My week would begin on the day it ended, the one day we were closed, Monday. First I would look to see if we had any money. Then I would look at the menus for the coming week, which I had written the previous week or day off for posting to the public on the preceding Friday. The Panisse regulars knew I would change much of the menus depending on what I found in the market or what foragers brought in, but also that I would try to stick at least with the main courses. Then I’d make up purchasing lists and call purveyors to alert them to what we would be needing. With luck there would be a few hours left in which to do personal things before the stores closed and the bars opened. Then I’d be off to Oakland’s Trader Vic’s to collapse into a martini.
The real inspiration for the menus came from wandering around the markets. At six on reopening day morning I would head off in Alice’s little red car to buy the food for the day and snoop around for the week. The trip to San Francisco was a logistical nightmare because the ancient, battered, powerless, ugly but faithful Dodge Dart couldn’t go up hills. At its age and level of decrepitude the car should never have run, but it never broke down.
First stop was Chinatown, for ducks, fish, shellfish, and the occasional vegetable far fresher than I could get from other suppliers. I would watch the little old Chinese women blow air up a chicken’s anus to see if it was fresh. I’d see the vendors sneaking ice into the boxes of fish before weighing, then taking it out with much gesturing and laughing in Chinese insults when I called them on it. With ducks and fish loaded in I would ritually confront the parking meter “dykes on bikes,” then head over the Bay Bridge to Oakland.
By the time I got there the pressure was on, since I had still to get back to Berkeley and cook lunch for sixty by myself. In Oakland there was one beef and veal “jobber,” where whole animals, hanging by their feet, would whiz past me down steel runners from huge trucks into the warehouse. As they swept by I would stand at the end of the ramp with my bucket and grab the sweetbreads and kidneys. The Sicilian workers, covered in dried blood and specks of animal fat, wondered aloud why I didn’t just go into the freezer and pick up boxes of already butchered meat. And they were really fascinated, in a Hammer Films sort of way, when I rolled up my sleeves and got shoulder deep into the big drums filled with the blood and livers of calves. I wanted only the blond ones with the mildest flavor and texture that reminded me of foie gras. No one, not even the old geezers, knew what I was doing, and I didn’t have the energy to explain. It was too long a story if you didn’t know the short one: buy fresh, buy the best.
I did get a lot of their respect for my beef project. I had reserved space in one of their dry walk-ins, bought New York sirloin strips on the bone, and left them there for another twenty-one days. The stress on the cash flow was worth it. Those Sicilians hadn’t seen anyone do that since the old days and soon learned plastic shrink-wrapping in Cryovac were dirty words to me. The blood from that packaged beef smelled dead. My dry-aged beef smelled like mown grass (with a lot of mold thrown in), and that, I knew from my childhood visits to English butcher shops, meant perfect steaks.
From the butcher’s I would have to hit the dangerous section of Oakland, and here that old red jalopy came in handy. The door locks had long since failed, and the poultry and fish blood leaking into the spare tire well in the back of the car had congealed, but not before raising green-miasma aromas in summer that kept thieves away. But it also drove off valet parkers, who’d retch and refuse to park the car.
I had to make my peace with that car, since it was our lifeline. I didn’t want commercial-grade, usually frozen stuff, but that was all we could get from companies big enough to have vans and Bay Area–wide deliveries. Spices, extra-virgin olive oil, and decent cheeses were unavailable anywhere except Italian specialty stores, which didn’t deliver. It fell to us all to find what we needed, and to me to devise menus around what we could find.
If I hadn’t come up with enough fish in Chinatown, my last hope for live crab, fresh shrimp, and still-kicking Baja spiny lobsters was Oakland’s commercial fish market or the vast walk-ins at Spenger’s Fresh Fish Grotto, located on the bay in Berkeley. The Bay Area’s biggest restaurant had its own boats and wholesale fish business. But detours to both meant cutting into lunch-preparing time.
With luck I’d make it back to Chez Panisse with two hours to cook—although I still hadn’t figured out what Berkeley people wanted for lunch.
My spirit had been badly shaken the first Christmas season, when we proudly imported California’s first fresh black French Périgord truffles and I stuffed them in omelets. I knew that charging ten dollars was asking for trouble, but not the kind that showed up. The first customer ate the eggs but carefully piled the truffles around the edge of the plate. I felt trapped in a barbarian land. The second order was completely eaten, but the plate came back with a butter-drenched fly on it. “Flies in December?” I shrieked to the waiter. “Give me a fucking break!” I needed every penny from that omelet to cover the exorbitant cost of the truffles. Next Christmas the fly came back again, and I swore I recognized it as well as the customer. Did he keep flies in his freezer to get free lunches? I made him pay me for his omelet personally.
Lunch was usually a bit of a blur, since my mind would be already on overdrive for dinner. There was a huge amount of work and only two of us to do it—although the dishwasher and a busser would help out in a pinch, a collaboration that turned out happily over the years. Several (like Steve Sullivan, who went on to open the famous Acme Bread Company) became cooks and entrepreneurs themselves. Another reason for anxiety was that, despite the published menus, I was unsure what we were cooking until the amateur foragers showed up with the promised wild mushrooms, octopus, or hand-harvested mussels.
At 2 P.M. Willy would come in, and while I was finishing off the last lunches I would go over the evening’s menu, telling him what the planned vegetables were and how he was to cook his dish. I had two dishes and he one, usually something that he’d never done before. It was by necessity of time a rushed and inexact conversation, and then Willy would wing it. I prayed every day for an easier, less harrowing way. A few hours on the “day off” over oysters and clams at Spenger’s was a start, but then the martinis and fatigue would erase the talk.
Finally, at six, the guests would arrive, and sometimes we’d be ready for them, if with tempers frayed and nerve endings as raw as the bloody livers I was still cutting up.
One of my more talked-about intemperate moments came when a busser started to carry plates out of the kitchen with his fingers in the food. I banged my spoon on the table in fury. “What is it about ‘keep your fingers out of the food’ that your little cockroach mind can’t grasp?” I yelled over the Puccini blaring through the kitchen music system. He blanched but held his ground:
“I am a person, too, you know.”
That was too Berkeley for me.
“What’s your point?”
That was only the beginning. An hour later Tom Guernsey, the very sweet upstairs manager and a partner in the restaurant, came in with two plates that guests had returned. “Bugs again,” he said with a sigh. Sure enough, two or three little red centipedes were swimming around in the cream sauce on fresh morels gathered that afternoon in the hills above the restaurant. “Jesus Christ!” I yelled, picking out the insects and replating the food. “Don’t they know this proves they’re eating the only fresh morels in America?”
A fresh and even louder scream was heard above the Maria Callas tape, freezing staff to the spot and curdling the food that had just hit diners’ stomachs. A dishwasher staggered out of his corner, blood spurting through his fingers. Some idiot had put a knife in the pot sink.
In a restaurant as small and understaffed as Chez Panisse, everyone is critical, and we’d just lost both the dishwasher and the employee who had to rush him to the hospital. I was frantically putting lobster claws in four different bouillabaisse pots and plating six others when the kitchen phone rang and a voice on the other end demanded, “Where is the finger?”
Two anxious waiters, shifting from foot to foot like racehorses eager to get out of the chute, were drafted to finish plating the bouillabaisse while I tiptoed over to a sink full of water as gray as my face, pots, and, evidently, one knife and one finger. I wasn’t certain which I wanted to find first. “Do fingers float?” I asked Alice, now looking over my shoulder. I rolled up my sleeve and gingerly reached through the congealing inch-thick layer of grease, coming first upon the knife, then upon the severed member, which I slipped into a Ziploc bag and handed to our last remaining busser, who dashed out the door and into a waiting taxi.
By then there was a serious backlog in the kitchen, but the guests would have to wait. It was a champagne moment. I opened a bottle of Clicquot, drained a glass in one long and sensual draft, and went back to cooking.
The scream had softened up the customers, who by now must have figured that any more food coming out of the kitchen would be a miracle. So after catching up with the orders, I knew it was time to visit the dining room. First I reassured the guests that the injured man was well cared for. Then I showed Californians how to get Maine lobster meat out of the claws. A waiter had spilled the beans that the bouillabaisse contained a wolf eel, and the news had traveled around the dining room as fast as that scream; I explained that wolf eel was not poisonous and that it really did give the broth a wonderful punch of authenticity. I informed one group that the salad oil was not “weird” but only “extra-virgin,” and that the fresh California goat cheese did not smell or taste like the rear end of a billy goat because the milk came from a dam with clean udders. That sent a neighboring table into paroxysms of giggles.
More champagne.
Just as we were getting back to a kind of normalcy in the kitchen, a waiter announced with great self-righteousness, “I am not serving that prick!” I recoiled in shock. It would take something very rare indeed for a waiter to talk like that to a chef. But with opera blaring in the kitchen to obliterate staff chatter, I hadn’t heard the waitstaff’s powwows about the politically undesirable “shithead” in the dining room. It was H. R. Haldeman.
“He’s paying, isn’t he?” I told the waiter. “Take the food out now.”
The mutinous staff stood firm. H.R.’s food was getting cold. Then Jerry Budrick, the headwaiter and another partner, stepped up to the plates and said, “I’ll take them. But for this you owe me big-time.”
Haldeman was dining with his daughter, who was graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, a schooling choice I thought a bit off the wall, if not downright dangerous. Alice was with the staff on this one, but I was adamant that the man would be served and served well. As somewhat of an outcast myself, I sympathized. Throw Molotov cocktails as a political gesture I did, but intentionally serving bad food was not in my repertoire.
I noticed all the phone lines on my wall phone blinking. Most of the customers and half the staff were trying to call out—to reporters or for reinforcements, I was not sure. I went back to cooking, hoping Jerry would handle whatever came through the front door. Then I heard anarchist Willy say “motherfuckme”—or words to that effect. I looked up to see him staring, false teeth at snarling half-mast, over my shoulder. I turned around to see Haldeman advancing on me with a smile and an outstretched hand.
The best part about English public school training is that, when all else fails, your manners take over. Mine did. So I watched my hand as it rose slowly to clasp Haldeman’s.
“Thank you,” he said. And for not shaming him in front of his my daughter, “Thank you for that.”
He was nice.
Somewhat blessedly, Alice and the staff did not speak to me for a week.
On a normal night we would be finished and cleaned up by about eleven—as long as Alice had not overbooked the room. If she had, Willy and I would do the loaves-and-fishes act, albeit not always as successfully as the original. Then Willy would once again pull off his apron and threaten to quit unless Alice promised never to do it again, a vow that came off her lips as easily as Willy accepted her cooings and proffered glasses of old Chambolle-Musigny. The time I spent holding both sets of hands (no one wanted Willy gone) was time I needed for planning the next morning’s sorties.
But I was not entirely out of sync with Alice on the subject of late walk-ins. They were almost all profit (who had heard of overtime), and the sales were always needed.
The rule, though, was that she had to check with the kitchen around ten to make sure there was food for those late diners. When she didn’t it would be cause for panic, since she would always seat her friends, whether the famous or any filmmaker like Nicholas Ray, Fassbinder, Pasolini, or Coppola. They were brought in late by Alice’s ex-boyfriend Tom Luddy of the Pacific Film Archive, and there would always be a table for them somehow. But the most disastrous night for Panisse was when she seated, without checking, her current lover, Robert Finigan, who was also the Bay Area’s most powerful restaurant critic.
As we were getting ready to clean up the kitchen, the order came in for a first course, triggering what I knew would be a crisis with the now-finished main course, leg of lamb. I looked down with dismay at the plastic buckets with lamb leg bones bare of servable meat. All that remained were the “souris” (little mouse) part of the shanks; that and some crisp bits that tasted delicious but were totally unpresentable to paying customers. The waiter was dispatched to ask if steaks would be acceptable instead. The answer was a firm no. He wanted lamb and Alice had told him he could have it. In those days I thought it improper for a chef to go out and talk to a local restaurant critic, so Finigan and company got what they asked for. (“Inordinately gristly,” he would write.) The plates came bouncing right back, the waiter (a friend of the restaurant volunteering for the night) announcing they’d demanded better lamb.
“Tough shit,” I said. “Where’s Alice?”
“At the table.”
In an instant Willy flung his apron down, his brows and beard twitching. “Get Tiny now,” he growled.
I searched the buckets again for lamb I knew wasn’t there and looked up to find Alice, red-faced and shedding not her usual crocodile “please forgive me” tears but genuine ones, of rage. “How could you?” she said.
It turned out that the volunteer waiter had repeated—in violation of a cardinal rule of the kitchen—my offhand comment. He’d told Finigan, “The chef says tough shit.”
All of this led to an hour or so of recriminations over many drinks, and we left around midnight, so that I could try to be asleep by 1, up by 6, and into San Francisco’s Chinatown by 7 A.M.
It never occurred to Alice to consider the role she had played in bringing about this embarrassing episode. In a 1978 article on the history of Chez Panisse, she typically shifted the blame to someone else. “I almost died,” she said. “Jeremiah just got fed up. It was not amusing at the time.”
She never bothered to tell the reporter why I’d been fed up and how even less amused we were in the kitchen to serve unpresentable food.
Finigan explained it nicely: “Had I not been visiting Chez Panisse in a professional capacity [with his lover the owner sitting with him], I might well have decorated the waiter with the gigot rôti and then set out for the kitchen, but instead I cooled my outrage with sips of the remarkable 1972 Mt. Eden Pinot Noir.” Years later I became a great friend of Bob and he finally, for the first time, heard my account of the incident, and could laugh over another glass of Mount Eden.
Alice may have nearly died, but a few days later I was more worried about customers in convulsions after having eaten American white truffles. Linda Guenzel, Panisse’s most devoted customer and later author of the first Chez Panisse cookbook, had brought some from Texas. She found squirrels digging them up in her mother’s front lawn. After calling UC Berkeley we found out they were Tuber texense, and that there was no record of anyone eating them. They had certainly not been served in a restaurant. I had called England’s culinary encyclopedia, Alan Davidson, and for the first and only time, he was stumped. He knew about Terfezia, the North African dessert truffles so beloved by the imperial Romans, but Texas? White Oregon truffles had not been heard of yet, so he cautioned me to try one first and wait a day. But there wasn’t time; we were to serve them that night. Alice thought I was mad—if not criminal.
After sixteen hours of shopping and cooking, I couldn’t look at food for at least two hours. That meant if we ate dinner at all, it would start at one in the morning, and that I’d have only four hours’ sleep before heading back to Chinatown to sniff the bloody gills of fish and hold down my rising gorge.
The dilemma in my few hours off was how to recharge my batteries instead of depleting them further. The mental onslaught was never-ending. Even in sleep. restaurant operation nightmares are famous in the industry. And drugs were easier to organize than sex, unless it was casual, which usually meant with one another. Who else would put up with us? So on a day off, temporary oblivion was what we sought. On that day, after I had written all the menus for the next week, done the accounts, and planned the next PR coup, and before a four o’clock lunch with some of the staff, I would head off to the Japanese baths for a long soak. In later years, when I was a bit more flush and certainly more famous, I would be invited out, sometimes by San Francisco’s elite restaurateurs. But in those early and not so well-funded days, it was either Trader Vic’s in Oakland for its tandoor oven-cooked food and expert bartenders, or Vanessi’s in San Francisco for tomato and anchovy salad, tortellini in butter, a great filet mignon cooked on charcoal, and zabaglione for dessert. We ate like pythons coming out of a long sleep. As cooks we had not really eaten during the week, just tasted and picked.
It was no surprise that, after six months of these ninety-plus-hour weeks, one night I wandered into the dining room, empty except for Alice and some staff sitting around a bottle of old Le Corton from Doudet-Naudin, and burst into tears. All my strength and discipline were gone. The months of a relentless attempt to make it all work with so few hands had done me in. “I am out of here,” I told the astonished group. “See you in a week.” I added, “And, Alice, you will just have to do the menus if you don’t like the ones I have done.”
She did, and took over the kitchen for a week. A photo of her and Willy from when I was away tells much: Alice is dipping her finger in a container of sauce, hesitancy and doubt pervading her face, and Willy is looking on with the scolding frown he reserved for her alone.
The most creatively lonely places in the world are beaches, and it’s on warm ones that I do my best thinking. Thirty hours after leaving the staff openmouthed in the Panisse dining room, I was sitting on the white sands of Yelapa, Mexico, down the coast from Puerto Vallarta.
I was the only guest in the hut “hotel” on a beach visited every day at lunch by a boatload of tourists from Puerto Vallarta. When the boat arrived I would retire to a hammock in the trees, to which my soon-trained waiter would bring perfect fresh ripe-lime-juice margaritas every thirty minutes. I managed a lot of thinking while sipping those drinks, some of it brilliant (between the first and third margaritas) and a lot of it junk (thereafter), but I returned to Panisse ready for battle, snippets from my just-read Sun Tzu’s Art of War still buzzing in my brain, my tactics outlined and ready to put into action.
On the beach while listening to my tape of Sidney Bechet’s soprano sax, I remembered that he was as famous for never sticking to the score as he was for his excuse for being always three days late for work: “The taxi driver got lost.” I figured I’d never be famous by sticking to the score, so I might as well do big, outlandish, nontraditional things based on traditional principles. If and when I got into trouble, if the revolution failed, I could always continue to Hawaii.