A chance for a new score came when my ex-roommate and now San Francisco poet Michael Palmer reminded me that it would soon be the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Gertrude Stein. For the Stein–Alice B. Toklas dinner, I selected dishes from the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Michael wrote the menu text, and Willy Bishop designed the menu card with a drawing of an old-fashioned stove that was Gertrude, with Alice in her oven.
Dining. Dining is west. Mushroom sandwiches.
Upstairs.
Eating. Eat ing.
Single fish. Single fish single fish single fish,
Sole mousse with Virgin Sauce. I wrote it for
America.
Everyone thought that the syringe was a whimsy. Mousse and mountain
and a quiver, a quaint statue and a pain in an exterior and silence.
Gigot de la Clinique a cake, a real salve made of mutton and liquor,
a specially retained rinsing and an established cork and bracing
Wild rice salad. She said it would suit her.
Cake cast in went to be and needles wine needles
are such. Needles are. A Tender Tart. That
doves have each a heart.
Nobody ever followed Ida. What was the use of following Ida.
Cream Perfect Love.
February 3, 1974
On the strength of Michael having invited his good friend, the poet Robert Duncan, to read from The Making of Americans for after-dinner entertainment, the audience was even more eclectically diverse than our usual patrons: high-minded Berkeley street poets, the Birkenstock brigade of both sexes, hunched-over academics from the university, anyone haunted by Gertrude, and the usual troublemakers. Like my sister. When Robert seemed out of his element reading from Stein, my sister took his place. As she sat down, she unconsciously took the posture of Gertrude in the portrait by Picasso, and a hush fell over the room. Years later my sister described to me those hours: “I have never felt so free, so comfortable and secure, so lovely, and surrounded by acceptance. It was a wonderful evening—a magic dinner.”
The year before I had contacted James Beard in New York. Since he was the most powerful food journalist in America, and the high priest of American food, I invited him to the restaurant. Afterward, in his annual widely syndicated reminiscences column, he called Chez Panisse “fascinating.” But even with Beard on board, no national press had responded to my notice of the Stein-Toklas dinner.
We did better locally: For the first time since it opened, Panisse appeared in the top San Francisco press. I invited Herb Caen, the Walter Winchellian gossip columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. He telegrammed his regrets. “Jeremiah: Would that we could be there for the signal event but alas, it is impossible. Much luck, merci mille fois-gras, and vive le Gertrud-inus one. T’jours, Herb Caen.” But he mentioned the dinner twice in his powerful daily column, starting an alliance that would boost my career as much as anything else. Later, Caen would put Stars in San Francisco at the top of the list of Bay Area places to be.
I didn’t have the nerve to put hashish in the after-dinner cookies, although not for lack of supply. I had learned to steer clear of it. The problem with smoking marijuana is that all food tastes just wonderful and cooking to a schedule becomes meaningless. We learned that lesson during the Moroccan Regional Dinner, when for atmosphere we burned some marijuana stems in braziers under kitchen tables and got so stoned that instead of the smoke our burned best efforts went up the flue.
I didn’t like it much since the really good marijuana from Hawaii and Jamaica was a far cry from the low-grade stuff that in college I could smoke all night. One night a Panisse friend handed me a cigar-size joint as I was cleaning up. I smelled the powerful resin from the new “Maui Wowie” or sinsemilla and said, “No thanks.” But the waiters kept pestering me as I was trying to finish up and join Alice and a group of eight food journalists, so I had one puff, pushed open the swinging doors to the dining room, took three steps toward the writers’ table, and passed out. When I came to I heard Alice screaming I was dead and Willy telling everyone to calm down, cancel the ambulance, and get me a glass of champagne.
A few months later we were all at a late-night party celebrating the opening of a local bakery when someone handed me a cigarette with black resin on the end. It was opium. I had tried it once in a village in the hills outside of Tangier with a blind Moroccan boyfriend and was curious to try it again. I quickly knew the most perfect moment of my life: I was fused emotionally, physically, and mentally in one perfect state—and I knew within seconds I must never use opium again or there would be no coming back.
Later there would be nitrous oxide canisters in the kitchen and a case of them at home. One night I was gazing fondly at a poster of the SS France, which I’d hung across from my bed so it would be the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing at night. It stood for my planned escape. After taking several little canisters of gas, I completed an entire crossing without leaving the room.
But these substances were diversions. The only drug friendly to the restaurant business is cocaine. It was cocaine that became the fuel for the energy that changed the way America dines, and for the high-profile and all-consuming peripatetic schedules that launched the superstar chefs.
At Chez Panisse it started on the restaurant’s third birthday, in 1974.
We planned an open house at five dollars per person, wine included, so we needed something cheap to serve. I had to come up with it fast since the poster for the party by David Lance Goines, one of Alice’s lovers, was almost in production. I grabbed a favorite cookbook, Jacques Médecin’s La Cuisine du Comte de Nice, and saw a recipe for something called, aptly enough, “Les Panisses,” a flat pancake type of thing with something boring on top I knew I could improve upon. Excitement caused haste. I didn’t read the recipe carefully, but I did write the menu.
Chez Panisse Menu for Third Birthday
August 28, 1974
6 P.M.—midnight
Hors d’oeuvre Variés
Panisses
Salade Verte
Glace de Fruits
Demi Carafe du Vin
$5.00 tout compris
—and sent it over to David at his St. Hieronymus Press for printing.
Soon the day arrived for me to tell everyone what a “panisse” was and to order the ingredients. The recipe called for chickpea flour to be mixed with water and fried in olive oil. I drove down to my Italian delicatessen in Oakland, bought all the flour they had, and made a “panisse.” It was disgusting. So I decided to lie. When anyone asked what a panisse was, I said, “Basically just a little pizza.” Alice and everyone else were happy with that. So pizza was what it had to be. We had no ovens that would cook regular-size pizzas. Individual ones were the way to go. What went on top had to be cheap and easy. I decided on a fresh California goat cheese (still new to the world in those days) and Sonoma beefsteak tomatoes, a fine idea until a hundred or so people more than we expected showed up and the cheese and tomatoes were all gone. In our walk-in refrigerators there were still fresh ingredients from the previous night’s bouillabaisse (clams, prawns, squid, crab, lobster, onions, saffron, garlic, and fennel), so I decided to scatter everything on top. What came out of the oven changed every hour depending on what was left, but little bouillabaisse pizzas they were.
Searches for ingredients caused delays, and soon a line formed to get into the kitchen. I was flagging a bit, and everyone was buying me champagne, which slowed me down even more. Word went out that the chef needed a boost. In sauntered a friend of one of our waiters with a black-leather-coated accomplice. Flashing a gold-toothy smile as he glided by me, he pulled a plastic bag out of his coat, then dumped half a pound of white powder on top of the chest freezer at the back of the kitchen. He cut it into several long lines and handed me a straw fashioned from a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill. In an instant, I was back at the stoves. Then a conga line formed (this time not for the pizza), snaking out through the kitchen, into the dining room, and up the stairs into the bar.
The demand for pizza evaporated with anything left to cook, so that was good. And there was more cocaine and more champagne. The night was a huge success, premiering three new trends: individual pizzas, the freedom to use any topping one wanted, and the drug that made all the long hours possible, then impossible, in the kitchen.
Meanwhile, as our cocaine intake got out of hand, I would think someone on the staff was in love with me; Willy would be stone broke and more interested in scoring than cooking; my partner waiter Tommy would spend the whole night at the Stud and, after hours, the gay baths in San Francisco; and headwaiter Jerry would shoot up the telephone with a friend’s .38. Alice disapproved of using cocaine, partly the result of her New Jersey suburban background and partly because she knew it interfered with the proper running of the restaurant. Still, inasmuch as she knew it was a release from the mad pressures of maintaining and improving upon an increasingly famous restaurant, she turned a mostly blind eye. Lindsey and Charles Shere never partook: they regarded us as naughty children, with Charles stentorianly pronouncing doom for all.
I don’t know the source of the dispute that got our original dealer killed, but he was replaced by another waiter’s friend, along with a few new runners. All was peaceful, in the drug world that is, for a few years, until Willy stabbed someone in a San Francisco bar for hogging the coke lines in the bathroom and was carted off to the state penitentiary—but not before we had cooked hundreds of marvelous meals together. Panisse somehow survived our love affair with champagne and cocaine. And I had long given up using it in the kitchen. Willy sent me a drawing from prison, missing our days off watering inspiration with champagne.
We had hired a lunch cook. Now that I no longer had the killing responsibility for being alone behind the stoves at lunch, I looked forward to more elaborate menus. But that ship hit a reef and her name was Lydia “Lili” Lecocq. She was, in her words, “just a peasant from the Savoie,” but with that said in the kind of way where if you agreed with her you’d never be forgiven. She reminded me of her peasant heritage every morning, when I returned from market with all the things she said she’d love to cook but couldn’t. I had a very trying time with her until I figured out that I was the problem. Lobster Bordelaise she couldn’t do, but with a potato gratin Savoyard she was a genius. I forgave her mustache, her nasal whine sounding like a slowly opening warped cupboard door, and her flirtatious looks intended to make me like her. All I knew was how helpful it was to have her at those stoves when I was shopping and gearing up to cook the eighty that had now turned to 120 dinners. And her food when I left her alone was delicious.
In crises I could draw assistance from Alice or the staff. One night, when Willy bowed out early and the waiters were lined up, their desperate sighs audible over the blaring Rigoletto, I asked a fifteen-year-old dishwasher named Joshua to come over and watch me make a sauce. “Now taste that and remember the taste,” I said. “Then duplicate it.” He did. Very well. So I said, “Do it again, and quickly.” As the waiters looked on hopefully, Joshua Kohn made the sauce even faster and better. He was a natural. I kissed him, work resumed, and we had a fifteen-year-old cook, and I had a new obsession stronger than the allure of Willy’s white powder.
By now we had located, grown, or imported a lot of ingredients that had not existed a year before in California, and the kitchen had a new assurance. So in midyear I decided to push the envelope again. A menu from June 1975 included Fernand Point’s classic, expensive, very time-consuming dish of shelled crayfish tails sautéed in cognac, covered with a cream and crayfish sauce and gratinéed; duck consommé with pureed red cabbage and sliced red cabbage cooked in walnut oil; marinated loin of pork roasted over a charcoal fire with fresh herbs, fresh herb butter sauce; and salad of spinach wilted in olive oil and sherry vinegar.
Other dishes included an egg dish from Alice Toklas and her love for “corse” or forthright food: Oeufs Knapik, or coddled eggs with a fresh basil, lemon, caper, mustard, and garlic sauce. And one too grand for her: Filet de Boeuf Nantua, grilled filet of beef served on a crouton spread with mushroom duxelles and sauced cream, crayfish butter, and vermouth.
Another successful menu was the “Sauternes Dinner,” inspired by my favorite childhood Russian, Count Cheremetev, and his stories of Rasputin’s assassin, Prince Yusupov. I was also intrigued to drink Sauternes throughout the meal. The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook (1982) prints the menu in English, but the original was in French:
Sauternes Dinner
Jambon de Virginie aux Pruneaux
Colombines de Saumon Nantua
Entrecôte de Boeuf
Pommes Chez Nous
Salade Alice
Tarte Chaude de Fruits
Blanc Manger
Noix Caramélisées
After this dinner Alice thought I walked on Sauternes.
She said the meal was “revolutionary, but magnificent in effect.” She also said that the menu and evening was a “turning point for the restaurant.” I could not have done it without Lili cooking lunch, without the five co-owners’ willingness to provide service for a meal with four added courses, without Alice’s gift for explaining our mission to the guests in the dining room, and without a new confidence in the kitchen that we could cook the food correctly and on time. It did feel revolutionary: a menu in which sweet wine could be drunk from beginning to end was surely a first, and this one followed Olney’s principle of keeping the palate fresh, teased, surprised, and excited.
The “but” in Alice’s “revolutionary, but magnificent” implies the concepts for her were mutually exclusive, whereas I believed there was no oxymoron. Although the food at Panisse was no longer what would restore the soul after a romp with the police in People’s Park without compromising one’s principles, it did make a political statement. The revolution from radical to radicchio that started with the college dropout Alice Brock in the Back Room in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was, as Arlo Guthrie sang and told us about in “Alice’s Restaurant” and when he dined at Panisse, all about fresh, healthful food. But while half my gaze was still on France, the intent was to use American ingredients for themselves rather than as substitutes for unobtainable French ones.
Drugs had not dulled our ability to create a wonderful restaurant or my instinct for public relations, so in 1974, well into the French regional dinners using old texts, it was time to liven up the menus with some contemporary culinary giants. Though fairly unknown to the United States, Richard Olney was my first choice. We had finally met a year before at Williams-Sonoma. “Yes he is what I hoped and expected,” I wrote in my journal. “Could easily spend some time with him, and cook. He knows I will see him again. That eye understanding was established.” I put in the back of my mind that, before the year was out, I would go to France and cook with him.
But we had still the already-planned French culinary regions festival to finish, and the last one had ventured beyond the penultimate Morocco-Tunisia to Corsica. The Corsican menu pushed me over the edge. I didn’t know what the Corsican version of “priest-strangler” strozzapreti were, so I called the walking food dictionary, Darrell Corti (of the still-famous Corti Brothers specialty food stores in Sacramento), and asked what they tasted like. “Think of them as “quenelles of summer greens,” he said. That was easy. Even without the authenticity of brocciu cheese. The next course was Stocaficado à la Corse. Caught up in a frenzy for authenticity, I found the “real” stockfish—dried-out cod as hard as an air-dried plank, and just as palatable. But since salt cod was second nature to me, I was not worried—until I cooked this version. The dish was authentically inedible. My low point. I could feel I was nearing the end of slavishly French cooking but could not give up overnight. I needed a break. A surreal holiday in Mustique, where Lord Colin Tennant tried to persuade me to stay as Princess Margaret’s chef, gave me an idea.
On my return I wrote a festival of menus from the cookbook of “The Divine Salvador Domenech Philippe Hyacinthe Dalí for Gala,” warning the public they were about to see their favorite restaurant, now thought predictable, take a surrealistic leap. The first week was “Dinners for Gala,” the second, “Galas for Dalí.” Among the dishes were “Un Délice Petit Martyr Sans Tête,” a toast of avocado, brains, almonds, Mexican liqueur, and cayenne, and “L’Entre-plat Drogué et Sodomisé,” a leg of lamb injected or “sodomized” with Madeira and brandy. One diner wrote to me, “My god, that dinner last night was more memorable than a Dalí crucifixion and a lot less painful to contemplate.” But others were not so happy, like “the pillow-breasted shrike” who demanded a green salad and soup in the old style of Panisse. If the unhappy ones had seen me sodomizing legs of lamb every day with huge syringes full of tangerine juice, Madeira, and brandy, they might have been even less confident.
All these challenging menus called for more ingredients than we could find. Our attempts in the last two years (1974–75) to have Francis Ford Coppola buy the Niebaum-Inglenook estate for a Panisse country inn and farm had not worked out, but the idea seemed still our only way to find the ingredients we needed. The list of what we couldn’t get seemed endless. When I hauled out my college notebooks filled with garden and country inn projects, I came up with some new ideas. I reread my notes on Robert May’s seventeenth-century Accomplisht Cook and saw recipes for salads calling for Alexander buds, or black lovage. I put a salad of watercress, sliced oranges, lemons, currants, and pears on the menu—without the buds. Then I read my notes on a 1950s Farmers’ Weekly section on “Farmhouse Fare” to grow mountain ash (for rowan or “rodden” berries), to flavor vodka as my Russian uncle had shown me, and whortleberries for stuffing game birds. We had bought some goslings and taken them up to Sonoma so they would be ready for the fourth Panisse birthday, on August 28, 1975. For that night we cooked a lineup of cassoulets with real confit of goose made weeks earlier. The result of such public acclaim was that I was now under pressure to make more cassoulet nights, and I nearly fell back into the comfortable lap of French bourgeois cooking.
The plans to make our own culinary region was not so much then a conscious movement as a race to have quality fresh ingredients available in enough quantity to keep up with more and more ambitious menus.
To see if I was on the right track, I needed a reality check. In mid-October, after serving our first in-house smoked California salmon, I put a side of it in my luggage and headed for Paris to join Richard Olney at a special dinner at Lucas Carton given by the Club des Cents for the legendary Madeleine Decure, the head of the magazine Cuisine et Vins de France. From there we journeyed south to Solliès-Toucas near Toulon, to his little house on the hill above the town. The place was still fairly primitive. Unfortunately for bathing, but fortunately for cooking. We did a lot of it in the fireplace, over coals that burned twenty-four hours a day to keep the house above freezing.
After we got the sex part of our affair out of the way, we got down to other business. The long winter nights were filled with single-malt whiskey, old French music hall records, and talks about food. I had never been to Chez L’Ami Louis (I couldn’t afford it), so I listened in awe to Richard’s stories of the ortolans cooked in butter, the perfume of premortem Armagnac anesthesia still lingering in their bodies; of the huge slabs of duck foie gras served with raw country ham; of the woodcock in the fall and the tiny legs of lamb for two at Easter. We shared stories of Alexandre Dumaine, who, with Point, were the greatest twentieth-century French restaurant chefs. And of Dumaine’s work at his L’Hôtel de la Côte d’Or, particularly his adaptation of Lucien Tendret’s “L’Oreiller de la Belle Aurore.” In Olney’s words this greatest of dishes was a large pâté intricately cross-sectioned in a mosaic of “pistachio-speckled dark and light forcemeats, alternating with striped layers of dark game and white meats, punctuated with fingers of red tongue, white back fat, and black truffle.” Richard promised to make it for me, but an exploration into the glories of the Bresse chicken cooked in the fireplace took over. He talked endlessly about his first days in Paris and later in Grasse cooking for a bunch of opium smokers, including the head of a well-respected travel guide. Dinner had to be ready by ten o’clock, but sometimes the group didn’t sit down to table until two in the morning. Richard was forbidden to get caught up in the opium, but he didn’t mind since he was too busy fending off the most famous chef in France at the time, Georges Garin, who was in love with him, a hopeless notion since Richard was in love with a male black Folies-Bergère dancer introduced to him by James Baldwin. I knew in a bizarrely comforting way that Richard had been as mad as I when I heard the story of the look on the dancer’s face upon seeing the broken-down shepherd’s hovel on the Solliès-Toucas mountainside that he was supposed to exchange for the makeup mirrors at the Folies-Bergère.
In 1975 Richard was trim and still youthful. He was not beautiful, but the sight of him walking fully tanned around the vegetable garden in a turquoise cotton bikini, a bottle of Krug chilling in an ice bucket under the grape arbor behind him, could be thrilling. I minded not at all his under-the-surface melancholy for past grandeurs and true loves, as he didn’t mind my simultaneous reverence for the past and obsession with the future. After a couple of glasses of champagne, we were in perfect sync. From all this talk of eating and love we decided to do a festival at Chez Panisse in celebration of his new book, Simple French Food. But first a lesson in ingredients.
I waited patiently in line at the neighboring town fish store, admiring all the varieties of fresh sardines and anchovies that I couldn’t get in California. One particularly intrigued me for its freshness. I asked the woman behind the counter what it was. She ignored me. I asked again, only to be ignored again. Finally I turned to Richard, who asked her. “Ils sont étrangers” was her disdainful reply. Foreigners? I asked Richard if I had heard correctly. He laughed and explained that the fish were caught more than twelve kilometers from the shop, so they were “foreign” and not fit for selling to him. “Wow,” I said to Richard, since the fish looked better than any I could get in California. “If that’s the standard, California is sunk.”
To complete the lesson he took me to lunch at Domaine Tempier, in Bandol. The wine was unavailable in the United States at that time, and Richard thought that since we were going to cook his food in California, I should have his favorite local wine to go with it. We tasted all the wines from barrels, then sat down to sea bass cooked on a fire of dried vine cuttings, served with a sauce of its roe made in a huge marble mortar; spit-roasted leg of lamb; and a deeply ripe and perfect apricot tart.
I asked Richard if we could finish the preliminary menus I had sent him for a two-week Olney festival in the spring of 1976 featuring simple French food and his 1974 book of the same name. I also wanted feedback on the menus for an upcoming “California Zinfandel” festival I had written. We decided to combine the two, and wrote the menus listening to the forty-year-old recordings of Mistinguett, Freyel, and Piaf while drinking Niagaras of Krug, other great wines, and the ever-present Glenmorangie. The original paperwork (now available with my other culinary papers in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan) shows we changed our minds at least four times, and constantly reworked the order of dishes and the sequence of evenings so that Saturday night, at my insistence, would be the crescendo. The final versions weren’t ready until after I returned to Berkeley.
Back in Berkeley, I tasted the Tempier wines with my friend George Linton, the brilliant eccentric vet who had started Connoisseur Wine Imports, and by April the first cases of Domaine Tempier arrived. I was eager to proselytize on behalf of the Mourvèdre grape that made Tempier’s wines so good, but started by commissioning and helping blend a Beaujolais-nouveau style with Joseph Phelps Vineyards in Napa to go with Richard’s menus. The menu read: “Richard Olney Autumn Menus to Celebrate Gold Rush Zinfandel from Amador 1975 County Grapes of Frank Dal Porto Vineyards Produced at Joseph Phelps Vineyards” and included dishes like “Rich pork stew garnished with vegetables, pigs’ ears and tails” as well as “French moussaka with watercress” and “Fresh white goat cheese in vine leaves.”
But first the year 1975 ended with a menu of French food influenced by rereading the great Lucien Tendret’s La Table au Pays de Brillat-Savarin. I’d found a hundred-year-old salad very similar to the one I had seen in Escoffier’s 1908 magazine Le Camet d’Epicure and which Richard and I had seen together at the great Jacques Manière’s restaurant, Au Pactole, in Paris. It was the “Salade Gourmande” or “Salade Folle.” The green bean puree was an homage to Georges Garin, the turnip puree was Richard’s Puree Blanche, and the rest was elegantly easy. But no one except Alice understood or appreciated it, and over a few glasses of yeasty champagne, I suddenly had the feeling that I’d gone about as far as I could go at Panisse.
New Year’s Eve Dinner: Chez Panisse
December 31, 1975
Salad of lobster, chicken breasts, black truffles, squab breasts, mushrooms, and shrimp with a mustard vinaigrette
Prime sirloin of beef with truffles, roasted and served with a truffled Madeira sauce
Puree of green beans and puree of turnips, leeks, and potatoes with garlic
Champagne sherbet
Fruit tartlets
Bonbons Chez Panisse
Many thought I’d gone mad charging twenty-five dollars per person—and I almost did when the truck carrying the fresh truffles and foie gras hadn’t arrived from the airport until six fifteen, fifteen minutes after the first guests had been seated. That one had me sweating. We couldn’t charge so much without the truffles, although even at that menu price we were hardly making any money. It was truly time to reassess once again what we were doing.