My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  The menu was smart and contemporary: At lunchtime, there were great Caesar salads and burgers and fries, among other things; the dinner menu might offer baked mozzarella with warm radicchio and green chiles, oysters topped with California caviar, vermicelli with six kinds of mushrooms, porcini risotto with fresh thyme, grilled duck breast tacos, roast pork loin with sage and sherry vinegar, a terrific New York steak seared on a comal, a Mexican griddle.

  If the West Beach was minimalist in style, Rebecca’s was baroque, in a contemporary way. It was, in fact, spectacular, a restaurant built around art and fun. The celebrated architect Frank Gehry designed the interior, a silly, playful jumble of onyx and Naugahyde, copper and glass, Brazilian blue granite and Plexiglas. A cartoon octopus hung with thirty thousand chandelier beads hovered over one part of the dining room; two limousine-length Formica crocodiles, lit up from within, were suspended over another part; telephone pole “trees” loomed here and there; and there was a private dining room with translucent, amber-colored walls above the bar. The booths were turquoise and the windows decorated with tarantulas painted by the artist Ed Moses. There was a forty-foot-long Peter Alexander black velvet painting on one wall, and a couple of Gehry’s own trademark glass fish leapt up from a low dividing wall.

  The food at Rebecca’s was Mexican, but hardly the usual Cal-Mex stuff. Diners dug into red snapper ceviche, grilled tuna tostadas, lobster enchiladas, crab and shrimp tamales, chiles stuffed with pork picadillo, and squash-blossom quesadillas (made the real Mexican way, from raw flour tortillas, their edges sealed around their fillings), charred flank steak asada with cascabel chile sauce, and a remarkable flan served cold so that it almost suggested a nougat glacé. The margaritas were dangerous. People went comatose from them all the time—sometimes literally falling asleep over their dinners—because they were real margaritas, potent cocktails, as strong as martinis, made with good tequila, Cointreau, and fresh lime juice, not the lightly spiked fruit punch people were used to. I usually limited myself to one, then switched to wine. I also flirted ceaselessly with all the waitresses, an unusually attractive crew, though I never quite managed to go home with any of them. I took visitors from out of town, especially New Yorkers, there all the time, and they were always dazzled by it. There was simply nothing else like it, anywhere.

  LESLIE AND I had discovered the West Beach shortly after we’d gotten married and moved to Venice. We liked it and went fairly often, and I also started meeting people there for lunch while Leslie was at work, or even just going in for a midday meal by myself. A lot of people thought Bruce Marder was sort of a jerk, not so much for anything he’d done but for what he didn’t do—like greet customers warmly, send out free food, ask how folks were enjoying their meals. Like smile. As I got to know him, though, I discovered that I liked him pretty well. He was quiet and sometimes oblique, but he turned out to have a deadly sense of humor, and he really knew food.

  I used to joke that Bruce smoked his way into the restaurant business, and I wasn’t talking about the cigarettes he gave out at the West Beach. Brought up in Los Angeles, he enrolled in the UCLA School of Dentistry, decided that he didn’t like it, and went off to hitchhike around Europe for a year. He ended up in southern Spain and wanted to go to Morocco. He took the ferry to Tangier, he told me over a bottle of Provençal rosé at the West Beach one afternoon, but the immigration man took one look at his long ponytail and told him to get back on the boat. He tried again the next week, and got turned away again. Finally, he lopped off the offending hair, put it into his passport, and handed the arrangement to his nemesis. The man smiled, tossed the hair into the garbage can, and waved him through. Once in Morocco, he ended up living in a van on a communal beach campsite, lying back and getting high. Everybody had to do something around the campsite, and he volunteered to cook meals. He discovered that he liked it, and on Christmas of 1972, he would tell Ruth Reichl sixteen years later, “All of a sudden it came to me that I wanted to be a chef.”

  Bruce thought he should start with a grounding in traditional French cuisine but couldn’t afford to go to culinary school in France. He ended up at a small institution in Chicago called the Dumas Père School of French Cuisine, run by a classically trained caterer and food stylist named John Snowden. Bruce learned the basics there, then returned to L.A., where he got a job as a cook at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and then worked for a week at the elegant and very French L’Ermitage in West Hollywood, before getting fired for leaving some plates in the oven to crack. His next job was cooking lunches at a little bistro called Café California, on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice. Lunches did all right at the place, but it was dead at dinnertime, and it soon became apparent that the restaurant wasn’t going to last very long. Bruce put up $500 of his own money to become a partner, closed the restaurant’s dinner service, and kept the place going. After six months, it was doing fairly well, but the principal partner and Bruce didn’t get along, so she offered to buy him out for $35,000. At almost the same moment, a Moroccan restaurant at the beach end of Venice Boulevard, called Casablanca Café des Artistes, was put up for sale—for thirty thousand bucks. A month or so later, the West Beach opened its doors.

  I think Bruce was one of the best natural cooks in Los Angeles in that era. He had the French grounding, but he quickly picked up techniques from other cuisines. His risotto was as good as anyone’s in town; his tacos tasted like something you’d get at a really good restaurant in Puerto Vallarta or Monterrey—and he was probably the first to interleaf Mexican fare on his menu with Italian and American dishes; his steaks put a lot of steak house meat to shame. He was miserly in the way that smart chefs used to be, always looking for a way to cut out the superfluous elements, and to cut costs by intelligently using by-products that other chefs would throw away. I’m pretty sure he was the only chef in the state who rendered the fat from all his beef trimmings—and then used it to cook his superlative French fries.

  Bruce’s partner in the West Beach—besides his wife, Rebecca, a onetime dance instructor from the California poultry capital of Petaluma—was a refugee from Nazi Germany named Werner Scharff, who helped start the Lanz clothing company and had been buying up and restoring property around Venice since the late 1940s. Scharff owned the West Beach building and another building across the street. When he decided that he wanted to put a restaurant there, too, he asked Bruce first. Bruce hesitated, but then decided that he didn’t need competition from somebody else in his front yard, and that he could use the new place to showcase the Mexican food he was increasingly enamored of. Rebecca knew Frank Gehry, and asked if he’d consider designing the new place. He must have had a lot of fun with it—but Bruce worried that the interior was so busy and unusual that people wouldn’t pay enough attention to the food. I thought the food held its own very nicely.

  I SPENT THE Christmas holidays in 1987 in New York, staying in a cozy and comforting room at the Algonquin, which was then my favorite New York hotel by far—it was shortly to be sold and its quirky charms neutered—reading galleys of my Catalan book. Calvin Trillin invited me to an afternoon party on Christmas Eve at his place in Greenwich Village. One of the other guests, a good-looking woman of about my age with a young daughter in tow, looked at me with envy, if not something approaching awe, when I told her what I was doing in New York. “You’re reading galleys of your book in your room at the Algonquin?” she asked. “Do you have any idea how romantic that sounds?”

  Later that evening, I sat alone in my room, missing Leslie, missing California, eating a room service steak with a bottle of minor Bordeaux—which at some point I knocked over, staining a corner of the bedspread—and watching an episode of a short-lived cop show called Beverly Hills Buntz. “Romantic” was not the first word that sprang to mind.

  Back in California, finished with Catalonia and vicinity for the moment, I dove back into freelancing, traveling around the country and going off to Europe periodically for Met Home, and meanwhile writing a weekly “Restaurant Noteboo
k” column of industry news bites for the Los Angeles Times. I didn’t have much heart for going out on dates, and stayed home and cooked for myself a lot, eating things I’d grown in our backyard—mesclun salads from French seeds; fat, deep red tomatoes, which I had to pick slightly unripe before our sweet-tempered golden retriever, Walter, gobbled them off the vine—and lots of fresh fish and shellfish and grass-fed steaks, which I grilled out back. When I did go out, it was almost always to the West Beach and Rebecca’s, moving back and forth between the two, depending on who was where and what I was looking for.

  Then, in the spring of 1988, Catalan Cuisine: Europe’s Last Great Culinary Secret was finally published, to modest advance sales but good reviews. I dedicated it “To Leslie, malgré tot”—despite it all. In July, I wrote to my editor at Atheneum, “I thought writing the book was hard. Now my life has become a seemingly endless round of Catalan food festivals, Williams-Sonoma book signings, cooking classes (which I ought to be taking rather than giving), telephone interviews from Detroit and Denver, and who knows what else. Oh well. At least people are paying attention.” In August I flew back to New York to appear live on Good Morning America, my first network television show, nervously demonstrating several recipes from the book and trying to impart to viewers some serious historical and cultural information. I was not a great success.

  My TV appearance did have an enjoyable result. The food and beverage director at the new Scottsdale Princess hotel in Arizona happened to be watching the show. He was about to open a “fine dining” restaurant at the resort and was looking for a theme. Mediterranean cooking was just starting to get big, but that seemed to mostly mean Italian, and he wanted something with a twist, something he could promote for its originality. And there I was with my “culinary secret.”

  In November the Princess officially launched its Marquesa dining room as a Catalan restaurant, with a Catalan Cuisine Festival starring me. Over a three-day period there I did book signings, cooking demonstrations, and radio and TV interviews, gave the kitchen staff tips on Catalan cooking, and hosted a couple of private dinners for VIP guests. The original chef at Marquesa was a Basque, and the dining room manager was from Galicia, and though the menu was written in (imperfect) Catalan, the food wasn’t much like anything in my book. Cheese tortellini with sun-dried tomatoes and manchego cheese was not Catalan cuisine; shiitake mushrooms, fontina, and fennel are not staples of the Catalan kitchen; nobody in Valencia has ever put veal in his paella. Ah, but the sun was shining, the pools were inviting, all my expenses were being paid . . . and I was there with my pretty new girlfriend, Paula.

  I’d met Paula at a publike restaurant in Santa Monica called the Darwin. She was a waitress; I was a guy who came in by himself and invariably ordered a cheeseburger with fries and a bottle of good red wine. Paula was pretty and antic, and we flirted casually, and then more than casually. One night, I got up the nerve to ask her out to lunch the following Sunday. I took her to the West Beach. “Tell me all about yourself,” I said when we sat down. “Make it fast and make it funny.” She deftly obliged.

  We got married in the fall of 1989, a few months after my divorce from Leslie had become final, and bought a two-bedroom condo in Santa Monica, just over the city line from Venice. The next year, we had a daughter named Madeleine. Two years after that, my second book, a collection of reworked older pieces and new essays called Everything on the Table: Plain Talk About Food and Wine, was published by Bantam Books, and by then we had a second daughter on the way.

  I decided that it was time to sell another book. I wondered if I could do something on contemporary Catalan cuisine, as opposed to the mostly traditional cooking I had covered in my earlier book, but nobody considered that part of Spain in those terms yet (this was some years before the emergence of Ferran Adrià and his disciples), and I knew that it would be a tough sell. Then I started thinking in broader terms and wondered if there might not be a good book in modern Spanish food in general. I would roam the country, paying close attention, of course, to the innovative chefs of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Madrid, but finding creative food in the restaurants of other regions as well.

  I wrote up a proposal and sold it to Bantam, and made two brief reconnaissance trips to Spain, looking for good contemporary food and eating through my advance. The results were disappointing. I knew where to go in Catalonia, and to a lesser extent in Madrid and the San Sebastián area, and as expected I found some terrific modern cooking in those places. But in other parts of Spain, following friends’ recommendations and a handful of guidebooks, I pretty much struck out. The comparatively few restaurants purported to be up-to-date and creative in places like Valencia, the Canary Islands, Majorca, Zaragoza, Huesca, and León mostly served things like foie gras with kiwifruit or filet mignon with blueberry sauce. I was looking for something more authentic, more organic; something with regional roots, based on traditional dishes but executed with a twist—like the esqueixada with white beans and angulas at Eldorado Petit or the crema catalana ice cream at the Hotel Ampurdán.

  I decided to try once more. Jonathan Waxman came with me this time, and our trip turned out to be the most sustained, extravagant eating expedition of my life. We met in Paris and drove down toward Spain, polishing off snails in pastry, baby rabbit with sautéed cabbage, roast guinea fowl with new potatoes, truffled foie gras, and duck confit at various stops along the way. We ate well at Zuberoa in Oiartzun, near San Sebastián—lobster and asparagus salad with truffle vinaigrette, oyster and cauliflower soup, cuttlefish tartlets, and cod cheeks in green sauce.

  We sat down to dinner the same night at the superlative three-star Arzak, in San Sebastián itself, but after more cod cheeks, this time with clams, and a truffle-stuffed roasted new potato, I found myself unable to eat another bite. Then Juan Mari Arzak himself proudly brought out our next course, roasted ortolans, those tiny, fabled birds, whose sale had long since been banned in France, that are eaten in a single bite, bones and all. I’d always wanted to taste one, but the way I felt, I couldn’t even look at the things, and once the chef had returned to his kitchen, Jonathan looked at me and said, “I’m going to have to do this, aren’t I?” “Yep,” I replied. (He still regularly evokes the memory of this selfless act as proof that I owe him some vague cosmic debt.)

  By the next morning, I had revived. Pushing on to Madrid, we had a leisurely, elegant lunch of fava bean salad, sea bass with fried seaweed, and oxtail with thyme sauce at Zalacaín, which had been the first three-star restaurant in Spain (it has long since been demoted to a single star). For dinner, we had a meal of a very different sort, at Iñaki Izaguirre’s unconventional Jaun de Alzate, where the magnificently mustachioed chef-proprietor brought us cream of white bean soup with “sushis” of chorizo and blood sausage (the meats were not raw, but they were embedded in sushi rice, with spinach taking the place of nori); smoked eel in a potato basket with a salad of mangoes, apples, and red chiles; a salad garnished with grilled foie gras with balsamic vinegar; “hamburgers” of chopped hake with ratatouillelike pisto manchego; fried hake with piquillo peppers; and loin of wild boar stuffed with goat cheese. The meal was a lot of fun, and mostly pretty good, but I was concerned. This was some of the most imaginative “new” food I had encountered in Spain, outside of Catalonia at least, but there was something a little gimmicky about it, and I wasn’t at all sure that American home cooks would want to reproduce any of it.

  I got even more worried when we traveled south. The best new-style restaurant in Seville at that time was supposed to be Egaña-Oriza, partly owned by Izaguirre, and while we had a decent meal there—grilled langoustines, duck-breast ham with foie gras, stewed red partridge, wild boar ragout with dried cherries, and crispy almond crêpes with caramel ice cream—I ate nothing that demanded to be taken home. Driving back up Spain’s Mediterranean coast, we found no intimations of the contemporary at all, though we did have some good traditional food, including a very satisfying arroz en costra—saffron rice with saus
ages beneath a crust that resembled a very dry omelette (the kind I will eat) loaded with bits of crispy pork.

  In Catalonia, home territory for me, we ate extremely well, as expected, for a couple of days. Eldorado Petit lived up to my expectations, as did Azulete, where Eldorado’s former chef, Jean Luc Figueras, was now cooking. He made us angulas with langoustine “carpaccio,” shrimp and sea snail salad, lobster with cabbage and artichokes in herb vinaigrette, sausage and potato ravioli with white beans, gilthead bream with tomatoes and confit garlic, goat cutlets with truffles, and fresh white cheese with pear compote. Driving back up to France, we had a knockout meal at Santi Santamaria’s always dazzling El Racó de Can Fabes in Sant Celoni: mousse of wild mushrooms and sausage with truffles, whole truffles in pastry, savory custard with truffles, turbot on a bed of thinly sliced calf’s head with sauce ravigote, and a couple of chocolate desserts. That was it for Spain.

  When I appeared at the door of our condo in Santa Monica the night I got back, Paula took one look at me, shook her head, and said, “You’ve got Euro-bloat.” She was undoubtedly correct. But I also had a bigger problem than that. My meals in Spain this time had confirmed what my repasts on earlier trips had suggested: There frankly wasn’t enough good contemporary cooking in Spain in that era, especially outside the Basque Country and Catalonia, to justify a book. It had become pretty clear to me that I had sold a project about a nonexistent subject. (My problem, of course, was that I was a decade or so ahead of the times.)