In the meantime, a trip to The Traders was the next best thing. The Traders was in fact an outpost of a Bay Area establishment called Trader Vic’s, and after a few years it was renamed to reflect that connection. On my earliest visits, my favorite dish was “Chopped New York Steak Hawaiian Style,” consisting of a thick, oval-shaped hamburger, a toasted English muffin, a fried banana, and a heap of crisp shoestring potatoes—just exotic enough for a boy who had been brought up on Spam and canned ravioli. I subsequently learned to love the “Cosmo Tidbits,” an appetizer assortment that included crab Rangoon (crabmeat and cream cheese deep-fried in wonton skins), sweet barbecued spareribs, small oval slices of lacquered pork loin, and battered deep-fried shrimp. I also developed an affection for the mahimahi, which was scattered with shards of almonds (later macadamia nuts), and for the Javanese saté, which the menu called “Meat-on-a-Sword Skewered with Pineapple”—cubes of marinated lamb, roasted on wooden skewers, served with a thick peanut sauce that I couldn’t stop eating.
Of course, part of the point, to me, was that this food was being served not in a clubby Chasen’s-like dining room with photos on the walls, but in a South Seas fantasyland. The slightly fuzzy sounds of slack-key guitar purred from hidden speakers. The hostesses wore flowing hibiscus-print dresses, the captains jaunty crested blazers. The tables were bare polished tropical hardwood with brightwork fittings. Inflated blowfish turned into lanterns hung overhead. There was tapa cloth on some of the walls, and fishnets, with amber glass floats attached, were draped on others; a carved Hawaiian war god glowered from one corner; a full-size outrigger canoe was suspended from the ceiling; the table lamps had squat tiki-figure bases, and the ceramic salt and pepper shakers were tikis, too. There were tikis everywhere.
The tiki thing had started not with Trader Vic’s but with the onetime New Orleans bootlegger Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, who had roamed the tropics before washing up in Hollywood, in the early thirties, where he did odd jobs—parking cars, waiting tables, and occasionally consulting at the studios on movies with a South Seas setting. When Prohibition was repealed, in 1933, he opened a bamboo-and-palm-frond watering hole just off Hollywood Boulevard called Don the Beachcomber, furnishing it with artifacts he had gathered on his travels and with pieces of wrecked boats he’d found along the California coast.
Theme restaurants were already popular in Los Angeles. Back in 1928, the travel writer Katherine Ames Taylor had reported, in The Los Angeles Tripbook, that “At 533 South Grand Avenue is the Bull Pen Inn, where you dine in stalls. There is the Zulu Hut on Ventura Boulevard, near Universal City, where knives and forks are dispensed with, and you dine most informally, in native fashion, eating fried chicken with your fingers.” Gantt’s vision of island life in the middle of Hollywood fit right in. And he knew just how to fuel the fantasy: Rum was cheap and readily available at the time, so he devised a number of rum-based cocktails, among them the Sumatra Kula (light rum with honey and grapefruit, orange, and lime juice) and the Zombie—so named, it was said, because more than a couple would turn you into one—which involved three kinds of rum, Pernod, and Angostura bitters, among other ingredients. In 1934, Gantt, who later changed his name legally to Donn [sic] Beach, started serving Cantonese-American food, and in the process quite possibly invented the assortment of snacks known to posterity as the pupu platter (the term is apparently a Hawaiian word for a kind of relish). He’d made friends working in Hollywood, some of them famous, and the place quickly became a popular hangout for people like Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich. (Celebrated regulars had their own personalized ivory chopsticks.) When Beach was drafted into the navy during World War II, he left his ex-wife in charge of the business, and when he returned he found that she had expanded his original establishment into a sixteen-unit chain. He signed the business over to her, maintaining a role as a consultant, and went off to Waikiki to open a new place of his own.
In the next two decades, imitations and elaborations of Don the Beachcomber appeared all over America. None was to prove more successful or ultimately influential than Trader Vic’s. In 1934, Victor J. Bergeron, a young entrepreneur with a wooden leg (the original lost to tuberculosis of the bone at the age of six), opened a bar and restaurant called Hinky Dinks in Oakland, across the street from his father’s grocery store. Besides beer and cocktails, Bergeron served all-American fare—roast chicken, steak sandwiches, and the like. The most exotic thing on the menu was a dish of ham and eggs with fried pineapple and bananas on the side, which he dubbed “ham and eggs Hawaiian.”
After a trip to New Orleans and Havana, Bergeron added daiquiris, planter’s punch, and other tropical-themed drinks to the Hinky Dinks repertoire. Then, in 1937, after a visit to Don the Beachcomber, he remade the place into a “Polynesian” restaurant, with an exotic-drinks menu supplemented by a Cantonese bill of fare. Bergeron’s wife suggested that he rename the place Trader Vic’s because he loved making deals. The father of his Chinese-American bartender built a barbecue pit behind the restaurant, and this evolved into the huge, tandoor-like cylindrical wood-burning ovens that Trader Vic—as he quickly started to call himself—designed and later installed in all his restaurants, calling them Chinese ovens and claiming that they dated from the Han Dynasty.
Trader Vic’s developed a loyal following—in 1941, the beloved San Francisco columnist Herb Caen wrote of it that “the best restaurant in San Francisco is in Oakland”—but when Bergeron invented the mai tai there, in 1944, the drink became an international sensation, and the fame of his restaurant redoubled. (Donn Beach always claimed to have invented the drink himself, years earlier, at his own establishment, but Bergeron cited chapter and verse: He mixed up the first mai tai, he said, for a friend of his named Carrie Guild, who lived in Tahiti. Tasting it, she apparently exclaimed, “Maita’i roa ae!” Tahitian for “very good,” thus giving the drink its name. Beach’s recipe was, in any case, much more complicated than Bergeron’s.)
Trader Vic’s began evolving into a chain in 1940, when Bergeron opened his first outpost, in Seattle. San Francisco and then Beverly Hills later followed. Bergeron turned out to be an innovative restaurateur. He admittedly had some funny ideas about food—he thought gazpacho was Mexican, and that Indonesia’s saté was “a powder from India,” best defined as “a mixture of screwball spices”—and he liked to make up food and gave it imaginative provenances (as much as I loved his crab Rangoon, I sincerely doubt that any Burmese cook ever wrapped crabmeat and cream cheese in a wonton skin and deep-fried it). But he could boast some real gastronomic accomplishments, too. He traveled widely once his restaurant empire started to grow, and he seemed to constantly discover new ingredients and new ways of preparing them. He was the first restaurateur to popularize mahimahi, limestone lettuce, kiwifruit (which he called “Chinese gooseberries” and served cut into pieces on a bed of shaved ice), morel mushrooms (in a cream sauce, on toast), and green (or, as he called them, Malagasy) peppercorns. He was also one of the first to use fresh cilantro, tofu, and snow peas outside strictly ethnic restaurants. He was serving thin disks of fried parmigiano years before anybody outside Friuli had heard of frico. His were almost certainly the only upscale restaurants of the time anywhere in America that cooked much of their food with wood fires. He flirted with the idea of Asian fusion cooking long before the idea had become commonplace (and then quickly a cliché). Bergeron was also, incidentally, an early and enthusiastic supporter of California wines, featuring extensive selections of the best available examples, at least in his Northern California restaurants, long before the wine boom of the latter twentieth century.
I NEVER MET Trader Vic himself (he died in 1984), but we did correspond briefly when I wrote to him, in the seventies, complaining about the inadequate wine list at his Beverly Hills restaurant. He wrote back to explain that the matter was out of his hands, that the Hilton hotel management chose the list—but he arranged for me to have access, whenever I dined at the restaurant, to the considerably m
ore extensive list offered at the Hilton’s pricey rooftop French restaurant, L’Escoffier. I enjoyed more than one bottle of 1949 Clos des Lambrays with my Indonesian lamb roast as a result. That, of course, was long after my childhood visits, when I had rediscovered Trader Vic’s on my own terms.
By that time, as I aged into my twenties, I was being drawn to the place by its good food and strong drink as much as its exoticism—but it was the whole experience that I enjoyed most, and that I can still summon up most vividly: I walk through the heavy varnished wooden front door, maybe alone, maybe with a friend, maybe even with a date. The aromas envelop me as I step inside—the faint hint of smoldering wood from the Chinese ovens; the pleasantly sour smell of heady rum and other liquors from the bar. I have cascading long black hair and what my mother likes to call, with distaste, a Fu Manchu mustache, but I am wearing a jacket (albeit corduroy) and tie, and anyway, they’re used to me here. The host, Laurence Abbott, always tan, greets me at the podium and hands me over to some vision of serenity in a flowered dress who leads me to my table. On the way, I stop to exchange pleasantries with Alex Kaluzny, the wise and genial Russian-born manager of the place. The moment I sit down, my favorite captain, Jack Chew, appears, greeting me like some long-lost relative. Depending on my mood (or my date’s mood, if that’s an issue), I order a serious rum drink—a tortuga or a sufferin’ bastard or even maybe a mai tai—or ask for the wine list and choose something red and good. It almost seems as if I don’t have to order, as if the food appears magically, but probably I do glance at the menu before the array of riches begins to appear: Cosmo Tidbits, possibly, or at least one or two of the assortment’s constituent parts; maybe some cheese bings, little crêpe packets of ham and melted cheese. Or if I’m feeling more grown-up, perhaps some bongo bongo soup (a silky purée of spinach and oysters) or morels on toast or just a limestone lettuce salad. Next, maybe an intermediate course of messy, garlicky pake crab, one of those dishes whose delicious residue lingers on your fingers for a day. Then almost certainly meat: Indonesian lamb roast or Javanese saté or a triple-thick lamb chop, or possibly a dish of veal fillets in tarragon sauce, something long vanished from the menu but still available to those who know enough to ask. And on the side, pake noodles scattered with bread crumbs and sesame seeds or perfect golden-brown cottage-fried potatoes, snow peas with water chestnuts, still-crunchy stir-fried asparagus. . . . Alex comes by to ask how I like the wine. Jack asks if I’d like some more peanut sauce for the saté. The room is glowing. I’m glowing. I smell the meat, the wood, a gardenia garnishing a nearby cocktail. I’m in paradise.
I NEVER MADE IT TO HAWAII—I did get straight A’s as a high school freshman, but times were tough financially for my parents that year, and my island vacation was indefinitely postponed (coincidentally or not, I never got straight A’s again)—and I’ve long since stopped having South Seas fantasies. I haven’t been to a Trader Vic’s in years. There are about thirty of them around the world today, most of them in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The one that meant so much to me at the Beverly Hilton was shuttered in 2007. It has been replaced by a poolside Trader Vic’s Lounge, and there is also a full-scale version of the restaurant in the L.A. Live entertainment complex in downtown Los Angeles. They’re not the same. But then, of course, I’m not, either.
Chapter Three
THE RANCH HOUSE,
Meiners Oaks, California (1958– )
THE RANCH HOUSE, IN A HAMLET CALLED MEINERS Oaks, next door to the town of Ojai, is a rustic, idiosyncratic restaurant with a faint aura of Eastern mysticism, and roots in mid-twentieth-century vegetarianism. It didn’t invent the fresh, Mediterranean-influenced, ingredient-focused idiom that came to be known as “California cuisine,” but it was certainly among its spiritual progenitors. It was also the place where I had some of my earliest real culinary adventures and, I suppose, first really noticed that identical or similar raw materials could be manipulated in the kitchen into myriad forms. (I’m not counting my mother’s ways with canned corn.)
We came to live in Ojai, an agriculture-and-tourism town about sixty miles northwest of Los Angeles, more or less by default. Ours was a family that took vacations, over Easter and Thanksgiving breaks, when Merry and I were out of school, several times each summer, and sometimes on long weekends, just because. Our vacations weren’t cross-country road trips or flights abroad, but two- or three-hour drives to resorts in various Southern California communities—the Inn at Rancho Santa Fe or the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club near San Diego; the Smoke Tree Ranch or La Quinta in Palm Springs; the San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito or its distant neighbor, twenty miles or so across the Santa Ynez Mountains, the Ojai Valley Inn and Country Club.
The Inn, which was slightly closer than our other destinations, became a particular family favorite. I’m not sure what my parents did there all day—they didn’t play golf or tennis—but my sister and I loved rollicking in the pool, bouncing on the trampoline, knocking brightly colored golf balls around the putting green, and moseying through the woods and underbrush on trail rides, clutching our saddlehorns, on big, shambling steeds with names like Tumbleweed and Lady B.
On the road to Ojai, about a mile before the Inn, was a sprawling complex of pink stucco buildings called Villanova Preparatory School, run by priests of the Order of Saint Augustine, and on one of our visits to the Inn, when I was seven or eight, my parents noticed that they had a summer camp for boys. I was promptly enrolled. My monthlong stay there, beginning in mid-June, was the first time I’d been away from home, and in the best going-to-summer-camp tradition, I was lonely and homesick for the first week or so, and then started having fun—fishing in shallow streams clogged with mossy rocks, camping out overnight under towering trees, learning how to use a bow and arrow, taking field trips to the beach at Ventura or the Natural History Museum in Santa Barbara, playing endless games of Old Maid and War, or watching cowboy movies in the rec room when it rained. When my parents came to pick me up at the end of the session, they told me that they’d decided I should come back to Villanova for high school.
I graduated from the eighth grade at St. Paul the Apostle in 1958—this time I was not asked to be the valedictorian—and in the fall of that year was packed off to Ojai. I found school difficult—elementary chemistry and physics were impenetrable to me, and I never heard the music or felt the rhythm of Latin, though I ended up studying it for four years—but I worked hard, and managed good grades (I was trying to get to Hawaii, remember). My friends were the outsiders—the gawky kids who were good at chemistry and physics, the aristocratic Mexican boys sent up to Alta California by wealthy families—not the jocks or the haloed scholarship geniuses. I went out for junior varsity football, but, though I had the bulk, I lacked the hand-eye coordination and didn’t make the team. I did better with the photography club, and found myself shooting gridiron games for the school paper instead of playing in them. (I did shooting of another kind, too: I joined the rifle club and proved reasonably adept at putting holes in targets.) And, as I had been at summer camp, I was lonely and homesick, though this time the feelings didn’t go away.
One of the worst things about being a boarder at Villanova was the diet, which was institutional in the humorless, bulk-grocery sense. For breakfast, we ate cereal from little boxes and gummy oatmeal and doughnuts that tasted of onions (because, I eventually figured out, they’d sat next to onions in the refrigerator overnight); lunch and dinner were spaghetti with generic red sauce, bready meat loaf glazed with ketchup, Salisbury steak, chicken à la king served over dense “patty shells.” Desserts included dried-out, unfrosted brownies, unglazed rectangles of spice cake, and damp apple pie. There were always extra servings of these treats put out, and students who had finished dinner and their original dessert were allowed to have another, on a first-come, first-served basis. This, of course, encouraged the bolting, and sometimes hiding, of food. One evening, one of my tablemates secreted a brownie on an unused chair so that he could rush back f
or another. I got the idea of anointing the brownie with the Tabasco sauce that was always on the table (a concession to the Mexican and Central American students at the school). I still recall, not without a certain satisfaction, my tablemate’s remarkable delayed reaction when he took his first bite of the doctored confection. I was still a wiseacre.
BACK IN WEST LOS ANGELES, meanwhile, my father’s professional life was falling apart. The old studio system under which he’d thrived had disintegrated. It was no longer economically viable for studios to keep writers (or directors or actors) under contract; the industry was changing, decentralizing, and industry veterans who’d had more or less dependable jobs now had to scramble for work. My father was by then in his early fifties, not exactly a young man, and he had never been an aggressive player in the movie business, a studio politician or a deal maker. The young hustlers with the right friends were getting the three-picture deals, and he was left to play catch-up.
My parents’ attitude toward money had always been that it was meant to be earned and then spent, a misguided notion (apparently) that I seem to have inherited. Their mortgage payments must have been negligible (they’d bought our Beverly Glen mansion in 1944 for around twenty thousand dollars) and, with the exception of my father’s trips to Asia, which were usually subsidized, they didn’t travel, other than to resorts within driving distance. But they had an extravagant lifestyle, full of nice clothes, generous parties, good booze, and, of course, all those dinners out, and they had only token savings accounts and no real investments; I’d be surprised if they even knew what stocks and bonds were.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 4
