Six: Stars, Rebel Chef

Six

STARS

Jeremiah Tower was the most famous chef in the world, or so it seemed in the early 1990s. After helping Alice Waters put Chez Panisse on the map, he had opened Stars in San Francisco in 1984. By the time I arrived in the city in 1989, it was one of the most talked-about restaurants not only in San Francisco, but in the entire country. Mikhail Gorbachev had eaten there, as had Luciano Pavarotti, Liza Minnelli, Sophia Loren, and Rudolf Nureyev, while Tower himself had become a celebrity.

I had been in San Francisco for a little over eighteen months and hadn’t rushed to find work in a kitchen. I had found my feet slowly, meeting people in the restaurant industry, at first through the French community, then through my waitressing. Everyone I met, I asked the same question: who did they think I should work for?

Tower’s name kept coming up. He was the best in the business, but it wasn’t only that. I had read his memoir and got the sense we were alike. Tower’s father had worked in global sales and he had grown up all over the world, combining French, English, and American sensibilities. His culinary style was known to be playful, his personality bold. Tower had studied architecture at Harvard and became a chef in his late twenties, entering his first kitchen with no professional experience. And although he was an admirer of classical French cooking, he was also a believer in the virtue of simplicity.

Something else about Tower appealed to me. While, like most chefs, it was said he could be imperious, I had heard through the grapevine that those who worked for him were given more freedom than in any other kitchen in the city. I liked the idea of working at the epicenter of the new California cuisine, but, more than that, I was attracted to Stars as a restaurant that was as far from the autocratic French kitchen as a chef with no training could get. All I had to do was pluck up the courage to walk in and ask for a job.

It might seem strange that I was even considering this approach, given my lack of professional experience. Apart from that stint making sandwiches for the kids at summer camp in Garches, I had only ever cooked for family and friends. And yet I knew I was good, and not only because my mother had told me. I knew it the way one knows the most profound things about oneself, without need of analysis or explanation. I was so confident, I even thought that “being good” or “not being good” was the wrong way to think about it. It was, I believed, about understanding why you wanted to cook. It was about knowing that when you cook something, even just a sandwich, it’s really an act of communication and caring. You can learn cooking techniques, but knowing exactly why you are using them is something you can’t always teach. In a funny way, I felt as if I already had the hardest part down.

The restaurant was on Redwood Alley, near City Hall, with a grungy exterior and an entrance via an alley that had a speakeasy vibe. Walking into the kitchen, I recognized Tower immediately from his appearances in the press. He was tall and good-looking, impeccably dressed in chef’s whites, and commanding the space with a calm and effortless air.

What happened next still makes me laugh: with the absolute confidence of youth, I walked right up to Tower, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “I want to work for you. I’m French so I already know how to cook.” I knew that Tower had pulled a similar move in the early 1970s went he’d marched into Chez Panisse and asked Alice Waters for a job. And I knew from his memoir that he believed in dreams. I had no idea whether hiring people with no experience was something he had a habit of doing, but I had a sense he only wanted to hire people who really wanted to work there.

Tower looked at me for a moment as if sizing me up. Then, instead of throwing me out or asking for references, he said simply, “Okay, come back tomorrow.”

I walked out of the restaurant in a state of euphoria. I had done it! I had plucked up the courage to ask, and now I had a shot at the big time! I’d been dreaming of working in a kitchen so long, the fact that it was finally happening felt simultaneously unreal and like a foregone conclusion. I was thrilled, and excited, and determined not to be intimidated. Getting the chance to try out at a restaurant like Stars was precisely the kind of opportunity I’d moved to America for. I wasn’t going to ruin it by panicking.

The next day, however, when I returned to the restaurant, my nerves really started to kick in. I looked around the half-empty kitchen. It was early in the day, many hours before the jump and hustle of the predinner rush, but this was scarier in a way than a busy kitchen might have been—the eerie calm before the storm. What if I couldn’t take the pace? What if, after all these years of dreaming, I wasn’t up to the job? There weren’t many women working at Stars, just a few in the pastry division, and as I walked in to report for my shift, I felt a shiver of apprehension. What if there were no women at Stars because, as the entire French culinary establishment had warned me, women couldn’t hack it?

To begin, I was put on prep duty. All morning I stood at my station helping prep basic ingredients. I sliced vegetables and peeled potatoes. I washed things and stirred things. “Oui, chef!” I called out, when Jeremiah addressed me, trying to attract as little attention as possible. If I could get through a couple of shifts without messing up, I thought, perhaps they’d allow me to stay.

A few hours before opening, Jeremiah gathered the team for a meeting. I hovered at the edge of the group, hoping to be either ignored completely or sent down to the basement to peel more potatoes. Instead, Jeremiah turned to me. “Dominique!” he said. I jumped. “Oui, chef!” I said.

“You’ll be on the line with Sean tonight.” Sean was the sous-chef, the head chef’s number two, and on a busy night, the real power in the kitchen. What on earth was going on? I was being taken off grunt work after a single morning and being given a chance to put together some dishes. “Oui, chef!” I said, hoping my voice wasn’t trembling.

I looked around the kitchen. There were stations for meat, fish, and pastry. There was the sautéing area, a wood-fire oven and a grill, and there were stations for oysters and hot and cold appetizers. Everything was quiet—it was still early—with the condensed energy of a theater before curtain up. I could barely believe I was here, that I was about to be trusted to put together even the simplest of ingredients for a restaurant so famed and so large. But if my confidence wavered, Sean didn’t seem to notice. He turned to me and asked if I’d get going on some couscous. I took a deep breath. Okay, here we go.

The brigade system—le brigade de cuisine—works in French restaurants the way a ranking hierarchy works in the army. It was developed by Auguste Escoffier, the famous French chef of the first part of the twentieth century who, if he didn’t exactly invent Hollandaise sauce, was certainly the first to formally codify it. (He definitely invented peach melba.) The way an efficient kitchen should work, he determined, was through a rigid class system that culminated in the chef de cuisine, ran down through the sous-chef, the cuisinier, the commis chef, and so on, and ended with the porter and the pot scrubber. It wasn’t impossible for a famous French chef to start out peeling potatoes and rise to the top of the pyramid, but such a move would take decades, during which time he—and it would always be a he—would be expected to obey the orders, and the recipes, of those above him.

This was not how things worked at Stars. There were no recipes, just guidelines. “Make mayonnaise,” said Sean and left me to it. “Make mashed potatoes,” he said. These were not hard things to make, but when you are helping to plate four or five hundred covers a night, the smallest mistake can feel like a disaster. This is why the brigade system was developed in the first place—to limit the extent to which anyone might lose their head and mess up by denying them the right to make even the tiniest decision. There was a cost to this, however. Inevitably, over the years, the system corrupted into a chain of command so inflexible that those at the bottom were given no opportunity to shine and those at the top grew too fond of power. Kitchens became rife with abusive behavior. It became de rigueur to brutalize one’s staff.

I was lucky at Stars. Sean was not the kind of sous-chef who got a kick out of oppressing those lower down on the food chain, nor was he a guy who just wanted to finish his shift and go home. He was interested in teaching and guiding his staff, a decent human being and a rarity in that role at that time.

I didn’t crumble on that first night nor did I panic. Even if I had, however, I wouldn’t have been screamed at. Jeremiah’s kitchen was not the kind of place where new recruits were put through the culinary equivalent of hazing. There was no yelling, no shouting, no slamming people up against the wall. There was just quiet collaboration and the encouragement to learn.

This is how it should be. Kitchen culture has improved enormously since I started out, and the cliché of the raging chef is less relevant than it once was. But only recently, I interviewed a young guy as a potential sous-chef in my kitchen and was shocked by his attitude. “Yeah,” he said, “I worked under this chef in France and got beaten up and yelled at—but I guess if I do that here I might get sued?” He was under thirty.

I was fortunate that my first exposure to a professional kitchen wasn’t like that. In Jeremiah’s kitchen, if a new recruit showed promise, she was given more responsibility, and within a few weeks I was being presented with a handful of ingredients—calamari, say, and a few herbs and vegetables—and invited to create my own dishes. At 4:30 p.m., Sean, Mark Franz, the executive chef, or Jeremiah would walk over to my station to taste and review. If the dish wasn’t working, I would have thirty minutes to fix it. If it worked, it was rolled out in the restaurant that night. There was pressure, of course, but it was managed and orderly. We all looked to Jeremiah, and as long as he wasn’t yelling and panicking, neither were we.

I still had moments of doubt. Had I really talked my way into this place on the basis of a French accent and a cocky attitude? It would be a long time before I stopped waiting for someone to call me out across the kitchen—Hey, you! Who let you in!?—and send me home. But even during the most frantic parts of the night, when plates flew and hundreds of people waited for food, I was never paralyzed. The calm of Jeremiah’s kitchen gave me the confidence to take a breath and clear my head. I watched and followed. I remained totally focused. I based my performance on three things: observation, intuition, and anticipation, and I sometimes found that my hands worked faster than my brain.

I might not have known exactly what I was doing or why, but my body apparently did. Being a chef is an intensely physical exercise in which muscle memory can play a large part. Mark Franz would later tell me that from the very beginning, I never had to be told something more than once and I never had to redo my dishes. You couldn’t, with those guys around. You had to find your feet quickly and then stay on your toes.

I was drawn to food from the earliest age, but I can honestly say that the light didn’t really come on until I was in Jeremiah’s kitchen. To dream of cooking when you are a kid is one thing; to have this concrete feeling of it being the right thing for you is something else entirely. Being a chef isn’t just about being able to cook. It is about being able to think clearly, quickly, and to be good under pressure—to thrive in a challenging environment. You have a dream but it might not fit who you are, and most of us don’t know who we are until we grow up. I had always known I loved food, but it wasn’t until those early weeks at Stars that I knew with complete conviction and for the first time in my life that I was in the right place.

One thing I noticed about Jeremiah: he liked to leave the kitchen to wander around the dining room, greeting the diners as if they were guests in his home. This seemed to me extremely civilized. If I ever had my own restaurant, I vowed, I would do the same thing.

In addition to Jeremiah, I was fascinated by Loretta Keller, who ran the café at Stars. This was an informal offshoot of the main restaurant, where the food was rustic, delicious, and often made from leftovers from the Stars kitchen—that is, perishable items not used in the kitchen that night that could be reconstituted into dishes the next day. Jeremiah could be whimsical, serving hotdogs, sauerkraut, and champagne at the Stars bar, while at the café, Loretta did something closer to home cooking.

The main thing I admired about Loretta was her attitude toward waste. She was way ahead of the crowd when it came to understanding the implications of industrial food production. Fifty years ago there was almost no waste. Even these days, in France, there is much less food waste than in the United States, where it can be cheaper to buy in bulk and throw away than to buy a lesser amount of what you actually need. This was one of the things that most shocked me when I first came to America—the sheer quantity of food it is apparently okay to throw away. If you looked in my (small, European) fridge today, you would find very little; some butter, some milk, maybe an open jar of tapenade. I buy what I need and no more than that.

Loretta would go on to open Coco500, a hugely influential restaurant (early menu items: stuffed squash blossoms, sautéed scallops with green beans, and quail stuffed with sausage) that closed in 2014 after twenty-three years of being a San Francisco institution. But it was the example she set at the Stars café that stayed with me: the effort to use what in other kitchens might be classified as waste; the simplicity of style.

These were insights that, along with everything else I learned at Stars—how to treat the people who work for you, how to run a calm and compassionate kitchen—set the tone for the rest of my career, as did Jeremiah’s generosity to me over the years. He has always been the first to congratulate me when I’ve had any kind of public recognition, telling me at a Stars reunion recently, when I thanked him for his inspiration, that I was the inspiration now.

But back then, I still had an awful lot to learn. I remember asking Mark Franz in those early days how much it would cost me to start my own restaurant and him replying five hundred thousand dollars. It seemed an impossible figure—where on earth would I ever get that kind of money?—but of course it is completely laughable now. In San Francisco these days, half a million dollars would barely buy you a kitchen.

Sometimes ignorance is necessary in order to move forward. Things had gone so well for me in the first year of my life as a chef, I had become thoroughly convinced of two things: that after my sure start at Stars, I had been able to skip that part of the traditional chef’s training in which the novice gets yelled at and abused by her boss; and that it wouldn’t be long before I had my own restaurant. On both counts, I was completely, utterly, stratospherically wrong.