in a few weeks.”
* Sweet pastry crust.
* This experience contrasted sharply with that of other women such as Helen Chardack, who attended the CIA around the same time and remembers: “You wouldn’t walk into the cooler on your own. There were a lot of chefs, kids, or guys who would walk in after you. And then you’d have to do the whole I’m-being-cornered routine and squirrel out. Even in some of the kitchens in New York. Passing by the dishwasher station could be tough. You’d get lots of comments.” And Napa Valley chef Cindy Pawlcyn recalls that when she applied to the CIA in the 1970s, “I got rejected because I was a woman and they’d filled their quota for three years. I got a letter.”
* The hatcheck job offer was extreme, even by the standards of the time. A more common act of chauvinism was to confine women to pastry or garde-manger (salads and cold prep). The great Boston chef Lydia Shire recalls the summer day she auditioned for a position at Maison Robert as it was preparing to open in the early 1970s: A self-taught, divorced mother of three at the time, she produced an elaborate seven-layer cake from a recipe by Raymond Oliver, called herself an air-conditioned taxi, and arrived at the restaurant unannounced. Her artistry and “chutzpah” earned her a spot in the kitchen, but “as a salad girl, because I’m a woman and I was young and American. I was part of the opening team, in garde-manger, opening oysters and slicing pâté, watching cooks cooking and thinking that’s what I wanted to do; that’s when I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” (She eventually decamped for Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in London, returning to Maison Robert as a line cook and working her way up to chef of the main dining room, then moved on to the more progressive Harvest restaurant.)
* Both Puck and Terrail maintain that Puck was indeed a partner.
* A one- or two-bite offering from the kitchen, common today in upscale restaurants. When David Waltuck introduced amuse-bouches at Chanterelle, he explained to the staff that it was like getting nuts at a bar. Front-of-house team members would order them by saying “Nuts for two,” or for however many people were at their table.
* Potted meats, often duck or pork, usually spread on toast.
* So were Barry and Susan Wine of The Quilted Giraffe. “John Novi was our Otto,” says Susan Wine. “He did totally innovative, amazing things. I could never understand because he never got out, didn’t know other chefs, didn’t travel. My God, I wondered, is he speaking to the ultimate source above us?”
* Liederman declines to disclose the amount of the sale, but was reported to have earned his first million by 1982, and as early as 1985, David’s Cookies boasted 178 stores nationally, mostly franchises, and anticipated annual sales of nearly $60 million.
* I had a firsthand glimpse of a number of Wine’s enduring traits—from the creative to the managerial—when, in the summer of 2014, my family and I visited his and Susan’s old home, now Barry’s weekend retreat, in New Paltz, so I could interview him and raid his Quilted Giraffe archives. He made his famous tuna-wasabi pizza as part of Saturday-night dinner. When I woke up early Sunday morning and wandered into the kitchen, I found him alone in his gym clothes, layering slices of mozzarella over a round of leftover pizza dough. He topped the cheese with blueberries, then powdered sugar. “I’m going to make a blueberry pizza,” he said, grinning beneath his shaggy gray bedhead, then shrugged and said delightedly, “Why not?” He popped the pizza in the oven and gave it a long ride. Meanwhile, as others roused and joined us, he assigned them tasks: His niece, in her twenties, prepared shirred eggs; I was instructed to cube leftover tuna, spread it on a sheet tray, and freeze it to replicate a Japanese breakfast dish he’d read about. When the cubes were cold, again at his instruction, I piled them in little pyramids on bread-and-butter plates and topped them with a speck of wasabi. Meanwhile, sugar, blueberries, mozzarella, and dough had improbably fused into a wonderful breakfast pizza. We all sat around his kitchen island and dug into the eclectic meal, which, while not perfect, was mostly delicious, and doubled as a conversation piece.
* Quilted Giraffe cooks recall a nine-minute system; Barry Wine, often stationed at the pass, remembers it as ten, and Susan Wine, honchoing the dining room, recalls an eight-minute span between one course being cleared and the next being dropped.
* A derogatory term for people from the outer boroughs and New Jersey.
* The restaurant has closed and reopened multiple times since 2010; it had a brief renaissance in 2014 with chef Amanda Freitag in the kitchen, and at the time of this writing has reopened once again with chef John DeLucie at the helm.
* French chickens raised and slaughtered according to strict guidelines.
* André Soltner had followed a similar path ten years earlier. When he first arrived in the United States in the early 1960s, he was so horrified by the ingredients that he almost did an about-face back to France. His hunt for better produce led him to, among others, a mushroom forager in Oregon who told him that he usually sold his mushrooms to a company in Germany that put them in cans, topped them with a preservative liquid, and shipped them back to the United States.
* A fruit preserves and condiment company.
* Silicone baking mats.
* Ingredients prepared ahead of service.
* Burke was also an unacknowledged precursor to the molecular movement of the early twenty-first century. He discovered Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen relatively early, reading and citing him in the mid-1980s. “I worked at some flavor houses out in Jersey,” he says. “People that create what a lot of molecular guys use. The xanthan gums, the extracts.” He’s referring to companies like Lipton who employed these additives for industrial purposes. “When I went to Park Avenue Café after The River Café, in the early nineties, I created cheesecake pops. That had some science to it, xanthan gum and all that stuff, and modified food starches and all that crazy [stuff]. I created pastrami salmon, packaged it. And you know, swordfish chops. So the creativity, some of it was [realized] with the help of some of that.” He’s quick to emphasize that the science was a means to an end, a method of bringing ideas to life, not an end itself. Does he see a dotted line between his food during that era and the work of a chef like Wylie Dufresne? “Absolutely. One hundred percent. There’s a dotted line to a lot of stuff.”
* Other prominent U.S. cooking schools founded in the 1980s and earlier include the California Culinary Academy (San Francisco, California); the French Culinary Institute, now the International Culinary Center (New York, New York); Johnson & Wales University (Providence, Rhode Island); Kendall College Culinary Arts School (Chicago, Illinois); and the New England Culinary Institute (Montpelier, Vermont). The French Culinary Institute offers a unique und
erscoring of the blue-collar roots of the trade: It was founded in 1984 by Dorothy Cann Hamilton, daughter of John Cann, known in the New York metropolitan area for his television ads for his Apex Technical School. Just as Cann promised in commercials that “you get to keep your tools,” an early pitch for the FCI enticed students with the prospect of graduating the school with a knife kit in tow.
* Another, less well remembered supporter of young American cooks at this time was Michel Fitoussi, who ran the kitchen at The Palace in Midtown, and then at 24 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village. Recalls Diane Forley, who was interested in a cooking career but not in cooking school and worked in Fitoussi’s kitchen for no pay: “Michel was a Frenchman in an American house, very different than Rachou. He hired all Americans, only Americans. He was known for blown sugar apples at The Palace. He was there in [the late 1970s]. He was cooking creatively. He was also part of the beginning of the ‘media chef’; he was on the news; that’s how I first saw him. Other French chefs were not part of the media, but he was flamboyant. He was a kid.”
In addition to staffing his kitchen with Americans, Fitoussi’s willingness to hire women was a striking exception to the long-hardened chauvinism that made breaking into French kitchens doubly difficult for American women. Michael Romano, a young American who had returned from six years staging in France and Switzerland and was hired on as chef at La Caravelle in Midtown Manhattan in 1984, recalls: “I hired the first woman in that kitchen, Jo-Ann Makovitzky. Roger Fessaguet—who at that point had moved from being chef to one of the owners—comes down in the kitchen, stops dead in his tracks, looks at her, and looks at me, and says, ‘What’s that?’ That’s exactly what he said. I said, ‘That’s a cook.’”
* Bouley was sous chef to Hubert Keller at Vergé’s Sutter 500 in San Francisco.
* The silver lining to the sameness of the menus in New York’s French restaurants was that even those who had jobs could pick up extra shifts for money, or knowledge, in other kitchens. A young Thomas Keller, Boulud’s sous chef at The Polo, was so hungry that he was in a constant state of motion, and cooking: “At night I would do my stages anywhere I could. Most weeks I would spend two or three days at the Maurice with Christian Delouvrier. Alain Senderens was the consulting chef there. I was just totally immersed. I would do some prep for Serge Raoul because I worked at Raoul’s in the winter of ’81, I believe, or ’82, something like that. I’d drive up to Nyack with a buddy after work at The Polo and we would prep galantines and mousses and things throughout the night and drive back to the city the next morning and get five hours of sleep and then go to work. So we’d go to Nyack twice a week, I’d do Maurice three times a week, and working at the Westbury six days a week, so totally immersed in what I was doing.”
* Sarrazin was killed after being hit by a car outside Claude Troisgros’s New York City restaurant CT, while in the company of Paul Bocuse, in 1995.
* A BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission) club in the basement of a space at the triangle formed by Ninth Avenue, Hudson Street, and West 14th Street.
* A French cooking teacher and food writer and Julia Child’s frequent cookbook collaborator.
* Amazingly, Prudhomme would later reveal that he lost $65,000 on the venture.
* The Paris Tasting of 1976, also known as the “Judgment of Paris,” was a blind tasting pitting French wines against American. Two California bottlings—Chateau Montelena’s Chardonnay (white) and Stag’s Leap’s Cabernet Sauvignon (red)—won the competition, in the year of the U.S. bicentennial, no less.
* Puck confirms that he was not at the dinner. Rather he was at the opening of Spago in Tokyo, but he doesn’t contest Peel’s description of his upset. “Maybe Mark remembers better,” he laughs.
* This segment is painfully ironic today; Graff died in a single-engine Cessna crash in 1998.
* He selected it, in part, for sentimental reasons: He had attended California State University in Hayward, California, where the grill was made, and the design was lifted from Maxim’s and other top French restaurants of the day.
* A prominent twentieth-century food writer, author of many books, including Serve It Forth, How to Cook a Wolf, and a translation of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste.
* He eventually nabbed it in 1989 and it became one of the homes of the New York City power lunch.
* Waxman says he gave more direction for the Onion Surprise dish than Bromberg remembers.
* Restaurant critic for the New York Daily News at the time.
* August 1985 also brought a seminal Time magazine article, written by Mimi Sheraton, who had recently departed the New York Times. The piece, titled “Eat American!,” which Sheraton first delivered in 1984 and periodically revised over the ensuing year, describes the moment. It demonstrates how much oxygen the Stanford Court Gang took up, naming and quoting many of them. Perhaps most helpfully, Sheraton, a New Yorker, cut through the California cuisine/New American Cuisine dilemma, essentially erasing the line between them: “Also designated as Californian because so many of its highly visible practitioners are on the West Coast, this new cooking is an intellectualized, even esoteric style, characterized by the use of fresh, native products and seemingly disparate ethnic influences in a single dish. In addition to local produce, some of the trademark foods are goat cheese, blue cornmeal, wild mushrooms, and game.” Problem solved! She also gave a nod to American wines and the strong Southwestern influence that was spreading across the country.
* Bouley has never discussed the breakup on the record, and declined to with me.
* A configuration in which cooks work around a central stove rather than in a line.
* Tower posted a single-spaced, two-page document on how to properly clean salad greens in the Stars kitchen.
* Pforzheimer owns a chain of Spanish wine bars.
* One reason for this was likely practical: Unlike in most American cities, chefs and cooks in New York City didn’t have to drive, and in most cases didn’t own cars, relying on the subway or taxis as their primary means of transportation, so they could drink as much as they wanted, as late as they wanted, without fear of an accident or DUI conviction.
* The roasts never happened.
* The New York Mets’ home stadium prior to Citi Field.
* Palmer’s recollection is that the idea was hatched at the Old Town.
* Crispo doesn’t agree with that characterization.
* Van Aken, Trotter, and Lagasse would go on to become close friends, nicknaming themselves The Triangle because of their geographic locations. Lagasse would become a top television star, but public speaking did not come naturally to him. Remembers Van Aken: “The night before we were in some bar in a hotel in Santa Fe and Charlie’s like, ‘Come on, we’re going to go meet Emeril.’ And we go over and meet Emeril. And Emeril is kind of hunched over. He’s got a sport coat on. And I was dressed more like I was in a country and western band, I think. I don’t even know if I had a sport coat. But he was kind of hunched over. He was cradling, like, bourbon or Scotch or something like that. And as soon as he introduced me to him, Charlie had to go away, so it was just me and Emeril. And he goes, ‘How you doing?’ I’m like, ‘I’m all right.’ He goes, ‘What about this speech thing tomorrow? What do you think about that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I wrote something.’ (It was me, Charlie, Emeril, Lydia Shire, and [Seattle chef] Tom Douglas, all asked to speak on why we cook the way we cook.) He goes, ‘I ain’t got a fucking thing and I’m fucking scared.’ And his ice cubes were rattling in his glass. Right away I felt really protective of him, like, ‘It’s going to be all right.’ Me not being so sure really in my mind that it’s going to be all right. I was coming out of the islands. He said, ‘I’m not used to speaking in front of people.’ And, man, I just think back to that day and think, Wow. You overcame it, buddy. You overcame it just fine.”
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 48