“What the fuck is California cuisine?” asked East Coast chef Dan Barber in late 2014. I feel I should now answer his question. And what’s the point? Culinary background and history may be fascinating and useful for some, but bore the crap out of others.
During a 2015 summer Blood Moon eclipse dinner at Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns with six very smart, ambitious, and dedicated young men in their twenties who wanted to re-create Stars, I knew the point. After an hour of hearing them talk about American restaurants, food, and wine, I could think only of kids learning to swim the hard way. Thrown into the lake and told to kick. Move their arms. A lot of determined effort, a lot of flailing, little progress.
It had been a shock to me when we opened Stars on July 4, 1984, that my twenty-something kitchen crew knew nothing of America’s culinary past. My eager young hosts at Stone Barns had heard of culinary America, had watched all the TV shows, but they also knew nothing about where it came from. Asking them the key to their futures, or what they could discard of the past to get on with an intelligent future, was pointless. I made do with “Does America, the world’s biggest melting pot of cultures, have its own distinct culinary identity?” Or is it just about making a thousand errors, then connecting the errors? Is the American food revolution the realm of legend, of myth? After all, what this young group of cooks, waiters, and sommeliers know of the origins of the changes in culinary America is pure media. None were there at the beginning of the revolution or grounded in what inspired it. The new generation has adopted the terminology of “fresh,” “organic,” “local,” and “California,” but how many of them had ever gardened or been on a farm? If the essential meanings of these concepts for them live only in the press, cooking magazines, and the floodlights of fame, one can hardly blame them. Some of their mentors were press-manipulating mythmakers.
Do we have that problem again?
The question gripped a group of chefs during the World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ first #50BestTalks event in New York in October 2014, put together as a forum to debate the future of American dining. The chefs group included Eleven Madison Park co-owners Will Guidara and Daniel Humm, Eataly’s Mario Batali, British chef April Bloomfield of the Spotted Pig, Italian chef Massimo Bottura of legendary Osteria Francescana, Wylie Dufresne, Sabato Sagaria of the Union Square Hospitality Group, Nick Kokonas of Chicago’s Alinea and Next, and Andrew Carmellini.
A veritable melting pot of Euro-American talent.
Dan Barber caught all their attention with his California cuisine remark, prefaced by “America doesn’t have a cuisine. I was in California and someone stood up and talked about California cuisine.” That’s when he wondered aloud what it is. Massimo had a different answer. “I go to America to recharge my batteries. In Europe, we’re not dreaming anymore: we have a sense of sadness filled with nostalgia.” At least they know what they are missing. My young hosts would have been incredulous had I told them that in 1974, France’s three-star Michelin chef Jean Troisgros told me in my kitchens in Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant that he envied my freedom.
The questions are relevant not just to the current and next generation of culinary professionals. As a restaurant goer, when you have finished the twenty or so courses at Blue Hill, have you wasted your three hundred dollars of eating-out money? How much can you believe of the “slips and stumbles” alleged in the New York Times January 2016 review by Pete Wells of New York’s Per Se, with the conclusion that “in and of itself” (in other words, “per se”) the restaurant is no longer worth the time and money? Unless you have something to refer it to, how could you know if a new restaurant’s revival of nouvelle cuisine stacks up unless you knew something about the origin, successes, and failures of that kind of cooking? Or whether they are just blowing hot kitchen smoke up your nose?
Dishing the history is a palatable way to find out.