A crisis of identity was looming in the growing community of flashbulb chefs and their mostly adoring press. But what about the food? What was American food, really, as we searched our way in 1990? I agreed with Marian Burros that it embraced “the principle of simplicity and impeccably fresh ingredients that you must be prepared to highlight, rather than mask,” but not everyone did. Menus were to be “not too esoteric, not too intimidating. Sort of straightforward and, at [their] best, surprising.” These were the lessons established twenty years before and made into a philosophy picked up by the press and therefore the rest of the country. But had it still been inspiring a new generation of chefs?
By the mid-eighties, California and America had embraced the values and philosophy of Chez Panisse, but the food had moved on, evolving under the influence of both the tradition of Japanese, Thai, Chinese, and the Asian and Mexican-Spanish food that all chefs like to eat, as well as by the new products and fresh ingredients of these cuisines turning up in the marketplace. Chez Panisse stayed itself, marched to its own drummer, and the food stayed the same, a goal not to be sniffed at by anyone. But a leader in food, however delicious, Panisse was not. California cooking as “New American” bedazzled the American press, but in reality the change toward the national cuisine was led by most of the same people who had been at the Festival of American Chefs in 1983.
The lineup by 1990 was Lydia Shire and Jasper White celebrating New England and New America in Boston; Michel Richard, Wolfgang Puck, and Michael Roberts in Los Angeles basking in the riches of farms like Chino Ranch and L.A.’s amazing Farmers’ Market; places like Mustard’s Grill in Napa Valley under Cindy Pawlcyn; a few glimmerings this early from Joachim Splichal, who brought an amazing elegance to this emerging food; the ongoing festival of the French South at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans (the divine Ella Brennan having brought forth Paul Prudhomme and now Emeril Lagasse); an extraordinary explosion of international foods and restaurants in Chicago by Rich Melman, king of American restaurateurs; Waxman’s Jams and Forgione’s An American Place in New York; Frank Stitt, of Highlands Bar & Grill in Birmingham, Alabama, who never forgot the tastes of the bounty of the rural South and the tastes of his mother’s food; a huge Texas, Arizona, and Southwest movement led by Robert Del Grande, Stephan Pyles, Robert McGrath, Dean Fearing, and Mark Miller at the Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe. Add to these the Europeans Sirio Maccioni at Le Cirque, who presided over a strict casual elegance, and the great inspiration of Jean Bertranou of L’Ermitage in Los Angeles.
People have always cared for how food looks, but now the press made a national case out of it as they weaned themselves from the juicy stories about “nouvelle cuisine” and created the “New American Cuisine.” Even the Wall Street Journal carried articles about cooking and food. “It’s spread like wildfire,” Larry Forgione told one of its reporters, “and the notoriety of the young chefs has helped fuel it.” Some of the fires were fairly soon extinguished, as the public did not take too long to figure out that a single scallop on a white plate with a dollop of white sauce was not worth twenty-five dollars, or that someone was being made a fool of by the language of the menu, though whether that was the chef or the paying public was not immediately clear. The Journal lists one of John Sedlar’s Manhattan Beach, California, restaurant dishes as a “Navajo Mosaic” of California vegetables, which must have left any Arizona or New Mexican Native American a bit confused.
What was contemporary American cooking after Panisse?
At Stars in 1984 we cooked for thirty American food editors, serving them Alaskan Pinto abalone with lime butter sauce as well as Portobello mushrooms in the center of which nested spit-roasted Gaspé ortolans, a dish I begged them not to talk about unless they wanted me in the fish-and-game penitentiary. For Pat Brown’s Cuisine magazine we cooked a Virginia ham–stuffed saddle of rabbit with chanterelle-mushroom-filled pasta shapes, and for New Year’s that year we served dishes like truffled salt cod ravioli with crayfish butter sauce, black truffle mascarpone-stuffed polenta with wild mushroom ragout, Muscovy duck breasts with chestnuts and persimmons, and California figs cooked in Zinfandel served with fifty-year-old balsamic vinegar cream. Whatever we cooked it had to conform to the list of food items available according to the month of the year that I handed out to all the chefs, a then cutting-edge list that included seasonal cheeses, edible flowers like violets, fuels like vine cuttings and fruitwoods, and herbs. The list was fanciful, given that the explosion of ingredients we’d started in the seventies was now in full roar and the months started to blend in with one another, but the list’s variety does tell how much had changed since I was looking out the back door of the Panisse kitchen hoping some amateur forager would walk in with a huge salmon or basket of chanterelles.
We had started to make the things that we could not get, like duck breast prosciutto. The Stars chef, Mark Franz, built a special refrigerator in the basement (well out of the way of any health inspectors) for air-curing meats, and that is where we kept the game sausages, salamis, duck breasts, hams, and ribs of beef. By 1985 we served smoked Russian boar, our own gravlax, and smoked salmon.
These dishes and others, like wild boars’ head galantine with truffled mushroom vinaigrette, or lobster risotto with monkfish, worried me that Stars had moved from California into a personal style that was made up of classical disciplines dressed up in new clothes. Did that mean we were looking fashionable? And if so, was it acceptable as a style? I compared it with what the other chefs were serving at the time: Wolfgang Puck’s Gulf snapper with red onion sauce; Bradley Ogden’s pheasant with smoked bacon vinaigrette. Certainly the sea bass carpaccio with lobster vinaigrette and caviar that I served to debut Wolfgang Puck’s frozen desserts in Northern California was not classical. But by the time we got to wild boar ham with grilled sweetbreads, lentils, and foie gras in 1987 for the American Institute of Wine & Food, with Dick Graff, I thought perhaps I really had relapsed to the menu I had in Paris at Lucas Carton in 1965.
Dinner for the Retirement of Lucas Carton’s Chef
Oyster
Minced Pike
Roast Lamb
Hare Pie
Woodcock
Cheeses
But when I remembered the dinner’s radical futurist pairing of 1955 Chateau d’Yquem with the oysters, and the wild strawberries in the pastry for the hare pie, and drinking the 1929 Bollinger and 1911 Clicquot with the cheeses, I knew we still had a long way to go.
When the Miami Herald asked in early 1987 what the future trends would be in America, I said I had no idea, “But why not take Cuban cooking, easily one of the most mainstream of America’s regional cuisines, give it a breath of fresh air, and turn it loose on the USA?” The reporter loved the fact that I answered my own telephone. “I would die to have time to do for Cuban and Indian food what nouvelle cuisine did for the grande cuisine of France. Rework it, make it smaller, lighter, more lively with less heat.” When he asked me if this was Florida cuisine, I told him it should be. After saying this, I still needed to look around for a jolt of inspiration.
That’s when the phone rang from Sydney.
The two-week California promotion Stars did in Sydney’s Regent Hotel with its chef, Serge Dansereau, in 1987 was the jolt we needed. The perfection and abundance of the fish and shellfish that I had seen before only in the fifties in Italy, the seventies in France, and earlier at Neil Perry’s Blue Water Grill right there in Australia brought a flood of ideas. A week on the Great Barrier Reef’s Lizard Island beaches, after those two hellish kitchen weeks, brought sanity again, as well as time to contemplate Australia’s new love affair with Asian ingredients and Thai flavors. I had picked up the scent of a new revolution about to happen. The genius of Australia’s new chefs and their new casual style set my brain going, and rekindled my childhood Australian love of tropical and exotic. The photo we took of one of our dishes (mussels, Moreton Bay bugs or slipper lobster meat, fresh tiger prawns, and pieces of barramundi fillet on a plate sauced with shellfish–saffron butter sauce, with a drizzle of Thai basil cream and a tiger prawn head standing up proudly in the center of the plate) is still one of my all-time favorites.
As the press from this visit flooded into Stars from Australia, every regular customer, every food magazine editor, and every restaurant critic was the only one who knew what should be on the menu, and how much it should cost. We were stuck in the Stars fame rut with the fans wagging the menu tail, but I was raring to go. I built a private room at Stars so that I could cook for forty instead of four hundred and then, in another corner, a thirty-seater called JT’s. There we could cook the kind of food I wished we had time for in the main dining room. The private dining room check could also be higher. In 1992 Stars’ average per-person check with drinks and wine was forty-nine dollars; this with a gross just over $9 million with only two hundred seats, fifty more in the bar, meant the main kitchen was cooking as fast as they or anyone could. My JT’s black-truffled salt cod puree club sandwich with lobster sauce and steelhead caviar would have raised screams in the main kitchen because of all the steps required. It was in these other venues that we could let our wings stretch out in the nineties.
Urania and Brunno Ristow: we served San Francisco’s most wonderful couple and Stars’ favorite customers white Oregon truffle custard with Jerusalem artichokes, chervil sauce, and more Quinault River steelhead salmon roe.
For another: capon breast stuffed with fresh Berkeley morels and steamed over lovage leaves, served in a lobster sauce.
Napa Valley’s eminent collector Barney Rhodes’s seventieth birthday: accompanying magnums of 1864, 1870, and 1874 Chateau Lafite, puff pastry in individual pithivier-like shapes filled with goat cheese and duck and goose cracklings.
And in outside venues:
James Beard Foundation House: Smoked sturgeon with deviled quail eggs and lobster rémoulade. Roast capon broth with ginger, foie gras, and Chinese fermented black bean custard.
The Florida Winefest: smoked wahoo carpaccio with grilled fresh Florida frogs’ legs.
British Columbia’s Mission Hill Winery: Arctic char with lobster mushrooms.
Barbara Tropp at Stars Singapore: lightly smoked sea bass with lentils, minced Chinese pork, lobster, and more duck cracklings.