by Holly Hughes
And while not every eatery in town banked on fantasy—downtown LA in the 1920s was crowded with sterile-looking cafeterias that catered to the sober tastes of the hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners who were flooding into the city at the time—the movie business was the engine that drove our fine-dining culture for much of the 20th century. In the early years, the stars gathered at night in places like the swank Cocoanut Grove, in Midtown’s Ambassador Hotel, where their comings and goings, documented in newsreel images in thousands of movie palaces, kept the rest of the country fixated on what was happening out here. In those flickering images was the inkling that Los Angeles, once a remote, dusty pueblo, was now a place with a vibrant culture all its own. It would take a few years, however, for that culture to find expression in food.
WELL INTO THE 20TH CENTURY, the fanciest restaurants in LA, like those in the rest of the country, were still looking to Europe for their models. Places like Perino’s—an Italian-owned restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard with a lengthy, haute-Continental menu—were still considered the epitome of stylishness in the 1940s and 1950s. When it came to food, imported cuisine was fine, but Angelenos of certain means eventually came to expect something more—a little sleight of hand, a memorable character. Romanoff’s, which opened in 1941 on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, delivered both, in the person of owner “Prince” Mike Romanoff. The self-styled Russian royal was actually Herschel Geguzin, an orphaned son of a Cincinnati tailor. Everyone knew he was a fraud, but no one cared. On the contrary, guests seemed to admire him for his chutzpah.
Mike Romanoff’s success also owed to this: he knew that for all of Hollywood’s glamour, the inner workings of the city amounted essentially to a bunch of hard-nosed men eating lunch. Romanoff’s, accordingly, was a boys’ club, complete with stiff drinks, deep booths, rich French food, and waiters who were models of discretion. Cigarette girls roamed the big back room; the coveted five tables opposite the Art Déco bar were reserved for the real movers and shakers, and for Romanoff himself. In 1949, M.F.K. Fisher, not yet a doyenne of the food world but a recently divorced sometime screenwriter, expressed admiration for the restaurant’s breeziness and pragmatism. “The attitude seems to be,” she wrote in her book An Alphabet for Gourmets, “that all humans must eat, and all humans must make money in order to eat, and therefore the two things might as well be combined.”
Romanoff had recognized an essential facet of LA culture, but an older restaurant had already begun to break through and represent something even more intrinsic about Los Angeles. The Brown Derby had opened across the street from the Cocoanut Grove back in 1926; with its exterior shaped like a giant bowler hat, it seemed to hint at the extravagances of the theme restaurant, and, filled with movie stars, it certainly had élan, but over the years it had gained a reputation for its tasty food. It wasn’t fancy: pan-fried corned beef hash was a popular dish, as was the grapefruit cake with cream cheese frosting. The most famous dish, the Cobb salad, didn’t skew European at all. It is hard to think today of iceberg lettuce, watercress, chicory, romaine, bacon, and avocado as being original, but it was a brilliant combination, as perfect as blinis and caviar, hollandaise and filets de sole, and certainly more interesting than any ersatz European grandeur hashed up under dusty chandeliers.
While the Brown Derby had begun to unmoor LA’s fine dining from Europe’s, it took a restaurant called Chasen’s to cut the ropes. In the 1950s, by which time LA had become an important enough city that the Dodgers decamped there from Brooklyn, this low-slung Beverly Hills restaurant was becoming the place to be seen. Its most famous dish wasn’t coquilles St-Jacques or chicken quenelles; it was a bowl of chili sprinkled with diced raw onion. Running a close second was the hobo steak, a New York strip steak cooked tableside in copious amounts of butter. Like Romanoff’s, Chasen’s had a manly brusqueness, but unlike Romanoff’s, it rejected dynastic pretensions. Actually, Chasen’s wasn’t really very good. (My aunt, a onetime Vegas showgirl and not one for moist-eyed nostalgia, once summed matters up saying, “Patric, the only things worth having at Chasen’s were the garlic bread and the decaf.”)
The only time I ever visited Chasen’s was in 1999, four years after it closed. The restaurant where Ronald Reagan had proposed to Nancy, where Orson Welles had hurled a flaming chafing dish at the producer-actor John Houseman, was auctioning off all its furnishings. I walked into the massive structure on Beverly Boulevard, with its weird white columned exterior and its green-and-white-striped awning that stretched to the curb, and there it all was: the silver crab forks, the butter holders, the golden cocktail stirrers, laid out and tagged with lot numbers. In the dark, wood-paneled interior, I got a sense of why that bowl of chili with diced onions had been so important. It announced that fine dining, with all its trappings, could be made in America. What remained to be figured out was whether fine dining in Los Angeles could be made to reflect not just America but this particular corner of California.
IT COULD BE ARGUED THAT LA’s unique brand of California cuisine was born on a patch of farmland outside Los Angeles, where a Cordon Bleu graduate named Michael McCarty and a chef named Jean Bertranou, who’d brought nouvelle cuisine to LA with his West Hollywood restaurant L’Ermitage, began farming ducks for foie gras. McCarty had fallen in love with French cuisine as a teenager but was intent on expressing that love in a local dialect. He opened Michael’s in Santa Monica, three blocks from the ocean, in 1979. In a complete departure from the upscale chop house vibe of places like the Brown Derby, Michael’s had a back garden that was suffused with sunlight in the afternoon. Yes, there was foie gras, but it was served by waiters in pink button-down shirts alongside California-made chèvre and wines. Whereas Chasen’s could have been mistaken for Manhattan’s ‘21’ Club, Michael’s couldn’t have existed anywhere but Southern California.
The confluence of graceful outdoor living and expensive modern art, of baby vegetables and understated affluence, was the sexiest encapsulation of modern American cooking yet. But McCarty was more than a showman. He was a mentor who believed in his mission of channeling the rigors of French cooking into something new. The LA pastry chef and restaurateur Nancy Silverton—one of a number of now famous alums of Michael’s, including the chefs Jonathan Waxman and Ken Frank—recalls McCarty’s taking her aside and saying of the mousse she was making, “It’s too French.” The dessert was over-aerated, he explained; he wanted more concentration of flavor. The moment was an epiphany, Silverton says, a turning point that would lead her toward her signature, rustic style of baking. “Suddenly, I understood that there was a difference between a good French pastry and a good pastry based on French technique.”
Michael’s had started a transformation, but to start a revolution, it would take a chef who really had something to rebel against. In fact, it took a European truly to see Southern California’s singular lifestyle and incomparable natural bounty for what they were. A few years before McCarty got his restaurant off the ground, a 30-year-old Austrian cook named Wolfgang Puck was living in a rented room with sheets on the windows and an Emmanuelle poster on the wall. Puck was a culinary hired gun. Before coming to LA, he’d worked at dowagers of haute cuisine like Maxim’s in Paris and the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo; once here, he got a job at Ma Maison, a Melrose Avenue restaurant that was the height of style in the mid-1970s. Certainly, the place was a change of pace for Puck: the dining room had an Astroturf floor, and the owner, a Frenchman named Patrick Terrail, was known to sport an elegant suit with sandals and white socks. But by Puck’s own admission, the kitchen was still doing a butter-with-more-butter style of cooking.
Puck became famous at Ma Maison anyhow, publishing a popular book on French cookery in 1981 called Modern French Cooking for the American Kitchen. But with Spago, which he opened the following year, he became a legend. The first iteration of the eatery was located on Sunset Boulevard in what had been a Russian-Armenian restaurant. Puck saw it as something casual—the dining room had checkered tablecloths—and
while there were certain connections to Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse (the same German bricklayer had made both restaurants’ pizza ovens, and they had the same enthusiasm for the produce of California), at first glance there wasn’t anything momentous about it. But Spago was unlike anything LA had seen before. Here was a chef who had been raised on the French “mother sauces” and had chosen not to use them. Instead, he installed a grill and had a truckload of almond tree wood delivered weekly. In the kitchen, he fostered an atmosphere of pure improvisation. The chef Mark Peel, who had come over from Michael’s to work as head chef, recalls the manic opening night. “We cooked with the menus propped in front of us to remember what the ingredients in the dishes were,” he says. This was not cooking from a playbook that had been slavishly passed down from one chef to another.
BY THE TIME I MOVED HERE, in 1988, Los Angeles’s role as a brilliantly inventive restaurant city had been cemented. I came as a cook, not a critic, carrying with me well-worn knives from Dehillerin in Paris, where I’d worked for Guy Savoy, and from Bridge Kitchenware in New York, where I was a line cook at the ‘21’ Club. Now the energy was pointing west. Everything seemed to be in flux when I got here. Even at the city’s older, well-loved places like Valentino, in Santa Monica, chefs were changing their stripes. When Valentino’s owner, Piero Selvaggio, opened the place back in 1972, it was a typical high-end ristorante with plenty of tableside pyrotechnics. “We didn’t use anything like buffalo mozzarella,” he recalls. “Mozzarella was something breaded and fried.” But by the time I visited, Selvaggio was wheeling an olive oil cart around his dining room, pouring samples over bruschetta so that customers could appreciate the differences between regional oils.
I got a job on the line at Citrus, a new restaurant that the French-born chef Michel Richard had just opened among the production houses and sound stages in the raggedy southern end of Hollywood. At Citrus, Richard wasn’t just mining the local terrain for the freshest beets or handmade charcuterie; he was going to the Thai grocery down the block and coming back to the kitchen with lemongrass and coconut milk. He was shopping at Armenian markets and bringing back things like katafi (shredded phyllo dough), which most of us had never seen before, and wrapping local Dungeness crab cakes with the stuff. One day, he became fascinated by watching one of the Salvadoran prep cooks eating a chayote salad. A few days later, we were plating up chayote slaw.
That you could play with culinary genres like that had become a given. Everyone was blurring boundaries: there was Roy Yamaguchi mingling Hawaiian foods like ahi and macadamia nuts with European techniques at his restaurant 385 North in West Hollywood (and later at the LA branch of Roy’s); Nobu Matsuhisa melded Latin American ingredients with traditional sushi at his namesake restaurant in Beverly Hills; and at the Melrose Avenue eatery Border Grill, which opened in 1985, Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken freely interwove strains of regional Mexican cuisines in homage to LA’s countless great taquerías. In a way, this sort of eclecticism was right at home in a city where fantasy and invention, rather than history and tradition, had formed the foundation of high-end dining.
By the end of the 1980s, LA was home to innovative restaurants that boasted an equally novel asset: homegrown talent. When Campanile opened, a few blocks north of Wilshire Boulevard, in 1989, its planked salmon and its grilled prime rib with black olive tapenade—served in a rustic but elegant dining room in a faux-Tuscan complex with a verdigris cupola—caused a sensation. Its owners were Nancy Silverton and Mark Peel, chefs who had come up through the ranks of LA dining and not from New York, France, or Austria.
I’ve eaten at Campanile too many times to count, and every time I do, I feel grounded in this city. Los Angeles is a hard place to know—its fantasyland roots, its ethnic patchwork, and its almost too perfect sense of glamour all defy easy explanation. But sitting in a crowded dining room like Campanile’s, I feel the disparate streams of LA’s history coming together, and I can gaze around me, and at the plates of beautiful food, and say to myself, This is it. This is LA.
AU REVOIR TO ALL THAT
By Michael Steinberger From Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France
Has France—the country that gave the world haute cuisine—truly ceded its place as the epicenter of all things culinary? Known for his controversial wine columns in Slate.com, journalist Michael Steinberger argues the case in fascinating detail.
On an uncomfortably warm September evening in 1999, I swapped my wife for a duck liver. The unplanned exchange took place at Au Crocodile, a Michelin three-star restaurant in the city of Strasbourg, in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. We had gone to Crocodile for dinner and, at the urging of our waiter, had chosen for our main course one of Chef Émile Jung’s signature dishes, Foie de Canard et Écailles de Truffe en Croûte de Sel, Baeckeofe de Légumes. Baeckeofe is a traditional Alsatian stew made of potatoes, onions, carrots, leeks, and several different meats. Jung, possessed of that particular Gallic genius for transforming quotidian fare into high cuisine, served a version of baeckeofe in which the meats were replaced by an entire lobe of duck liver, which was bathed in a truffled bouillon with root vegetables and cooked in a sealed terrine. The seal was broken at the table, and as soon as the gorgeous pink-gray liver was lifted out of its crypt and the first, pungent whiff of black truffles came our way, I knew our palates were about to experience rapture. Sure enough, for the ten minutes or so that it took us to consume the dish, the only sounds we emitted were some barely suppressed grunts and moans. The baeckeofe was outrageously good—the liver a velvety, earthy, voluptuous mass, the bouillon an intensely flavored broth that flattered everything it touched.
We had just finished dessert when Jung, a beefy, jovial man who looked to be in his mid-fifties, appeared at our table. We thanked him profusely for the meal, and my wife, an editor for a food magazine, asked about some of the preparations. From the look on his face, he was smitten with her, and after enthusiastically fielding her questions, he invited her to tour the kitchen with him. “We’ll leave him here,” he said, pointing at me. As my wife got up from the table, Jung eyed her lasciviously and said, “You are a mango woman!” which I took to be a reference to her somewhat exotic looks (she is half-American, half-Japanese). She laughed nervously; I laughed heartily. As Jung squired her off to the kitchen, I leaned back in my chair and took a sip of Gewürztraminer.
By now, it was midnight, the dining room was almost empty, and the staff had begun discreetly tidying up. After some minutes had passed, Madame Jung, a lean woman with frosted blonde hair who oversaw the front of the restaurant, approached my table, wearing a put-upon smile which suggested this wasn’t the first time her husband had taken a young female guest to see his pots and pans. Perhaps hoping to commiserate, she asked me if everything was okay. “Bien sûr,” I immediately replied, with an enthusiasm that appeared to take her by surprise. I was in too much of a stupor to engage in a lengthy conversation, but had I been able to summon the words, I would have told her that her husband had just served me one of the finest dishes I’d ever eaten; that surrendering my wife (in a manner of speaking) was a small price to pay for such satisfaction; and that I’d have gladly waited at the table till daybreak if that’s what it took to fully convey my gratitude to Monsieur Jung.
In the end, I didn’t have to wait quite that long. After perhaps forty-five minutes, Jung returned my wife to the table. She came back bearing gifts: two bottles of the chef’s own late-harvest Tokay Pinot Gris and, curiously, a cold quail stuffed with foie gras, which had been wrapped in aluminum foil so that we could take it with us. We thanked him again for the memorable dinner and his generosity, and then he showed us to the door. There, I received a perfunctory handshake, while my wife got two drawn-out pecks, one to each cheek. She got two more out in front of the restaurant, and as we walked down the street toward our hotel, Jung joyfully shouted after her, “You are a mango woman!” his booming voice piercing the humid night air.
Early the next mo
rning, driving from Strasbourg to Reims in a two-door Peugeot that felt as if it was about to come apart from metal fatigue, my wife and I made breakfast of the quail. We didn’t have utensils, so we passed it back and forth, ripping it apart with our hands and teeth. As we wound our way through the low, rolling hills of northeast France, silently putting the cold creature to an ignominious end, I couldn’t help but marvel at what had transpired. Where but in France could a plate of food set in motion a chain of events that would find you whimpering with ecstasy in the middle of a restaurant; giving the chef carte blanche to hit on your wife, to the evident dismay of his wife; and joyfully gorging yourself just after sunrise the next day on a bird bearing the liver of another bird, a gift bestowed on your wife by said chef as a token of his lust? The question answered itself: This sort of thing could surely only happen in France, and at that moment, not for the first time, I experienced the most overwhelming surge of affection for her.
I FIRST WENT TO FRANCE as a thirteen-year-old, in the company of my parents and my brother, and it was during this trip that I, like many other visitors there, experienced the Great Awakening—the moment at the table that changes entirely one’s relationship to food. It was a vegetable that administered the shock for me: Specifically, it was the baby peas (drowned in butter, of course) served at a nondescript hotel in the city of Blois, in the Loire Valley, that caused me to realize that food could be a source of gratification and not just a means of sustenance—that mealtime could be the highlight of the day, not simply a break from the day’s activities.
A few days later, while driving south to the Rhône Valley, my parents decided to splurge on lunch at a two-star restaurant called Au Chapon Fin, in the town of Thoissey, a few miles off the A6 in the Mâcon region. I didn’t know at the time that it was a restaurant with a long and illustrious history (among its claims to fame: It was where Albert Camus ate his last meal before the car crash that killed him in 1960), nor can I recollect many details of the meal. I remember having a pâté to start, followed by a big piece of chicken, and that both were excellent, but that’s about it. However, I vividly recall being struck by the sumptuousness of the dining room. The tuxedoed staff, the thick white tablecloths, the monogrammed plates, the heavy silverware, the ornate ice buckets—it was the most elegant restaurant I’d ever seen. Every table was filled with impeccably attired, perfectly mannered French families. I hadn’t yet heard of Baudelaire, but this was my first experience of that particular state of bliss he described as luxe, calme, et volupté (richness, calm, and pleasure), and I found it enthralling.
