Inside the California Food Revolution. Joyce Goldstein
creativity and freedom combined to give rise to a new subset of California cuisine: fusion. A fusion dish results when a chef borrows flavor combinations, signature ingredients, or techniques from one culture’s cuisine and applies them to a dish where they are not part of the original flavor profile or even part of the culture from which the dish is derived. Russ Parsons, who has written about food for the Los Angeles Times for many years, said that some people thought that all California cuisine was fusion, and this perception gave the movement negative connotations. He described the fusion cooking of the early 1980s, especially as it was presented at Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois on Main and John Rivera Sedlar’s Saint Estèphe, as “the period equivalent of molecular gastronomy today. It fit with the general California reputation for more is more, but also ‘the land of fruit and nuts.’ You know, we’re wacky out here. We can do anything we want, and frequently we shouldn’t, but we still do.”
Chef Mark Miller, on the other hand, rejoiced in fusion cuisine’s inventiveness. According to him, “California cuisine was born when Chinois opened in 1983. It was definitely the keynote speech—times had changed and they were never going back. California cuisine was taking Chinese things, cooking them in an Italian oven, and putting French sauces on them. It was a mastery of multiplicity, fashion, form, design, flavor, everything.” Like it or not, fusion in its various forms became part of the movement.
After the cuisine was named, chefs and restaurants would become famous for preparing it. Chefs in the California cuisine movement did not go into cooking to reap fame and never really dreamed of financial reward. Cooking in the United States up to the 1980s was not considered a prestigious profession, and most entered the trade simply because they were passionate about food. Chef Gary Danko, who attended the Culinary Institute of America in New York in the mid-1970s, said, “It wasn’t the most highly revered profession, but a lot of us went because we loved to cook. We loved to eat. We loved the whole feeling about it. It wasn’t like we were going to be famous.”
But as food became a hot topic in the United States, many chefs did indeed become celebrities. Gradually they and their food became the focus of restaurant dining. There wasn’t the full-blown worship of today, but there was a growing spotlight on newly famous California chefs and the restaurant world in general. By the 1980s the names Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, and Jeremiah Tower were familiar to the dining public.
JEREMIAH TOWER
Chez Panisse and Santa Fe Bar and Grill, Berkeley; Stars, San Francisco
Flamboyant, hedonistic, and blessed with an amazing palate, Jeremiah Tower came to Berkeley in 1972 after graduating from the Harvard School of Architecture. He was born in Connecticut but spent much of his childhood abroad, attending schools in Australia and England. Through dining out with his parents and relatives, he developed a highly refined sense of taste. The timing of his arrival at Chez Panisse in 1973 could not have been better: he was broke and the restaurant was in need of a cook. He read the want ad in the paper and prepared eighteen sample menus, as requested. When he came into the restaurant, he presented his menus and asked Alice for an immediate interview. She ordered him to taste and adjust the day’s soup. He stepped up to the pot, added some wine and cream, and was hired on the spot.
Both Jeremiah and Alice were committed to using the best-quality local ingredients, but stylistically and philosophically their paths diverged. She wanted rustic and simple food, while he wanted boldness and drama. In the battle of egos, only one could be the winner. It was clear to both of them that Chez Panisse would always be “Alice’s restaurant.” Jeremiah needed his own place, where he could be the star.
He left in 1978 to pursue numerous ventures. He opened Ventana Inn at Big Sur, taught at the California Culinary Academy, and consulted at the San Francisco watering hole Balboa Café. In 1982, he took over the Santa Fe Bar and Grill in Berkeley. Then, in 1984, in partnership with moneyman Doyle Moon, he opened Stars, a grand brasserie near the San Francisco Civic Center. Stars was an instant sensation.
“The food was very California-driven, very seasonal, and done in a big way,” said pastry chef Emily Luchetti. “With fancier restaurants, if you wanted good food, you had to sit for a three-course meal. At Stars, you could go for oysters, hot dogs, and dessert, or for a martini and oysters, or just the martini, or you could get a full-fledged dinner. You could have it your way.”
Stars, July 9, 1988, with French, Asian, and Latin American flavors on the menu.
Jeremiah had a purist’s love of fine ingredients. “For me, it’s always been about quality. I don’t care where it comes from as long as it’s properly raised, healthy, and of the quality that I want. In the Chez Panisse days, you couldn’t get anything unless somebody brought it to you from their garden. It had to be local; anything else was supermarket food that had survived shipping across the country or being flown in.”
He felt that it was essential for cooks to travel and taste to develop their palates and establish a benchmark for the dishes they would make. “If you’ve never had the best of anything—the perfect olive oil or white truffle—how would you know what you’re supposed to be doing?”
Gradually Jeremiah moved out of the kitchen, entrusting Stars’s day-to-day culinary activities to his talented chef Mark Franz and a dedicated kitchen crew. Jeremiah became the host with the most, a glass of champagne always in hand, throwing a great party every night in the spectacular tiered dining room, which seated a huge number of guests.
But even the grandeur of Stars was not enough for Jeremiah. He began to expand his domain, opening Stars Café, an upscale bistro adjacent to Stars, in 1988. “In his mind he was going to serve all the most important socialites, artists, designers, opera singers—everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Pavarotti,” said former Stars Café chef Loretta Keller. Jeremiah opened branches of Stars in the Napa Valley, Palo Alto, Manila, and Singapore. But after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which closed off Civic Center and forced the opera and symphony to relocate, Jeremiah lost heart. Overextended both financially and emotionally, he sold his interest in Stars to a financial group from Singapore led by Andrew Yap. It closed after two difficult years. Jeremiah first relocated to Manila and then New York before finally settling in Mérida, Mexico, where he enjoys a less stressful life restoring old houses and scuba diving.
Imitating It: Food for the Masses in the Mid-1980s
Not everyone could afford to eat in the hallowed halls of Chez Panisse, Spago, Michael’s, and Stars. But people who read about these places wanted a taste of this new cuisine. Seizing this opportunity, Robert Freeman, Mosen Aminifard, and James Benson, owners of the Victoria Station restaurant chain, formed the private California Café Restaurant Corporation in 1979. They opened the first California Café in Walnut Creek in 1983, followed by restaurants in Los Gatos in 1985 and Palo Alto in 1986. These were bistro-style places serving what the owners considered “idiomatic” California cuisine to the general dining public. Their eclectic menu offered interpretations of dishes that had become California classics, such as the Chez Panisse baked goat cheese salad and the grilled fish with a side sauce that Patricia Unterman was doing at Hayes Street Grill. Their simplified—some might say dumbed-down—presentations defined California cuisine for many people. By 1997 the California Café Restaurant Corporation had successfully established twenty cafes, and in 1993 it added the Napa Valley Grille to its portfolio.
In the mid-1980s, two lawyers who knew a good thing when they saw it, Richard Rosenfield and Larry Flax, jumped on the California cuisine casualdining bandwagon in Los Angeles. I first encountered Rosenfield and Flax while I was chef at Chez Panisse Café, where they took notes and questioned me about the value of a wood-burning as opposed to a conventional oven. They went on to hire Ed LaDou, who had worked for Wolfgang Puck at Spago and had created unusual pizzas at San Francisco’s Prego. In 1985, Rosenfield and Flax opened the California Pizza Kitchen. CPK, as it was known, offered some multi-ingredient fusion pizzas that would have turned any Italian’s hair white, including Thai chicken pizza and Jamaican jerk pizza. The chain is still in business, with over two hundred restaurants in the United States and almost a dozen abroad.