18

A PHONE CALL FROM VERGÉ IN THE EARLY 1990S set me off on yet another new journey. He was coming to America to cook dinner at a series of one-night events. A big hotel chain was throwing a dinner party in Palm Springs, California, at their newest location. They were billing Vergé’s work as a million-dollar dinner for their best corporate clients, to introduce them to this new product. Then he was going to Santa Barbara to cook at Michel Richard’s restaurant there, then Citrus in L.A., then to San Francisco, and from there to the Highlands Inn in Carmel, for a series called “The Master Chefs.”

This was not his first time doing one of these trips. As far back as 1972, Yanou Collart had brought Vergé, Paul Bocuse, and Pierre Troisgros to L.A. for the first time. They were supposed to cook a special dinner at a restaurant called Ma Maison. Yanou got Danny Kaye, one of her large coterie of Hollywood friends, to present the chefs. He was not only a fantastic entertainer but also a gourmand and a pretty good chef himself. The chefs discovered they couldn’t cook their planned meal in Ma Maison’s kitchen, so they ended up preparing it in the home of none other than George Greif. That was how George knew Vergé before I did. Yanou got the chefs written about in magazines like Food & Wine, Gourmet, and Bon Appétit, which until then had been all about how to stuff a picnic basket or roast a turkey, not about individual chefs.

Almost no one was paying them for these appearances. Not Yanou or anyone else. They did it for food and lodging. The idea was they were getting exposure for their restaurants and any product lines they might have. Just as African-American artists put up with the Chitlin’ Circuit because it was a way to promote their albums.

America didn’t have enough interest in fine food in the early 1970s for Vergé and the others to get much recognition outside a small and elite circle. But they did start to influence a generation of young American chefs—Wolfgang Puck, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Larry Forgione. As Chuck Berry is to Mick Jagger, Roger Vergé is to them. In the 1980s they helped America develop its own food culture. All across America young chefs began opening their own places and getting some notoriety. In L.A., Wolfgang opened his first restaurant, Spago, in 1982. In New York, Larry Forgione started An American Place in 1983 and Alfred Portale opened Gotham Bar and Grill in 1984. In 1987, Charlie Trotter’s opened in Chicago.

So you’d think that by the 1990s Vergé would be treated like visiting royalty when he came. I was about to find out different. When he told me he was coming, I said, “Let me be the road manager. Let me do what I do for my acts. I’ll check you into the hotel, come prep with you, work the gig with you, and collect the money.” It would be the first time I ever experienced how these places treated him when he came there to work.

We went first to Palm Springs. Vergé was the absolute focal point of the million-dollar weekend. When I checked us in, the receptionist asked for his credit card.

I said, “No, this is Mr. Vergé. He is doing the event.”

“We need his credit card for incidentals,” the receptionist said.

Incidentals?

After that I went to his room. They had given him this tiny, piece-of-shit room. I went back to the front desk and said, “There’s something wrong here. I can’t put him in this room.”

“That’s the room,” the receptionist said, deadpan.

I upgraded him. I figured I would take care of it later.

The event went beautifully. When it was over I said to Vergé, “We have to check out tomorrow, so who should I see to pick up your check?”

“Oh no,” Vergé said. “I do not get paid for this.”

I said, “What?”

He said, “Shep, they are very nice people. And they will send business to my restaurant.”

I had assumed that since they were basing a whole millionaire weekend on his appearance, of course they were paying him.

I checked out, brought the car around, and found that Vergé was not there. He was always on time. I went in to the desk and asked.

“Oh, they brought him down to the pool for a photo session.”

I found him at the pool, holding up two bottles of wine for the photographer. Renaissance owned a wine company, and that’s what he was holding. Vergé had his own Vergé Wines. Why wasn’t he holding, say, one of each? I took the publicity person aside and asked her.

“We’re doing a piece for Bon Appétit, and we want Mr. Vergé to have our wines in his hands in the shot.”

“Are you paying him for this?” I asked.

“Oh no.”

I called Vergé over. “What are you doing? You have your own wines. If you’re going to take a picture it should be with your own wines.”

He said, “But, Shep, they are very nice. . . .”

I was starting to get a little bit crazed. If someone had tried that with Alice I would have stopped the shoot and destroyed the film.

Next we did two engagements at Michel Richard’s. He had actually offered to pay Vergé $2,500. Then he decided that was too much and he was going to give Mr. Vergé only $500.

“I thought you had agreed to $2,500,” I said.

He said, “Well, I thought he was going to do a different thing. . . .”

After that we went to Puck’s restaurant, and Wolfgang’s manager stiffed him completely. On top of that, we had brought a box of Vergé’s books and they had all sold, but the staff wouldn’t give him the money. It took a year, but Wolf finally had them pay Vergé for both.

When we got to the Highland Inn, I took Vergé’s luggage to his room and found that it was next to a garbage dump. I told them we needed another room; they told me they don’t have one, because they were booked solid. I could not put him next to the garbage dump, and I was not going to sleep next to the garbage dump, either, because this was not a room anybody could sleep in. I found a hotel down the road and booked two rooms. What I told Vergé was that the Highland wanted him to be in a nice spot but had run out of rooms so they were paying for him to stay at this other hotel.

The Highland was in fact sold out, generating maybe a quarter of a million dollars, all because Roger Vergé was there. At the end of the event I asked him whom to see for his check.

“Oh, Shep,” he said, “I wouldn’t accept money. They are nice people.”

Roy Yamaguchi was cooking the next night at the Highlands. I knew Roy from Hawaii. I got Vergé to spend one more night so we could try Roy’s food. I made a reservation at the Highlands’ restaurant in my name. We got dressed up and went back to the restaurant where Vergé had just been the star chef, and as we approached the maître d’, he turned white. He asked us to go to the bar. We went and sat in the bar.

About ten minutes later, the maître d’ called me outside.

“Mr. Gordon, I have a very serious problem.”

“What’s that?”

“I just spoke to the owner. I tried to get the rule changed, but he won’t change it.”

“What rule?”

“Employees of the hotel cannot eat in the dining room. I can serve Mr. Vergé in the bar. I cannot serve him in the dining room.”

I was ready to explode. “How is he an employee when you didn’t pay him? We even paid for our own rooms.”

“Well, technically he is an employee for us. I’ll comp the meal, I’ll do anything you want, but I cannot let him in the dining room.”

I went into the bar and said to Vergé, “I love you so much that if you ever make a deal for yourself again, with anybody, for anything, I am going to choke you to death! I can’t take the embarrassment of these deals you make. I love you too much to see you treated this way.”

I got on an airplane. I was managing Kenny Loggins then, and he was playing on the Big Island of Hawaii for a corporate event. Wolfgang was there to cook for it.

When I met up with him, I told him how Vergé had been treated by his staff. How could he let his staff give such shabby treatment to the man who had inspired him? And so on.

After a while he put up his hands and said, “But Shep, this is the only way we know. This is our lives.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “No chef expects anything different. We know how we get treated. Nobody expects anything. I go somewhere, they tell me they are going to pay me, but I don’t expect to get paid. Let me tell you the story of my weekend here. They promised me two first-class tickets to come over and cook, plus a suite for five days. Three days before I came over, they called me up and said, ‘We can’t get some of your food, so could you bring it over with you? We’ll reimburse you.’ So I brought a hundred and fifty pounds of food with me for this big banquet. On arrival, I get off the airplane, and there’s no car. I call up the hotel and they say, ‘Oh, the cars are all busy. Jump in a cab.’ So I jump in a cab, with the hundred and fifty pounds of food. I get to the hotel and ask them to get the food to the refrigerator. They say, ‘We don’t have any refrigerator space for you. But we can arrange for you to store your food at the hotel next door. We’ll give you racks and you can walk it over there.’ So I put the food on the racks and walked who knows how far, maybe a half mile, to the next hotel. Then I had to get up early in the morning to walk the food back to the hotel. Oh, and by the way, the tickets were not first class. They were coach. But what was I going to do? I had a hundred and fifty pounds of food with me already at the airport and I can’t disappoint all those people who are coming.”

I watched Kenny do his show. Kenny Loggins, by the way, got $150,000, and twenty-three airplane tickets, ten of them first class, and two weeks at the hotel.

A week later I was back in L.A. and Wolf called me.

“Can you come over for lunch? I really want to talk with you.”

I walked into Spago, the old Spago, and there were maybe thirty-five of the greatest chefs in the world gathered there. Alice Waters, Dean Fearing, Paul Prudhomme, everybody. I was stunned.

They all wanted to talk to me. Boiled down to its essence, what they said was, “Help us, Shep. Now you see how poorly we’re treated. There isn’t one of us who can afford a private school for our kids. Please do for us what you do for Alice Cooper and these other people.”

That was the day I started my agency, ACR, Alive Culinary Resources. I said to them, “Let’s think of ourselves as a union, rather than this as an agency. All I want you guys to do is say, ‘No.’ Just direct the calls to me.”

So now I was managing chefs. I did it all pro bono, because they weren’t making anything. It was really an investment of time and money for me rather than something that generated income. I did it because I had come to love these chefs and what they created and I could not stand to see them continue to get shafted.

I framed it as a company designed to bridge the gap between the public and the world’s most sought-after chefs by booking them for events. For starters, our who’s-who roster of master chefs included:

Wolfgang Puck, Spago, Los Angeles

Alice Waters, Chez Panisse, Berkeley

Daniel Boulud, Daniel’s, New York

Dean Fearing, Mansion on Turtle Creek, Dallas

Michel Richard, Citrus, Los Angeles

Lydia Shire, Biba, Boston

Stephan Pyles, Baby Routh, Houston

Mark Miller, Coyote Café, Santa Fe

Larry Forgione, An American Place, New York

Jean-Louis Palladin, Jean-Louis, Washington, D.C.

Robert Del Grande, Rio Express, Houston

Joachim Splichal, Patina Restaurant, Los Angeles

Nobu Matsuhisa, Matsuhisa, Beverly Hills

Pino Luongo, Coco Pazzo, New York

Paul Prudhomme, K-Paul’s, New Orleans

Jimmy Schmidt, Rattlesnake Club, Detroit

Celestino Drago, Drago Centro, Los Angeles

Alfred Portale, Gotham Bar and Grill, New York

Jonathan Waxman, Michael’s, Los Angeles

Jeremiah Tower, Stars, San Francisco

Norm Van Aken, Norman’s, Orlando

Michel Nischan, Heartbeat, New York

Mark Tarbell, Tarbell’s, Phoenix

Roger Vergé, Moulin de Mougins, Cannes

To me, one name was missing. There’s a story behind that.

Sometime earlier, Jim Fifield had taken over as head of EMI Records. He loved New Orleans, and Jazzfest was the same weekend as his birthday, so he invited George Greif and me to come celebrate with him and his wife, Betsy. My job was to pick our restaurants. I asked Bob Krasnow for suggestions.

“You have to go to K-Paul’s, right in the French Quarter,” he said. “Excellent Cajun food. Paul Prudhomme is the executive chef.”

I didn’t know Paul yet, but Bob did. He got him on the phone, told him we were coming, and made reservations for both our nights in New Orleans.

We flew down in EMI’s jet. The first night we walked to K-Paul’s. When we got there the line was very long. I left the others at the end of it and walked up to tell the girl at the door who we were. She looked at me like I was speaking Martian and informed me that no one jumped the line at K-Paul’s.

Things were not off to a good start. We waited a good thirty minutes, shuffling forward one step at a time, getting sweaty and cranky in the humid heat of a New Orleans evening. When we finally got in, the place was mobbed and loud. They put us at a long family-style table with a bunch of tourists. This didn’t improve our mood. We were big shots, or so we thought.

We ordered appetizers and drinks. I downed my Cajun Bloody Mary in a few gulps and managed to get the waitress’s attention.

“Can I get another one of these?”

“You can only get that with an appetizer.”

“Excuse me?”

“If you want another Bloody Mary you have to get back on line, be reseated, and order another appetizer.”

I kept my cool. Don’t get mad, I told myself.

“Is Chef Paul here tonight?”

“Yes, he is.”

I told her to go tell him that Bob Krasnow’s friends were in the house and could he please make an exception. Prudhomme himself came out of the kitchen—and told me that if I wanted another Cajun Bloody Mary I had to go back on line, etc. Don’t ask me why.

George exploded.

“That’s it. Get me out of here before I throw everything on the floor.”

We left.

The next day was Jim’s birthday. When I asked where he wanted to go for dinner, he said Commander’s Palace, the famous, historic place outside of the French Quarter in the residential Garden District.

George blew up again.

“It’s a tourist trap. They drop them off by the busload. I will not eat where they unload them from buses.”

On top of that, we found out that we had to wear sport jackets. I’d have to go buy one. George always wore a sport jacket, but he threw a fit about that, too, and said now he definitely wasn’t going.

I said, “Well then, you’re eating alone. Jim wants to go, and it’s his birthday, and I’m going with him.”

So we got a car and drove out to the Garden District. Commander’s Palace is a big, old, wood-framed place, facing a small cemetery. There were in fact tourist buses outside. George grumbled and fumed. We walked up to the maître d’—another maître d’ straight out of Central Casting. He was in a tux, standing at a little lectern, looking down at his reservations list through half glasses. He never made eye contact with us as he informed us our table wouldn’t be ready for forty-five minutes, but we could wait at the bar. By this point George was punching me in the back.

Another guy in formal attire collected us. At Commander’s Palace you walked through the kitchen to get to the bar. As we did, a cook on the line caught my eye. He was a guy with a wide, friendly mug, flipping something in a pan over a hot stove. He grinned at me. I smiled back. He dropped the pan, wiped his face, hustled over to me, and gave me a hug.

“Hey, man,” he said, like we were old pals. “They got you hooked up?”

“Well, no,” I said. “They told us it’s going to be a forty-five-minute wait.”

“Okay,” he said. “You like champagne? Come with me.”

He led us to the bar, ordered a bottle of a nice champagne, and then vanished back into the kitchen.

“You know him?” George asked me.

“Never saw him before.”

“So who does he think you are?”

“I have no idea, George.”

“Well don’t say a word. Whoever he thinks you are, you are.”

A few minutes later, our friendly cook came back to the bar. He picked up our bottle and said, “C’mon, bring your glasses.” We followed him upstairs to a table overlooking a terrace, obviously one of the “A” tables in the restaurant.

“You want to order?” he asked. “Or do you want me to give you a ride?”

“Give us a ride.”

After he went off, George said, “We better order some expensive wine. Because sooner or later this crackpot’s gonna find out you ain’t who he thinks you are, and then we’re outta here.”

That didn’t make a lot of sense, but okay, we ordered a very expensive wine.

The cook reappeared with some waitstaff and served us our first course. He kept doing that throughout our meal, accompanying each course. We were getting hysterical wondering who he thought we were to deserve such personal service. By the time he brought up dessert George couldn’t contain himself any longer.

“Sit down for a minute,” he told the cook. The cook sat. “Okay,” George said, “who do you think this guy is?”

“I don’t know,” the cook said. “Who is he?”

“Then why are you doing this?” George cried.

The cook looked around at us and said, “You know, I’ve been cooking here a long time. I cook the same dishes every night. It gets a little boring. They’re not even my recipes. So once a month, I pick some people coming through the kitchen and take them on a ride. I really enjoy it. When you guys came through, he had a good smile.” Meaning me. “So I picked you.”

How cool was that? We high-fived him.

Then he said, “What are you doing now?”

“I’d like to try to get into Tipitina’s tonight,” Jim said. “The Neville Brothers are playing.”

I had tried all afternoon to get us in, but it was Jazzfest and booked solid. In New York or Los Angeles I could have gotten us in no problem, but I didn’t have any New Orleans connections.

“I got you covered,” the cook said. “I’ll write you a note that’ll get you in.”

We thanked him. Jim paid the bill with his EMI credit card. As we were getting into our car, the cook knocked on a window and said, “You guys like cognac?” He showed us an old and obviously expensive bottle of cognac, filled four paper cups, handed them to us, and wished us a great rest of the night.

His name was Emeril Lagasse.

By the time of the chefs’ meeting at Spago, Emeril had his own restaurant in the French Quarter, Emeril’s. I found him there and he joined ACR.

After Emeril the number kept rising, until at one point we were representing something like one hundred chefs—everybody, basically. Once the word got around, my office received hundreds of letters and calls from people seeking representation. I got dozens of recipes a week from cooks all over the country.