Charlie Trotter, at the 1993 Napa Valley James Beard Foundation benefit dinner, served hand-harvested sea scallops with olive-oil-poached tomato, artichokes, caramelized shallots, vegetable juices, red wine essence, and veal stock reduction.
Drew Nieporent and his chef from Montrachet, Debra Ponzek, served Pacific sea bass with chanterelles, spinach, and lobster “au jus.”
Stars served a mussel-potato timbale with herb-infused huitlacoche shellfish sauce.
Ritz-Carlton’s Gary Danko, for “A Taste of the Nation,” offered a warm caramelized onion, goat cheese, and morel tart.
Bradley Ogden at the Celebrity Sports International event at Squaw Valley ski resort cooked a bit of England-California with Zinfandel jam on lamb chops, some Southwest with a black bean cake, and a taste of New England with his lobster and salt cod stew.
Wolfgang Puck had both Asia and California with Germany in his restaurant’s Chinois chicken salad and apple-cranberry relish on foie gras.
Obviously we were all over the map. The country was inundated by famous chefs cooking in what seemed to the press like a dizzying spectrum of individual styles that were not easily legible as a single style, so they called it “New American Cuisine.” Edward Carter’s magazine of the best restaurants around the world said the Stars food “epitomizes what is now known as ‘California Cuisine’ by its freshness of ingredients, cleanness of taste, utter simplicity of flavor and texture that can’t be faked and are unpretentious.” I thought it was New American, but his analysis is not a bad beginning to define California cooking not fallen off its tracks.
A legion of frenzied writers and journalists in the late eighties threw the baby out with the dishwater, leading the public to think that California cooking could be defined by bashing the food.
Making fun of a few grains of corn on a huge white plate with some minuscule dollops of sauce is fine as long as one doesn’t think oneself a dragon slayer, because there was no dragon, just a lot of enthusiastic mistakes. Paula Wolfert in Cook’s magazine goes on about how her father used to cook tuna in his backyard, so doing it in a restaurant with a seasoned butter was no big “advance,” pointing out that California cooks didn’t invent coriander butter. On the defensive, she misses two points: that recipes do not develop in linear progression, but are historically cyclical, and that what “advanced” the United States from Continental cuisine was not her father. Not tuna, butter, or mesquite alone, but a vision that allowed a new simplicity to be recognized and welcomed as being as important as the temples of red-plush French, old Italian, and Continental American food and restaurants beloved by previous generations.
The new vision was strong, clear in what the food should taste like. Cutting edge and trendy as it was, it now had a purity and simplicity that indeed made it classic in the manner of Fernand Point.
One journalist scolded Alice. Throwing “a few aging pansy petals on a one-note salad” did “not make a cuisine.” I told everyone at Stars that the food should be done up but not overdone. The debate whether there even was a styled California cuisine had raged since 1981, when the Chronicle’s Harvey Steiman and a bunch of us gathered at the California Culinary Academy with Julia Child to debate its existence. She stopped all conversation with “When I first came to San Francisco, the height of gastronomy was cinnamon toast and artichokes,” a mind-boggling statement until everyone realized she didn’t mean together. Marion Cunningham said she thought California cooking existed in “fresh, pure, and seasonal.” The academy’s French chef said that it was all about regional cuisines that developed around the availability of the raw materials and the genius of the cooks working with them. Alice Waters said, “It’s very exciting to be in kindergarten,” meaning (I think) that we had “advanced” no further than that.
Harvey put up with everyone rattling on and said California was the only place in the United States with a great abundance of fresh ingredients. That was the point. When I reminded everyone that in 1973 there was no such bounty, I met only blank stares, as if I had said that the pope wasn’t Catholic or bears never shit in the woods.
Of course it took someone outside Californian tunnel vision to nail it all down. When Sydney’s Renaissance man and critic Leo Schofield walked into Stars, he wrote that he felt he was witnessing the death of the old culture, defined as an evening spent out with a three-course meal. Stars, he said, was not Old World dining but a new style that said, “Here it is, just pick out what you feel like eating and we’ll get it for you—either just a salad or a five-course meal if that is what you have the time for.” When the lifestyle caught on in the East Coast, he said, for obvious marketing reasons the food could not be called “California,” so it became “Nouvelle American.” Leo’s last evaluation is a bit bitchy, but there is a hint of truth in that it was the East Coast press who determined first that California was the leader after the deluge of national press in 1983 when we did the Astor mansion lunch, and later that America was in the lead after the American Festival in San Francisco the same year. Newsday wondered where “America’s Nouvelle” was headed and asked if it was “an evolutionary process.” An evolution toward “Liberty Cuisine,” the Detroit News called it. Alice Waters said, “There is no set way of doing things.” Jimmy Schmidt was driven by his love of experimentation. Paul Prudhomme yelled, “Just freedom!”
Len Allison from Hubert’s in Manhattan spoke like a true chef: “The challenge is to create a harmony, to be inspired by the past but allow it to be an inspiration, not a ball and chain.”
In an interview in 2014, Chris Kimball from America’s Test Kitchen asked me to define first a “revolution” and then what a food one was. And how it made changes in American cuisine.
First Kimball argued that all revolutions, “especially a food revolution, should be fun, counterculture, flamboyant, and full of the unexpected. That is what you brought to American cuisine but it was a moment in time that has long gone. Those heady years only occur, at best, once in every two or three generations.” As in the French Revolution, the moment of Talleyrand, his clothes and food, and his encouraging his chef, Carême, to create a new style of a few perfect ingredients instead of the old compiled and complicated ones, I answered. But, he said, “you have been described as a royalist. How does a royalist co-opt a revolution?” I’m not really a royalist but I’m certainly no lover of mobs unless they are turning out the old with something new that is fabulous. Who else but someone who knows or has known privilege would know how to challenge it? And there is no hierarchy to perfection.
“Does a revolution have to be reckless?” he wondered. Without caution, careless of consequences, it’s just chaos, but even the most carefully planned revolution needs some chaos or else it’s just a committee meeting.
“What about that fire-starting seminal moment of the lunch at the Astor mansion in Newport?” Was that “a good quick definition of how California cuisine outpaced French cooking at the time?” I’d say not so much the food as the attitude, spontaneous improvisation, which is the same as making a menu from the market stalls in front of you, and not with preconceived concepts of what is “proper.” “What are your rules for cooking for success?” Make it good, unfashionable, and cheap. “How long does a dish have to be around before it becomes a tradition?”
How long is a tweet?