“The hot young chefs have arrived,” screamed the San Francisco Chronicle’s food section a few days later. André Soltner (Lutèce in New York), the dignified and beloved older chef of the profession, who was seen (quite oddly) as having no penchant for public relations, was interviewed about all these carryings-on. “I blame you . . . the press,” he said. “If you glorify a young guy at twenty-four, good for him, beautiful, but if you don’t help him at the same time, you spoil him. We cannot forget, even if we are celebrities, who we are. We are cooks, but soup merchants too.” Soup merchants with heads too big to see the soup pot beyond the latest press clipping.
The new chefs felt the first part of the American food revolution was the realm of legend. Of myth. They were too young to remember JFK: “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”
This new group knew the origins of the changes in culinary America only from the press. Hardly any had been present at the revolution and they weren’t grounded in what inspired it, either. This new generation had only the terminology of fresh, organic, local, and California. How many of them had ever gardened or been on a farm? Or did the essential meanings of these concepts live only in the press, cooking magazines, and the floodlights of fame? The question was not answered until the end of the century, when the new chefs and their sous chefs found and held their own true ground and the entire revolution reached its full farm-to-table and nose-to-tail fruition.
Every chef in the industry adored and revered André Soltner, judging from the reception he received for Lifetime Achievement at the James Beard Foundation awards when he retired in 1994, and even if many of the new chefs on their feet may have been wondering why. Not even Julia Child ever got that kind of standing ovation. Between accepting this fame and his saying we should not forget that all chefs are cooks and soup merchants, too, and the seminal backlash in the national culinary press, any chef attuned to the pulse must have thought about which path to take. The restaurant business was a lot of work, and if fame alone as a payback for all the exhaustion seemed not enough, who could have blamed any chef for looking beyond the glamour for something else? A big bank account seemed the obvious answer, since it was now clear that fame only indirectly paid the Visa or MasterCard.
A good way, your publicist told you, to be taken seriously and make more money was to have your name on a cookbook. This trend escaped no one’s attention. The success in America of promoting a whole new style or presentation was obvious. French publisher Laffont’s late-seventies illustrated editions of the Young Turks helped make nouvelle cuisine world famous. Everyone saw the legitimization of Alice as a chef instead of restaurant owner in 1982 with The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook even when she hadn’t written it. Or the kind of publicity I received for Stars with the 1986 Jeremiah Tower’s New American Classics. When it received a James Beard Foundation award I got to be seen, heard, or read in multimedia by likely more than 15 million Americans. Creativity of the menu across America was temporarily halted while every famous chef wrote a book.
Or had it done for them.
At the tenth birthday party of Panisse in 1981 Alice gave me a copy of the manuscript of The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. The next day, as I looked at the manuscript, I noted with shock the lack of acknowledgments. Alice had taken sole credit for the most important events in Panisse’s history, among them the Gertrude Stein dinner, the blue trout of the Champagne and Alsace dinners, the Louisiana dinner, the whole Escoffier festival, and even the California Regional Dinner. When I read on page 297 of the manuscript, “For some ten years now, I have faced, every Thursday, the weekly dilemma of planning” the menus, I nearly fell off my deck chair. That claim was unconscionable. Did she think she had done the menus all those years because she had typed them? I reached for my Beverly Hills Hotel cabana phone to ask the author, Linda Guenzel, if Alice thought I had never existed.
“I asked Alice about that,” Linda replied. “She said it wasn’t necessary to include your name everywhere after you had been mentioned once in the credits as having been the chef there.”
I called Alice.
I told her the approach was beneath her or anyone else, and downright dangerous to her reputation if the book were published without some important changes. I made a detailed list and sent it to Alice, who said, “Before anything happens, I really do want it to be right with all my friends; I hope you believe that. I should have sat down and talked to you first, but it was such an afterthought to do it.” I wondered if “it” was doing the right thing or trying not to. I told her, at the risk of sounding condescending, that giving proper credit and telling the truth could only reflect more credit on herself, that all the book had to do was “to honor all those people involved in the history—most of all yourself. Though a scandal might be fun, it is probably best avoided.”
At the end of the letter I asked her to destroy it—to show it to no one—saying no good could come of anyone seeing the letter and knowing what she had done.
When the book appeared in print, I saw that some menus and events that were so obviously mine had been removed, and that the “for some ten years now” had been changed to “for some years now.”
The lure of the myth was just too strong.
On the back cover, Richard Olney’s quote characterizes the book as “wonderful—funny, instructive, and rich with common sense,” which describes Alice’s contribution to Panisse, and “eccentric and passionately serious, full of an air of celebration,” which describes mine. The woman who actually wrote it, Linda Guenzel, was all of that. She told me that she had done the book out of love for Panisse and Alice, but also so that Alice would introduce her to the Random House editor Jason Epstein, for whom she wanted to write a book on chocolate. At the book launch party at Panisse, Linda reminded Alice of her promise. I had not been invited to the party, so I called Linda the day after. She was in tears. Alice had introduced her to Jason as “the typist.”
Obviously typing in some cases was more important than in others.
On the inside cover Linda inscribed my copy, “For Jeremiah—The inspiration, the raison d’etre, the creator on these pages—without you, there would be no Chez Panisse, no cookbook. Truth shall triumph. Much love, Linda. August 10,1982.”
If you couldn’t or didn’t want to write a book, there was always the world of cooking magazines, even with its danger of who exactly was the tail and who the dog. It was one thing for a chef to be inspired by Jean-Louis Palladin’s food from original material like his 1989 Jean-Louis: Cooking with the Seasons, since it looked exactly as it did in the restaurant, but another when the chef’s food in a cooking magazine was prepared by stylists who had probably never met the chef, tasted the food, or been to the restaurant. When aspiring chefs, creatively stuck ones, or students would look at the magazine photographs, they thought they were seeing the chef on the page.
Within a week of a magazine featuring a famous chef, his or her food was being reproduced three thousand miles away in a manner light-years from the original. Charles Palmer’s fantasy of caramel at Aureole in New York looked like Indian astrological temples, and was soon all over America. The only problem was that most of his imitators, experiencing it only from glossy photographs, had never tasted it, and thought it was all about architecture and not flavors. Imitations of these imitations were soon imitated in their turn, leaving Charles’s new pastry chef trying to stay ahead of the field and imitating himself. All this could take just a year, putting the eighties right back into the arms of nineteenth-century staged foods and pièces montées from which we had all fled so righteously in the previous forty years. And without even knowing it.