Back in San Francisco I went to see the site, that of a very run-down restaurant called Bacchini’s in the scary Civic Center part of town that only we believed would be great again. The owner of the space was polite, if skeptical because I wasn’t Italian, and was, he seemed to think, too young to be taken seriously. Never mind that when I walked into the restaurant on its last day of business, it was so dark after the strong California sun outside that I tripped over the potted plants and fell into a jungle of plastic leaves and fronds. As I picked myself off the floor, a covey of Sicilian “businessmen” rolled off their bar stools and turned to me, eyes rock still. The only noise in the vast room was the sound of the owner’s artificial leg scraping against the once-plush carpet, now slick with decades of grime. No expense had been spared when the restaurant was built in 1961, but it took a starry-eyed optimist to see even a trace of that grandeur now.
Yet I was breathless, and not just from the air, which hadn’t been clean-filtered in twenty years. It was the perfection of the setting. When my eyes grew used to the dark interior, I saw not the swarms of cockroaches eating the grease in the kitchen or the dirt-encrusted walls, but a perfect stage setting for a grand American brasserie. I envisioned a place evoking the staying power of Delmonico’s and Rector’s, the food of Le Pavillon, and the ease and comfort of San Francisco mahogany-lined restaurants like Jack’s, Sam’s, and Tadich, but with new air tinged with the cordite smell of the California food revolution. I saw it all as I dreamed of how to make again the powerful synergy between restaurants and freshly harvested ingredients, just as Delmonico’s had done with its own truck garden in New Jersey in the nineteenth century.
I signed an option on the lease to lock it up for the six months it would take to get money and get it going. Two years of wooing, gaining, and losing investors in places as far-flung as Alexandria, Virginia, New York, Boston, and Florida followed. Wherever I went I asked for money. I took any job that came along, continuing my stint with the Good Cook series. Along the road I gave parties for Eartha Kitt and Geoffrey Holder’s rich friends and sponsors, for the younger sons of mainland Chinese warlords laundering money in the restaurant business, and for anyone else. To pay for the lunches and dinners, I said yes to any invitation to do cooking classes. The most lucrative were at Carol Steele’s cookware store in Scottsdale, Arizona; the most fun with the bored of New York in Nantucket; and the best with Ken Hom in Berkeley.
In 1978 Ken Hom was a long way from the Independent magazine’s 2001 description of him as “a Buddhist monk in Gucci shoes.” He was no monk, not by a long shot, and was barely getting by, totally unrecognized as one of the best cooks in America.
To make ends meet, he gave cooking lessons in his Berkeley house. We used to cook together, his Franco-Chinese and my Franco-Californian food side by side. In 1977 he began teaching at the California Culinary Academy, from where some pupils went on to great success, among them Chicago’s famous chef Charlie Trotter. Ken was a Chinese traditionalist, “fresh” meaning killing chickens in the kitchen, but a modernist as he combined other cuisines’ principles with his Chinese. In 1979, when Belle Rhodes, involved in public relations for Robert Mondavi and Joseph Phelps wineries, suggested that we do some classes together in Napa, we agreed with enthusiasm.
She named the four days “East Meets West,” an oft-used phrase now, but a first and original at the time. She invited local and national press, a few bankers (for my new-restaurant fund-raising), cooks from Panisse, and the cream of Napa Valley “society.”
The first dish started off as planned, but then I coveted Ken’s Asian ingredients. And Ken coveted my Western ingredients right back. I took some fermented Chinese black beans for the wilted curly endive salad. He took my fresh herbs, vegetable purees, and extra-virgin olive oil. By the end of the first day, we were filching each other’s mise en place at a furious rate, and the students were as fascinated as we were.
The second-day menu morphed into cooking that no one had seen before, unless one had been to Richard Wing’s surreal Imperial Dynasty in the Central Valley town of Hanford, where the menu featured things like tripe consommé garnished with various glandular parts of slaughtered-to-order Chinese frogs. Ken and I kept to the dishes on our list, but the printed recipes were virtually useless except to see the variations on our themes.
Fish and Shellfish
Jeremiah |
Ken |
Fish Stew with Artichokes |
Sweet and Sour Cod with Fruit |
Sea Urchin Soufflé |
Scallion Steamed Fish |
Bouillabaisse |
Sizzling Rice Shrimp |
Zephyrs of Perale Sole |
Blue Crabs |
My bouillabaisse turned into a fish stew with whatever was on the table, adding a flourish of Ken’s sizzling shrimp. Ken set my artichokes and foie gras on his steamed fish, and some of the strawberries ended up in the sweet and sour cod. And so on it went. The next day he put his squab in puff pastry and I found a use for his noodle cakes. At the end of the last class, Belle said, “Jeremiah, something amazing happened here. Something really has now changed forever.”
One student spoke for all: “There was a time when I would have been totally intimidated because I didn’t have a specific recipe to follow. Now it’s just a pleasure to watch them work and learn new rules.” The San Francisco Examiner’s Harvey Steiman opened his account with a boxing ring metaphor, with Ken in one corner and me in the other: “At the sound of the bell, Tower starts applying the techniques of Carême, Escoffier, and the French housewife. Hom uses the centuries-old methods of Chinese chefs—and housewives.” It was an exploration of a spur-of-the-moment “market-basket” approach to cooking and menu making. In “the battle of the ducks, no winner was declared.”
FINDING MY TEAM
My foie gras was not covered by our rather minimal food budget, so after the Napa event I was broke again. In the nick of time came a call from my friend Ron Batori, dean of the California Culinary Academy. Would I provide an antidote to their usual European classical recipes and worn-out techniques? I would have total freedom. Ken had horrified the students by blowing up chickens’ butts before killing them in the open kitchen. After that precedent, he said, anything goes.
After I toured the academy’s kitchens, I called Ron back, shocked by all the carts piled high with five-gallon tins of Maggi stock and powdered sauce bases, as well as the frightening canapés covered with industrial gelatin, made Tuesday to be served on Friday. What was that about? I told him the air was thick as a skunk’s den with old-guard Swiss and German professional jealousy and suspicion when I walked in. Perhaps, I said, he didn’t want me making trouble.
“That is exactly what I do want,” he said. “Just don’t kill any chickens!”
As far as I knew, the students were satisfied with their old Swiss masters and their mummified canapés. An obvious place to find out was to start with ingredients and their benchmarks. In the first class I explained that new techniques in air transportation guaranteed arrival in the marketplace in good condition, and that these changes were a challenge to completely rethink the concepts of “fresh,” “local,” and “quality.” Fresh fish in San Francisco had always meant from the bay or outside the Golden Gate. Now, I told them, after local storms keep the boats at sea, that fish is three days old. At that same time, Norwegian farm salmon could be only eighteen hours from their water to our kitchens. So “quality” had new boundaries now that “local” did not now always mean “fresh.”
I took them to a new San Francisco import company that with my encouragement was now bringing in fresh European ingredients such as mascarpone, buffalo milk mozzarella, and real Reggiano Parmesan. Next were blind tastings of beer, rum, chocolate, whiskey, cheese, pepper, coffee, bottled water, dried meat, smoked fish, and every possible oil coming in from France, Spain, and Italy. Each student had a form on which to grade each product according to appearance, color, odor, taste, and overall quality. All were astonished by the results. Before we blind-tasted the beers, I asked them to name their favorite. “Budweiser!” came the resounding cheer. Not when they couldn’t see the label. Much to their horror, 85 percent preferred the Czech Pilsner Urquell and put Bud last.
At Panisse I showed them dessert wines and taught them that the dessert must always be less sweet than the wine served with it if the wine is not to taste sour. With Darrell Corti we tasted single-cask cognac and whiskies against blended ones. With the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook’s author, Linda Guenzel, we tasted chocolate. That became the ultimate lesson in quality and why one shouldn’t mind paying more for it. The differences between Hershey’s and Lindt was profound. The Swiss chocolate was “conched” 40 percent more than its American counterpart, making it smoother, richer, and much more satisfying. And clearly worth the extra cost. When the students found they could easily taste the difference between a mass-produced product and a hand-crafted one, they were willing to accept that excellence is not just a personal “matter of taste,” that one can commonly perceive and measure a standard that can be agreed upon as “the best.”
Now that we were ready to cook I imported the ingredients I needed, all new to the commercial marketplace: extra-virgin olive oil, nut and grape seed oils, cured meats like bündnerfleisch, gravlax, and smoked salmon, real Roquefort, goat and Val d’Aosta fontina cheeses, red and green peppercorns and real saffron, fresh herbs, salad greens, white veal, haricots verts, snow and snap peas, radicchio and Treviso, American caviars, fresh paprika, Belgian endive, fresh ginger, fresh Asian vegetables and spices, ripe heirloom-variety tomatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, sherry and balsamic vinegars, fresh tuna, yellow bell peppers, foie gras, wild mushrooms, truffles, or fresh and great quality dried pasta. With these ingredients in hand at the beginning of 1980 we cooked the following dishes for the public at the academy’s restaurant:
1980 California Culinary Academy
Salmon tartare with deep fried salmon skin and chive flowers
Tricolored bell pepper salad with crayfish sauce and tails
Baby green bean salad with Treviso, whitefish and steelhead caviars
Buckwheat pasta with goat cheese and onion flowers
Bayonne ham with ripe farmers’ market figs
Provimi veal carpaccio with fresh ginger, salted anchovies, and Key limes
Grilled squab with fresh raspberry vinegar
Sole “fingers” with Muscat Beaumes-de-Venise
Salmon stew with Szechuan pepper, artichokes, and kombu
Grilled duck with blackberries, cloudberries, blueberries, and Jerusalem artichokes
Duck with mangoes and fresh lychees
Fresh albacore with Mexican limes, avocados, and grilled red torpedo onions
Santa Barbara white peach salad with basil and rose peppercorns
Unlike at Ventana, the food we cooked was a big success with the public and, more important for me, with the academy’s main benefactor. When I accepted the job I was not unaware that Cyril Magnin was also the Bay Area’s richest and most influential man. Would this legendary food lover fall in love with the idea of a great American brasserie? Ron Batori thought so. He made the introduction, and Magnin was taken with the proposal. He especially loved the thought of saving millions in labor costs by using CCA students in the kitchen. I chose twenty of my best students, made them my executives, drew up a staff list, and called the bank with the good news.
Then Cyril Magnin died.
Once more I was staring unwilling bankers in the face. And more teaching.
FROM UDDER, TO BUTTER, TO CHEESE, TO THE FINAL DISH
In October 2015 I was fascinated to read on Facebook a posting by Randy D. Adler: “I have [Tower’s] memoir [but]. . . . so many don’t realize how much he contributed to the farm to table/locally sourced movement. His book California Dish is must read. . . . You go Jeremiah Tower.” But in 1979 I was still looking for a farm.
And fascinated to read a letter to me on the Fourth of July of that year from John Ronsheim, a professor of music at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. “Richard Olney has suggested that I contact you. Finally I got the faculty to accept that I prepare the College for a new program to give a B.F.A. in the Culinary Arts. It will be the first.”
It took my breath away to think one could get a degree while working on a farm that provided ingredients for a college dining room: what a departure from the diet of bread-margarine-marmalade at my English boarding school, the chipped beef in flour sauce on Wonder rusks at my New England prep school, and the lime Jell-O with bacon and marshmallows at Harvard!
I knew this Antioch idea could be the beginning of a national awareness about food in all parts of our lives, and I was convinced that school food, no matter how young the students, was the place to start. Since Panisse, America had learned that California no longer meant a Pebble Beach Club Salad of canned peaches and cottage cheese, and the press had trumpeted the idea that the movement had meaning for the whole country and its national culinary identity. Restaurant work no longer needed an apology. After the Young Turks of France found international fame, and soon the young ones in California, it was not much longer a second-class profession. Now it would have a place in serious academic thought as well as being the foundation of training for the trade in grade and high schools all over America. Students could summer intern at Antioch, learning to grow what they cooked and ate.
I called John Ronsheim and told him I had visions of my favorite eighteenth-century architect, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, who spent his life designing the “ideal town” of Chaux. Perhaps we could have a modest “ideal town” of our own, with working farms where students could track a single ingredient—say, milk, from udder to butter to cheese to the final restaurant dish. Ohio would become just as prolific in perfect ingredients as the Ile-de-France. Perhaps, I went on, we could do everything from reproducing Thomas Jefferson’s kitchen garden and vineyards, or Louis XVI’s private dining room to teach service, to serving thousands of students three times a day. Even mad John was quiet on the other end of the phone.
“Couldn’t we just start with making wine?”
The Antioch staff was scared half to death, but I wrote everyone in the United States, Italy, and France who I thought would be interested enough to raise money, drew up the board of advisers, and created a budget. I set up files on experiments such as the new Picart Snail Factory in Santa Rosa, California, and Aquatic Farms for oysters raised on land in Maui’s Waihee Valley.
In February 1980, John’s letters to me struggled with questions such as “Does Mimi Sheraton pose a problem?—call Jim Beard.” I did. He said she did. “Madeleine Kamman—great response. Has Alice Waters asked Coppola?” At a West Coast meeting, Janet Trefethen gave a dinner and I presented the board of fifty-one I’d recruited, which included Jim Beard (reluctantly), Joseph Baum (founder of Restaurant Associates and the Four Seasons restaurant in New York), Craig Claiborne (New York Times restaurant critic), Darrell Corti, Elizabeth David, Sybille Bedford, M. F. K. Fisher, Gael Greene (restaurant critic for New York magazine), Pierre Franey (partner with Craig Claiborne), Barbara Kafka (cookbook author and restaurant consultant), Jane Grigson, Robert Mondavi, Richard Olney (“The art of the table will be very much at home with the Humanities, and this program cannot help but rapidly influence and humanize the food of America”), Joseph Phelps (of his Napa winery), James Villas (Town & Country), Chuck Williams (Williams-Sonoma), Hugh Johnson (English wine writer), Cecilia Chiang, and Sri Owen (English cookbook author). Jane Grigson wrote, “I think your idea of connecting the source with the final dish is admirable.”
John and I organized the 1980 East Coast Meeting at the “21” Club for the board. The meal was to have been sponsored by the club, but ended up as a two-thousand-dollar tab handed to me by the headwaiter. Now my funds were as exhausted as I was. I told John that we could not keep up the pace and money required to get this off the ground on one coast, let alone two. But the idea had been launched. The Antioch East and West fifty-one-member Culinary Arts Advisory Board evaporated, but it soon reentered existence as the American Institute of Wine & Food, a name that took at least a case of Dick Graff’s (founder and chairman of Chalone Vineyard) Chalone chardonnay for a small group to decide whether it should be “food and wine” or “wine and food.”
There is a moment in all revolutions when the bureaucrats take over. With Robespierres on the horizon I decided to bow out. I handed over the reins to Dick Graff and Julia Child, both of whom had a great deal more tolerance for such bureaucratic perambulations than I did. And sources of funds.
Dick had the machinery to get a business going, including Chalone’s San Francisco offices and a private Cessna to fly south to meet Julia and the provost of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Julia had convinced the provost to donate some campus land to the institute near her “winter headquarters.” The site we picked smelled of the crude oil spillages just offshore, but it was free and on the beach. As I enthused about bringing La Jolla’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography into the organization, some of the board members began to look at me the way John Ronsheim had the year before. When my negotiations began in earnest in 1978 for a San Francisco restaurant site, I was relieved to be out of the world of food politics and back in the familiar territory of cooking.
Enough people did stick around to keep the organization alive, especially the wealthier wineries of Napa Valley, led by Lila Jaeger of Rutherford Hill Winery. The institute went on to promote and celebrate American gastronomy, and was a necessary first step for two formations: the James Beard Foundation (a center for showcasing emerging chefs in the United States) in New York, and the Robert Mondavi culinary center in Napa.
SERENDIPITY (AT FIRST)
In 1978, while I was teaching at the California Culinary Academy, Mark Miller, who had been one of my sous chefs at Panisse, opened the Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley with the former Panisse hostess Susie Nelson. It was a smash hit. Heady with success, the pair opened another restaurant up the road in the old Santa Fe Railroad Station and called it the Santa Fe Bar & Grill. Another hit at first. It’s Bar & Grill name was a bow to traditional San Francisco restaurants like Tadich and Sam’s, but its location was an area more comfortable for prostitutes and drug dealers from Oakland than for Volvo drivers from the upper Berkeley hills.
One night right after the opening, I was sitting at the Fourth Street bar trying out their margaritas and lamenting the paucity of investors for my restaurant when Susie—whom I had once approached to be part of the new restaurant but who had grown tired of waiting for me to get the financing—gave me a lead. “Why not talk to Doyle Moon, our new partner in the Santa Fe,” she said. “He has money and knows the bar business,” she added, referring to his once hugely successful Balboa Cafe in San Francisco.
The Balboa was located in the singles bar battleground off Union Street called the “Bermuda Triangle” after so many customers’ girlfriends had disappeared into the arms of other men (or women). But now the Balboa had reached a state of neglect where no one cared who disappeared, gone from being packed with singles to being half-empty with people who always would be. I called Doyle Moon. He said if I wanted access to his bankers and credit line, I would have to give the Balboa a quick fix.
THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE
The Balboa Cafe had been one of the first “fern bars” after the legendary Henry Africa’s years before, and I found the look and smell of vintage testosterone stuck in dark corners. The food was somehow hamburgers and Iranian food operator. The bar was stale and tired. The “fix” obviously meant freshen, so on the first day, in 1979, I showed up with my car full of flowers. Within an hour I had free-form English “country” arrangements now seen everywhere but then had the few die-hards at the daytime bar immediately proclaiming “sissy” and “faggoty.” No worries, I told them, wait till you see what’s next! I installed women bartenders (“treason,” “queer,” “they must be dykes”), white tablecloths on the tables (“too fancy”), and long white aprons on the waiters (“effeminate”).
Soon the disapproving bar hounds were gone, replaced by the likes of socialite Ann Getty and her friends eating hamburgers and pasta next to actors, real estate moguls, and restaurant workers on their day off. On any afternoon, you could hear the two or three regulars who refused to decamp giving anyone who’d listen their admiring appraisal of the day’s flowers and taking credit for the idea of female bartenders. We’d succeeded.
After nine months, just as everyone was getting bored, things came to a boil across the bay. Doyle and another Balboa partner were owners of half the Santa Fe Bar & Grill. Known to Doyle but not to me, the Santa Fe Bar & Grill was broke as well as under surveillance by the Alcohol Control Board. Oakland dealers were ensconced at the bar drinking free Baileys Irish Cream and selling drugs and firearms. Loss of liquor license, foreclosure, and arrests were imminent.
Within minutes of waring calls from the bank and another from the control board, Doyle and I were in his new BMW speeding across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley. My queries about our destination and mission were answered with uncharacteristic coyness by this Apache in Hugo Boss. When Doyle pulled off the freeway into University Avenue, on which I had driven for years to Panisse, my stomach turned. But when he pulled into the parking lot of the Santa Fe, I knew it was another fixer: save it or kiss the bankers good-bye.
I nearly threw up in the parking lot.
THE SLIM CHANCE
My horror yielded to mixed emotions as soon as I walked in. My fatal attraction to underdog, once-beautiful spaces kicked in. Like that of Black Beauty, the restaurant’s body was racked by neglect and cruelty, but the soul was still there. I was charmed. Just as I had never been able to resist the allure of a neglected but once-great garden, I was challenged. Tired and unfiltered air, walls and carpets stained with grime, peeling paint: all could be easily dealt with. As could the coke dealers at the bar. They were not like the first rather jolly dealer at Panisse’s third birthday party, who took to my rose champagne like a fish to water. These guys were grabbing shot glasses of Goldwasser and Amaretto in hands heavy with gold.
There was no time for pleasantries. The Balboa was making money now with my makeover, and Crocker Bank had confirmed to Doyle that if I cleaned up the Santa Fe, we’d get a $350,000 loan for the new restaurant. Crocker was calling the shots. As we stood in the bar surveying the situation, Doyle told me Crocker wanted the place redone ready for the Berkeley-Stanford football game, and its guaranteed cash flow, four days from that moment.
“Get them out of here,” I told the bartender, nodding my head toward the gold.
How had I gotten here, on the end of yet another banker’s strings? Every moneyman I’d ever cooked for had so far told me I had “no track record”—including the ones who’d wanted special favors at Panisse, or the married banker staying at Ventana Inn who wanted discretion regarding the young men in his free suite. That day at the Balboa, thinking of clearing out the restaurant, was one of life’s lonely moments. Would I instead do the healthy thing and walk out the door? Or stay, following my troublesome preference for the slim chance? It was midafternoon in a near-empty restaurant: a good time to act, if I was going to. My gut told me I was dealing with the Devil & Company, but I was willing to make that bargain if I could just get on with my own San Francisco restaurant.
“We’ll have to close the restaurant now!”
“Fine,” said Doyle.
I told the thugs at the bar that the restaurant was now closed. Then I told the staff to be out in ten minutes and to come back the next day to reapply for their jobs. Then I called a locksmith. I called my best students at the academy. I opened a bottle of champagne Grande Dame. Within an hour we had new locks and keys, and my students had assembled. “We have a date with destiny,” I told them—a better line than the one I was actually thinking, which was “Welcome to the final circle of Dante’s hell.”
That was the Tuesday in November before Saturday’s game, Berkeley’s biggest day. Ideally we would reopen on Friday to catch the first wave of fans.
The next morning at the staff meeting, after an all-night setting, suddenly I couldn’t walk—muscle cramping, brought on by the tension of having to come up with the outline of restaurant and bar menu and philosophy. The cooks made a massage table from the bar tables. From there I addressed the wide-eyed new staff.
“WE OPEN IN THREE DAYS”
“And I want to finish what I started at Ventana, continued at the California Culinary Academy, and lay the foundation for a great American brasserie.”
“What about the Southwest?” someone piped up. “We have the name ‘Santa Fe’ and an Indian Santa Fe Superchief logo. Won’t the public expect chilies?”
Thank God for my mother, I told them, and all those Sunday morning huevos rancheros and chiles rellenos. If she could, in the thirties, drive from Connecticut to Mexico City with my two older siblings in a Model A Ford, I could conjure up all my childhood Mexican food and barbecues in Australia at my parents’ friends’ hacienda.
The allusions confused everyone.
For the food, I told them to remember the dinner that Mark Miller had done for the Académie Internationale du Vin and Richard Olney a couple of months earlier at the Chalone Vineyard. That meal, cooked outside and served on white-clothed tables on top of a wilderness mountain, was southwestern-infused yet truly Californian in style, the next generation after my California Regional Dinner of 1976.
“And we,” I said, “will create the generation after that.”
As for the facilities, they could be surmounted, I told them, feeling a bit like the commander of the fleet in Sink the Bismarck who encouraged his staff in the face of impossible odds.
“Is it going to be that bad?” they asked.
I recounted one of our most delirious moments: when my Balboa cooks and some CCA students had prepared an elaborate dinner in San Francisco’s de Young museum without any facilities at all. It was a fund-raiser to create the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra of the West. The museum had promised us a back room and kitchen, then made us work on the floor of a corridor filled with priceless twelfth-to fourteenth-century triptychs. I got the go signal a half hour ahead of schedule, when my cooks were all in the parking lot taking a last-minute break before service. It fell to me to make 250 salads by myself. I was madly tossing the contents of four twenty-quart bowls when I heard a gasp from three cooks who’d just walked in and looked up to see leaves of baby lettuce and rivers of vinaigrette rolling down tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Flemish altar paintings.
“Get a towel, say nothing, and plate the fucking salads now.”
The seventeenth-century dinner was a triumph, and we hadn’t, somehow, altered the course of Bay Area art history.
I hoped that this sermon would inspire the staff and give the hosts a sound bite for the public when they came in the door for the first time. But it seemed to be making things worse. Finally my star pupil, Mark Franz, said, “Let’s just cook good, simple food, and not make fools of ourselves.” That put a lid on my ramblings. Everyone understood and knew what to do.
Lawyers representing other partners showed up the next day, but I told the staff not to bother with them. We had menus to write. And since the reality is always determined by the layout of the kitchen, we set about analyzing the setup, how many people it would allow to cook at one time, and what kind of food we could do in quantity without compromising quality.