“Dear Jeremiah Tower,” is how my second letter of employment read. “Your salary will be $22,000 gross . . . and the starting date will be July 15, 1977.”
The Ventana Inn in Big Sur was a mess. Had I known how much, I would not have taken the job. But in that halcyon beginning, both the general manager, Lee Ivey, and I thought that a great American restaurant in the middle of several hundred California coastal acres—a wilderness of frozen vegetables and chefs salads—would bring us national attention and fill up the inn.
So I reread Beard’s massive American Cookery and set out to write the Great American Menu.
I dug out plans for a fruit and vegetable garden I had made in the late 1960s on the farm in Prides Crossing, Massachusetts, then looked my collection of American menus. The first I found was from the September 1959 “Southern Pacific Special Train” that took “Nikita Khrushchev and Mrs. Kruscheva” from Los Angeles to San Francisco: Caviar Frappé, Omelet with Walnut Jelly, Strip of Bacon, Fried Young Chicken, White Wine-Flavored Au Sec [sic], and so on. No wonder there was a Cold War! This was boarding school food, not what I knew America could do better, and a long cry from America’s first luxury train and its dining car, the Delmonico. I looked at a menu that René Verdon, chef for the Kennedys, had given me from the 1962 White House. The language was compromised French, like “Pommes Chipp,” but then I remembered the Kennedys and the day I was drinking Jack Daniel’s in my Boston “Champagne Palace” when Jack was shot, and put the menu aside.
Perhaps further back in the past was the clue to the future. A 1936 dinner menu from Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel began with the usual appetizer, a flat glass dish of celery and olives, as well as the ubiquitous first course, Grapefruit with Honey, broiled or not. Then the standard prime rib “au jus,” Virginia ham, “Broiled Half Spring Chicken,” and “Spiced Blue Plums.” It was a September menu with no hint of seasonality, so I put that aside as well.
A menu from the San Francisco Western Women’s Club in the midst of prewar rationing seemed more promising, though not with “Lemon Ring Salad with Seedless Grapes and Stuffed Figs,” which reminded me too much of my New England grandmother and her grape peeling. But “Sliced Avocado, French Dressing, Crab and Grapefruit Louis” seemed likely to please the rich ladies of Carmel and the Pebble Beach Club, and “Broiled Sweetbread au Beurre Noir, Crisp Bacon” would please the serious eaters.
A late 1930s souvenir menu from the SS Morazan of the Standard Fruit & Steamship Company (with my mother and sister aboard) encouraged me more with its Calf’s Brains Vinaigrette and Sauté of Lamb Kidneys. But it was a 1961 menu from the Montecito Room at the Clift hotel in San Francisco that sealed my determination to update the future with a bit of grace from the past. The food was pointedly seasonal, “Fresh Cracked Crab Now in Season,” and not a French word in sight. It included even “Grand Central Station Oyster Stew” ($1.75), for which I had always made a pilgrimage every time I visited New York. On the back it invited diners, “Mail this menu to a friend,” and paid the postage. An eminently stealable idea.
That was the past. Now I had to look around at the present. When Cecilia Chiang, America’s greatest Chinese restauratrice, told me that momentous things were afoot in Los Angeles, I knew I had to take the tour. It was early 1977, and her itinerary listed her new Mandarin, Mr. Chow, Le St. Germain, La Scala Boutique, Rex, Le Bistro, the Palm, Le Restaurant, L’Ermitage, Chaya, and Michael’s in Santa Monica. The black-and-white decor at Mr. Chow’s was daring; Rex was all homage to Art Deco; the Palm was interesting, but couldn’t hold a candle to New York steak houses; there was nothing new about the Italians; and the French restaurants were new only in that their owners were young, ambitious, and of a generation not quagmired in preconceptions. What were new, and already resonating with the drumbeat of revolution, were the restaurants created by young Americans steeped in the traditions of France yet just beginning to express their California background and lifestyle in food, attitude, and decor.
The three restaurants that in the late seventies gave birth to the “California” look were the West Beach Cafe in Venice, Michael Roberts’s Trumps, and Michael McCarty’s Michael’s in Santa Monica. The first was a single room, its bar featuring glass shelves that held fifty single-malt whiskeys and cognacs. It took my breath away, then breathed into me the courage to banish red plush “serious restaurant” forever. I loved the irony that the most avant-garde and trendsetting “first” hailed from that roller-skating little beach town named after an Italian city. I loved even more the stark white concrete decor that changed every few months depending on the arrangement of the sand sculpture around the dining room cornice. Sitting at its concrete bar waiting for my lunch guests to arrive, I felt immediately that this was going to be the new restaurant establishment look.
Trumps was pure Michael Roberts, insanely individual, almost uncomfortable in its concrete bunker style of cheeky chic, its menu in the new California colors of white and beige, ferociously spare in its English (“cold lobster pesto,” or “grilled swordfish”), the whole place daring in everything from its lack of flourish to its new Italian glassware.
Michael’s food was basically French bistro, but the interior and exterior were a new version of Mediterranean (Roger Vergé’s Moulin de Mougins) that was a whole new California style. At my first lunch, I had a grilled chicken with pommes frites and watercress that was the perfect spirit of French bistro cooking, but better than most in France could do it. The chef was the young, bushy-haired American Jonathan Waxman. Out front was Michael McCarty, in azure tie, slicked-back hair, and Susan Bennis–Warren Edwards ocelot loafer-slippers. The waiters, the umbrellas in the open garden, the curtains, the walls, the tablecloths, were the color of Michael’s suit—off-white toward cream. We sat at a garden table. Marion Cunningham was along and chattered away, but I could barely talk. Cecilia knew why: I was choked up by seeing and sitting in the future. These were the Young Turks of the moment.
I knew what I had to do, but jobless, first I had to make enough money to eat.
Richard Olney had written that he’d been hired for a Time-Life series called The Good Cook. The twenty volumes were to be heavily illustrated with how-to photo spreads, and to keep the costs down the recipes had to have been previously published and in the public domain. That meant surfing the last four centuries of cookbooks for material. The French and Italian recipes had to be translated, and all the recipes had to be usably formulated: Would I come to the South of France, look after his house whenever he was in London, and translate the old texts? I called him when the Ventana negotiations bogged down, and by April I was living with Richard, surrounded by dictionaries, lexicons, chickens, and an old Corona typewriter.
While translating old French cookbooks into English in his little farmhouse in Provence, I reveled in the local ingredients from the markets and the garden, cooked, ate out, and continued to plan the second great American seasonal menu. The first had been the Four Seasons’ in New York in 1959. So when I took a day off for lunch at Roger Vergé’s Michelin three-star Moulin de Mougins, it was one thirty on a boiling hot French Riviera Sunday. I was with my great Harvard College friend, John Sanger, and after some cool white wine we stared at the huge menu card and felt ill, amazed at the lack of attention to season. It was, in effect, a dinner menu for February. Was there nothing light, cold, refreshing, we asked? The waiters stared. Not even a salad? Non. John and I shared a grilled lobster because it was the closest thing to something cold. A chicken and foie gras terrine was superb—but foie gras should be outlawed in the South from May to September. After seeing the bill of $140 for two, I could not blame the poodle at the next table for biting the waiter when he served it a $40 lobster salad under the table.
The next morning, back at Richard’s house on the Solliès-Toucas hill, despite the insanity of the Mougins chefs putting sugar in their sauces, I felt unexpectedly nostalgic for the restaurant business. Since rumors were afoot that Richard was up to something and, for the first time in his life, in the chips, a flurry of the famous came through the little house on the hill an hour from Toulon. Naomi Barry, at the top of her form in Gourmet and the Herald Tribune, told me over a dinner of zucchini flowers stuffed with green fresh almonds, and the first bottle of Cheval-Blanc 1948, that I should go to New York to find my fortune. A week later the collector Mary Guggenheim, with the writers Édouard Roditi and Philippe Jullian, suggested Paris. The novelist Sybille Bedford, over several bottles of Krug, said I should try London. Over a lunch of oysters and “pourpres,” Michael James of Robert Mondavi Cooking School fame and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking coauthor Simone “Simca” Beck said nothing that wasn’t petulant. Julia was without any advice at all. I wrote the general manager of Ventana and said that I was hot, tired, and mentally exhausted after two days of Simca, Richard, Julia Child, English writers, unbelievable Côte d’Azur rich lesbians, and U.S. Cuisinart salesmen, but ready to return. Then Richard said I should forget the whole terrible nonsense of running a restaurant and live with him. I said I might have if I were not already in a relationship with Gregg, whom I was desperate to get back to. I was going back to California and to Gregg. “First,” Richard said over the phone from London, “join me here in London, meet the Time-Life editors, and apply for the job of creating The Good Cook with me.”
In London, my pal Rudolf Nureyev said I should live with a dancer, which was the only sane if impossible advice I received until Elizabeth David advised me to have another glass of white wine. “Oh dear,” she said, “oh dear,” her voice trailing off into memories of when she was young and beautiful. “If you must” (go back to restaurants), she went on, “let’s go and look at Boulestin’s. Perhaps you could revive that. And the original Dufy’s murals, even if a bit faded, are very pretty.”
I have hardly ever been as happy as when having lunch with Elizabeth. Not so much because of the restaurants of choice, in which anything could go wrong and the hours could be filled with more “Oh dears” than eating, but because the conversations, which would come to life after the second glass of wine and continue until she’d called it quits in her Chelsea kitchen at around seven in the evening, were spectacular.
Mention of James Beard elicited two further “oh dears” before a long pause and the observation, “He could be very sweet, but what about all those rather louche boys?” Certainly there had been enough queens in her life—that was not the point. It was more about Jim’s scholarship: could he really concentrate on the culinary matters at hand, she wondered, while obsessing about rent (as she saw them) boys? Was there perhaps just too much of Oscar in Beard?
Of Alice she said, “She does mean well,” while wondering aloud why, if Alice regarded her as the first inspiration for Chez Panisse, she’d never actually bothered to contact her? But Elizabeth was flattered that someone should pay her such homage for so long. She was far from ungrateful, and a couple of years later, while visiting her friend Gerald Asher, the wine writer for Gourmet magazine, in San Francisco, she met Alice and became very fond of her.
Before Elizabeth came to know Richard Olney well, his name would provoke an “Oh dear” and a very long silence. In the beginning she thought Richard a bit bombastic and a snob about wines. She hated his restaurant scenes, when invariably he would call the waiter over and ask him to ice down the red wine. One Sunday summer afternoon in the London Ritz dining room it was a 1947 Cheval-Blanc. He was quite right to, since its temperature was of the too-warm dining room rather than hotel’s cellar. Later, when the great wines flowed and flowed, she became more tolerant, but did stop going to restaurants with him and insisted we cook for her at our apartment on London’s Conduit Street, across from Hermès.
After a long Saturday lunch at that flat, I would take Elizabeth home at five and we would dig into quite a lot of Chablis to reestablish her sense of reality. Both of us would feel a tiny bit guilty as I got up to open the third bottle, but Elizabeth would inevitably sigh, “Well, if we must.” Then we would continue talking about whatever latest scholarship possessed her. Perhaps how the Romans transported ice to chill their creams, and did I know anything about New England icehouses? Did Richard as a boy really have chilled oysters brought in by train as late as May in Marathon, Iowa?
I adored her.
It was time to go only when we both got teary-eyed over some past and improperly forgotten glory—such as restaurant service in the fifties, or how a real sole Colbert or côtelette Milanese should be cooked. Then she would wipe away the ever-rebellious strands of wispy gray hair, her Garboesque former beauty now glorious only in its suggestions of past magnificence, and lift to my face her robin’s egg blue eyes, now clouding over with fatigue and old age. As I kissed her good night, my heart would break at the delicious sadness of her brilliant mind in a body so gracefully tendered into frailty.
Back in Richard’s house in France, alone and consoled with a twenty-year-old Côte Rotie and whole fat-encased lamb kidneys, flavored with wild thyme from the Provencal hillside above the house, and cooked very slowly in earthenware in the embers of the kitchen fire, I thought sadly of the ingredients I had been used to. Nothing in California could match the South of France, and the best was in Southern California. Could I live in Los Angeles? I thought not.
The next morning, over a plate of Tunisian oranges sprinkled with sage-flower sugar, a double cafe au lait, and a baguette tartine slathered with Normandy butter and wild fig jam, I wondered why I would ever leave France. But I wrote a list of food to serve at Ventana, even if we had to grow our own.
Suggestions for a Big Sur Lunch Menu
Virginia ham with California fruits
Smoked local Big Sur trout
A devastating green salad with our own fresh herbs, and herb flowers
“Fruit salads” with sauces like watermelon vinaigrette
BBQ Monterey Bay jumbo prawns
Chicken and pheasant hash
Paso Robles peaches in local red wine
Shad roe on toast
Chicken pie Delmonico
Wild boar, walnut vinaigrette
Scrambled eggs with sweetbreads
Macadamia nut cream pie
Cathy Simon’s Blackbottom pie
It was mid-1977, and California was calling. I missed Gregg and had to get back to get on with my life. My French life of old Rhônes, a perfect butcher in the village owned by the “Mouton” sisters, five-dollar white wine made by local priests, original Piaf records at four in the morning as the mistral blew through the terrace’s cork-beaded curtains (each cork a memory of a perfect meal), Richard in sweat-soaked and revealing gardening bikinis—none of these could delay my return. Back in Berkeley I packed up Alice’s old house where I had lived and filled the car with wine and cat. Gregg and I drove to Big Sur.
The three of us moved into the little cabin on the highway, the hundred-year-old Pfeiffer homestead, of an original landowning Big Sur family. From the beginning it was filled with the feelings of Big Sur, which, stories of UFOs and ghostly magnetic fields aside, is one of the most magical and spiritual places on earth. No matter what horrors happened up in the restaurant, the mornings on the back porch with my Earl Grey tea in the light of the rising sun reflecting on the honey-colored hills, looking at my usually spooky Abyssinian cat now cross-eyed with contentment, were as happy as any this side of France. If up at the restaurant I felt like a UFO myself, in the cottage I never felt more at home.
My Mexican restaurant staff was a godsend, their jefe a dream. But even then I needed help. Ventana’s restaurant in the summer was a seven-day-a-week 250-seater, serviced by a three-man cook team. The bad habits that had set in after a long period of neglect could hardly be eradicated by one person. Then there was the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s habit of rushing in at the busiest times and sending the Mexican cooks scattering into the fields below, their white hats high in the air and aprons fluttering after them—all very amusing to the guests, until they figured out the relationship between disappearing cooks and nonappearing food.
In addition to preparing the menus, I oversaw the inn’s and the store’s baked goods from our shared pastry shop down the hill. This little fiefdom, like the rest of the operation, saw me only as a disturber of the old ways. Nothing I could do would convince the pastry chef to get rid of the cream fillings that needed no refrigeration for months on end. I was desperate. Marion Cunningham, in a break from washing Beard’s feet, offered to help. She sent me three ideas on a piece of foolscap paper: rhubarb with crème anglaise, a rhubarb ring with strawberries, and baked bananas. The American public then wouldn’t touch rhubarb, and I hadn’t gone near the smell of cooking bananas since my time on that Italian ship from Australia. Hearing Marion’s ideas, Beard snorted, “Well, my dear, she’s great at cookies.” From then on Marion would be known to us as “Cookie.”
I called Panisse and a few friends and begged for help right after I started. To my surprise, everyone showed up, with Alice leading the caravan. Then the sensible ones decamped after a week. Only my old pal and sous chef Willy remained. He had as much disdain as I did for the man who claimed to be the owner, but Willy stayed on.
After one of Pebble Beach’s richest women refused anything but chef’s salad made with the frozen canned ham loaf and cheese muck that I had inherited from the previous kitchen administration, I had a talk with the general manager. Not from this chef, I told him. But my confidence was shaken. Together we reviewed the rest of my original menu ideas:
Excellent steaks (a ranch connection in Santa Barbara)
All grilling to be done on wood or real charcoal
Vodka in a block of ice—small individual bottles
Aquavit the same way (do our own herring)
All fruit and vegetable juices done to order at the bar
Lillet with champagne
Juleps
Fiuggi water only
I was getting carried away, I told him, so went back to the grilled food:
Roast duck with Big Sur blackberries and green walnuts
California real chicken with Napa Valley olives
Braised beef cheeks finished in the wood oven
Charcoal grilled tuna steaks with our fresh herb butters
Live trout from Garrapata Creek
Oysters out of our tank, on a bed of ice, with our own lemons
Deviled venison ribs
A wonderful boiled dinner, beef, chicken, and duck, vegetables, pork belly, little cornmeal dumplings
Parsnip cakes with watercress salad
Pigs’ feet or sheep trotters on johnnycakes
Whole fish grilled over wild fennel branches and rosemary Smoked Big Sur lamb
Bread and butter pudding with pears
Syllabubs
Turtle Cay bananas in rum with mango ice cream
Tangerine sherbet served in the fruit
“And let’s change the menu every two months, and do the breakfasts with everything raised on the property—the honey, the jams, stone-ground flours, Indian cakes. And espresso machines in every room. I realize this is only a list and not menus. It’s New American food, and sometimes Californian.”
“Let’s go for it again,” Lee Ivey said. We did, and almost everyone hated the food. I lasted less than a year in 1977.
But there was one menu left in me before I took my American menu on the road again. Beard was in San Francisco, and I invited him down for a dinner in his honor.
A Dinner for James Beard, at Ventana, Big Sur, California
January 7, 1978
Perrier-Jouët “Flower Bottle” 1971
Seafood Service with Crayfish
Paiusnaya Caviar Blini
Consommé of Big Sur Chanterelles
Petaluma Pheasant Salad
Chappellet Chardonnay 1974
Steamed Whole Fresh Périgord Truffles and Potatoes
Chateau Haut-Brion 1970
Wild Herb-Roasted Wisconsin Veal Loin
Chalone Pinot Noir 1971
Fresh & Aged Lafler Canyon Goat Cheeses
Troisgros “Opus Incertum”
Monterey Vineyard Botrytis Sauvignon Blanc 1974
Entrance of the Mandarins
Delamain Très Vieux Cognac du Grande
Champagne Corti Single Vintage Cognac Selections
Among the group of twelve were Alice Waters in Victorian black lace, a black ribbon at her throat holding a gardenia; Marion Cunningham in denim; an impeccable Cecilia Chiang in Mandarin clothes, pearls, and emeralds; and Darrell Corti in English tweeds. Jim loomed large next to Emile Norman, who, I had told Jim, had introduced me to the glories of drinking great wine, naked, in the countryside of Big Sur.
The tables were set with big glass globes full of water holding goldfish and sprays of cymbidium orchids. The “Entrance of the Mandarins” was an homage to Cecilia Chiang. To the overture of Coppelia we wheeled in a live orange tree covered with mandarin oranges hanging from gold wires. The waiters snipped the wires with fruit shears, and presented each guest with an orange filled with a sorbet made from its own juice.
The gesture caught the breath of the guests, and the eyes of Ventana bugged. Now they thought I was truly mad. Later, when I posted the gushing letters of thanks from the famous, Lee and I were heroes.
No letter was as warmly written as the note from Alice.
“I will never forget a single moment,” she wrote. She told me that every moment of the meal was unforgettable, and none so much as the moment when Darrell Corti read from my copy of the Lucien Tendret book the story of overindulgent nuns and their craving for crayfish. Alice loved the sea urchins, the taste of the sea in the mussels, and the fact that the caviar on the blini was so thick she could hardly see the little pancakes. She loved the entrance of the mandarin tree, and wondered, looking into what she said were my “sad, Escoffier eyes,” what that look was all about.
I hoped Jim Beard would do for Ventana what he had done for Panisse, but we both knew it was too late. The ship had started leaking badly before I got there, and then a few weeks later a fire burned most of the countryside and nearly the inn. As the huge walls of flame approached over the ridgeline, Gregg and I packed, the car engine running, the cat screaming at the prospect of leaving paradise. But the flames stopped on the ridge a few hundred yards above the cottage. When the rains followed the fire and washed out what was left of the village and our supply route from Carmel, the charm of the countryside turned to nightmare, given the inn’s nonexistent cash flow and unpaid bank loans.
I knew it was time to go.
Four days later Richard Olney called from London and Time-Life. He could not handle both the photography studio cooking and the writing for The Good Cook series now that a book was due every two months. Would I come to London to cook? I felt that travel itch again.