We honed our skills with the help of another journalist. In a 1982 issue of Cuisine magazine, Pat Brown and her “Cuisine Game” gave a group of chefs a market-basket list of ingredients and asked them to come up with a menu and recipes.
Ingredients
Lamb shoulder
Trout
American caviar
Coconut
Asparagus
Salt cod
Rhubarb
Pine nuts
I decided to serve the pine nuts toasted with champagne, then continue the champagne with a tartare of trout with asparagus. The rest:
Menu
Raviolis of Salt Cod with American Caviar
Braised Lamb Shoulder with Garlic Cloves
Fried Goat Cheese with Shredded Romaine Lettuce Salad
Rhubarb Soufflé with Coconut Custard
When the contest was published, the Santa Fe customers immediately wanted that food. Once more a restaurant that had started simply was pushing its limits to live up to what had been promised in the food press. In August, we cooked a menu for the birthday in 1982 of Gourmet’s wine columnist, Gerald Asher, using local wild salmon we smoked ourselves, served with Sacramento River sturgeon caviar processed by Narsai David, another Berkeley restaurateur. Following the salmon were:
Birthday for Gerald Asher
Santa Fe Bar & Grill, Berkeley, 1982
Garden Herbs, Flowers, and Black Truffle Soup
Ravioli of Brain Puree with Sweetbreads
Mesquite-Grilled Partridge with Chervil Butter
Laura Chenel Sonoma Goat Cheeses
Figs Poached in Sauternes with Rose Petals
By the time we cooked a dinner called “Future” for a promotion for Berkeley’s sportswear company The North Face a few months later, New York was watching. I began with trays of champagne and pills—a joke on the futurist idea that all food will one day be in pill form. But the courses that followed were “real” and included melted Sonoma cheese in a ramekin lined with Meyer lemon leaves and Lunar Free-Ranging Rabbit Stew with Crazed Mushrooms.
But it was another menu that whetted Jim Beard’s appetite.
1982 Napa Valley Wine Symposium
Fresh Berkeley Hills morels stuffed with duck livers fattened for the Santa Fe Bar & Grill
Poached wild striped bass with chervil butter and nasturtium sauce
Sonoma squab smoke-roasted over cabernet vine cuttings
Warmed goat cheese dipped in violets
Winter fruit compote in Napa Riesling
The squab’s breast meat was served in its juices, the leg and thigh meat chopped into a puree with sage leaves and served on grilled garlic toasts. “If that is not new American food, my dear, it should be,” said Jim, impishly parroting my Florida dinner line. The food seemed awfully French to me, but I kept that thought to myself.
CALIFORNIA CUISINE
By mid-1983 the word had spread about “California cuisine.” Wolfgang Puck had given up his job at Patrick Terrail’s very French Ma Maison and opened Spago on Sunset Boulevard in 1982. It picked up on the theme set by Michael’s a few years earlier: simply done, all white, great lighting, and a bedazzlement of highlighted flowers, a style now known as “Californian.”
Word had spread as far as that hotbed of trends Hong Kong. The Mandarin Hotel wanted to transform its old-boy Mandarin Grill. They called to persuade me to introduce Santa Fe Bar & Grill’s “New California Cuisine” at the Grill. As I talked to them, I could feel the starched heavy linen sheets in the suite with its own butler. I needed a rest. I sent them a list of 150 dishes, some of which were:
Anaheim chilies stuffed with California goat cheese, Chinese black bean sauce
Warm avocado salad with shiitake and lobster mushrooms
Palm Beach crabmeat salad with pomelo
Duck prosciutto with pear and spiced pecan salad
Grilled oysters with barbecued duck skin
Gumbo with crayfish, smoked duck sausages, fried pork belly
Grilled sweetbreads with sea urchin cream sauce
Buffalo steak with BBQ sauce
Cranberry-glazed lamb loin
Turtle Cay bananas in rum with durian cream
Tropical fruit compote with coconut ice cream
Cornmeal blini with three American caviars
The Mandarin’s press release said, “Inspired by the superb natural produce and wines of California, and fresh Pacific seafood, Jeremiah Tower is leading a revolution in American restaurant kitchens with a highly inventive, highly personal style of cooking, giving new flair to ethnic and regional dishes, whilst maintaining their basic simplicity. Dishes are brilliantly eclectic blends of wholesome ‘country fare’ and exotic imported ingredients such as blood oranges, Maui onions, Oregon morels, nasturtium flowers, stone crabs, quail eggs, American caviar, and garden tomatoes.” I thought garden tomatoes were going to be a challenge in Hong Kong, but the Mandarin assured me their import company didn’t know the meaning of unavailable, that we could get whatever we wanted in Australia.
I burst out laughing. The land of flathead and carrots fit for pigs would supply us?
“No way, mate,” I said.
“Check it out,” the supplier replied. “You’ll be surprised by what’s going on down there.”
All I knew about Australia was that anyone who could live somewhere else did. My childhood playmate Brett Whiteley was now Australia’s most famous painter, and he lived in London, as did all his Australian pals. I knew the names of Tony and Gay Bilson, who would open the amazing and Panisse-like Berowra Waters, in Sydney; of Phillip Searle, Neil Perry, Peter Doyle, and Serge Dansereau at the Regent, all of whom were said to believe that California chefs lived by the motto “If we can sell it, someone will produce it.” Serge told me that in Australia restaurants had to drag, cajole, and coax their suppliers into producing anything other than mass-market ingredients. I was not optimistic.
But the ingredients from Australia turned out to be marvelous, and I made a note that I must soon return to the land of my culinary awakenings—both wonderful and horrible.
In Hong Kong I ruined two pairs of Italian loafers running up and down the stairs in the multilayered hotel kitchen, wowed the local press, and filled the Mandarin Grill with locals loving California food. The night we finished I took my Santa Fe crew to the floating fish market restaurants. The next morning, due to leave for mainland China, I could not get out of bed. The train left in four hours. The Mandarin doctor was called. He knew what to do, pumping my behind with an enormous amphetamine– vitamin B– antibiotic cocktail such as only Hong Kong could provide. In an hour I was up. In two hours I was on the train, where I revived myself with a bowl of goose and of fresh pink ginger soup. In the Canton (Guangzhou) markets I saw that “freshness” and “local” still held their original relationship: everything was alive, and in its skin (including for my morning pick-me-up of cobra blood mixed with Chinese wine). Giant salamanders, eagles and owls, civet cats, puppies, and snakes were in abundance, if menu challenging, but the richness of choice was an inspiration.
The success of the Astor mansion event a few months earlier had made the Hong Kong promotion easier, and I could hardly wait for the next one. So when I got a call from Jonathan Waxman and Larry Forgione (of New York’s River Café, and later, of An American Place) saying they were organizing a charity dinner, in either New York or San Francisco, using American chefs, I felt another great moment could be upon us.