I didn’t yet know Alice well, but I could tell she was a kindred spirit. She loved the way I encouraged the fishing boat boys to come to the back door with stuff that no one else would accept—wolf eels and other unappreciated “trash” fish. It didn’t take long to find Sacramento River Delta crayfish; whole wild boar I’d pick up at the Stuyvesant Fish ranch in Carmel; trout from my teenage stomping grounds in Big Sur’s Garrapata; and fresh spot prawns from Monterey’s Fisherman’s Wharf, where my grandfather had indulged my childhood insistence that we survey the fish stores before hitting the restaurants there.
By the summer of 1973, my menu format had an English version on the back page. Panisse, the “experiment in dining,” was becoming a real restaurant. A menu in July shows the food was now heading more into the Fernand Point Ma Gastronomie style, but the price was still six dollars per person:
Salade de Champignons
(Salad of fresh mushrooms)
Potage à la Florentine
(Cream of spinach soup)
Truite Jurascienne
Trout Jura Style Cooked in Rose Wine, served with a Hollandaise Sauce and Buttered Croutons
In another few months the price had gone up fifty cents, the food another more luxurious notch.
Escargots en Cocotte Languedocienne
(Snails with garlic, fennel, ham, and wine)
Crème de Champignons
(Cream of mushroom soup)
Thon Poché, Sauce Beurre Blanc
(Fresh poached tuna with shallots, butter, and white wine)
I had always loved my parents’ books of the compiled Gourmet magazine articles of Samuel Chamberlain and his wife on their tours of the gastronomic regions of France, so I came up with the idea of doing special dinners of the regions of France to teach the restaurant staff and increase the range of customers beyond Berkeley. And catch the attention of the national press as well. Among the inspirations were my books by Curnonsky (1920–30), Austin de Croze (1931), Urbain Dubois (1856), John Evelyn (1699), Robert Courtine (1970s), Ali-Bab (1928), Lucien Tendret, my handy 1931 Larousse Gastronomique, and the incomparable Almenach des Gourmands (1803) by Grimod de la Reynière.
In September 1973 I wrote the menu for the region “Brittany” and decided to charge $8.50 per person, pushing the prices for a Wednesday night. Attendance had been forty-five to seventy on weeknights and seventy to ninety on weekends; weekly gross sales were averaging $3,600. If I was ever going to earn enough to move out of my flophouse—not to mention make it to Hawaii—I needed to raise the revenue, then my salary.
Local or “Native” Oysters on the Half Shell
Mussel Crepes
Roast Duckling with Baby Peas
Watercress Salad
Pont-l’Evêque Cheese
Almond Cake with Almond Paste and Chantilly
The attendance was 104 and the sales $1,200 for one night. I knew then what we had to do.
A month later I wrote the “Provence Region” menu, our first local foraging and sourcing. The menu started with our take on the famous aioli de province of fish, vegetables, and snails, followed by sea scallops, then spit-roasted pork loin with wild sage (from a Sonoma ranch), a whole small artichoke, not stuffed with saffron milk cap mushrooms (barigoules) but the more contemporary version, artichauts à la barigoule, stuffed with onions, garlic, and chopped carrots and braised with white wine. Then a course of California goat cheese. The finale was fresh figs we’d picked in the Sierra foothills and poached in red wine, served with crème fraîche we made ourselves since there was no other way of getting it. That was another weekday night, and another 104 people came, boosting the weekly revenue to five thousand dollars.
I was convinced we were on a roll, so I decided to tempt the gods on November 29 by serving a Champagne dinner featuring a real truite au bleu, or live trout cooked in vegetable broth.
Champagne Regional Dinner
November 29, 1973
Boudin de Lapin à la Sainte-Ménehould
(White sausage of rabbit breaded and grilled)
Truites au Bleu au Champagne
(Fresh trout poached in champagne)
La Brioche de Ris de Veau au Champagne
(Sweetbreads in a brioche pastry with a champagne sauce)
Salade Verte
(Field greens salad)
Plat du Fromages de Champagne
(Special cheeses of Champagne)
Sorbets de Poire et de Cassis
We charged a then astonishing ten dollars per person on a Thursday night. We offered various champagnes from the middle sixties. Roederer Cristal was sixteen dollars and Dom Pérignon a dollar more. Best of all, we debuted the new and superb California Schramsberg Blancs de Noir for eleven dollars.
The first time I ever saw truite au bleu was at Stonehenge, the Ridgefield, Connecticut, restaurant of Albert Stockli, the first chef of the Four Seasons. In 1968 I asked Albert if he would cook live trout au bleu for me. Not just for the spectacle of watching the live fish caught from the pond outside the dining room window just after it was ordered, but because I wanted to see it from a master I admired. Albert served it perfectly “blue,” meaning none of its color-giving protective slime had been rubbed off as he gilled, gutted, and immersed it in a bath of simmering vegetable broth. Minutes after it was netted, the trout would appear on a huge silver platter, this time swimming in an inch of melted butter. Then, in one magnificent gesture, Albert would slide the skin off and serve the fish with whipped cream–lightened hollandaise sauce spooned over.
The day of our Champagne dinner, the trout arrived from Big Sur in a huge tank on a flatbed truck that Jerry, the headwaiter, had driven there and back. We filled every available sink with the Big Sur mountain stream water in which they’d been raised, and kept the water bubbling and aerated with a compressor from the garage across the street.
The printed menu notwithstanding, the trout weren’t poached in champagne. Some pink champagne was poured over them before they left the kitchen and the rest I drank so that I could face killing more than a hundred trout myself.
Then it was killing time.
The first trout slipped out of my hands and went flapping into the dining room, spraying slime over some dowager’s ankles. The entire neighborhood heard her ensuing shrieks. My last trout, at around fifty, was worse: it looked up at me as I prepared to bash it over the head, and croaked a complaint. I couldn’t go on—the dishwasher had to finish off the rest.
Blue Trout in Pink Champagne
4 eight-ounce live trout
1 gallon vegetable broth
1 cup clarified butter
½ bottle pink champagne, at room temperature
1 cup savory (shellfish) sabayon
Prepare the trout: Being very careful to handle the trout as little as possible so that the protective slime is not rubbed off, hit it over the head, put your fingers into the gill opening, wrap a finger around the esophagus, and pull out the entire intestinal tract along with the gills. You will get really good at this after the fiftieth trout, so just do your best with the first four.
Bring the broth to a gentle simmer. The moment you have cleaned the trout, put them in the hot broth and cook for 8 minutes.
Have ready a heated rimmed 2-inch-deep platter that will just hold the trout and melted butter. Stand the fish up on their bellies on the platter in a swimming position and pour the butter over each trout. Take the platters to the table, open the champagne, and pour the pink wine over the trout.
Serve the trout with the champagne butter from the platter spooned over them. Each person draws back the skin, then spoons some sabayon on each bite of trout.
Success we could bask in seemed just around the corner. A letter from the head of KQED, one of the country’s flagship National Public Radio stations, had waxed lyrical about the Champagne dinner, saying it was “extraordinary for the originality of the courses and concept . . . the best of Panisse.” Our work, he added, was as important to the Bay Area as that of San Francisco Symphony conductors Kurt Herbert Adler and Seiji Ozawa. We’d become a cultural institution.
Nineteen seventy-three was a year of experiments culminating in a menu that I hoped would set the stage for the new Chez Panisse. We charged fifteen dollars per person.
New Year’s Eve Dinner, 1973
Crabe au Macôn, Sauce Moutarde
(Fresh Dungeness crab poached in Macôn wine, mustard sauce)
Tarte de Bresse Nantua de Lucien Tendret
(Tart of chicken livers and fish quenelles with a crayfish butter sauce)
Civet de Lapin Lyonnais
(Civet of rabbit cooked in red wine)
Fromage Saint-Marcellin
(Saint-Marcellin cheese marinated in olive oil, juniper berries, and garlic)
Sorbet de Cassis aux Poires
(Pears poached in red wine served with a black-currant sorbet)
In June 1974 Panisse received a local review from the newsletter À La Votre. “The few flaws we found [earlier have] virtually disappeared, and there is a feeling of life and creativity.” It used terms like “poetic” and “a wonder.” The reviewer also applauded our effort to promote California wines on our list, among them the Santa Cruz and Ridge Geyserville Zinfandels. She gave us three and a half stars out of four, saying she needed to keep a half star back to give us something to strive for.
And strive we did. As one of the equal five general partners in Chez Panisse I was still hoping one day to collect my winnings and finally head off to Hawaii. If we were starting to become famous, we were a long way from rich. The restaurant’s finances were in a shambles, and the lone partner with financial smarts, Gene Opton, had also been alone in regularly standing up to Alice. The upshot was that Alice had successfully lobbied the rest of us and the bank to buy her out.
Alice pretended she didn’t care about profits, until she needed them to travel or buy a new car, or to subsidize the business of one of her close friends, a crazed but wonderful woman who looked like Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil, lived with ocelots, and ran a vintage clothing shop. Disarmingly casual about expenses, Alice would take a bunch of checks and never bring back the dupes, so operating as we did on a day-to-day cash flow, it was common for me, as the principal food buyer, to be in constant fear of the bouncing checks—a waste of energy. And energy, in the days before cocaine fueled a chef’s eighty-to ninety-hour week, was what it was all about.
I commandeered the checkbook and took over the books, keeping track of the food costs and attendance each day. After twenty-eight years of the world’s most expensive schooling, I still had no experience handling money. In college when I had problems balancing my checkbook, I would just give in to my grandfather’s constant offers to send me more money. But I was determined, some said ruthlessly, to make money and get out, and I quickly learned my way around accounting. If my Irish side promptly spent whatever I made for myself, with my inherited Yankee Puritan grandfather’s instincts I fiercely guarded the restaurant’s takings.
Our first financial statements of the new partnership were an exciting “grown-up” moment, even if no one knew how to read them. For the first six months of 1975, we had assets of $24,000 and a long-term debt of $60,000. Sales averaged $25,000 a month, and the profit was 12 percent, a huge improvement over the previous year. We still owed Gene ten grand on her investment, but with $5,000 in the bank, things were looking up!