Patrick’s fortunes changed in 1975, when he had the perspicacity—or the blind good luck—to hire a young French-trained Austrian chef with the unlikely name of Wolfgang Puck. Puck was born in a small town in southern Austria, near the Slovenian border. His mother cooked at a local hotel, and his father—who left the family before he was born—was the town butcher. (Wolf takes his name from his stepfather, Josef Puck, a professional prizefighter.) There wasn’t a lot to do where he grew up, Wolf once told me, so he hung around the hotel kitchen and watched his mother and the other cooks at work. By the time he was fourteen, he’d decided that he wanted to be a chef. He went to school to study restaurant and hotel management and then, at seventeen, headed for France. He eventually landed at the celebrated L’Oustau de Baumanière in the Provençal hamlet of Les Baux, which then had three Michelin stars. After three years at Les Baux, wanting to broaden his experience, Wolf moved on to Maxim’s in Paris—in those days also still a Michelin three-star restaurant, and a golden name on any young chef’s résumé. It was at this venerable institution, Wolf has said, that he first recognized the importance of attracting famous people to a restaurant: “It brings excitement into the place, both the dining room and the kitchen, and that’s good for everybody.”
While he was at Maxim’s, Wolf decided that he’d like to try his luck in America. He couldn’t find a job he liked in New York City, his first choice, but the respected Lyonnais chef Pierre Orsi had opened a fancy restaurant called La Tour in Indianapolis, and the young Austrian was offered a post there. Indianapolis surprised Wolf: Because it was the home of the Indianapolis 500, he had expected a certain level of sophistication; he thought it might be an American Monte Carlo. He ended up cooking almost nothing but well-done steaks, and couldn’t wait to get out of the place. His biggest accomplishment in his year in Indiana, he once told me, was learning English.
The company that ran La Tour also had properties in California, and eventually Wolf moved to Los Angeles as night chef at one of them, Restaurant François, a French-Continental place of no particular distinction in a rather somber shopping mall at ARCO Plaza in downtown L.A. According to Patrick, he hired Wolf and a coworker and friend of his, Guy LeRoy, away from the place at the recommendation of a friend who worked for Maxim’s back in Paris. According to Wolf, he ran into a young American cook whom he’d fired in Indianapolis—a kid, he has said, “who had like two left hands and two left feet and no taste”—and learned that he was cooking at a new little place called Ma Maison. The restaurant, said the young man, was looking for a lunch chef. However it happened, Wolf took the job several days a week, continuing on at François in the evenings, until Patrick’s head chef quit and he offered Wolf the job full-time. When he went to deposit his first paycheck, Wolf remembers, it bounced, but Patrick offered him a ten percent stake in the business, so he stayed on.
Settling into Ma Maison, Wolf reproduced the old menu briefly, but his style quickly evolved, and before long he was serving things like cream of sorrel soup, lobster terrine, steamed oysters with baby vegetables, grilled chicken with sherry vinegar, and grilled squab with thyme and honey—deft interpretations of what was then the hottest thing in France, nouvelle cuisine, which may sound staid and archaic today but was pretty much cutting-edge at the time. He prepared this fare under difficult conditions: The kitchen was tiny, with only one oven, and instead of a walk-in cooler for fish, meat, and produce, Wolf had to rely on half a dozen home refrigerators lined up outside the kitchen door.
I met Wolf the year he started at Ma Maison, not at the restaurant but in Manhattan, at a big walk-around tasting event promoting the heroes of nouvelle cuisine—Paul Bocuse, Roger Vergé, the Troisgros brothers, and other such luminaries of the movement, all of whom were present, serving their specialties. Wolf was there as a guest, like me, not as a participant. Nobody knew who he was—except possibly Yanou Collart, the know-everybody Parisian restaurant PR woman who had wrangled all those big-name chefs, and who introduced me to Wolf. I liked him immediately. He seemed simultaneously self-confident and modest, and communicated a genuine enthusiasm for the possibilities for good cooking in America in an era when this was by no means a given.
I hadn’t been to Ma Maison yet. It hadn’t been very well reviewed. The prissy society columnist and restaurant reviewer George Christy, for instance, wrote after a meal there that “the pâté maison was a joke” and that the brochettes were “tough, stringy, not especially flavorful.” Then there’d been a story in the Los Angeles Times, reporting that when Patrick took the coats of arriving female guests, he always looked at the labels before deciding where to seat the diners. Another version of the story was that he’d said that because even the well-to-do wore jeans these days, the only way he could tell if they were wealthy was by stealing a look at their watches or handbags. (Patrick always denied both versions, and maintained that if he had in fact said anything of the kind, he’d been kidding.) I thought that sounded really stupid, in any case, and I’d decided that Ma Maison wasn’t my kind of place. Wolf said, “No, really, you should come. I’ll cook for you.”
By 1976 Ma Maison, which had survived early criticisms, had begun to thrive. Patrick—who wore sturdy Swedish clogs with a dark double-breasted suit, even on hot summer afternoons, ornamented with a Charvet tie, a silk pocket handkerchief, and a red carnation boutonnière—greeted the rich and powerful of Los Angeles with a rapidly evolving sense of calculated snobbery that seemed to work like catnip on these fat cats. Wolf, meanwhile, continued to turn out some of the best food in town. Now the celebrities started arriving for real. One of Wolf’s—and Patrick’s—favorite famous customers was Orson Welles, who came almost every day and sat alone, or with his pretty Croatian girlfriend, Oja Kodar, at a table just inside the dining room, where you couldn’t see him unless you were returning from the restrooms. Wolf charmed Welles and the rest of the illustrious crowd with his sense of humor, his guileless nature, and, of course, his excellent cuisine. Other regulars at the place included Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Jack Lemmon, Elizabeth Taylor, Rod Stewart, Ursula Andress, Goldie Hawn, Michael Caine, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Lauren Hutton, Dustin Hoffman, Jacqueline Bisset, Sylvester Stallone, David Hockney (who designed a menu cover for the place); directors including Billy Wilder (Puck’s fellow Austrian), Tony Richardson, and Steven Spielberg; other Hollywood heavyweights like the attorney Greg Bautzer, the agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar, and the financier Kirk Kerkorian; and even, on occasion, a couple of ex-presidents named Ford and Nixon. The not typically starstruck Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times, called it “probably the most celebrated celebrity hangout since Romanoff’s in the days of the Rat Pack.”
Friday lunch became the essential see-and-be-seen occasion at Ma Maison. Alicia Buttons, wife of the comedian Red Buttons, once claimed that her Fridays at the restaurant were so sacred that she gave her young son a handwritten card reading, “Mommy . . . Fridays . . . 655-1991.” There were people around L.A. who probably would have mugged the kid if they’d known about that note. When People published a short piece about Ma Maison and its talented young chef in 1975, the phone started ringing nonstop. To avoid being completely swamped, Patrick decided to unlist the number—which, of course, only added to the cachet of the place. Another cachet booster was the “parking lot” facing onto Melrose Avenue: It had room for only five or six cars, and these were always the most extravagant trophy vehicles—Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, Ferraris, vintage Jaguars, and the like. Patrick always claimed that these expensive cars were parked there strictly for security reasons, so his valets could keep an eye on them. The fact that everyone who drove past on Melrose also noticed them was presumably just a happy accident.
I WAS ABLE TO BECOME A REGULAR at Ma Maison myself after I got a full-time job again, which meant both an expense account and a steady if modest income. One morning in the spring of 1978, I got a call from a woman named Leslie Ward, who had recently been named Southern California editor of New West magazine, a
sking if I’d consider writing restaurant reviews for the publication. New West had been launched the previous year by Clay Felker as a Californian analogue to his groundbreaking city magazine New York, though by this time, Rupert Murdoch had taken over both publications. I told Leslie that I wasn’t interested—I already had a good relationship with the magazine’s considerably older, more established rival, Los Angeles—but I was feeling the pressures of the freelance life, so I added that I might consider some sort of editorial position, especially one involving oversight of the magazine’s food and wine coverage. She promised to discuss the idea with the editor, a recently transplanted San Franciscan named Jon Carroll.
Jon apparently liked the notion, and there followed a courtship of several months, a succession of phone calls, lunches, drinks. One afternoon, finally, I got a call from Jon, offering me a job as New West’s food and wine editor. I ran into trouble right away. There were two editions of the magazine, one in each half of the state. The San Francisco edition had two restaurant critics, trading slots in alternate issues of the biweekly publication: Sandye Rosenzweig, a health writer who had once been married to Jon, and Ruth Reichl, a transplanted New Yorker who lived in a communal house in Berkeley with her artist-husband and several friends. One of the first things I did when I arrived at New West was to ask the Northern California editor, a brisk professional named Rosalie, if the Bay Area reviews could come straight to me for editing in the future without going through the San Francisco office first, which didn’t seem like an unreasonable request for the newly hired food and wine editor to make. “No,” she said. End of discussion. Well then, I continued, I thought I might make a trip up to San Francisco in the next week or so to meet the two Northern California critics. “I think that would be premature,” she sniffed.
Well, okay. I had business to attend to in L.A. In addition to a regular restaurant review, New York had had great success with a column called “The Underground Gourmet,” covering budget-priced, usually “ethnic,” restaurants. The idea was borrowed by New West, and taken on in L.A. by Jivan Tabibian, a dapper, diminutive political scientist and urban planner who loved good cigars and good wine and always seemed to be surrounded by a gaggle of pretty young women. He was also a friend of Milton Glaser, the designer who had helped Clay Felker create New York, and Jivan—who had coined the name New West—apparently considered the column to be a kind of sinecure. Jon didn’t. He thought Jivan’s columns were too fussy and old-style, and one of my first jobs, he told me, was to fire him. I did this over a civilized lunch at Club Elysée on Doheny, where a precocious young chef named Ken Frank was in the kitchen, and we remained friends. (Jivan subsequently became a restaurateur himself, as the designer Adam Tihany’s partner in the Santa Monica branch of Remi. Later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he served as a high-level diplomat for the Republic of Armenia for more than a decade, before dying in his native country in 2009.)
In place of “The Underground Gourmet,” I decided to mirror the Northern California edition and hire two critics to alternate reviews. One was my old wine mentor, Roy Brady, who also knew the local restaurant scene well; the other was a longtime Rolling Stone writer and editor named Charles Perry, who had roomed with the legendary black-market LSD manufacturer Owsley Stanley in Berkeley but was also a student of Middle Eastern languages and culture, an expert on the food of the Arab world, and a witty writer with a particular affection for obscure cuisines. At the same time, I hired Phil Reich, an eccentric wine merchant recently relocated to L.A. from Colorado, as wine columnist. When Reich begged off the task after a few months because he had become too busy creating and managing the wine list for a new restaurant called Michael’s, I brought in the wine-loving screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin (Cutter’s Way, The Pursuit of D. B. Cooper), whose columns compared certain aspects of various wines to the porn star John Holmes or the alternative singer-songwriter Tonio K. (Fiskin later endeared himself to me permanently by giving a New Year’s Eve dinner party, based largely on recipes from a Troisgros brothers cookbook, for which he designed a menu patterned after the cover of a popular Devo album. It was headlined “Are we not men? We are Troisgros.”)
I was finally given permission to visit the San Francisco office and introduce myself to our restaurant critics there. I met Ruth first, and we went out to lunch, walking a few blocks to a French restaurant of the kind by then pretty well vanished from L.A., called Lafayette. “The meal was straightforward and good,” I recorded in my notebook a few days later, “and Ruth was a delight—tall and rangy, extremely pleasant, and extremely knowledgeable, apparently, about les choses de vie.” That night, I had a dinner date with my wine business friend Rich Leland and his wife at Fournou’s Ovens, the dining room at the Stanford Court hotel. Since Ruth had mentioned that she was going to be reviewing the place for the magazine, I invited her to join us. The food was up and down (I recall that I particularly liked a cream of artichoke soup), but the wines were excellent and abundant: ’66 Bollinger R.D., ’74 Albert Pic Valmur Chablis, ’69 Coron Les Cent Vignes Beaune, ’71 Henri de Villamont Chambolle-Musigny, and ’71 Château Lynch-Bages. Ruth seemed a little stunned by the number of bottles we consumed, and certainly—since she had gamely offered to pick up the tab, on her expense account—by their prices. “Get used to it,” I said.
The next day, I drove across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley to meet our other critic, Sandye, for lunch at the Café at Chez Panisse. She turned out to be very nice—she’d brought me a single red rose as an offering—and we had a fine meal of fresh tuna salad, cheese, blueberry ice cream, a bottle and a half of Domaine Tempier Bandol rouge, which I had never before seen in America, plus two half-bottles of Bourgueil. I left thinking that between Ruth and Sandye, both with very different sensibilities but both obviously pretty smart and possessed of real food sense, our Northern California restaurant coverage was probably in very good hands.
That night, I took Ruth and my short-lived wine critic Phil Reich, who was in San Francisco on other business, to Trader Vic’s, the high-society Bay Area counterpart to my old favorite hangout in Beverly Hills. Ruth had been supervising a photo shoot all day for a story of hers and was tired and quiet. She liked Phil, though, and they became fast friends. In the course of the evening, I asked Ruth if she’d spent much time in Los Angeles, and she said no—with, I thought, the usual San Francisco (or, worse, Berkeley) tone that seemed to ask, “Why on earth would I go there?” Well, I replied, you should come down and see what’s going on in our restaurants, just to give you some sense of comparison. She was skeptical but agreed to fly down the following week.
I thought of the San Francisco office as something of a rebel satrapy. It lived by its own rules, protected from unwanted incursions from the south (or the East Coast) by its tough, supremely self-assured ruler, Rosalie. To put it somewhat less dramatically, while the office wasn’t willfully malevolent, and while its population included several very talented writers and editors, I thought it was rather provincial—not in an oblivious way but in that smug, self-referential manner that certain denizens of the Bay Area so skillfully affect.
I got into fights with the San Franciscans over the silliest things. Once I happened to notice, in galleys, that one of the photographs in a piece on wild mushrooms was misidentified—one of the toxic Amanitas was labeled as being edible—and pointed that out. The caption was corrected, but I was told that I wasn’t supposed to be looking at galleys of stories I hadn’t edited. Another time, in a short piece about jazz, somebody San Franciscan made a reference to “the late Roland Kirk.” I pointed out that in the latter years of his life, in response to a dream he’d had, this quirky, talented saxophonist had renamed himself Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and suggested that it would be both respectful and accurate to call him that in print. I was told that this was a minor error and didn’t warrant correction. I said, “It’s my opinion that a magazine that lets its contributors use bylines like Susan Subtle [née Dittenfass] and Futzie Nutzle [a.k.a. Bruce K
leinsmith] ought to damn well have the courtesy to call Rahsaan Roland Kirk by his proper name.”
I think Jon was simply scared of Rosalie. One day there was a flap about the title Ruth had given to one of her restaurant reviews: She’d called it “Diary of a Fat Housewife”—prompting one editor to crack, “Ruth, you’re not a fat housewife, you’re a slender communard.” Rosalie refused to let the title be used, on the grounds that it was “sexist.” Everyone else liked the headline, but when Jon attempted to champion it to Rosalie on the phone, she told him that she was prepared “to go to the mattresses” to keep it out of the magazine. Jon, by his own admission, “crumbled like a little sugar cookie.”
A few weeks after my first visit to the Northern California office, Ruth came to L.A., and we went to dinner at L’Orangerie, which was almost certainly the most beautiful restaurant in town, and one of the best. After a couple of bites of her first course—a wondrous fresh vegetable assortment, in which each vegetable was different and differently perfect—she looked around the elegant, flower-bedecked, candlelit room and exclaimed in delight, “There’s nothing like this in San Francisco!” We went on to share a dish of sea bass with green peppercorns, then had calf’s liver with sherry vinegar (me) and veal medallions with “three mustards” (Ruth), followed by the restaurant’s signature apple tart à la minute. With this we managed a bottle and a half of Sancerre, a bottle of ’70 Grand Barrail Lamarzelle Figeac, and a bottle of ’76 Benôit-Trichard Moulin-à-Vent. The owner of the restaurant, Gérard Ferry, insisted on picking up the check, on the grounds that I was now editing food pieces and not writing about restaurants—and, somewhat to Ruth’s surprise, I let him.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 17
