The instrument of change arrived in the form of the 350-pound James Beard, who came to Panisse for dinner the day after Christmas in 1975. The menu started with a trio of oysters: one an oyster soufflé with shellfish sauce, the others Escoffier’s “Favorites” with cream and black truffles, and cold “Natives” on ice. This was followed by filet of beef with beef marrow, and then California goat cheeses.
I showed him the press we had been getting that year. The pieces were a paean to the accomplishments of our little band of amateur owners. They are worth repeating to see how much difference a few years had made with the food press and what they now felt a “serious” restaurant could be.
James Beard had said that Panisse had become “a superbly authoritative restaurant.” A Bay Area critic reported “unrelentingly superb quality in food preparation, innovativeness in menu planning, purchasing only the finest ingredients, and resolute attention to even the smallest culinary details.” In the October 1975 issue of Gourmet, Caroline Bates summed up what we had achieved: “Jeremiah honed his palate at an early age and now, like many creative young chefs in France today who have turned away from the pretentiousness of La Grande Cuisine, he strives for the simplicity and directness that characterize French regional food with its emphasis on fresh ingredients and the integrity of each taste.” So why did I tell Jim that I was still not satisfied?
I moaned to him that size of the profit line was still a vital question for me; that places like Ireland and England, not to mention Italy and France, still had better ingredients, and that they had the courage to put them on the plate without much interference from the chef. I told him that I had not turned my back on la grande cuisine in its purest and most perfect form (as in Tendret’s book), but that I was beginning to doubt a three-star French restaurant could ever be achieved at Panisse prices.
Jim gave me the smile he reserved for young men he held in favor.
“Darling,” he said, “keep your mouth shut about all that. You have a good thing going here; you’re on the right track. Just stick with America.” I promised to reread his wonderful 1972 book, American Cookery.
The next morning at the Stanford Court Hotel, where Jim’s own court of cooking classes was held each day, I bandaged his feet (devastated by lack of circulation), giving his devoted servant Marion Cunningham a rest from her daily chore. His robe had been left open where it “fell,” exposing a belly as vast as Yosemite’s El Capitan, which swept down to reveal what he could have been proud to reveal were Jim not the exception to the rule that large fingers are also a measure of the family jewels. Jim did have very big hands. This was a morning ritual, exposure to which I had long since become familiar and with which I’d grown comfortable over the years I’d known him. After a little hug or two, we talked about Alice, about Marion, about Gourmet magazine’s “simplicity and directness” as the path to continue following, about my career, and saying it was fine not to make money. We talked about Delmonico’s and the time, a hundred years earlier in New York, when the great restaurants listed the provenance of their ingredients on their menus. We talked of the great William Niblo in his Old Bank Coffee House in 1814 serving ingredients with their origins called out on the menu: “Bald Eagle shot on the Grouse Plains of Long Island.” And the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, where Jim had consulted starting in 1959, and which did the same thing.
Jim had rethought his earlier position about sticking where I was, but going American. He asked me if I wouldn’t be happier in New York, since the Bay Area press had begun to see me as “pretentious,” “autocratic,” “royalist,” and so on. “Perhaps you should start wearing Birkenstocks to work,” he quipped. “Whatever you might think, there is no love lost for you here.” I showed him a letter in the Berkeley Independent-Gazette that complained of paying ten dollars for “pork and beans”—meaning the cassoulet I’d made from our confit of our own geese! He also read a San Francisco Bay Guardian article from November, in which Alice said the restaurant had reached a “plateau.” She complained that the telephone lines were always clogged and that 60 percent of the customers were now from out of town instead of the East Bay regulars. “It’s extremely frustrating,” she concluded.
I wasn’t frustrated so much as impatient to go to the next level. Jim knew that Alice’s ideas of success were going to conflict with mine, and sooner rather than later. “Jeremiah, they’re jealous,” he said. “And if they aren’t now, they will be. Get out.”
“But, Jim,” I protested. “I have to work. No one wants an under-ocean architect!”
We pondered this for a while.
Then I was out the door to go to work when he boomed out and waved me back with a huge, effete hand clustered with loose gold wire bracelets.
“How about a restaurant of your own?”
I went back in and sat down.
“But what kind?”
I reminded him of his recent comment that if he had to go back to four restaurants in the United States they would be Tony’s in Houston, the Coach House and the Four Seasons in New York, and Chez Panisse. I hadn’t been to Tony’s, but I knew it was “Continental” and red plush. The top famous restaurants in San Francisco at that time—L’Étoile, Ernie’s, and La Bourgogne—were similar: they had severe dress codes and even more severe headwaiters, who would flick open menus half the size of the table and call you “Madame” even if you weren’t.
We went on talking about food in San Francisco and the rest of America in 1975. Locally there was Dungeness crab, Petrale sole, and abalone at Sam’s and Tadich Grill, and a great mutton chop at Jack’s. Trader Vic’s had surprisingly forward-looking ingredients (mahimahi, fresh mangoes, and tiger prawns). In Los Angeles you could eat simple and direct food like sand dabs, more Dungeness crab, and prawn cocktails (Chasen’s), and even crabmeat baked in papaya with cream (Il Padrino), which always sounded better than it was, and it didn’t sound too good. You could get Mexican lobster tail (frozen) with California avocado in La Jolla’s Top of the Cove. In Baltimore there was Danny’s with its Chesapeake Bay blue crabs, crab soup, and perfect fresh lump crabmeat that I adored and that was a favorite of my Russian uncle when it was made “Imperial.” In New Orleans there was Commander’s Palace, serving soft-shell turtle stew; Le Ruth with frogs’ legs, oysters, and artichokes, and French fried parsley long before it became a fad in the eighties; the Bon Ton had its fried soft-shell crabs; and Maylie’s my favorite fried oysters and soft-shell crab po’boys. In Detroit there was the legendary London Chop House with its menu of Americana, Continental cuisine, and English grills. In Boston, Locke-Ober, the scene of my twenty-first birthday dinner, had its famous baked oysters, as well as a lobster dish from a century earlier in New York. The Union Oyster House was where I had spent most of my college allowance on scrod, codfish cakes, clam chowder, and oysters.
This was all very appealing, but you couldn’t get these ingredients except in their locales, and even then they were often frozen. The age of airline shipping of fresh food would not arrive for at least a decade.
I had brought along one of my favorite books, a 1958 Picture Cook Book from Life (Time Inc.) that listed the great American city restaurants of the day. Of the nineteen selected, we saw that only five served American-ingredient-driven menus, and they were all in either San Francisco or New Orleans. Of the photographed specialties from eight “America’s Inns,” only one, “devilled crab,” was American, and only southern and Texas restaurants had menus derived from regional ingredients. We decided that, seventeen years later, the two notable American restaurants (rather than Americanized European) were the American Restaurant at Crown Center in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Four Seasons in New York. Jim had consulted on both. We laughed about the former’s Swiss German chef, who could just not resist the old European sauces (Grand Veneur) and garnishes on indigenous American ingredients.
Jim asked me if I had read Frank Crowninshield’s 1939 book, The Unofficial Palace of New York: A Tribute to the Waldorf-Astoria, for the Sert murals, the chapter by Elsa Maxwell, and the American menus with Diamond Back Terrapin, Chicken California Style, Roast Mountain Sheep, and Basket of Lobster, all at one dinner in 1899. And especially for the 1937 menu for an “Idaho Dinner,” which then called out the origins of the ingredients: Snake River, Twin Falls, Sawtooth Range, Jerome County, Boise Valley, and Lone Pine, Idaho.
I told Beard of my obsession then with Rex Stout for his food-loving private eye. In Stout’s Too Many Cooks of 1938 there was wonderful food in praise of America: Creole Tripe from New Orleans; Missouri Boone County Ham—cooked with vinegar, molasses, Worcestershire sauce, cider, and herbs; Chicken in Curdled Egg Sauce—almonds, sherry, Mexican sausage; Tennessee Opossum; and Philadelphia Snapper Soup. Or the Nero Wolfe Cookbook, one of the first books I read that made me want to cook.
Beard told me that when he, Joe Baum, and Restaurant Associates created the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, the menus were huge, and I should get one to study. Three days later I had one from the woman I bought menus from for my collection, Jan Langone in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
A dinner had eighty items, not including the twenty or so dishes listed “As a Dinner Accompaniment,” which might include “Nasturtium Leaves,” a “Beefsteak Tomato Carved Tableside,” and “Broccoli Flowers.” In block letters was written, “OUR FIELD GREENS ARE SELECTED EACH MORNING AND WILL VARY DAILY.” Under the separate “Vegetables & Potatoes” it said, “Seasonal gatherings may be viewed in their baskets.”
They were obviously mad.
I could not wait to carve a beefsteak tomato tableside.
I couldn’t get mallard duck or Jersey poulardes, or frogs’ legs. And I’m not sure how many of those ingredients were fresh and in perfect condition anyway. I called Jim in New York to pose that question. I could almost hear his lifting of what was left of his eyebrows in reply. (Those brows over the years did a lot of rising and falling.)
But the menu fascinated me. It was mainly in English and in its scope reminded me of an article called “Recent Menus” from an English publication named The Epicure. I had filed it years before under “Regional Dinner Ideas,” and showed it to Jim. The article featured a banquet “recently given at the California Hotel, San Francisco, the object of which was to prove the possibility of making up an extensive menu solely from the products of the State.” No date is given for “A Californian Banquet,” but a supper menu that follows, for three hundred at the National Skating Rink on London’s Regent Street, is from 1896. Of the hundred or so dishes I had underlined Artichokes; Lettuce, Egg Sauce; Bear’s Meat; Striped Eels, fried in butter; Spiced Pickled Cantaloupe; Black Halibut; October Strawberries; Frozen Watermelon; Figs White; Figs Black; Grape Fool.
“It’s like Delmonico’s,” Jim said, “and from the same era.”
“So how about an American restaurant!” we chimed in together.
I fell into his large arms and onto his even larger belly and gave him a big kiss before heading off to Panisse to cook dinner, proving Marion Cunningham wrong when she claimed that Beard was incapable of loving anyone. “And don’t forget California wines!” he bellowed as I was once more going out his hotel room door. Apart from Panisse, the only restaurants I knew pushing premium California wine were the Four Seasons, the Wooden Angel outside Pittsburgh, and Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, Florida.
Late that night on the ride home, I thought about the complexity of Jim’s personality. He was like an erratic elevator car, one that could take you up fast but sometimes, when you stepped in, wasn’t there. Like all the great men I had met, he had two parts: the big jolly one and the big-tempered one. One could never claim to know him until one had seen the temper-induced flapping and flying of his weighty and ponderous jowls, their quivering a preface to an even more serious seismic body event and a stentorian roar. I’d seen it for the first time a few weeks before in a restaurant on San Francisco’s Nob Hill. I had finished bandaging his startlingly black and maroon legs, had massaged the even worse feet, rewrapped the bandages, taken tea, heard the latest gossip, seen on the coffee table the latest unreleased cookbooks and endorsement proposals, and listened to what was going on in the cooking world and its satellites. Then it was time to take him to lunch in the new restaurant of his choice. We were oiled to the table by the maître d’. The owner’s prostration made Jim nervous from the outset. Nothing went well. The food was mediocre, our guests fidgety. Jim’s already pink face turned even redder, splotched with streaks of purple. Those jowls started to quiver, but he held himself back. When his espresso arrived the jowls went into full swing. “Who asked for lemon zest in the coffee?” he roared. The waiter looked as if he might make a puddle. I hid. Soon his cane was found and he launched himself, Robert Morley–like, into the foyer. “And furthermore, the coleslaw was terrible.”
Thank God I was paying (he never did). I stretched to a new height and said, “Okay, Jim, but whose coleslaw is better? Your uncle Billy’s or my aunt’s?” The latter I had fed him a week earlier; Billy’s was from one of his cookbooks, The New James Beard. Jim looked at me fiercely. His body stopped heaving and began to roll. Tears appeared and he roared again, this time in laughter.
A month earlier I’d had my thirty-third birthday lunch with Jim at New York’s Maxwell’s Plum. There was something coyly in the air, and it wasn’t until after our hamburgers and a magnum of Dom Pérignon (I was paying) that he offered the usual advice: write a cookbook and take on the job of chef at Maxwell’s—in no particular order. After lunch he called his editor, Judith Jones, at Knopf to set up a meeting about doing a Chez Panisse cookbook, and we looked at the kitchen at Maxwell’s Plum. It was far too small to make all the dishes on the menu, and I could see why the chef wanted to leave. There were four-foot-high mounds of bus tubs packed with food oozing out of them and spilling down the narrow stairs. When I left I stopped to wipe my alligator shoes. “That’s New York, my dear,” he said. I gave up on the idea of moving to New York and redoubled my efforts to capture America. A few months later in 1976, I was hit with three bombshells, one professional and two culinary.
Willy quit after the glowing Gourmet review. He couldn’t stand the idea of “food weenies or trendies” who float from restaurant to restaurant, like the lone diner who had a copy of that Gourmet open on his lap under the table in the dining room and kept demanding dishes we didn’t have but had served weeks before when the reviewer had dined.
The first culinary bombshell was Jim Villas’s article in Town & Country covering restaurants serving American food, titled “At Last, a Table of Our Own.” It heralded “the possible existence in the United States of a slowly developing formalized American cuisine, a stylized native cookery that might one day rival the European and Far Eastern culinary traditions.” That was what were trying at Chez Panisse. Villas mentioned the bicentennial “American Culinary Festival” that Hilton International was holding around the world during the summer of 1976: “Sea Bass with Ginger,” which Jim described as Californian; “Berkeley Banana Fritters” in Tehran; and “Peanut Soup,” “Black Bottom Pie,” and “Shoo-Fly Pie” in Hong Kong! I knew the Hilton chefs were fishing in unchartered waters: bananas from Berkeley? Perhaps just menu alliteration. My notes from Villas’s article read: “Duck with Quince Puree; Walnut-Macadamia Nut Crepes but make crepes with cornmeal; Sweetbreads with Crayfish Ragout; Oysters with Green Chilis and Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette; California Cheeses; think Thomas Jefferson.” None of those dishes had been cited, but the article was so provocative I started making up my own.
The second bombshell was the Gault and Millau article summing up what French chefs were up to, calling it “la nouvelle cuisine.” An account that immediately caught the imagination of all Western food chefs and writers. In their On the Town in New York, Michael and Ariane Batterberry explained what the term meant: All unnecessarily complicated cooking was to be dumped. In order to “reveal forgotten flavors,” cooking times were to be reduced, and the new style was designated a cuisine du marché, cooking inspired by what is found in the marketplace and reliant on the freshest seasonal produce—a proposition that would lead to collaborative efforts between chefs and breeders of livestock, cheese artisans, and vegetable and fruit growers to secure the finest. Domineering sauces were to be discouraged, especially any thickened with flour; game was to be served fresh and not high from hanging; regional dishes would be reexamined; technological breakthroughs like the food processor were encouraged in the interests of convenience, speed, and virtuosity; long menus, once the hallmark of “grand hotel” or “Continental cuisine,” were to be discouraged.
Our less formal in-house printing job at Panisse meant that we could finalize a seasonal market menu honoring the day’s best fresh produce mere hours before the meal service. But I had still some work based in France and its great traditions that I needed to finish before I launched into new American cooking. I needed one last taste of what had started off my love of cooking decades earlier.
As 1976 opened Alice and I were starting to go in different directions. We were equal partners in the restaurant, and up to this point had avoided confrontations. I believed that revamping the upstairs of Panisse with a high volume, low-food-cost cafe would be its financial saving, as well as bringing in new, younger, and less affluent “starter” customers. And we needed non-reservation seating, since our fame had brought also the ruinous phenomenon of no-shows. But Alice didn’t agree that great restaurants should have cafes attached to them.
The fact that I was living temporarily in her house made the arguments turn final. Alice had recently been assaulted there and didn’t want to stay alone, and she didn’t regard Willy, before he quit, living in the garage with his paintings, as protection. It was not long before the close quarters became claustrophobic. It had been a while since Alice and I had sat on the terrace of Venice’s Gritti Palace in the moonlight sipping vintage Krug champagne, or stayed with friends on a romantic trip to Nice. Both were wonderful memories, but I was newly seeing, and in love with, someone else: a teacher, Gregg Lowery, the love of my life, with whom I was to live, if for not nearly long enough. One night I did not come home when I said I would and in the morning I had forgotten my house keys. Alice met me on the steps, screaming loudly enough to bring out the neighbors. “It’s my house!” she shrieked (which was true), “my car” (not true), and my restaurant” (she owned 10 percent). It was such a preposterous lovers’ tiff performance that all I could say was “May I have my toothbrush?”
I took “her” car to go buy fish.
The next day, while eating the last of the crystallized fruits that Alice and I had bought at Vogade in Nice, I decided to take a break and think. Or quit. But whatever: it was time to find myself again.
I sent a roomful of parrot tulips to Alice with an apologetic note. “Like Lord Henry’s wife,” it said, “she was usually in love with somebody and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions.” I told her she should write a cookbook called “A Matter of Course,” the title taken from Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson: “As the homage of men became for her, more and more, a matter of course, the more subtly necessary was it to her happiness.”
I fled to Paris, only to run out of money two months later and terrify myself with lots of nights alone in the Île Saint-Louis apartment above Marc Chagall, which I rented from Pavel Tchelitchev’s former lover Charles Henri Ford. My thoughts turned to employment and therefore to California. In Paris, even though I no longer felt “a soul exhausted by concealed thoughts” as I had in Berkeley, I ignored Charles’s guest, the young and godlike godson of the queen of England who said of the Bay Area, “It’s a pleasant euphoria, but not for me,” and planned to get back.
Alice felt abandoned by my leaving, but while I was away she had my wonderful sous chef Jean-Pierre Moullé, who had long since given up his first notions that if food was not French, lobster, or filet mignon, it did not make for a serious restaurant. The menus from the time I was away were mostly the dishes we had done in the past, leaning heavily toward Provence, the Brittany Regional Dinner menu, and the dishes that I had brought back with me from Richard’s house in the South of France. Emotionally bruised by French bureaucracy and shopkeepers, I looked around California with a new glee, even a little love.
I remembered all the conversations I’d had with Beard about my career, and all the doubts I had about California were transformed into a new focus as I reread Charles Ranhofer’s cookbook from Delmonico’s, The Epicurean. I realized I had been improvising for years, so why fret any longer about authenticity of French ingredients for French regional food? Why not just go shopping in Northern California and call that the region? I wrote a series of menus called “A Week of the Cuisine of Charles Ranhofer, Former Chef of Delmonico’s,” including a dish called “Crème de maïs à la Mendocino.” What in the world, I thought, was the chef of New York’s most famous 1890s restaurant doing thinking about dishes local to small regions of California? Once again it was the soup that kick-started my future.
I was all fired up with new plans for Panisse even if I felt I was numbering my days. I told my partners all the ideas I’d come up with in France: an à la carte menu for Panisse downstairs, including four menus starting at the low end of ten dollars to the high end of twenty-five dollars for a tasting menu with California’s best ingredients, a cafe menu, and a list of “dishes available on command one week in advance.” I wrote a statement for the menu: “If there is ever a dish on the menu that is not available, it will be because of the caprices of the weather, the fish themselves, the transport services, and our own limitations. We would rather buy sometimes scarce first-rate good ingredients and run out of them than compromise standards and disappoint ourselves and the customer.”
Alice was dead set against the ideas, especially for the cafe. No one on the board had heard of a tasting menu either. Only the headwaiter, Jerry Budrick, and I were insistent on the need for a cafe. I decided to stay until the end of the year and let them all buy me out.
The Panisse board decided to sell the restaurant instead. On May 26, 1976, Herb Caen reported the price as $500,000, adding, “Now that the restaurant has made a big splash with the critics, the owners are tired.” Perhaps. Certainly they had had enough with reviews saying that Panisse was becoming pretentious. I felt we were not pretending to do anything but actually trying and most of the time succeeding. A customer, the journalist Robert Scheer, complained that Panisse at ten dollars per person was “expensive” (untrue) and a “hangout for drug pushers” (true). I replied that Panisse was a victim of his uninformed “radical-chic liberal veneer,” but my partners were unnerved. They felt I was taking them down a path they didn’t know, even more so now that the food was taken for granted and critics were focusing on things like us not having senior citizen discounts, or that Panisse was in a converted house. Another said we were not expensive enough to survive.
And on it went, making me more determined than ever to keep from being made or unmade by the press. I was a bit defensive about our old house, which I’d redesigned three times. We now had heat, a chilled wine cellar, a carpet, and a pleasant atmosphere. It was also “world famous,” because the great chef Jean Troisgros had actually asked if his nephew Michel could work with me in the kitchen. I was aghast. Troisgros was one of my heroes—I said it was I who should be studying with them. “Au contraire,” he said. “You may not know what you have here, but I envy you and admire what you are doing with the food. I am jealous of your freedom to do what you want, to make the customers want what you do. I have to cook what the customers expect, and if I were to do it again I would do what you are doing.” And once more I was reminded of that Jim Morrison quote.
Michel Troisgros arrived and was part of the cooking team that took over from me with Jean-Pierre Moullé as their leader and executive chef. Mark Miller and Fritz Streiff, who had worked in Paris with Jacques Manière at Au Pactole, were the others.
Alice herself was now getting the hang of special festivals and events. Her main interest in 1976, others than friends’ birthdays, was a benefit she did for Les Blank and his “Louisiana Playboys” to raise money for a film. Although I had a deft hand with gumbo and other dishes I’d learned in my culinary travels through Louisiana (our very first regional dinner at Panisse had been Creole), Alice imported a certain Creole “madame” to “authenticate” the food. She was hardly a madame, and she dealt a fair blow to that always “difficult concept of authenticity” when she boiled twenty pounds of beef lung in our big soup pot, without salt, producing a sludge-gray mess so stinkingly ugly that even our resident tomcat, Blackie, hissed at it. We threw it out, and at the last minute I had to cook another whole meal.
“Authenticity” took on less meaning after that, and we all now saw it as a verbal and mental crutch. Its kissing cousin, “purity,” raised even more hackles in my kitchen. Whenever I heard a cook say, “I am a purist,” I knew that bean sprouts were only a moment away, and that his or her pets were fed macrobiotically. Despite our using Big Sur trout and California pigs, no one challenged the authenticity of my menu for an Alsace dinner, which Alice called “one of the highlights [for her] of the last ten years.”
Dinner for Alsace
Pigs’ ears breaded and grilled, mustard sauce
Alsatian vinaigrette salad
Live Garrapata trout cooked in court bouillon, butter sauce
Munster cheese
Tart of dried fruit with a coffee cream
This was the last of the French festivals, since my mind was on America in my last year at Panisse. But I summoned up the energy for one final push, returning to the lessons of past masters in order to understand the forces that had shaped the current ones, even if only in reaction, to create a foundation for the future. I announced we’d be educating both ourselves and the public with menus to “celebrate a great master, a great pupil, and their followers.” The “master” was Escoffier, the “pupil” Olney, the “followers” the young French Turks Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and the Troisgros. Then I became caught up in the idea of educating the public and expanded the masters to include Carême (1784–1833; “I want order and taste”), Urbain Dubois (1818–1901; “a new order”), Prosper Montagné of Larousse Gastronomique (1865—1948; “Miracles? No, simply good food”), and Philéas Gilbert (1857–1934), who had persuaded Escoffier that Montagné was right in a “reform” of the classic cuisine and service. I wrote a two-page history and handed it out to the public and staff.
The regional French food “Curnonsky Week” at Panisse two years before had been a huge success and resulted in our first featured magazine article. But the roar of success from the Escoffier week—five days of my adapting menus from Le Guide Culinaire and Ma Cuisine, with a menu printed in side-by-side French and English—spread the word of what was happening at Panisse far and wide. Darrell Corti sent us a funeral wreath and a note that said there was nowhere to go except down after this little death moment of success.
That week was followed by two of the Olney menus, ending with one from Olney’s Paris teacher, Georges Garin, that included a duck boned through the neck and left in one piece so it could be presented whole but sliced right through.
There remained one region: our own.
I was encouraged to take on America by an act of daring at the Four Seasons in March 1976, the “First Annual California Vintners Barrel Tasting Dinner.” The menu was in English, with French terms only for those now accepted in American grand dining.
The dinner started with Snapper Tartare and continued with several more dishes including Quenelles of Shad, Velouté of Crayfish, Spring Chicken in Joseph Phelps Riesling, Emincé of Young Rabbit, and Essence of Fennel. The wines were Wente, Chateau St.-Jean, Freemark Abbey, Parducci, Mirassou, Phelps, and Beaulieu for these courses. The menu seemed wonderfully way over the top, but the language was elegantly restrained, a perfect combination. I wondered if any of the diners knew just how New York it was, in the Astor and Diamond Jim Brady grand tradition of twenty or so courses.
I loved the daring of this menu and now wanted to have our own new region at Panisse. My menu, in English, was a celebration of our new sense of place, of where we lived and ate.
The Northern California Regional Dinner
October 7, 1976
Spenger’s Tomales Bay Bluepoint Oysters on Ice
Cream of Fresh Corn Soup, Mendocino Style, with Crayfish Butter
Big Sur Garrapata Creek Smoked Trout Steamed over California Bay Leaves
Monterey Bay Prawns Sautéed with Garlic, Parsley, and Butter
Preserved California Geese from Sebastopol
Vela Dry Monterey Jack Cheese from Sonoma
Fresh Caramelized Figs, Walnuts, Almonds, and Mountain Pears from the San Francisco Farmers’ Market
In his The Last Days of Haute Cuisine: America’s Culinary Revolution, Patric Kuh predicted that this night at Panisse “would be one of the great switching points in American gastronomy.”
I didn’t have such high-flying sentiments then. I was trying only to finish the year and then do great things in the next and final year of my stint and ownership at Chez Panisse. To go out with a bang and no whimper. With only three months to go in 1977 I amused myself with a series of menus to amuse everyone else: one for the “Society of Grand Stomachs,” one “For the Spirit,” a “Black and White,” and some old favorites that spanned a century or so.
The menu on what was meant to be my last night, New Year’s Eve, 1977–78, was ambitious. Paul Bocuse’s famous Élysée Palace truffle soup, roast fresh wild mushroom stuffed quail on a bed of watercress, California cheese, chocolate cake with in-house nougat ice cream, our bonbons, and a croquembouche made to order for every table (to keep the profiteroles crisp), all for twenty-five dollars per person.
At the end of the evening I was still making one-and two-foot towers of pastry-cream-filled profiteroles stuck together with hot caramel. I remember laughing bitterly at the irony that I should have my arms and hands burned by the hot caramel in order to fix this most festive of French desserts when American chocolate cake would have done just as well. My French-American schizophrenia was dead after that night, well gone by the time the burn scars had healed. But I did return once more to cooking at Panisse.
At the end of 1978, after I had worked at Big Sur’s Ventana Inn for six months (much more about that later) and with Richard Olney at Time-Life Books in London, I took over from the chef Jean-Pierre Moullé. Alice wanted to take the last three months off and did not trust the kitchen team headed by Jean-Pierre to hold the fort, especially when she heard that Beard would be coming back after Christmas. The previous nine months of dishes had been pretty much drawn from my old menus, with more Richard Olney menus and another Alice B. Toklas dinner. Alice’s menus had been ones like this one, later included in the 1982 Panisse cookbook: “Huîtres natives, crepes bretonnes, porc braise au cidre, salade ou fromages, fruits.” Right back to France as the culinary region for Chez Panisse, leaving California as a memory. The menus she left me with to start off the ninety days’ absence were “The Best of Chez Panisse.” It was familiar territory, so I left most of the work to Jean-Pierre and the others while I busied myself trying to launch an American restaurant in San Francisco. I thought to write the last few weeks of menus and go out, again, with a bang.
There was a bit of tension in the kitchen, however, since I was there for no particular reason other than to soothe Alice’s nerves. Sous chef Michel Troisgros wanted to show the latest beurre blanc; Mark Miller was inclined to think he knew everything already; and Fritz Streiff had never forgiven me for not showing enough sympathy when, during an important wine tour with Olney and a group of American journalists, he returned to our hotel room in Strasbourg with a bloody nose, having been attacked in a public men’s room. Only Jean-Pierre was his usual steady as a rock.
After the Best of Chez Panisse menus were finished, I did a week in honor of cooks who had influenced Panisse menus the most: “Richard Olney, Prosper Montagné, Auguste Escoffier, Elizabeth David, and My Russian Uncle.” Then, since Alice was now back, I asked the team to each take a night for the last week of the year and write their own menu. They all had so much difficulty deciding what to cook that I took over their menus. My Saturday night menu:
Fresh Select Tomales Bay Oysters on Ice with Lemon and Pernod
Poached Fresh Sturgeon with Caviar Butter
Capon Stuffed under the Skin with Truffles Lucien Tendret (homage to Alexandre Dumaine)
Crepes Suzettes in the Original Manner of Auguste Escoffier at the Carlton Hotel in London
What would be my very last Chez Panisse menu coincided with Beard’s visit: “The Orlando Dinner: Following the Last Hundred Years,” a four-course affair with Carême (ragout of vegetables in a puff pastry, which he called “Moderne”); Escoffier (his oyster “Favorites” with black truffles); Point and Dumaine (white veal loin with cream, truffles, and fresh noodles); and then “New and Future” (fresh tropical fruit with creamed chilled papaya yogurt and fresh macadamia nuts). But I never got to do it. When Alice returned and saw that Beard was coming to dinner on December 27, 1978, she condoned a palace revolt. She said that the chefs wanted to cook for Beard by themselves. And with a different menu. They wanted the usual duck.
I saw Jim at his hotel as usual that morning, and told him I would not be cooking. “I guess they don’t want me to know you have been holding their hands.” He giggled.
“Do you think I should force the issue?” I asked him.
“Jeremiah, you have already done that. If I were you I wouldn’t ever go back. You should have never agreed to fill in for Alice in the first place.”
The next morning he called me early.
“Well, that was god-awful,” he bellowed, with just a tinge of accusation, as if it had been my fault.
“The duck was inedible,” he said, then went on to scold me for every dish as if I had been there cooking it. “At least that reviewer Merrill Shindler said that the public noticed your food when Alice was gone, even if she called you ‘oft-crazed.’ But don’t do it again.”
I went to his room to kiss and make up, and then went home to reread Alice’s farewell letter, which she’d written on a piece of yellow lined paper.
“Dear Jeremiah,” it started, and then expressed how hard it was for Alice to accept the fact that I wanted to leave Chez Panisse. She went on to write that our relationship and the restaurant would never be so vital after I left.
I would not go so far to say, like Ford Madox Ford, that “there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties,” but Alice had done some of that for me originally. Now this private Alice showed it was the same for her still.
But the public Alice after I left Panisse had another face. By my last year she had already begun circumspection with the press, editing where credit was due in the kitchen and for the success of the business. In 1978 I felt that if that was what she needed to do, so be it. What harm could it do to let her have the limelight? After all, we had been equal owners, and I had always given her credit and told her when photographers would be around, a gesture she did not return. I knew that there was plenty of room for everyone. But within the next few years I was beginning to be a bit edgy about the extent of her editing.
In interviews she said she was now the chef at Chez Panisse, and taking on the task of “flying in the face of old, conservative menus.” Linda Guenzel, who wrote The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, wondered with me over the telephone about that comment, and agreed it was pretty funny thinking the Dalí menus and their leg of lamb “drogue et sodomisé” could be considered conservative. But Alice believed in her role so much that when an interviewer in a Bay Area publication wrote that Jean-Pierre Moullé was the head chef (he was), Alice called me asking me to fire him. “How could he say he is the chef?” she asked. I told her he was, and that I couldn’t fire him even if I wanted to. I hadn’t been his boss in months.
The press began to believe Alice totally. But later, when they said that the food and perhaps Alice were tired, that there were too many fingers in the pie, that Panisse was now just a case of the emperor’s new clothes, Alice described herself not as the chef but as the “orchestrator.” She lamented that it was very difficult to be so successful “and not have people upset.”
When Jean-Pierre Moullé had gone back to France, and Bay Area restaurant critic Robert Finigan wrote in 1983 that dishes poorly executed and badly served were coming out of the cafe and main dining room with alarming frequency, Alice said he was nitpicking and just looking for something to write about.
The general press feeling was that Panisse had lost it. One article said that even though Alice wanted a one-star restaurant, by 1983 it had no stars at all.
But by 2001, the thirtieth anniversary party was a national event, lauded by everyone. Reading all those accounts of the party, I thought Alice could replace all those little lettuces in her arms with both arms full of awards—and sit back for a well-earned rest.
Paul McCartney summed up our relationship when talking in 2001 on American TV about his own with John Lennon: “We had a war in the newspapers.”