Around April 1971, I hitchhiked to Champaign-Urbana, where some friends were having a party. I was just not in a good place in my head. I was just disturbed by the darkness of the political climate, the few opportunities I was having with anything. And suddenly the party was sort of breaking up and I said, “Where’s Steve?” That was the older brother to my best friend. They said, “He went down to Key West.” I’m like, “Isn’t that the last island down there?” And they’re like, “Yeah, he’s all the way down there.” I said, “Jesus, that’s incredible. I bet it’s warm.”
There were two brothers that were at the party and I said, “Anybody want to go to Key West?” And these two brothers said, “Yeah, we’ll go.” We left about an hour later. Drove thirty-six hours, Champaign-Urbana down the little rickety highway to Key West. It was a few months before Jimmy Buffett got there and a few months before Key West was beginning to become the party town that it became soon after.
When we pulled into town, it was like two in the morning. We woke up our friend and he said, “Sure, camp out. You guys get the couch and you can have a sleeping bag and sleep on the porch.” And we camped out. And it was the next day I was falling in love, head over heels, with Key West. The smell of it. Flowers, the wooden homes, the rickety little streets, the little tiny cafes to go and get food I had never even seen before—Cuban sandwiches and cafe con leche* and maduros plantains* and picadillo.* The same things that are the hallmarks of Cuban food now.
We were saturated in music but it was mostly still playing LPs on turntables. The Allman Brothers, Derek and the Dominoes, Dave Mason. All that kind of music. We were [Dead] Heads. We loved music. We would have been musicians of some sort if we had the talent to have been them. We knew everybody that played in the bands. We studied the backs of album covers like they were religious texts. We just were all into it. We’d go fishing. We’d try and eat for free. And finally, we’d get jobs. Some were house painters. Some were carpenters.
I lived there for a month. And quite frankly, we just got wrecked every day, and zoned out, flowered out, and then realized that it suddenly ended with a thud and I had to go back to work, figure something out. Nobody was hiring me in Key West. It was still a pretty financially depressed town, I guess.
So I went back to Illinois, got a job doing different things. Met a girl,* got into a relationship, decided to take her to Key West. Seventy-two, we went down, stayed at a campground. She liked Key West but not as much as me. We broke up, went back home. Seventy-three rolls along. Got a job in a diner. Saved up money for nine months this time. We [Van Aken, childhood friend Wade Harris, and Rick Taylor, a friend from Hainesville, Illinois] got a drive-away car from Chicago to Miami. Dealerships need cars moved from one city to another and a cheap way to do it is to get somebody to just drive it there. We had a Lincoln Continental Mark IV. Here we are with hair down the middle of our back pulling into gas stations in Tennessee and people looking at us like we were moving scads of marijuana or something to have a car like that, not realizing we didn’t own the damn thing.
I was down there a couple days and one of the guys that I had lived with in Illinois that had come down two years before with me in that first trip, he had made it. He financially was doing okay. He got a job as a carpenter. Had his own place he was renting. And he told me about the possibility of this barbecue place to go get a job at. So I found this guy, this big gentleman named Bud, asked him if he was hiring, and he said yeah. And he hired me on the spot. I said I don’t have any experience with barbecue; all I’ve done is flipped eggs. He said, “That’s okay, man. You’re working the midnight shift. Everybody’s going to be so fucked up by the time you get to them that they won’t know what you’re cooking.” Okay. Fine. Worked the midnight shift. Did that for about three weeks, and then I got enough money to send [ Janet] a bus ticket to Key West.
And when I got to Key West, I was in America but I was also, like, in another country with another set of values that seemed so far removed. And it was peaceful. And it didn’t matter that I had long hair. Even old people would say good morning to me. And it was welcoming and it was a Pacific mentally-spiritually kind of a place that I just felt like, okay, this makes sense again. I’m back in an America that I can relate to even though it’s so far away from my home. And it was like being welcomed to the bosom of something again, and I loved it. I was so happy. And my disappointment with the politics and the situation was softened because I was somewhere else and I didn’t have to contend. And it was not long after that Nixon was bounced out of office and things kind of got a little bit back on their feet.
—Norman Van Aken, chef
For those who could afford it, international travel beckoned. Some needed a break from the turmoil; some craved new experiences and perspective, on the United States and themselves. An accidental by-product was that exposure to European attitudes toward food proved transformative to many.
“We’re the generation that traveled with backpacks,” says Los Angeles chef Evan Kleiman, who today hosts the current-events radio program Good Food. “When you travel, you eat, and you’re eating preindustrialized food. In Europe during the seventies, there was no such thing as frozen food. There was no such thing as industrialized products. There weren’t even supermarkets. So you were eating food that is akin to what people who grew up in America were eating pre–World War II. So you go there and you have this unbelievably pristine experience for very little money. There’s so much that’s evocative about it. And we’re all young so we’re all either finding people to go out with—I’m using the words go out loosely; everybody’s hooking up, right? You’re out there, you’re either traveling with a boyfriend or girlfriend or you’re single and you’re meeting kids that are traveling from all over the world, and you’re having this sort of seminal experience that’s filled with sensuality. So you’re experiencing your own sexuality. You’re drinking wine. You’re eating food that’s two steps from the field, in a totally joyous, non-Puritanical, nonjudgmental way. For a lot of us it’s the first time that we’ve ever experienced food in this context. When we came back, I went to my mother: ‘I want to make the broccoli different but I need fresh garlic.’ And she’s like, ‘Fresh garlic? I have this garlic powder.’ And then what happens is slowly we start doing it.”
Overseas culinary epiphanies could be more or less divided into two categories. The first was everyday food as it was woven into daily life in France, Italy, and other popular European destinations of the time, the market culture that drove home cooking and unfussy, soulful bistro staples, all of which dovetailed perfectly with the hippy movement toward pure, “real” food in the United States. Much of the historical blood flows to Berkeley, because of the confluence of factors there, but similar strains were present elsewhere: “Among our friends who had nothing to do with the restaurant world, people were interested in cooking,” says New York City chef Michael Lomonaco. “And it wasn’t just that they were going to recipe swaps. I think a lot of this dates back to the hippies of the sixties, communal living, and the back-to-the-land movement, the back-to-the-farm movement. This purity of the late sixties, the early seventies. You have to look at it through this prism. People were weaving. People were making things with their hands. Texture. Ceramics was huge. Pottery classes. We were living in Brooklyn at the time. Park Slope had a kind of a Greenwich Village vibe to it. It had ceramic shops, and small bakeries were making breads and cakes and brownies and things that were more natural, with natural ingredients. There was a lot of talk of naturalness in food. I think that rippled through the culture. And everybody was kind of interested in food.”
“I think that the hippies had a lot to do with it,” says former Stanford Court pastry chef Jim Dodge, who grew up in a family resort and hotel business in Vermont. “They weren’t the best cooks but they were looking for pure, pure ingredients, organic ingredients, good quality. They wanted to know how things were grown. I remember going to the organic farm with my father every day to pick up sele
ct produce, and the pride that this young hippy family had. They had long beards and dressed extremely casual. They lived in a very modest house. There was a lot of focus on organic. I think the biggest thing was that they were making their own breads, which nobody did at that time. Just for themselves, although some of them would sell breads. In New Hampshire and especially Vermont, I think there were a lot of organic restaurants and cafes. They were opening organic food stores at that time so they were bringing awareness to it.”
Bronx-born Barbara Lazaroff, who would go on to cocreate Spago and other restaurants with future husband and business partner chef Wolfgang Puck, attended New York University, starting in 1970. On Friday nights, she participated in informal dinner parties with friends. She describes one frequent host, a well-funded Saudi student named Nassar, who had the biggest apartment, mostly unfurnished, with pillows scattered about. “We would put newspaper all over the floor and every Friday it would be a different cuisine. That’s the first time I tasted sashimi and sushi. One person was from Abu Dhabi, another was from Saudi Arabia, another from Japan, Argentina, Peru. One person was Bolivian. A number of Africans from countries I don’t think exist anymore because I can’t keep track of how many times they’ve changed. So it was absolutely everything I aspired to immerse myself in but couldn’t afford to: travel. I was traveling through the stories and the cuisine and the lives of these other people.”
Wonderful as it sounds, writer L. John Harris cautions against idealizing the era: “I was in the art department at UC Berkeley,” he remembers. “That’s when food became almost like theatrical performance art. There’s that whole side in the seventies of cooking with friends and making it visually beautiful. It was food experienced as a kind of ritual for artists to be interested in, but ingredients were kind of irrelevant. There was a side of food at the time that was performance—theatrical and visual—in addition to taste. We were living in communes. We were cooking for each other. There was a gourmet club we went to that cooked out of Julia Child and all of that. This is in the late sixties, early seventies. . . .
“It was a mission. I felt like we were discovering something. It was certainly important to us. This is very California and it can sound very pretentious and very hippy dippy, but our generation was about changing things, whether it was antiwar or whatever. Some people discovered that you can change things through food. You can create pleasure. You can create community through food. Food is community. This was the beginning of the breakdown of the American family. We were re-creating the family. We were living in communes. We were disgusted with the American system. I marched against the war, of course. But I didn’t think of food in that way at that time and I don’t think most people did. I think we ignore the fact sometimes that this discovery of good food was about pleasure. It wasn’t about changing the system at that point. I think that came a little bit later. I think we had discovered a great source of delight and pleasure and sensual gratification in a very sterile, corporate world. So we weren’t on a political mission at that time, I don’t think. History tends to compress reality into very simple sound bites. It was a vast period in the seventies where we were about food as pleasure, sensual awareness, and community.”
The new interest in food wasn’t limited to the counterculture. A proliferation of hobbyist cooking schools and classes materialized to meet the moment; a 1971 New York Times article listed no fewer than twenty-four Gotham-based businesses proffering cooking classes—everything from fantasy-camp instruction by the likes of writer James Beard and Mexican cooking priestess Diana Kennedy to crash courses in Chinese food, kosher buffet catering, and macrobiotic practices.
In their newfound fascination with food and cooking, many Americans were guided by a small group of writers and television personalities: James Beard, a failed thespian and opera singer of Hitchcockian stature who had lived for a short time in Paris, turned his attention to food full-time by 1940 and became a prolific author, television personality, commercial pitchman, and networker. He loomed large, as did Julia Child, whose first book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961, helped demystify the intimidating European cuisine to generations of home cooks. Child’s first television show, The French Chef,* debuted in 1963, amping up the effort. There was also Englishman Graham Kerr, less well remembered than the others, but notable for the humor and bonhomie on display on his show The Galloping Gourmet (1969 to 1971), on which he took a thematic approach to cooking, combining travelogue footage, history, and instruction; sipped wine on camera, often running into a frame with his drink nearly splashing out of the glass; appeared in a variety of costumes (from a tuxedo to a knight’s armor); and charmed a live studio audience.
Richard Olney, an American expat living in France, also developed a cult following for his books The French Menu Cookbook (1970) and Simple French Food (1974), notable for their masterfully written recipes, chock-full of information, opinion, and evocative detail. A similar fandom sprung up around Brit Elizabeth David for her books such as French Provincial Cooking (1960). Craig Claiborne ushered in a golden age of newspaper food writing when he became the New York Times food editor in 1957; in the role, he introduced the paper’s standard-setting restaurant review system. And food magazines such as Gourmet and Food & Wine were beginning to make their marks, although they wouldn’t begin covering chefs until years later.
I view the American food revolution as having started in France. One of the markers is August 1975. Paul Bocuse appears on the cover of Newsweek magazine. That was one month before I came to The Culinary Institute of America to be a student. And to have a chef be on the cover of Newsweek magazine back in the day when Newsweek and Time actually meant something, that was a big thing. I remember buying as many as I could buy—I could only afford probably four of them—and bringing them home because I wanted to have them and show my parents what it was to be a chef. Things were starting to change then, and young people like myself were saying, “Wow, this isn’t just a job.” The French created an aspiration for us.
—Tim Ryan, president, Culinary Institute of America
The other dominant genre of culinary experience available to Americans overseas during these years was restaurant food on a level beyond imagining, thanks primarily to the rise of a new style of cooking commonly referred to as nouvelle cuisine. The movement was first trumpeted as such in Le nouveau guide, the brainchild of food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau, who founded the Guide with André Gayot. The Guide debuted in 1969, in part as a response to what the authors saw as the staid Guide Michelin, which had been evaluating restaurants according to its three-star scale since 1931. Gault and Millau contended that Michelin had failed to praise an emerging new guard of French chefs who broke away from the timeworn canon of haute cuisine recipes first codified by Escoffier in Le guide culinaire in 1903.
“Michelin: Don’t forget these 48 stars!” screamed the first issue’s hand-scrawled headline accompanying an image of chefs including Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and Louis Outhier, who were changing the construct of French cuisine, abandoning the Escoffier playbook in favor of a freer, more personal style. The best-known edition of the Guide was the 1973 issue featuring an article revolutionarily titled “Vive la nouvelle cuisine.” In it, the authors put forth not only the name of the movement itself, but also distilled it down, with religious undertones, into the “Dix [Ten] Commandments.” The list seems quaint, but at a time when food was tiptoeing away from platter service and table-side carving to the style of dishes plated by the chef in the kitchen that has endured and evolved through today, it was transformative. The ten commandments included such rules as simplifying where possible, reducing cooking times, cooking seasonally, employing lighter sauces, rediscovering regional dishes, availing oneself of modern equipment such as nonstick pans, cooking with diet and health in mind, and being inventive.
There’s just one problem: Like most culinary catchalls, nouvelle cuisine oversimplifies, emphasizing certain aspects of the tr
end while omitting the nuance and individuality that distinguishes any chef. Created by journalists to corral electrifying but disorienting change into a manageable construct, the term nouvelle cuisine was promotable but confusing. (Mimi Sheraton, restaurant critic for the New York Times from 1975 to 1983, suggests discarding the delineated elements in favor of the less specific, literal translation of nouvelle cuisine: “new cuisine.”) In the case of Gault and Millau, the name they assigned their movement conveniently echoed the name of their publication: In today’s parlance, nouvelle cuisine might have been considered a brand extension of Le guide nouveau. (The movement was also commonly—and unhelpfully—confused in the United States with cuisine minceur or “slimming food,” the specialty of chef Michel Guérard, also one of the chieftains of nouvelle cuisine.)
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