Inside the California Food Revolution. Joyce Goldstein
in foreign-trained chefs. Highly skilled professionals could land good positions in the United States, and many of them leaped at the chance to leave their predictable career paths behind and take advantage of these overseas opportunities for advancement. Most thought American food meant hot dogs and hamburgers, but they were willing to come and elevate our cuisine and have an adventure too.
The majority arrived from Europe—primarily France, Germany, and Scandinavia. Some had endured a lengthy apprenticeship from a very young age, in which they were often treated harshly, but they learned how to work hard and fast. Those who attended culinary school were trained in the manner of the rigorous Escoffier brigade.
European chefs who settled on the East Coast generally retained a European culinary point of view, whereas those who came west found that their cooking evolved. In California, chefs were exposed to diverse cultures and gained access to local and seasonal ingredients, and soon they were putting more vegetables on their plates. Their food became lighter and healthier. Ethnic influences made their mark on chefs who had essentially grown up in a monoculture, and California’s unfettered restaurant milieu allowed European chefs to break away from culinary traditions and rules and enjoy increased creative freedom. Their cuisine could become more individual.
In Southern California, almost everyone who opened a restaurant had either worked in restaurants or gone to cooking school or both. Michel Richard, Joachim Splichal, and Wolfgang Puck had started working in European kitchens as teenagers, although in keeping with the entrepreneurial spirit of California, Michel Richard trained in pastry and later reinvented himself as a restaurant chef and became a master of technical ingenuity. His clientele were delighted by his fried shrimp “porcupines” wrapped in kadaif pastry, thousand-layer salmon terrine with caviar sauce, and phyllo-wrapped white bean “belly dancer” rolls.
In the early 1980s, Joachim Splichal was representative of many Europeantrained chefs working in fine-dining establishments. Chef Traci Des Jardins, who joined the staff of his Max au Triangle at the age of seventeen, noted that the restaurant “had a very extensive menu, a lot of fancy ingredients—foie gras, truffle, lobster, John Dory, sole—all imported from Europe. We were using the best ingredients, but I don’t know that we were paying as much attention to season as we were to luxury. I can remember menus where we would have asparagus in December, and they were beautiful asparagus, but they weren’t from California, and they weren’t seasonal.”
It was a major departure for a classically trained European chef to step back from the premise that a recipe, once perfected, doesn’t ever change, and instead decide to use something else or alter the recipe if the prime ingredient is not in season. It took Joachim a while, but he eventually adopted the philosophy of California chefs such as Mark Peel, whose credo was “the best dish today is going to be made with the best ingredients today.” Joachim narrowed his list of menu items and shifted from imported goods to local.
JOACHIM SPLICHAL
Max au Triangle, Beverly Hills; Patina Restaurant, Los Angeles
Joachim Splichal is the chef of Patina Restaurant Group and runs a culinary empire that includes pizzerias, the Nick and Stef’s steak house chain, the Pinot bistros, and his flagship Patina Restaurant, which has reopened in the Frank Gehry– designed Disney Concert Hall in LA. Born in Germany, Joachim began his training on the international hotel circuit. In his early twenties he moved to France to work at La Bonne Auberge in Antibes and the legendary L’Oasis in La Napoule, and then he spent four years on the Côte d’Azur under the tutelage of famed chef Jacques Maximin at the Chantecler Restaurant in the Hotel Negresco.
Joachim came to the United States in 1981, when he was hired to serve as executive chef for the Regency Club in Los Angeles. He stayed for three years but felt frustrated because the LA clientele never warmed up to what he liked to cook. His cuisine, which included such Provençal-derived dishes as vegetable napoleon, stuffed zucchini blossoms, shrimp ratatouille, and salade niçoise, may have been too authentically Mediterranean for diners who were used to heavy cream sauces and classical French fare, so he was forced to compromise and offer a few more familiar dishes on his menu. Initially he shipped in ingredients from France, including truffles, olive oil, and fish. “But then I met a couple of guys from Santa Barbara who brought fish to my doorstep and I went away from the European imports.
“When I first came [to the United States], I was shocked. You went to the supermarket, you had big carrots, ugly produce, and there was not much there. I was amazed because, for example, people threw the zucchini flowers away. Everything was a size too big. There was a lot of produce I was used to in the Mediterranean that I couldn’t get. That became better very rapidly; within five or eight years we had a tremendous amount of progress. First the variety was better, and then there also was a direct connection between farmer and chef. I didn’t know any other way because wherever I worked in Europe, mostly in France, you went to the market, you knew the farmer, you ate tripe early in the morning with him. Then he came to the restaurant. There was a strong connection between farmer and restaurant or restaurateur or kitchen.”
Joachim built his own network, because at the time the Santa Monica farmers’ markets weren’t in full swing. In the 1990s, new produce companies started up that acted as brokers between the farmers’ markets and the chefs. “You could call and ask, ‘What’s really looking good?’ If they said ‘tomatoes,’ you could say, ‘Bring me two cases of tomatoes.’”
After leaving the Regency Club Joachim opened Seventh Street Bistro in downtown LA, then Max au Triangle in Beverly Hills in 1984. Patina opened in 1987 to great acclaim. By then LA was ready for Joachim’s inventive cooking. Diners loved his innovative lasagna made with thin slices of potato, duck liver with rhubarb, lobster minestrone, corn blini with salmon, and squab with bacon sauce atop spiced bread.
“When you’re in Europe, you eat in French bistros, Italian trattorias—typically the food of that country. When I came here, I started to eat at sushi places, Korean places, Indian places, Chinese places, and that influenced my cooking. I used some of their ingredients, some of their vegetables, and incorporated them into the food I did. In my opinion, everybody was influenced by ethnic cuisines because it’s Southern California and that’s the way we live. It’s totally different from Europe.” Joachim became enraptured by California’s bountiful ingredients and never stopped exploring and sharing what he discovered.
“The basic approach I took was French, and I added a twist to it, and people loved it. People really appreciated variety. When I came here, [the food] was basically French, heavy and super heavy. The restaurants at that time—L’Hermitage, L’Orangerie—did that old-fashioned cooking. I was taught under nouvelle cuisine—light, the vegetable stock sauces, really letting the quality of the produce and the protein speak and not bothering with some sauce. Early on I was doing vegetarian menus.
“If I had stayed in Europe, I would have been most likely part of the group of people who took nouvelle cuisine to a different level. I think it was better that I made the decision to come here and elevate the cuisine in California. I saw my food evolving from a very traditional, nouvelle cuisine standpoint, and now I feel my approach about food is ten times more casual. I incorporate all elements, the pizza oven as well as the grills. My food, I want it light. It’s all about the product. It’s all about the connection with the farmers and the fishermen.”
Although Northern California was shaped in large part by its preponderance of self-taught chefs, it also had its share of the professionally trained. Foreignborn chefs René Verdon, Jacky Robert, Hubert Keller, Masa Kobayashi, Jean-Pierre Moullé, Udo Nechutnys, Julian Serrano, and Staffan Terje had received classical training in Europe, along with a legion of hotel and country club chefs.
Roland Passot illustrated a typical progression from France to the United States. He grew up in Lyon and at the age of fourteen apprenticed at Les Trois Dômes at the Hôtel Sofitel Bellecour. He then went to work for Jean-Paul Lacombe, whose restaurant Léon de Lyon was a one-star Michelin establishment transitioning from classical to nouvelle cuisine. Roland emigrated to the United States in 1976 and after several restaurant ventures opened the elegant La Folie in San Francisco in 1988. After more than twenty-five years in California, Roland still cooks his “root French cuisine,” but being here,