“He would sit at the table and we’d be drinking Champagne and he would sort of infuse ideas into us,” says Franz.
Steve Vranian, who would quickly become one of Tower’s most trusted chefs and lieutenants, describes the vibe at Santa Fe as an academy unto itself: “During the day at Santa Fe Bar and Grill it was more like a history class; we were trying to go back in time and re-create things. We were always researching recipes so we had to go find old books and old magazines, and this was before the Internet, before you could just Google something. I think part of it, for me at least, was just this huge interest in history, and it didn’t matter what the culture was. A lot of us took that stuff home and came back the next day or if we did go out to eat we would be picking it apart—not just the food; you would sit there and say, ‘Ah, their vents are dirty. What’s up with these guys?’ Or ‘Their bathroom’s a mess,’ or whatever; it went beyond the food.”
“We got kinky and we had fun,” says Franz.
Vranian describes the distinctly Bay Area sensibility of the cooking community: “I don’t know how to talk about it. It was just family. It was an extended family and it’s what you did. We didn’t even call each other chefs. Anywhere that I worked but especially at Santa Fe Bar and Grill, if you were at a certain level, you went by initials J.T., S.V., M.F. Otherwise, it was just the first name. And if East Coast guys came in the kitchen for events and they were all saying ‘Chef,’ we would all go, ‘Oh, oui, Chef, oui, oui.’ Really sarcastic. And to this day, the only person it would be meaningful to have recognize me as a chef, and call me chef, would be Jeremiah, frankly.”
“I don’t recall any of us thinking that this was a career or thinking it was a job; it was more of a lifestyle,” says Vranian. “I never thought I was going to have my own restaurant. I never thought anything like that. It was my lifestyle. I wanted to be in a place where the food and the wine and the people you were with reflected what you do outside of it. I wanted to eat the food there that I would eat at home and vice versa. And it had to be that. And so somehow you had to find a way, whoever that leader was, and to me I was specifically thinking Jeremiah, who could round up all these people that had like values, although I don’t think it was intentional; I think it just sort of happened.”
“WE WEREN’T GOING INTO KITCHENS OF ESTABLISHED RESTAURANTS; WE WERE THE PEOPLE THAT SET UP THE KITCHENS.”
Another defining characteristic of the industry in the Bay Area at this transitional time was that it was, uniquely among Western culinary hubs, not just welcoming to women in the professional kitchen, but—with the significant exception of Tower—largely dominated by women chefs and restaurateurs.
Waters was, of course, the most powerful of them all, and many of the women who followed her worked for a time at Chez Panisse, either at the inception of their careers or midstream: Joyce Goldstein of the Mediterranean restaurant Square One, opened in May 1984, just weeks before Stars debuted; Deborah Madison of the vegetarian Greens, opened in 1979; and the late Judy Rodgers of the enduring local classic, Zuni Café, where she took over the kitchen in 1987, to name just three. (Chez Panisse also launched the careers of several male chefs, including Paul Bertolli, Christopher Lee, and David Tanis, among many others.) Beyond Chez Panisse alumni, there were: Nancy Oakes of L’Avenue, launched in 1988, and then Boulevard in 1993; Patricia Unterman of Hayes Street Grill, opened in San Francisco’s Performing Arts District in 1979 (and before that of Berkeley’s Beggar’s Banquet, which she purchased and took over with no real professional experience); and Napa Valley pioneer Cindy Pawlcyn of Mustards Grill, opened in 1983, and other restaurants, including San Francisco’s Fog City Diner, opened in 1985.
“Females did dominate the Bay Area for many, many, many years,” says Goldstein, who taught cooking classes for close to two decades, first in her home starting in 1966, and then in her own school, before discovering the professional kitchen at age forty-six at Chez Panisse. “They don’t dominate anymore, not so much. It used to be way more. At that time, women ran the Bay Area.”
Why were San Francisco area kitchens so open to women when in virtually all other cities they were centers for sanctioned sexism and harassment?
“Because San Francisco is the least traditional place in the country,” says Unterman, who in addition to being a chef and restaurateur was the San Francisco Chronicle’s food critic for fifteen years. “The strictures of society are the loosest here. There was the whole self-discovery/gay movement. There are no barriers here. And we’re at the end of the continent here, the Wild West. We’ve also been a boom-and-bust society up here, of the Gold Rush and whatnot. Anything is possible, and nothing holds you back.”
Gayle Pirie, who with partner John Clark was co–chef de cuisine at Judy Rodgers’s kitchen at Zuni Café, and today co-owns Foreign Cinema restaurant with him, echoes the sentiment: “We’re new. We’re like two hundred years old in 1970. New York is, like, four hundred years old . . . plus the size, the dynamics, the hierarchy of the city, the age of it. I do think it was old school in the seventies and eighties, New York. Trying to apprentice in a hotel, corporate, male-driven—I’m sure [women] all had a problem. Out here was the fucking Wild West. Chez Panisse, I mean, opened up in a house. . . . The West Coast is just not as old as New York and we had less constraints. It was just very free and hippy-ish here; it really was. . . . We were a younger society, there was real estate and space, and less people. And in New York, it’s older, there’s more people, there’s more structure, and we just didn’t have it out here. The sky was the limit, the sky.”
Unterman applies the same logic to why it was so easy for inexperienced American cooks—both men and women—to find their way into kitchens in San Francisco in the first place: “Because we created them. We weren’t going into kitchens of established restaurants; we were the people that set up the kitchens. So, of course, there was no barrier. No one had even worked in a restaurant. For me it was just starting at such a basic level, and being fearless and jumping in and learning step by step how to do it.”
A philosophical and practical distinction between chefs in New York City and Northern California, one which facilitated the introduction of so many untrained cooks into the Bay Area’s culinary workforce, was the relative emphasis on sublime, local product (Northern California) over transformative ambition and technique (New York), or vice versa.
Unterman says that, for her, dining in New York City in the 1980s “seemed like it was in another age. Different. They were too far away from their ingredients. The food got its energy here from the ingredients. And there, the product was really far from what you ended up getting. Everything was manipulated, overly cooked. . . . Nobody did have technique out here, but we had the advantage of having really tasty raw materials and so you really didn’t have to do so much to it to make it taste really good because the stuff itself was so delicious. You add a little good butter and a great just-picked vegetable—oh my God. I don’t care what you do to the damn thing, it can’t be surpassed with cooking. So that’s the difference. We were the place where all the good stuff was. You went to New York and you just felt, like, Well, it’s very French. But somehow in France you felt much closer to the ingredient.”
Whether or not this speaks to an inherent difference between men and women chefs is debatable, but many key players believe it does: “When men get food they want to transform it into something else,” says Goldstein. “We don’t want to transform it; we want to bring it up, and the guys want to take it and change it. That’s just a different headset. Now, I also want to say that I never wanted to have an all-female kitchen. The hormone level is insane. There’s too much Are you all right? It makes you crazy. And you don’t want to have an all-male kitchen either because there is all the competition: chop, chop. So you want to have this balance of female energy in the kitchen and male energy. It’s a good thing to have. The men who end up working for women chefs turn out to be better chefs later on because they’ve had two different approach
es in their learning career and also because they’ve been nurtured by the woman chef, so that maybe when they go to open their own restaurant they’re not throwing pans at people and calling them motherfucker and screaming at them and humiliating them in public.”
Echoes Waters herself: “I think you need both points of view; they complement each other. When the restaurant becomes too male-oriented, I want more women in the restaurant. Front and back of the house. I think there’s a very important balance that needs to be maintained. I just think that men think about food differently, and women are—I mean, they have it in them. This is just part of their genes. They’re into the nurture play. . . . [Men need] to be creative, to be career-oriented, to be recognized, to be all of that. But that comes from the culture that pushes on that, demands that of men. I think of myself as a more masculine woman, and I think of a lot of men that I work with as feminine men, and I think it’s a beautiful thing to strive for, that we can meet in that place and understand each other.”
Another by-product of the unique gender dynamics of San Francisco kitchens, which admittedly flirt with the stereotypical, was that they were, on the whole, collaborative and communal.
“It was, We’re all in it together,” says Goldstein. “We all want to make it, but we all want to help each other out. Not, Fuck you, this is mine. I think that made us democratic in every way, not just towards who dined in the restaurants, but also how we ran our businesses.”
It sounds romanticized, but San Francisco had a sort of mystical pull on people in those days, and not just because of its politics. Native New Yorker Goldstein moved there after spending time in Italy for apolitical reasons: “We came back from living in Europe and traveling around the Mediterranean, and I looked at New York and I said, ‘This city is so ugly, I can’t live here. I’ve been living in the Mediterranean and I need to see light and water and the sky and trees.’ My former husband had worked in San Francisco for a summer and he said, ‘The only city in the country that looks like the Mediterranean is San Francisco.’ We packed up everything we owned in our car and we drove across the country. I’d never been and we didn’t know a soul.”
(Dominique Crenn, who now presides over her own two-Michelin-star Atelier Crenn, first came to San Francisco years later in search of a less chauvinistic professional community than the one back home and ended up working for Tower at Stars. She experienced an epiphany the moment she arrived. “I was still in the airport, and I felt something,” she says. “I don’t know what it was. I just felt like I was home.”)
“We all love it here,” says Goldstein, more than half a century later. “That’s why we’re here.”
Sue Conley and Peg Smith, partners in Cowgirl Creamery, were part of the Northern California cooking community at the time—Conley as a cook for Bambi McDonald at Hotel Obrero in Chinatown, and then Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley under Paul Bertolli, and Smith as a cook and then manager of the Chez Panisse Café kitchen—and they echo Goldstein’s point: “It was very collaborative back then,” says Smith, who describes how cooks from different restaurants freely compared notes on dishes and preparations. “You’d talk to cooks. Deborah Madison would come and cook with us, then somebody would go cook at Greens. And the idea was learning and perfecting. It wasn’t holding secrets. It wasn’t competitive. It was so collaborative. Well, maybe amongst a few people it was competitive. But the cooks were very collaborative.”
“Zuni was a community of women,” says Pirie. “When I got to Zuni it’s fifty percent males, fifty percent females. A lot of the males didn’t have any authority, but they were lead line cooks who were extremely helpful, so I have that. And then I have also the experience of just all these great women showing up to help Judy. You know when she went to Africa, she asked Amaryll Schwertner, of Boulettes Larder, to come and be chef. When she went to Italy, she asked Catherine Brandel to come and help. [Both Schwertner and Brandel were fellow Chez Panisse alums.] It was this great community of women who would come and dovetail—I mean, I don’t know anybody that I could call and say, ‘Can you be chef for a month while I go to Africa?’ No way. No way. Anybody who is a chef is buried in their own shit, so deep they just are trying to figure out how to get through the day, really; that’s what we’re all trying to do. . . . There were women spilling out of places and Judy had deep roots with Chez Panisse. And within the Chez Panisse family, there’s hundreds of wonderful people. And as bohemians, sometimes you have a month off, and then there’s another person who needs a job for a month. So I would say, at Chez Panisse, it’s still very bohemian because they still run it on this bohemian thing where chefs take sabbaticals and another chef from somewhere else comes in to fill in, or a local person comes in to fill in. I think it still goes on there, probably not as deep, but that’s what it was. . . . You can’t even find a cook today, a line cook, let alone to hire a sister visionary to come and run your place while you’re gone. Who does that? But that happened; that’s what it was.”
“I think Chez Panisse might have set a tone in Berkeley that was contagious,” says Conley. “That collaborative tone, and that people would leave there and that was okay because then they would take the ethics and the vision with them.”
Smith feels that this sentiment was extended even to outsiders. “I remember Wolfgang [Puck] coming up, and it was before he opened Spago. I remember him sitting in the booths. He came and looked at how we did the pizzas and asked a lot of questions. It wasn’t, ‘Sorry, we can’t tell you that; this is classified information.’ It’s just pizza. Everybody thought, This is food. This is not a life-or-death situation that we’re doing here. We’re just trying to make things as good as they possibly can be. It’s like, Carry the message out to the world. I really think it was an offspring of the feelings of the protest, the Free Speech Movement.”
Christopher Lee, who began working at Chez Panisse in 1986, eventually becoming co-chef with David Tanis, believes that Waters taught “a way to live, a way to treat people, a way to be in the kitchen. She was one of the people who also taught us not to shout and throw things in the kitchen.” Much of this wasn’t stated explicitly, says Lee, but rather “in a way that a dog pack might teach its young, where you’re very specific, you get a correction, and that’s it. But mainly it’s sort of by your own observation. You see, first of all, it’s a kitchen at that time run by women, a significant number of women on the staff, so that took some of the brutality out of it. Now I’m not saying that there are no brutal female chefs; there certainly are. But it was a different tone . . . and I think the Bay Area is sort of fifteen or twenty years ahead of New York in that respect. . . .”
Jesse Cool, chef and owner of Menlo Park’s Flea Street Café since 1981 (and before that of Late for the Train) and a pioneer in organic practices, so associated the profession with abhorrent male behavior that “I didn’t like the word chef because I thought chefs were assholes.
“We used to struggle with what to put on my card,” says Cool. “‘Cooker person?’ They said, ‘You can’t use cooker person.’ ‘How about head cooker person? Lead cooker person?’”
Continues Cool: “Chefs were arrogant and egotistical and they were rude to women. I cooked at the Ahwahnee Hotel twenty-six or -seven years ago. They would stick me in the corner by the dumpster. I had to bring every ingredient. I had to bring my own tools. They didn’t want anything to do with me because I was a woman, untrained, and had purple hair.”
Cindy Pawlcyn, whose Mustards Grill helped establish a new era in Napa Valley dining, had had a particularly bruising experience as a cook back home in Minneapolis. A male chef for whom she worked would enter the kitchen and say, “Good morning, cunt,” to her every day. If something broke, she might get an angry call from him on her day off, blaming her “woman juju.”
“I just ignored it because I learned a lot,” she says today. “And the minute I sucked everything out of him I could, I left.
“I wanted to become a chef,” says Pawlcyn. “I tasted his foo
d and I saw how he ran his kitchens and I knew I wanted to learn from him. So the fact that he was an asshole didn’t bother me as much as the fact that he wasn’t realizing that I was getting stuff out of him. And it built my confidence, in hindsight.”
But the experience also influenced Pawlcyn more than she realized. She became a kitchen screamer the first time she became a chef herself, in Chicago: “I was really intense and pushed people a lot. Because I followed their example, until I realized what I was doing and I went, ‘Wow, this isn’t how I want to live.’”
In 1979, when her colleagues Bill Higgins and Bill Upson moved to California to open restaurants, they asked Pawlcyn if she’d relocate and chef for them at a rib restaurant at McArthur Park. The three went on to open Mustards Grill in the Napa Valley in 1983.
Much as Mary Sue Milliken had, Pawlcyn looked to a very few predecessors as her guiding lights: “I’ll never forget: I came out here with my sister-in-law and my brother, and just before we came out, she sent me a Sunset magazine and there was a little picture of Sally [Schmitt, original chef and, with husband Don Schmitt, co-owner of The French Laundry in Yountville, California] and her herb garden, and I put that on my wall and said, ‘See, there’s a woman chef.’ And there was one small book on woman chefs in France. That’s kind of what kept me going.”
“WE’RE OVER. THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END.”
In 1983, Tower and a few of his cooks traveled to the Astor mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, to cook lunch for one hundred journalists, invited there by Ocean Spray’s ad agency. It was the kind of thing that was happening at the time, increasingly prominent American chefs being weaponized in service of a product or produce. But the French still ruled: Paris’s Guy Savoy had been enlisted to cook dinner, Tower and his crew the lunch. When Savoy’s French brigade, already prepping their meal, wouldn’t surrender the stoves, Tower marched his crew outside, improvised a grilled feast—even the dessert—cooked by his team while he mingled about with a glass of Champagne, discussing the meal with the writers, who promptly wrote it up for their papers.
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