My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  El Coyote was a hive of color, sound, and animation, a nonstop party in a series of lively dining rooms more festooned than merely decorated. Walking in that first time, I hardly knew where to look. Autographed photos of Hollywood luminaries, John Wayne and otherwise, lined the entryway. (The place remained popular with celebrities; its macabre claim to fame is that Sharon Tate and her friends had their last meal at El Coyote the night they were murdered by the Manson Family.) Christmas lights drooped everywhere, year-round, and clusters of plastic grape leaves hung from latticework; ornate sombreros, portraits of señoritas on black velvet, and mirrors framed in seashells hung on every stretch of brightly painted wall; in every corner stood huge sprays of plastic flowers, and papier-mâché birds perched here and there. The waitresses, rustling around the place in flouncy embroidered eyelet bodices and petticoated peasant skirts, seemed dedicated to keeping the festivities alive, beaming broad smiles and chattering with customers as they dispensed pitchers of margaritas and beer and big plates full of food. Somebody once described the place as a Chuck E. Cheese for adults.

  I’d heard that those margaritas were famous, so of course I had to try one on my first visit. I’d never had a margarita before, so I had no basis for comparison, but I loved it. It was sweet and foamy, with no discernible tequila flavor (not that I could have discerned tequila flavor back then), and it sure went down easy. For years, that was my ideal of what a margarita should be, even after I learned that the El Cholo margarita’s sweetness was due partly to a “secret ingredient,” pineapple juice, and that the drink was foamy because it was mixed up in huge batches and dispensed through a bar gun. (Today I rarely drink any margaritas but my own; few bartenders get the proportions of tequila, Cointreau, and fresh lime juice—the only acceptable ingredients, in my view—right.)

  My first time at El Coyote, I ordered what was to become my standard meal there: a No. 1 combination plate, which included a shredded beef taco, a ground beef enchilada, and rice and beans. Though I eventually figured out that the platter, with its soggy meat-stuffed rolled tortilla resting in a soupy lake of melted cheese and mildly spicy brown sauce, its crisp-shelled taco overflowing with shredded yellow cheddar and iceberg lettuce that obscured its meaty filling, its pasty refried beans and tomato-flecked soft rice, didn’t have much to do with what people actually ate in Mexico, it quickly became for me an emblem of what I loved about Mexican food: It was friendly, accessible fare; it was reasonably complex in flavor (even if the blend of spices that made it so probably came powdered out of 128-ounce Smart & Final canisters); best of all, it was foreign, but foreign in a way over which I could claim partial ownership as a native and longtime resident of a city whose original name was El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula.

  I tried other things in the years that I was an El Coyote regular, of course.

  There was the really quite remarkable tostada, which was in fact a kind of lunch-counter salad: shredded iceberg, frozen peas, frozen green beans, canned three-bean salad, canned shredded beets, and tomatoes, anointed with something I suspect was Thousand Island dressing, heaped atop a crisp-fried corn tortilla, with beans on the side. There were nachos, of course, made with sharp cheddar and pickled jalapeño rings, and “El Coyote Pizza,” which was the same thing, but with beans and salsa added. There was a respectable albóndigas soup, bready, parsley-flecked meatballs in a meaty broth with a polite kick, served in big bowls. There was something the menu listed as chili con carne, but it was far from Mr. Reed’s version; it was cubes of pork in a medium-spicy brown sauce—really good—that probably should have been called chile colorado con puerco. There was even a ground round steak with French fries, though I’d gotten far beyond that by this time.

  THE LOS ANGELES County Museum of Art opened in April 1965, endowed by some of the richest men and women in the city—Life called them “the instant Medicis”—and hordes started streaming through the galleries, and the bookshop, too. I worked hard, unpacking and putting out books, straightening and restocking the shelves, watching for shoplifters, eventually helping to do the accounts and order both books and art (we sold original lithographs and etchings, and I took a night class in graphic arts sales at artist June Wayne’s esteemed Tamarind Workshop). I also hung out in the bowels of the place, with the preparators and conservators, watching as they unpacked and readied for exhibition what must have been many, many millions of dollars’ worth of art and artifacts, even then. I got to know a number of the best young L.A. artists of the time—George Herms, Peter Alexander, De Wain Valentine, Eric Orr—and renewed my acquaintance with another of them, Ron Cooper, who’d lived in Ojai and whom I’d last seen when he used to bag our groceries at the Bayless supermarket, before going off to hitchhike around Europe for the summer. (I renewed our friendship yet again, thirty years later, when he started importing artisanal mescal into the United States, and we’d end up at the same food-and-wine events together, usually in Texas.)

  It was a great time to be at the museum. The energy and imagination of the curators, above all the contemporary art wunderkind (as he was frequently described) Maurice Tuchman, were amazing. They mounted one dazzling show after another—an immense array of etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, and other graphic works by Picasso; a major retrospective of seductively luminous paintings by Pierre Bonnard; a show of paintings, objects, photographs, and “Rayographs” by Man Ray (who signed one of the exhibition posters for me and took me to coffee at the museum cafeteria one afternoon; I wish I could remember what we talked about); and a big collection of New York School abstract expressionists, which afforded me the chance to linger in empty galleries, before opening hours, looking at huge canvases by such artists as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko (talk about luminous; I’d swear that the temperature in the Rothko room was five degrees warmer than anywhere else in the building). Then there was the scandalous Ed Kienholz retrospective, which an L.A. County supervisor named Warren Dorn tried to close down for obscenity—mostly defined, in his mind, by a chicken-wire couple locked in chicken-wire coitus in the artist’s now iconic Back Seat Dodge ’38. The museum couldn’t have asked for better publicity, and for weeks lines of museumgoers streamed down the front steps and along the sidewalk on Wilshire Boulevard, waiting to get in.

  Shortly after the museum opened, a young English girl, several years my senior, came to work at the bookshop. She was small, cute, raven-haired, smart, bitingly sarcastic, very English; she dressed in Mary Quant and Carnaby Street outfits, and carried a lethal-looking penknife. Without ever having been to England, I was already an Anglophile—this was the mid-sixties, after all, era of the Beatles and the Stones, of “swinging London”—and I was captivated by her.

  I called her Martin, which was her last name, and she called me Andrews, and after a few weeks, I got up the nerve to ask her out to dinner. No doubt depleting my bank account—I knew the meal would probably cost at least twenty-five dollars—I took her to one of the classiest places in town: the Bistro, which was the Beverly Hills society restaurant of the time. Its name might suggest some modest family-owned French place, but in fact the Bistro was a fancy Continental eatery, with tableside service and flaming desserts, run by a haughty Austrian-born restaurant veteran named Kurt Niklas. The interior suggested some Hollywood set designer’s vision of a Parisian brothel, complete with fringed table lamps, smoky mirrors, and black leather upholstery. It was the kind of place where ladies out of Jackie Collins novels lunched, and it was the site of the agent Swifty Lazar’s famous annual Oscar Night party, later moved to Spago. (It was also the restaurant in whose upstairs banquet room Julie Christie serviced Warren Beatty under the table in Shampoo.)

  Though I’d only been there once before, I liked the Bistro. Decor and clientele aside, it had pretty good food, and a cosmopolitan electricity that wasn’t easy to find in L.A. back then, and I hoped it might impress Martin. I put on a tie for the occasion and donned my most fashion
able sport coat, a sort of Italian variation on the Nehru jacket in gray tweed. Martin wore a short cotton dress banded in black and purple, and big silver hoop earrings. I have no idea what the habitués of the place, with their Don Loper dresses and London Shop blazers, must have thought of us, but we didn’t much care. We sat down, ordered our dinner (the particulars elude me) and a couple of glasses of wine, and had a wonderful time. Our captain was a handsome Irishman named Jimmy Murphy (later a successful restaurateur himself), who was delighted when Martin chose fresh strawberries for dessert and then asked if there was any clotted cream to go along with them. Her question prompted an Anglo-Irish dialogue about the virtues of this opulent dairy product—for a minute or two they seemed to forget I was there—and then he went off to the kitchen, where he somehow found Martin exactly what she’d asked for. She was, she said, “chuffed.”

  This was our first of many meals together over the next couple of years. As we’d sit at one table or another, I’d pepper her with questions about music, fashion, theater, and politics back home, and drink in her answers. I loved her accent, her skeptical grin, her sophistication (she’d been to countries I’d barely heard of and spoke credible French and Italian as well as the fluent German of her Sudeten Czech parents)—and I loved the way she made me think before I spoke, made me sidestep constantly to avoid the clichés and cheap sentiment I knew she’d mock mercilessly. She must have liked things about me, too, as a few months after our first date, she moved into my castle on Beverly Boulevard.

  Among the artifacts she brought with her was a book that opened up a whole new world to me: Len Deighton’s Action Cookbook, a collection of brief cooking lessons in comic strip form that spy novelist Deighton had been producing for several years for The Observer in London. It was about as unintimidating as a cookbook could be, and, with Martin’s approval, I decided that I’d teach myself to cook from its illustrated pages. There was plenty of no-nonsense culinary lore within, and I tried many of the recipes, with varying degrees of success. The single most illuminating sentence in the book, though, was Deighton’s simple statement “When onions are cooked a chemical change takes place: they no longer make the eyes water, and they taste quite different.” This was an absolute revelation to me—having grown up in a house where onions and their kin were anathema—and I suddenly understood what that faint appealing sweetness was in so many of the dishes I had grown to love, Mexican and Italian and down-home American alike. I also understood why Dad, who wouldn’t have eaten a slice of raw onion to save his life, was mad for French onion soup, even if Mom rarely let him order it (“Oh, you don’t like that”).

  Deighton was hardly my only source of culinary inspiration in those days. I started reading Gourmet and Bon Appétit and the Los Angeles Times food section and checking cookbooks out of the library. I clipped or transcribed recipes, putting them into a big red envelope and pulling them out more or less at random when I wanted to cook something. Among the dishes I remember making more than once are tuna steaks with onions and curry sauce (fresh tuna was a rarity in those days, and it took me a while to find it); a putatively Greek preparation of lamb baked in a foil packet with garlic, carrots, leeks, and two kinds of Greek cheese; pommes de terre Bretonne, which were thin-sliced potatoes baked with beef stock in a dish lined with bacon; ragout of pork with cider; and the Argentinean artist Lucio Fontana’s puchero, the recipe for which I clipped from Vogue, whose celebrity cooking pages also gave me Federico Fellini’s recipe for sangria, which I made to acclaim at parties for years afterward. (The secret ingredient was two tablespoons of Strega.)

  I didn’t cook every night, of course. Martin and I ate crisp-crusted rice and sweet, aromatic lamb stew at a little Persian place across La Brea from Hollywood High, and went to Musso’s for the big pancakes they called flannel cakes, or Welsh rarebit. We went back to the Bistro when we could afford it. And I think we probably went to El Coyote at least once a week. I must have celebrated three or four birthdays at the place. It was always crowded, full of film and record business types, quasi-hippies, old folks from the neighborhood, multigenerational families, big groups celebrating special occasions. The food never changed, and the margaritas never stopped flowing from that bar gun.

  It’s hard to imagine this today, but in the sixties, sit-down Mexican restaurants were still something of a rarity around the country, especially outside the Southwest. El Coyote was hardly the first one, but the combination of its central location, its friendly spirit, and its easy-to-enjoy and reasonably priced food made it probably the most popular Mexican place in Southern California, at least in that era, and in a way one of the most influential. I wonder how many modern-day lovers of South-of-the-Border food—even acolytes of Diana Kennedy or Rick Bayless, or more-authentic-than-usted devotees of moles in Oaxaca, tamales in Pátzcuaro, or sea urchin tacos in Ensenada—were first introduced to basic Mexican forms and flavors, or really came to love them, at El Coyote. I’ll bet I’m not the only one.

  Chapter Five

  THE ADRIATIC,

  Los Angeles (1964–1974)

  I’VE NEVER UNDERSTOOD WHY WE ARE DRAWN TO certain places, places that, at least when we’re first attracted to them, we’ve never seen, places with which we have no familial or cultural connection. Why are we enthralled, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere, by what we know or imagine of the look and feel and sensibility of other cities, countries, corners of the world, or even by just their very names? As a young teenager, I was drawn to the notion of the South Pacific. This probably isn’t hard to understand, considering the romantic image I had of Polynesia: sun, sea, sand, palm trees, warm breezes, and, yeah, okay, exotic cocktails and babes in bikinis. But why not, then, the Caribbean, Mexico, Rio de Janeiro? No idea. No logic. Generations of European intellectuals dreamed of Tibet or Timbuktu, for not much more reason than that their names sounded mysterious and impossibly far away. My father, for his part, had only a passing interest in Europe and none at all, as far as I know, in Africa or Latin America, but as a boy conceived a lifelong fascination with India.

  By the time I turned twenty-one, having long since realized that I wasn’t going to make it to Tahiti or Samoa in the foreseeable future (and frankly no longer caring whether I did or not), the region that was beginning to capture my imagination was Eastern Europe, meaning places like Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia—and in particular three cities whose names I’d come across in various contexts: Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, and Zagreb. I have absolutely no idea why I found the idea of these places so compelling. I had read no stirring adventure novels, seen no memorable films about that part of the world; I knew no Eastern Europeans. And Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, and Zagreb? I couldn’t have found them on a map, and at first I didn’t even realize that they were all in the same country (and later, of course, it turned out that they weren’t)—but they sounded irresistibly romantic to me.

  I was abetted in my Balkan daydreams by the Adriatic, a restaurant that opened in 1964 on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. The proprietors were a genial couple named Bob and Gordana Sipovac, she a warmly pretty blond woman with a genuine smile, he an amiable, husky fellow with a broad Slavic face and an athlete’s shoulders. The couple had moved to California from their homeland in 1959. They’d had only limited experience in the restaurant business—Gordana’s family had run eating places in Serbia before World War II; Bob, who’d grown up in Sarajevo, in Bosnia, was tending bar at the Beverly Hills Italian restaurant and celebrity hangout La Scala—when they decided to open their place, but they were naturals, with a good sense of food and a talent for professional hospitality.

  In decor, the Adriatic could have been mistaken for a more or less standard Italian restaurant of the time, with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, red leather booths, and wine bottles lined up on shelves and hanging from wooden archways—except that some of those wine bottles, interspersed with the usual Chianti fiaschi, bore names like Žilavka, Plavac, and Dingač, and there were paintings of Adriatic scenes, including
that unmistakable walled mini-peninsula of a city, Dubrovnik, on the walls.

  The menu was something else, though. Here I learned to eat—and to pronounce the names of—yet another whole new category of food: Bosnian-style bureks, which were damp but flaky snail-like coils of pastry filled with ground lamb or a sort of cottage cheese; ćevapčići and ražnjići (skinless sausages and flat veal kebabs, respectively, with chopped raw onions on the side); sarma (cabbage stuffed with ground pork and veal); the Serbian mixed rice-and-vegetable casserole called djuvec. . . . The food was always accompanied by slabs of the restaurant’s extraordinary bread, a yeasty, crumbly, faintly lemony white loaf of a kind that I’ve never encountered anywhere else but can still almost taste. (It was made from a family recipe of Gordana’s.) As a condiment for both the bread and the meat dishes, the restaurant served the Serbian relish called ajvar, made of roasted red peppers, garlic, and olive oil. I liked it so much, I practically ate it as a vegetable.

  At the Adriatic, too, I developed a taste for šljivovica, or slivovitz, the throat-scorching, soul-stirring clear brandy, consumed under various names all over Eastern Europe, distilled from bright blue damson plums. Something about its flavor, tart, faintly metallic, fruity in a lean but rounded way, appealed to me immensely. I liked it so much that one evening Bob and Gordana invited me over to their apartment near the restaurant to sample a special bottle they’d brought from Yugoslavia. And I liked it so much that, in later years, I drank enough of it to provoke what were easily the worst hangovers of my life, more than a few times.

  The Adriatic fed my gullet, but also my imagination, fueling my determination to actually visit Yugoslavia. In 1966, I managed to scrape together a little money, secured a two-month leave of absence from the art museum, and began to plan a summer trip to the places I had been dreaming about. This was a major undertaking for me. Apart from one visit to Vancouver with my parents when I was fourteen or fifteen, I’d never been out of the country. I was reasonably well educated and well read, but I wasn’t at all what you’d call worldly. Fortunately, Martin—who actually came from the other side of the Atlantic—was an old hand at traveling around the continent. She’d even been to Yugoslavia.