Revolution: the cyclical movement of celestial bodies. From Delmonico’s epoch-making restaurant in 1900 New York and its foragers on Long Island farms, to its re-creation in the Four Seasons in 1959, to 1970’s Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, to 1980’s Stars in San Francisco, to Spain’s El Bulli, with its famous foam, to El Bulli disciple René Redzepi at the world-famous Noma restaurant in Copenhagen. And now back again.
Or from what first inspired me professionally to what is influencing chefs today. The gonads from sea urchins I cooked in their spiny shells as soufflés for James Beard in the early 1970s, after which he exclaimed to the national food press the beginning of a new American cuisine—a highly exaggerated claim, but Jim always had a nose for something about to happen, even if he didn’t live to see the world-conquering foam from El Bulli that changed restaurant cooking overnight.
Chefs were still debating which fork in the cooking road to take as late as 2013, as in an article by Hillary Dixler on Eater.com that quotes a well-known British chef complaining to blogger Fuchsia Dunlop, “This isn’t food. It’s got nothing to do with food, with the earth, with Spain, with what his grandmothers cooked. Ferran Adrià has fucked it all up.” The chef goes on to explain that Adria has friends in Barcelona who complain that all the young chefs want to become “gastro-magician[s], . . . celebrit[ies], . . . superstar[s].” They want to invent and play but don’t see the value of the basic skills. El Bulli’s creator, chef Ferran Adrià, himself started with those basic skills, beginning his culinary career first as a dishwasher and then a cook at the Hotel Playafels in Castelldefels, on the Barcelona coast, where the chef de cuisine “taught him traditional Spanish cuisine.” Only later did he turn traditional Europe on its head and make a new haute cuisine in Spain.
“The Orson Welles of the food world,” I was called by journalist Bruce Palling in his interview for the Wall Street Journal Europe in November 2010. Were I to make a film of this book I would subtitle it “The Roots of New American Cuisine.” Perhaps the script would start with a 2001 Wine Spectator article: “One day in 1976, Jeremiah Tower was leafing through some old cookbooks,” looking for the future in the past and inspiration for the next in a series of French regional menus at Berkeley’s as yet unknown Chez Panisse—specifically from The Epicurean, the 1894 cookbook of Charles Ranhofer, the French chef of Delmonico’s in New York, the American equivalent of France’s culinary bible, Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire.
The Wine Spectator goes on to say that although “Chez Panisse had been open for five years, no one had yet uttered the term ‘California cuisine.’” Before I arrived, co-owner “Alice Waters and her friends were just cooking the way Americans do at home, using American ingredients to make recipes from classic cookbooks. They took a lot from France, the occasional dish from Italy or elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and a little from mom. But the elements were there, and inspiration met opportunity. Chez Panisse’s previous menus had been written in French, but this one Tower couched in English. Significantly, the wines offered were from California as well.” The menu, as the Spectator says, crystallized the way America should cook: great local ingredients simply prepared.
The 1976 “California Regional Dinner” menu at Chez Panisse created a new outlook on how to find a new cooking style in America. It was the match that lit the revolution, changing American food and the way we eat, and ingredients were what led it. But it had no name until we took a team from the Santa Fe Bar & Grill in Berkeley to a lunch at Beechwood, the Astor mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1983 for one hundred food journalists. Days later their hundred or so national newspaper food sections proclaimed “California Cuisine Is Here,” and “Grilling Is It.” A few months later “California” became “American” when chefs from all over America came to San Francisco to cook at the Stanford Court hotel “An American Celebration” of chefs and their cuisine. When Stars restaurant opened in San Francisco on the Fourth of July in 1984, it continued the celebration, creating a new democratic and popular American brasserie style of eating out, as journalist R. W. “Johnny” Apple Jr. from the New York Times claimed, calling Stars “the only truly democratic restaurant in the United States.”
Just as César Ritz at the beginning of the twentieth century had made it socially acceptable for women to be seen in a public dining room, San Francisco’s Stars and Los Angeles’s Spago, Michael’s, and West Beach Café set the stage for the rich, the famous, and indeed the superstars to mingle in restaurants with those who were none of the above. At Stars one would find celebrities mixing with government clerks from the courts across the street, the owner of the hot dog stand next door, and groupies from all over town. Stars also created the superstar chef, raising the profession of cook out of the social gutter.
It was also the setting for the new casual. Uber-chef Mario Batali, who tasted a bit of his career at Stars, nailed the reasons for eating out ready-to-wear instead of couture. Speaking at the World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ 50 Best Talks event in New York October 2014, he said, “Fine dining came to be defined as a three-to-four-hour thing and that has faded in a life where you’re busy. You still want delicious and nutritious food, but maybe you don’t want to put on a jacket and long pants.”
California did that.
Whatever the style of the restaurant now, ingredients still tell the story. American food writer John Mariani wrote in November 2013 in Esquire: “A great chef needs to do so little to make so much of what he finds perfect to begin with.” If that’s true, then why, before the 1970s food revolution in California and again now when that revolution has matured, are chefs trying to make perfect ingredients jump through hoops? Why isn’t simplicity still just that simple? Can we still believe, like Robert Capon in his 1967 book, The Supper of the Lamb, that “[t]he purpose of mushrooms is to be mushrooms”? Or should the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have a culinary program, its textbook Hervé This’s 2005 book, Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor, one of molecular gastronomy’s bibles? Looking beyond gels, sous vide, and any other approaches to cooking, Hervé sees our future belonging to NbN, or “Note by Note” cooking. Olive oil becomes cis-3-hexen-1-ol. Or is this, as Dan Barber warns, a product of excitement about food that is now fetishized and privileged?
I thought about that question on my way to the 2014 MAD symposium in Copenhagen, hosted by chef René Redzepi of the world-famous and “best in the world” Noma restaurant. In a 2014 Wall Street Journal article, Jay Cheshes called the annual event the “Food World’s G-20,” where “international tastemakers convene to eat, drink, and be mindful.” Evelyn J. Kim, writing in the Huffington Post of the 2013 MAD, called it “a mashup of TED and Burning Man.” The 2014 theme was “What is cooking?” Subtitle: “The past decade has given rise to a great many things that we know cooking is not. Our goal is to remind ourselves what cooking is.” NbN, or a simple mushroom soup?
The jet lag from Mexico to Copenhagen disappeared in a flash of pain as I ate the first course at Noma the night before the symposium. René Redzepi brought me a bowl of crushed ice with a langoustine on top, its tail shell removed. “It’s very fresh, Jeremiah.” The Yale culinary history professor next to me got it immediately and stuck his animal down into the ice. I didn’t. As I picked it up in one hand to bite its tail, it bit me. Very fresh indeed. Definitely all about ingredients, spurring me to go back to my hotel for a rewrite of my speech to focus it even more on the ingredient revolution that had started in Berkeley.
Speaker Massimo Bottura, chef of Modena, Italy’s, famous Osteria Francescana, stated that after revolution there’s evolution. The question of where that leaves us all was addressed by Alain Senderens, famous for Paris’s restaurants L’Archistrate and Lucas Carton. René asked Alain what keeps him going. What had inspired him as one of the creators of nouvelle cuisine? What made him give back his three Michelin stars when he changed the name of Lucas Carton to Restaurant Senderens? Alain talked passionately about going to the market and of the beauty and inspiration of ingredients that fueled his long and world-famous career. He made it clear that it was always about ingredients and still is, even more so now, when, carbon footprints aside, the whole world is our marketplace—hard to match that when I gave my speech following Alain’s. I talked of the new world of cooking, with everything from Noma to food trucks, and the change from cooks as social pariahs to sought-after, tattooed superstar chefs. I discussed the ingredient marketplace, how the nineteenth century’s ubiquitous American organic products gave way to industrial ingredients, to the cornucopia of the world market, and back to the local and the hundred miles around it. I also talked of the new hypocrisy of “pure” and “authentic” versus innately flavorful.
That is why we see René Redzepi traveling to the Yucatán, in love with its indigenous tacos, proving that a taco is now worth a journey. A market stand or food truck taco can be as satisfying a moment as a twenty-two-course meal at San Francisco’s Saison, New York’s Stone Barns, or Chicago’s Next. It’s different, no doubt, but in its own way equal in the weight of satisfaction, like the first course of perfect, just-picked tiny vegetables at Stone Barns and the radishes picked that morning to make the salsa for cochanita tacos in Mérida, Yucatán’s Santiago market.
As for what keeps me going? As Elizabeth Taylor told me at my restaurant Stars after the 1989 earthquake, “When the going gets rough, put on your lipstick, pour a cocktail, and get on with it.”