The day started with a sunrise promising to radiate its desert red onto Scottsdale’s Camelback Mountain. It was a perfect Arizona winter desert morning in January 2002, the temperature picking up, the air clear, smelling like clean dust and doused campfires. I was at the Roaring Fork restaurant with its owner, Robert McGrath, gathering material for my book America’s Best Chefs Cook with Jeremiah Tower and filming the PBS television show America’s Best Chefs, as recognized by the James Beard Foundation.
We met Gina Collins at her Victory Farms truck in the parking lot while she pulled out vegetables and greens picked in the cool of the early desert morning. Robert, Gina, and I decided on what mix of greens we would use on the show and for that day’s Roaring Fork menus. The next farmer’s truck had every kind of fresh and lightly dried chili I had ever seen or heard of, gallons of fresh cream, and its butter, which made my mouth water.
For years, starting in 1973 at Panisse, I had tried to convince Vella Cheese company and others in Sonoma to give me some unpasteurized cream to make sauces like the French. For years they all stubbornly refused. Then I tried to get the cream from the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, knowing full well that the Amish and Mennonites would not fool around ruining cream and butter by boiling the milk. But no dice. They would not ship unpasteurized cream across state lines.
So thirty years later, in a parking lot in Scottsdale, dipping fingers into a gallon of real cream and canary yellow butter that had come from Mennonites neighboring this farmer’s property, I was moved almost to tears at what had finally come to pass.
While waiting to film the legendary happy hour at the Roaring Fork, we chilled some Gosset champagne. I took my first sip of this fabulous hand-made wine, spread some hand-churned butter on my hand-forged tortillas warmed over the fire, and sat back to watch the sun go down. Looking up at Camelback turning magenta in the moments before night fell, and knowing that we would soon be facing a 4 A.M. call for more filming the next day of another perfect sunrise over the Arizona desert, I poured another glass of rosy champagne, remembering that, in the immortal words of the Pink Panther, “champagne has the minimum of alcohol and the maximum of companionship.”
Any winning restaurateur these days realizes that outstanding cooking starts with superb ingredients, and that a menu should be conceived from the marketplace rather than intellectual abstraction. The cornucopia of January in Santa Monica the day before Arizona was as plentiful as that of New York in August or September: sweet-tooth wild mushrooms looking like giant hedgehog mushrooms; cabbage in all its glory—cauliflower, cavallo nero, and several broccolis; purple, pink, and fire engine red mustard leaves; radicchio that was not magenta with white stripes but the other way around and with lime-green stripes running though the leaves as well; the onion family in all its glory—still-sweet cipollini picked that morning, fresh green garlic, every variety of chives with some of them flowering; Throgmorton Farm’s vast array of fruits dried in the sun—white peaches, nectarines ugly when dried but with a perfume that made me swoon, six varieties of pears, hideous-looking but delicious persimmons, and an encyclopedic selection of dates, fresh and dried; ripe pomegranates and fresh-crop walnuts; and best of all, the citrus of Southern California at the peak of its season—Meyer lemons, kumquats, clementines, tangerines, “sweet lemons,” five different kinds of grapefruit, crosses of grapefruit and oranges like pomelos, and a few others of mysterious parentage, like “manellos.”
At the end of my walk in the market I ate a little box of wild strawberries from miniature rose grower Lore Caulfield, who that day had just a few handfuls of precious fraises de bois, or wild strawberries.
Inspired by my trip I set out again in 2002 to explore how non-restaurant America ate. I wanted to see what was going on in the towns of America, if what had been reported, that now home cooks could find ingredients in supermarkets that once were available only to top restaurants, was true.
The new supermarkets all seemed to have the word fresh somewhere in their names. All over America, even in unlikely places like Marathon Cay in Florida, I saw radicchio Treviso, mascarpone, American goat cheese, and perfect little green beans. Given this new shopping, the only thing good American home cooks needed was a television show to push them back to the stove. Why wouldn’t anyone try Mario Batali’s latest easy ravioli of fresh wonton wrappers? Or Lydia Shire’s fresh tomato sauce, or make a sauce for steaks out of salted anchovies on the imported foods shelf, fresh basil, spring garlic, and new crop, not rancid organic hazelnuts from Oregon; give Martin Yan’s Peking duck a try once having seen it on his Chinatown; or use the barbecued pork or roast duck in America’s Chinatowns as the ultimate fast food at home, just chopped up with fresh herbs and cilantro on top of pasta or a cabbage salad? Or cook some white corn posole from Los Chileros de Nuevo Mexico, which specializes in “gourmet” New Mexico foods?
In late 2001, John Mariani in Esquire magazine had summed up the new chefs’ cooking: “Simplifying, removing extraneous ingredients from their plates, and focusing more on essential flavors of the main ingredients.”
The first revolution in American fresh ingredients occurred at Chez Panisse with freshness and local California ingredients.
The second started to occur in the last two years of the seventies, when local started to mean international because of the revolution in air-shipping of fresh ingredients like the ones I introduced to the California dining public at the California Culinary Academy.
The third was when American chefs picked up the mantra from the first revolution and helped spread farmers’ markets and new supplies of organic, local, sustainable ingredients across the land.
The fourth was the current extension of the second, or the instant international Internet marketplace. Local and fresh and seasonal now mean wherever there is a field of superb ingredients, refrigeration, and an airfield nearby: South African wild mushrooms in New York in June; haricots verts from West Africa in California markets; fish from ten thousand miles away fresher than from a coastal United States locked in by storms.
The public no longer sees these changes as a California phenomenon. Jeffrey Steingarten’s end-of-the-millennium prediction in Vogue that there was a restaurant crash in the air, or that the next trend would be a gay cuisine, did not come true. Certainly his horror of famous chefs expanding their empires and leaving the new restaurants in the hands of inexperienced, lower-paid staff was often played out. But the choice of where to go in America to find the ingredients heretofore the realm of famous chefs was no longer a mystery. Culinary magazines like Bon Appétit celebrated these sources and started publishing the addresses and websites of where to find them.
A supplier like Portland, Oregon’s Nicky USA, for example, published its quality guidelines, which were no longer about fresh versus frozen. Their rules went right to the heart of it all, to the kind of farming that is sustainable over a long period of time. By the end of the decade, these standards became the norm rather than the exception for small producers supplying restaurants of conscience: “raising animals humanely, on feeds without medication, animal by-products, or hormones.”
By 2002 Chez Panisse used beef from Western Grasslands Inc. (since renamed Panorama Grass-Fed Meats). In May of that year, ranchers showed up at San Francisco’s “Open Market Day” to talk about how their healthful, sustainably reared local beef was raised. That moment was a long way from thirty-four years earlier, when western ranchers would have shot at anyone with long hair from the radical streets of Berkeley preaching organic farming.
In 1974 Richard Olney introduced me to fresh green almonds in the South of France. We ate them with cherries, over which I pined because they were so superior to the two varieties that I could buy back in the United States. Had anyone except an old-variety cherry farmer ever eaten one in the United States? I begged local suppliers for them for years to no avail. The May 2002 newsletter from GreenLeaf, San Francisco’s revolutionary new produce supplier, was a manifesto of the revolution that had taken place. I could have bought Brooks, Burlat, and King Bing cherries, as well as unirrigated fruit from the foothills of the Sierras. My dishwashers at Panisse used to have to spend hours carving rosemary skewers, the rosemary and rose geranium flowers I had to steal on my way to work. Now here they were in a list that also included rue, fresh hearts of palm, popcorn shoots, cardoon, wild arugula, lovage for perfuming lobsters, nepitella mint, peppercress, and lemon balm. Stars’ lettuce mix, which in the eighties took eight hours a day to make, was now just a phone call away. The tender lettuces mix was sucrine, majestic red, black jack, red perella, brunia, little gem, spreckles, freckles, roger, dark lolla rosa, four seasons, and green tango. It was enough to make one break into dance.
On rereading James Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks, which celebrates bounty and calls a collection of songbirds in the high months of summer an “exaltation,” I wondered what the collective name for all this bounty should be. Strolling though Manhattan’s Union Square farmers’ market in 2002, seeing what New York, Long Island, and New Jersey alone can produce in August, I thought that the word was still revolution.
The first stand had bambino eggplant as well as white, purple, and purple-and-white-striped ones looking like a Karl Lagerfeld coat; there was Texas tarragon; Caribbean oregano; basil green, purple, and Thai; rosemary, thyme (lemon and flowering), black peppermint, lemon verbena, and seven kinds of mint, including apple. At stand number two I saw an entire regatta of radishes—watermelon, black, French breakfast with their white tips and white icicle (all white), as well as a whole section of tiny and giant red round ones; parsley root; tatsoi; long squash runners and their blossoms; mounds of tomatillos; small round carrots as well as long ones; bushels of limas; baby turnips; five kinds of beets; red, yellow, orange, and gold-and-green-striped cherry tomatoes; cranberry beans; microgreens; and pinterelle dandelions. At New York’s Fox Hill Farm potato stand there were Yukon gold, whites, reds, russets, small red, carola, Norland red, brintje, Desiree, Augusta, Russian banana, agria, and French fingerling. But it was the onion stand that trapped me, as it always does.
It was next to a stand selling old-fashioned roses; the heady perfumes of the Duchesse de Brabants mingling with the smell of the glisteningly fresh onions made my mouth water. I saw a bread stand nearby, as well as some Vermont “European style” butter, and was tempted to make an onion–rose petal sandwich on the spot. After all, in Sydney as kids we used to make nasturtium ones. All I needed was some sea salt and Lampong pepper. And the onions in all their glory: salad whites, cooking yellows, rocambole, shallots on the stem, garlic tops about to flower, scallions large and small and white and red, purple and snow baby pearls, gold coin, luscious leeks, red cipolle, small red Italian, Kelshe (sweet and mild), and the Walla Walla sweets. I took home the Walla Walla, sliced them thinly, marinated them in fleur de sel and freshly squeezed blackberry juice for twenty minutes, and served them with a sauce of the rose petals ground up in a mortar with egg yolks and lemon juice, adding light French yellow extra-virgin olive oil to perfume and color the mayonnaise.
In January 2003 I received a letter explaining what ingredients I could expect to find in Minneapolis in February for my cooking demonstration promoting my new book, Jeremiah Tower Cooks. “We have a great game supplier with Peking duck, pheasant, and rabbit; any meat, including whey-fed lamb; fish and seafood no problem either. Of course, the White Earth Land Recovery Project’s wild rice comes from here. Also fresh hothouse herbs, and a large Asian community with great markets. We have a Farmers’ Market on full alert for whatever fresh ingredients you need: you can have the best, freshest organic eggs, farmstead butter, purest cream, goat cheese, and an extraordinary aged sheepsmilk cheese—all from pasture pampered animals.”
Obviously the ingredient revolution has worked. What about the ingredient-driven food?
American restaurant food had come a long way since the “sentimental” menu that, as Marian Burros reported in the new millennium, Alice Waters had just created for Marion Cunningham at Chez Panisse. Some of the diners’ comments included:
“Marion would never put truffles in her chicken.”
“Marion would want iceberg lettuce.”
“Marion doesn’t eat oysters.”
Marion’s mind was more on cookies.
Consider the difference of England’s Jamie Oliver, who said in an article at that time on new English food that he was willing “to give it a go” with whatever he has seen that intrigues him. Like Peruvian food: “It has a really good social vibe, like tapas with lots of little bowls of this and that, a really refreshing way to eat.” Or at England’s Fat Duck, where the chef took whatever he fancied from the past fifty years of techniques and fresh ingredients to make his own, like sweetbreads cooked in hay and salt crust, crusted with pollen, and served with cockles à la plancha and parsnip puree. When he served red mullet with a velouté of coco beans, licorice, and vanilla, a reporter thought the mullet dish might be at odds with traditional tastes.
Which traditions? I wondered.
How old does a dish have to be before it becomes a tradition? Was El Bulli in Spain too new? I guess not, since the cooking world was soon covered in foam and the fire didn’t go out.
The new American food had the same lineup as Jeffrey Steingarten used in Vogue to describe the newness of the “nouvelle cuisine” movement in France and its impact on America: “Hand-raised ingredients [nothing new in France], bought that morning [as it always had been], cooked at the last minute [new], and eaten only in season [as always], the return to cooking’s regional roots [had been going on for decades in France and Panisse], and the banishing of formulaic sauces [new].”
A look at restaurant menus in nineties America shows that the earlier, wilder throwing of ingredients into the air like cards to see how they fell had, by 2010, settled down into more personal visions. Ingredients are chosen for their harmony on the plate rather than for pure novelty, as in “look what I’ve found.” The Square in London showed a perfect example of the new sure-footed cooking, its menu listing dishes like pea soup with morel Chantilly, or steamed zucchini flowers with scallops and buttered crab, and a soup of peaches and strawberries with champagne.
Some visions remained true to the original: In August 1996 I went to the Chez Panisse twenty-fifth anniversary party.
For fifty-five dollars and 15 percent service charge we had:
Hors d’oeuvre
La Bouillabaisse de Lulu
Salade du Jardin
Compote Anniversaire
Sorbet de Cassis
The menu took me back to twenty-three years earlier, when I had to spend many hours trying to find fresh ingredients for my bouillabaisse at Panisse, shopping in Oakland, Berkeley, both Chinatowns, and from any foragers who had been out fishing and gathering. At this anniversary dinner, I wondered where all the famous ingredients had gone.
I could not believe my eyes when I read why Chez Panisse was voted the single best restaurant in the United States in 2001 by Gourmet, nor could I stop laughing at the irony. Green beans again. Could I ever escape them! “Sharply vinegared” and served as a first course with “an artfully rumpled heap of beyond-organic herbs,” a drop of jelly, and “a swath of mayonnaise,” the beans “vibrated” on the plate. Along with half a soft-boiled egg, this dish was reviewed as “the loveliest conceivable expression of a great cultural region.” Really? The magazine drew the battle lines between what it said were the two schools of American cuisine: Chez Panisse was devoted to displaying nature at its best, Jean-Georges Vongerichten to bending nature to his will.
When I wrote the last menus at Stars in 1998, they celebrated a marriage of the old and the newest ingredients: foie gras sandwiches, boned rabbit saddles, wood-oven baked oysters and spiny lobsters, roast chicken broth soup served with ginger, foie gras, and Chinese black bean custard, and red and white Belgian endive leaves stuffed with quail egg and lobster rémoulade. Or desserts with fresh lychee, rambutan, mangosteen, or ginger and jasmine flower sorbets.
By 2001, an event in New York organized by Charlie Trotter, David Bouley, and Australia’s great Tetsuya “Tet” Wakuda used mostly new ingredients.
Dinner at the James Beard House
May 2001
WAKUDA
Scallop with foie gras, citrus and soy jelly
BOULEY
Striped bass, fennel-braised with saffron rose olive sauce
WAKUDA
Confit of Tasmanian soft-smoked ocean trout with kombu
TROTTER
Organic veal shank with soy beans and hijiki seaweed sauce
BOULEY
Braised beef cheeks with Catskill Mountain ramp spaetzle
TROTTER
Three custards: green tea panna cotta, chamomile crème caramel, Assam tea brûlée with melon sauce
BOULEY
Chocolate tart with pistachio ice cream
The dinner was a paean to flavor and textures. Tet’s dish was a two-inch round of perfectly fresh sea scallop sliced an eighth of an inch thick. On top of it was a round of foie gras cut in exactly the same proportions. Nothing else was on the plate except for a little citrus juice, soy jelly, and olive oil. As the Chicago Tribune’s Bill Rice said at the end of the meal, when we were all almost speechless: “Sometimes simplicity is just downright that simple,” reminding me how far we had come in twenty years.
Sometimes too far.
At a dinner benefit for Share Our Strength at New York’s Gramercy Tavern restaurant in 2001, the first course from Sydney’s Rockpool restaurant seemed quite normal: salad of squid ink noodles. The chef from Seattle’s Rover then served rabbit hearts with halibut. That seemed a bit off center. But when Paris’s Petrossian caviar emporium offered a dessert of “Coca-Cola Cajou of Coca-Cola emulsion, fruit and spice cookie, coconut sorbet and cashew sables,” it seemed like outer space. I wondered what was going on with top chefs as the century passed into a new one.
I found it odd that Chez Panisse was the only restaurant on Gourmet magazine’s list of the nation’s top fifty restaurants whose website didn’t feature, let alone mention, the name of the chef. Just the service charge. That brought up the question of what made a famous chef as the new millennium began. Perhaps there was a clue in Gourmet’s saying that Alice Waters “is not so much a chef as an impresario.” A concert master. Certainly by 2000 the best American chefs did seem to be marching to their individual music.
According to Gourmet:
Thomas Keller’s the French Laundry aspired not so much to cook good food as to pursue fundamental truths revealed through food.
Wolfgang at Spago Beverly Hills served up passion and seriously glamorous dining.
Alan Wong in Honolulu was a true fusion of an organic, street-level blend of Chinese, Polynesian, and mainland American, lightly seasoned with imports from Japan, Mexico, and Korea—proving that Trader Vic’s was the original fusion food forty years earlier.
Charlie Trotter was likened to “the Aleph,” or that point from which every single thing in the world can be seen and from which Charlie cooked.
Ken Oringer in Boston was all about intensity of flavors, drawing on those of Maine, Japan, and Spain.
Nobu Matsuhisa was “the Escoffier of all things great and raw.”
Clark Frasier and Mark Gaier at Arrows in Maine, who learned salad aesthetic at Stars, grew the greens in their kitchen garden so that the leaves’ “immediacy is breathtaking.”
Tom Douglas at the Palace Kitchen in Seattle created “campfire cooking fit for kings.”
In New Orleans, Galatoire’s, where on college trips from Harvard days I consumed more fried oysters and shrimp rémoulade than any human should, was still a restaurant that made one “giddy with pleasure.”
Marcus Samuelsson at Aquavit made herring first acceptable and then chic.
Le Bernardin, always superb with the always impeccable Maguy Le Coze and Eric Ripert, was as if the Romans had built a temple to fish and shellfish cooking.
Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who gave us the absolutely brilliant early Vong with a recently departed Stars chef, was now giving a lot more.
Daniel Boulud’s “piercing intelligence” and approach to classical French cooking got more flavor out of a single bell pepper than most restaurants did out of a whole truckload of foie gras.
Adornment in America was left to the David Rockwell dining rooms.
San Francisco food and wine critic Robert Finigan wrote to me in 2001 about the San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic Michael Bauer, namely his latest off-the-tracks voluptuous excitement over the food at the redone Clift and its Asia de Cuba dining room. Bob was horrified at the bananas with fried calamari, and floored by Chinese-style fried rice with guacamole. Bauer’s take, by contrast, was “marvelous” food. Bob wondered if “marvelous” meant the sheer marvel of being able to think it up, cook, and plate it, or whether the food was wonderful to eat. “When you conceived Stars,” he said, “you brilliantly had the idea of an upscale bistro just right for its place and time, perfectly prepared dishes of historical and regional significance with excitements around the edges perhaps not previously experienced by most Stars’ patrons.” I replied that what turned me on then and what turns me on now are clean, pure, rich, and totally inspiring simple and complex flavors. The movie Woman on Top. Déjâ vu all over again.
Now in danger from a runaway horse eclectic, we-can-do-anything cycle, the quality instead of quantity of ingredients was the only thing that could provide stability, besides knowing how to treat and present them. As a guideline in this culinary wooing of different cultures, ingredients, and flavors, I told my chefs to always remember their first paint box. First you discover primary colors. They are so wonderful, you feel they must be even more wonderful mixed together. Adding three more colors all you get is brown. Mud. It’s the same with ingredients and flavors. A muddy result means that all the flavors stay on the same note, or slightly different ones all at once, without any structure. Just noise. A clear flavor has incredible clarity and purity, the culmination of perfect ingredients and masterly cooking, or sometimes just the ingredient. The clarity of a kilo tin of beluga caviar is in its “Here I am.”