Nine: LA, Rebel Chef

Nine

LA

As a kid, all my favorite TV shows were set in LA, from which I gathered it was as far from a sleepy French town as a girl with ambition could get. In LA, people flashed their white teeth in the sun. They jumped into dune buggies and flew across the beach by the ocean. They chased stolen cars down something called the Pacific Coast Highway. Going back to San Francisco so soon after leaving would have felt like an anticlimax, and the prospect of moving to LA seemed wildly exciting.

In the late 1990s, LA wasn’t being celebrated for its food culture. This isn’t to say the food scene wasn’t interesting, particularly with the rise in popularity of Japanese food and the strong Mexican influence in the city. But it wasn’t considered a destination for food. The stereotype of the average Angelino is someone too busy trying to stay thin to eat out with any conviction. To me, however, the health consciousness of the city was a bonus. Surrounded by rich agricultural lands and blessed with dry, year-round sunshine, LA sounded like a chef’s dream.

Chefs are as subject to trends as anyone, but professional cuisine as a whole can be very intolerant of new tastes, particularly when they are imposed from the outside. When I was growing up in France, even vegetarianism was considered dangerously radical. You didn’t ask for sauce on the side, or for lactose-free milk, and no one would have dared call themselves gluten intolerant. To some chefs, the rise in these sensitivities, along with general changes in palates and appetites, has been an unwelcome interference in the kitchen.

I tend not to think like this. Even by the health-conscious standards of San Francisco cuisine, my restaurant has one of the most vegan menus in the city. This is a natural reflection of my interest in plant-based cooking, but it is also a reflection of the times. It has always struck me as bizarre when a chef gets angry when asked to accommodate someone’s dietary needs. I make my own decisions in the kitchen and the final say is with me, but I also like to consider the other point of view. I want to welcome people to my house, I don’t want to make them feel bad. So you want the sauce without dairy or sugar? Okay! Let me see what I can do. It can be a challenge, but whatever the demand, be it vegan, gluten-free, or fructose-free cooking, I try to meet people’s needs.

I’m even relaxed about food being sent back to the kitchen. It rarely happens, but perhaps a dish proves too salty for someone’s palate, or isn’t cooked enough for their tastes. I try to deal with that respectfully; after all, every palate is different. I happen to like acidity and salt, and I like my fish lightly cooked if at all. But if you come to my restaurant and want everything cooked medium well? Bien sur, I will try to accommodate your terrible taste.

The only thing that really irritates me in the restaurant is when people say, “It’s not to my liking.” I’m doing a seafood and vegetable menu and occasionally people ask, “Can I have meat?” And I say no; that I don’t accommodate. You shouldn’t eat here. Or someone says I don’t think I like mushrooms, or fish. I am not interested in that. You go out in order to experience new things; there has to be some give and take on both sides.

The first time I visited LA, I was with my boyfriend Philippe and we were both still in college. When we checked into the YMCA in Hollywood, we found a drab, squalid place nothing like the shining city of my dreams. We immediately checked out, and for the rest of the vacation Philippe and I rented a small bungalow on the water in Malibu.

I loved the ocean and the weather, but the city itself had seemed bizarre. How did it even function as a city? It was so spread out that the definition seemed barely to qualify. And how on earth were you supposed to get around the place without sitting on the freeway for hours every day? When I returned fifteen years later, I don’t know if the city had changed or only I had, but after the stress and disappointment of my time in Indonesia, LA seemed like a balm. For a few months, I stayed in a hotel in West Hollywood, then I found a little duplex in Larchmont. A new life began.

To find a job in LA, I reconnected with my old chef network in San Francisco. YoYo Bistro was situated in a hotel owned by the Radisson group, and it was through one of my hotel acquaintances that I found a position in LA. For a few months, I ran the kitchen at the Radisson in LA’s Koreatown, a good entry into the city’s culinary scene and one that chimed with my interest in Asian flavors. After my experiences in Indonesia, however, I wasn’t ready to commit long-term to working for a big hotel chain, and when a friend heard of a job going at the Manhattan Country Club in the southernmost part of the city, I headed down to take a look.

Manhattan Beach is a thirty-five-minute drive from central Los Angeles, slightly to the south of Marina del Rey. The venue was owned by a man called Keith Brackpool, a British American entrepreneur who was well-connected politically, and the club was known as a destination for visiting politicians. It was quite a spread: 75,000 square feet of land, including 18 tennis courts, a 6,000-square-foot gym, and a 25-meter swimming pool, all of which would sell in 2017 for $73 million. At the center of this was the club restaurant, which I would end up running for almost eight years.

Running the kitchen of the Manhattan Country Club was not like running a fashionable fine-dining restaurant. Despite the prestige of the venue, compared to Stars, or YoYo Bistro, or even the InterContinental Hotel, it was a laid-back environment. The food had to be good, but there was no pressure to turn it into a traditional fine-dining establishment. It was a sports and social club. Everyone was encouraged to relax.

It was exactly what I needed at that point in my life. After the frantic pace of life in San Francisco, the split with Melinda, and the move to Jakarta and back, what I needed was a few years to kick back in the sun. There were fifteen hundred or so members at the Country Club, and in addition to the daily lunch and dinner menus, Keith engaged me to do a lot of private parties. I cooked for Al Gore. I designed the menu for a big tennis tournament. For these events, I could devise whatever menu I liked. I started to take my time and develop my style.

After I took over the kitchen, the first thing I did was reach out to the farmer communities around LA in order to learn more about the organic movement. I wasn’t interested in working with the big food corporations, and preferred to go out and visit small farms and small suppliers, and try to source the best ingredients for the simplest meals. Keith trusted me, and because of that I was able to experiment a lot, and I wasn’t made to strictly adhere to recipes.

Cooking this way isn’t for everyone. In the early days, before I had much of a reputation to go on, it was hard to attract collaborators who understood what I was doing. One day in the early 2000s, I met with a young man named Juan Contreras. He had heard of me through the grapevine and emailed to ask for a meeting. I hadn’t jumped at the chance. I was busy and I had no idea who he was. He emailed again, and again. Juan is quiet and dogged in ways that complement my own doggedness, but with a flair for planning I completely lack.

He is also an extraordinarily good chef, although I didn’t know it back then. When he walked in the door, I saw a young guy with cutoff pants and sun-bleached hair who looked like a typical Californian surfer. Juan was born in San Diego and is of Mexican descent. His grandfather was a carpenter, his father was a doctor, and his mother, who he had been very close to and who had died when he was young, had been a teacher. We talked for hours at that first meeting, about his life, his dreams, and the loss of his mother. What’s interesting is that we didn’t talk exclusively, or even overly, about food, yet I immediately had a deep sense of compatibility with him.

(A friend of mine recently asked Juan to recall his first impressions on meeting me. “Crazy!” he said. “All over the place! A lot of ideas and goals!” I guess my energy had yet to find its true focus, although I was many years into planning my own restaurant. “Her strength is in risk-taking. She pulls the trigger and the rest of us go along for the ride.”)

In late 2006, I woke up one day and realized I had been at the Country Club for almost eight years. Though I was happy there, the longer I stayed the more remote some of my ambitions seemed to become. It was a good life and a satisfying job, and I was close to the owner. I still am. In many ways, I had gone much further in my career than I could have ever imagined, working in prestigious restaurants and for the biggest names in the business. But in one very specific goal I had fallen short. I had turned forty a year earlier and was starting to panic that if I wanted to open a restaurant, I’d better get on with it.

This goal was about more than being my own boss. From my chef-owner friends, I knew that owning a restaurant was a huge headache. It was financially risky and emotionally fraught and the probability was it would fail. But the reward, if it worked out, was something I could barely imagine. Even at the Country Club, where I had so much freedom, there was a limit to how much influence I could exert. Its look and ethos had been established long before I’d arrived and reflected the owner, not me. I wanted to create something of my own.

Later that year, toward the end of 2006, a pair of restaurateurs approached me and said they were opening a restaurant in Santa Monica. Would I come in with them, as a coinvestor and the executive chef? On the face of it, it seemed a good fit. They talked about farm to table, and organic and local food movements, and they talked about a love of innovation and modernity.

The restaurant was to be called Abode, in a building on Ocean Avenue, across the street from the entrance to the Santa Monica Pier. The interiors were to be warm, with a lot of exposed wood and soft lighting. The menu was to be fresh, seasonal, and wherever possible sourced from farmers using sustainable practices. I would have creative control of the kitchen and a say in the major decisions concerning the restaurant. The most important of these was the staff. Although it had been a couple of years since we’d met, the first thing I did was call Juan. I knew I wanted to work with him and that he would understand my vision instantly. Looking back, it is safe to say that the only good thing to come out of Abode was the beginning of my working relationship with Juan.

There were a lot of things wrong with Abode. The management was chaotic. There was discord over how high end they wanted the restaurant to be and what crowd we were trying to attract. Though we raised over $2 million from investors, most of it, as far as I could tell, was spent on the decor.

I built on many of the recipes I’d devised over eight years at the Country Club and reconfigured them for the new setting. I concocted a lot of small plates, including a pear-and-parsnip “cappuccino” soup, with truffles and coffee on the side. I created an eight-course vegetarian tasting menu as well as a slow-cooked osso buco in apple cider.

We had some good reviews, and a couple of terrible ones. The Los Angeles Times complained about the cost of the beef and that too much time had been spent on how the food looked. (The creation of foam, in particular, sent one critic over the edge. “Arts and crafts,” she called it.) Nonetheless, the restaurant was runner-up in the 2007 Angeleno’s Restaurant Awards, and that same year, Esquire magazine named me a “chef to watch.” This was a big deal. After working nonstop as a chef for almost fifteen years, I felt I was finally being publicly recognized.

None of these achievements were acknowledged by the people who’d hired me; all I heard from management were complaints. They were cheap, wanting me to work seven days a week without adequate time off, and they were manipulative—smiling to my face and being rude about me behind my back, which of course I found out about later. I didn’t feel I could trust them, nor that they were on my side. The restaurant had barely opened before I was planning my escape.

This is often the downside to being impulsive. I should have done my due diligence before accepting the job. But now that I knew I was in trouble, I was at least decisive about what I needed to do. I find moving on easy, an instinct that is built into my very foundations and probably goes back to my being adopted. Fresh starts, however unscheduled, always energize me, and so after only six months, I left Abode. Six months after that, the restaurant shut. I’d lost the money I’d invested and I had no job, but I didn’t care; I was free.

The lesson of all this is that it’s never just about the plate. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you don’t have the right people around you, it will never come to fruition. I didn’t have the right people at Abode, so I did what I needed to do to dig myself out, at considerable cost. But the alternative—to shrug and make do; to work with people who didn’t look after their staff—was unacceptable to me. I would rather go out of business than do business with them.

Leaving takes stamina. So does standing up for yourself. Even the baseline energy required to run a kitchen day in, day out, is phenomenal, and it’s no coincidence that substance abuse is rife in culinary culture. I worked insanely hard in LA in my thirties, but I never had those problems. When people ask how I have so much energy, I tell them the truth: I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink much alcohol—wine, that’s it—and I get exhausted, like anyone else. What drives me is doing things right.

It always has, from the time I first listened to my dad talk about the world over dinner or watched him taking pains over his paintings in the garden. He taught me that success can’t always be measured in wealth and acclaim but rather in the satisfaction of doing things right.

However, if I’m to be entirely honest and tell this story right, I have to acknowledge there was something else going on. I worked radioactively hard in my twenties and thirties because I was pursuing a goal and a vision, but that wasn’t my only motivation. For the previous eight years, I’d been trying to block something out, something that I would continue to put off thinking about. I didn’t want to think about my dad, or the fact that I had lost him.