The kitchen layout was the kind that came from the original owners’ initial budget of close to zero: nowhere near enough space to plate cold first courses, and there was an obstacle course to run with the hot ones. This was not going to be pretty. The grill was a monster, six feet long by three feet deep, guzzling twenty-five pounds of mesquite charcoal at a time. If you were slightly crazy and a firebug, you could cook fifteen or twenty orders of fish and meat at once. Steven Vranian was the man to do it, unfazed by multiple burns along his forearm flesh from being sizzled on the grill’s front (a sound you could hear over the noise of the kitchen), and sanguine about the .22-caliber bullets that occasionally exploded in the charcoal and shot his way. The waiters became adept at ducking without dropping plates—the knowledge that bullets travel faster than sound perhaps mercifully repressed.
We all felt charmed. Young and untouchable.
There was neither time nor space for advanced sauce making, so we opted for salsas and simple compound butters that took no time to do and could be made at the last minute. Their beauty was that if we ran out of Key limes for a lime-cilantro-cumin butter, there were always tangerines or mandarins or Meyer lemons, dipped in mint oil and rolled around on the grill to toast the oils in the skins before throwing them into the food processor with butter, salt, and chilies or pepper. As for salsas, we started with the fresca of tomatoes, red onion, cilantro, lime juice, olive oil, salt, and sometimes garlic, which was always chopped by hand. When this ran out we’d invent salsas based on whatever was in the walk-in refrigerator and easily assembled.
There was another reason for our reliance on salsas and butters. The majority of the main courses at the Santa Fe were grilled, and it makes no sense to create a crisp skin or surface and then douse it with something that leaves it a soggy mess. So out of one restaurant’s necessity came, after the Newport Astor mansion lunch, a national fad. Eventually salsas would be one of the cliches of California cuisine. In 1981 they made total sense.
We never made the Friday evening as planned because I was still on the massage table and the utilities inspectors hadn’t signed off. But the day of the big game we did—to great success. Within days the drug dealers had found greener pastures, replaced by the usual free-spending foodies and the critics, including Robert Finigan of the infamous Panisse lamb incident. He’d been about to publish a scathing review (with the restaurant business as soap opera, using an account of the fallout between Mark and Susie), but in the face of the new regime, he changed his mind. “Enter Jeremiah Tower’s team,” he wrote, “all dressed in chef’s whites and fresh from transforming the Balboa Cafe into one of the city’s most popular bistros.” The Santa Fe, he continued, is “much cheerier now . . . and there is a comfortable air of informal elegance about this place and the seriousness of the kitchen is immediately evident.” He praised the smoked Oregon trout and sturgeon, the wild Bélon and Pigeon Point (Sonoma) oysters, the black bean soup and cake, the squab marinated in raspberry vinegar, bay scallops, Rex sole, and other local ingredients. “Tower delights in devising and executing menus like this one, emphasizing freshness of ingredients prepared with that extra twist of inventiveness which distinguishes the great chefs from the useful ones. See to what levels apparently simple conceptions can be taken in the hands of a master.”
I was ecstatic that our first review was so positive. But I’d have to spread the word if we were ever to get back over the bay to San Francisco.
MORE AMERICAN CULINARY REGIONS
I had moved from Berkeley to San Francisco in anticipation. One night, early in the Santa Fe era, I was sitting in Gregg’s and my Bernal Heights rose and vegetable garden, drinking champagne with my college friend Philip Core. He had just finished his paintings for the restaurant’s walls of famous people who’d traveled the Santa Fe Railroad, and had then rendered the likes of Escoffier, Marlene Dietrich, Richard Olney, Gary Cooper, Johnny Hard-On, Clare Boothe Luce, and Truman Capote on my dining room ceiling. He was bored. As we moved from champagne to a bottle of 1927 Taylor from the cellar under a trapdoor in the dining room, he said, “Let’s do a TV show. Or a book. We’ll call it ‘Stars in Your Eyes’”—I guessed from the stars on the room’s ceiling—“and it will be all about the food and culinary regions of the Americas. We’ll travel around on the Santa Fe Railroad and have them pay for it.”
Into the second bottle of Taylor we did an outline, with topics like “Combination of heritages—roots of American eclecticism; Reworking tradition—the bounty of nineteenth-century America; Harvest as menu—the new eclecticism as the garden and market come full circle; European principles established in America; The American outdoors—localization and ease of preparation, the directness of Texas, redefining the frontier.” The symbol of the show or book would be a dining car with people looking at a menu while the American landscape speeds by.
I couldn’t cope with all this inspired madness while opening the Santa Fe. But he did give me an idea of how to promote the new American Bar & Grill. I would restart the regional dinners we had done at Chez Panisse, but using the culinary regions of America.
I started in March 1983 with a benefit dinner for the American Institute of Wine & Food:
Florida State Dinner
March 1983
Tarpon Isle rum cocktail
Salty dogs
Florida backwoods biscuits
Gulf stone crab claws with Key lime “Old Sour” sauce
Palm Beach crabmeat salad with avocados
Key West conch stew
Roast Appalachicola oysters
Tarpon Springs fish and shellfish soup with salt cod dumplings
Cross Creek French fried eggplant with “Guspachy” sauce
Pompano en papillote
Grilled rum-spiced Gulf shrimp with creamed onions
Turtle Cay bananas with mango ice cream
Guava pecan pie
After the dinner a Metropolitan Home editor asked, “Is this really Florida food?”
“No,” I replied. “But it should be—and with your help it will be.” This dinner was such a hit that we followed it immediately with another at the Santa Fe, this time inspired by memories of my visits to San Antonio spice-vendor friends.
Texas and Spanish America Dinner
April 1983
Grilled Appalachicola oysters with 1883 Catsup
Broiled Spanish onions cowboy-style with BBQ sauce
Gulf shrimp and bonita in escabeche with avocado
Rabbit chili with mole sauce and peppered mangoes
Smoke-grilled red snapper with fresh sea urchin roe sauce
Goat stew with hominy, cilantro salad, and smoky chili sauce
Hot pecan pie with chocolate ice cream
The national press was now paying attention, so when we did a “Michigan and Midwest” dinner, the governor of Michigan actually attended. His presence did nothing to ameliorate the hurt pride of my friends in Napa and Sonoma, who were aghast that I’d do regions of America with no indigenous winemaking. I promised we would do them next. Again.
In an article in late 1982 in San Francisco’s Focus magazine called “Withstanding the Taste of Time,” Liz Lufkin said that “until recently, no one paid much attention to California cooking.” Although Spanish Jesuits had planted orchards of pears, peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, and oranges, a variety of anything other than fruit was nonexistent, and the accounts of miners and settlers about California food in the 1830s are famous for their enthusiastic disgust. It made me laugh to read that Liz felt sorry for a priest who “back then lunched on only an ear of corn roasted over coals,” as we were making our living to re-create those haunting flavors not interfered with by an overenthusiastic chef. She went on to say that cooking in California was coming into its own: “Indeed, some think it’s a trend that will sweep the country and change the face of American cooking.” Six months later, in the spring of 1983, our Newport lunch proved her right.