Earth, Air, Fire and Wine
In the 1970's, California chefs found inspiration in their own backyards, and the cuisine they invented radically changed the way America dines
Earth, Air, Fire and Wine
In the 1970's, California chefs found inspiration in their own backyards, and the cuisine they invented radically changed the way America dines.
By Harvey Steiman
A dinner menu from Alice Waters' Chez Panisse
One day in 1976, Jeremiah Tower was leafing through some old cookbooks, seeking inspiration for
the next in a series of French regional menus at Chez Panisse, a modest restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., where he was the chef. In a turn-of-the-century collection of recipes by Charles Ranhoffer, the French chef of Delmonico's in New York, Tower encountered something unexpected ...
"I saw the title of a soup, Crème de Mais Verte à la Mendocino—Cream of Green Corn à la Mendocino," he writes in Jeremiah Tower's New American Classics, published in 1986. Why, Tower wondered, did a recipe from a French chef in New York refer to a Northern California town? "Like a bolt out of the heavens, it came to me: Why am I scratching around in Corsica when I have it bountifully all around me here in California?"
The recipe, Tower discovered, was nothing but American ingredients prepared according to French cooking principles. "I could not contain my exhilaration," he wrote, "over what I beheld as the enormous doors of habit swung open onto a whole new vista. And I began to compose an American regional dinner—California, not Corsica."
Chez Panisse had been open for five years. No one had yet uttered the term "California cuisine." Proprietor Alice Waters and her friends were just cooking the way Americans do at home, using American ingredients to make recipes from classic cookbooks. They took a lot from France, the occasional dish from Italy or elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and a little from mom. But the elements were there, and inspiration met opportunity.
Chez Panisse's previous menus had been written in French, but this one Tower couched in English. Significantly, the wines offered were from California as well. The menu crystallized Waters' vision of the sort of food Chez Panisse should serve—great local ingredients prepared classically:
Cream of Fresh Corn Soup Mendocino-Style,
With Crayfish Butter
1973 Mount Eden Chardonnay
Monterey Bay Prawns Sautéed With Garlic,
Parsley and Butter
Preserved California-Grown Geese From Sebastopol
1974 Ridge Fiddletown Zinfandel
Fresh Caramelized Figs From Sonoma
1974 Harbor Mission del Sol
Walnuts, Almonds and Mountain Pears From the San Francisco Farmer's Market
If this menu sounds familiar, it's because a culinary movement that began in California in the 1970's so succeeded that its principles completely dominate the way we eat today.
Ronald Reagan's presidential inauguration festivities in 1981 included an event called "A Taste of America," a food fair for thousands, featuring top restaurants from around the country. Almost all of them proffered French, Italian or some other non-native cuisine; American cooking was represented by barbecued ribs and clam chowder.
Even San Francisco was trapped in old habits. Gary Danko, whose San Francisco restaurant is now one of America's best, recalls that when he arrived there in 1978, the city's best restaurants served what he calls "fuddy-duddy food." But he sensed something beginning to happen, a sort of gastronomic counterculture.
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"To be a serious restaurant, you had to serve Dover sole, even if it was frozen. You had to have filet mignon, white veal and foie gras, even if it came out of a can."
-- Jeremiah Tower |
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"Hippies were a huge influence on the food in California," Danko notes, adding that they became yuppies, who became today's informed diners. "They formed communes and searched for inexpensive sources of protein. They used Asian products like tamari soy sauce and tofu, and ethnic dishes, like tabbouleh and falafel. It was peasant cuisine, and we all learned to appreciate it."
The best American restaurants today operate on an elevated plane, serving a refined cuisine that blurs the lines once separating French haute cuisine, Mediterranean cuisines, Asian and Latino cooking. It's not that boundaries no longer matter, but that chefs do not feel they need a special visa to cross them. French restaurants, Italian restaurants and Japanese restaurants didn't go away, but new genres have emerged that absorbed their ideas and styles into American cooking.
At The French Laundry in Napa Valley, Thomas Keller, the most celebrated chef in California, filters elements of several cuisines through his own culinary genius, as in ravioli filled with marrow bean puree as rich and creamy as foie gras and topped with black truffles. At Gary Danko in San Francisco, pheasant breast benefits from Moroccan spices, with a bed of braised Chinese cabbage playing off the textures and flavors perfectly. Three thousand miles away in Virginia, Patrick O'Connell of The Inn at Little Washington sears a rockfish fillet and serves it with braised bok choy and a delicate sweet-and-sour jus. The fish may come from local rivers, but the concept incorporates France and China. We used to identify that as California cuisine. Today, it's American.
"I never referred to it as an actual, specific cuisine," says McCarty today. "It was a philosophy [and it became] a new way of cooking. It was about the ingredients, about the seasons, about how we could throw off the shackles of Escoffier without falling into the traps of nouvelle cuisine, which had some great ideas but got to be overdone."
Not every U.S. chef avoided those traps, or managed to succeed with the new freedom. In the early days, I can recall endless variations on grilled chicken or squab with salad, and lamb chops with every conceivable berry. In one memorable dish, a misguided chef topped a grilled fish-and-salad preparation with pineapple salsa, chipotle cream and pancetta, and garnished the plate with those puffy, fried, Chinese shrimp chips, an insult to several cuisines on one plate.
A recent dinner at Röckenwagner, a Los Angeles mecca for foodies, proved that California cuisine can become as tired and routine as the traditions it sought to update. "California saltimbocca" is a case in point. True Italian saltimbocca is a light dish of veal scaloppine layered with prosciutto and sage, quickly sautéed and finished with a light pan sauce made with wine or lemon. Röckenwagner's version wraps a chicken breast in pancetta, sautés it, cuts it into inch-thick slices and lays the slices on a towering mound of truffled mashed potatoes topped with potato chips and a radio antenna of rosemary. Although the trend seems to be waning, piling up ingredients—which makes a dish difficult to eat, and often looks silly—visited a scourge on modern American restaurants.
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"The top five restaurants in L.A. were all French. They didn't grill. They avoided salads. Everything was fancied up. Service was formal. What we did was make things more casual, but still spiffy. And the food was green and crunchy instead of brown and mushy."
-- Michael McCarty |
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"They're committing the same sins as their fathers," laments Tower, who recently returned to the United States after living in the Philippines for two years. "American food has sort of become baroque-continental again, only the continents are different. The majority of chefs have lost touch with simplicity."
But as California cuisine has matured, its food faux pas have become less frequent. Instead, we find things like this preparation from Joe's in Venice, Calif.: Sand dabs, a tiny California flounderlike fish, come filleted and lightly sautéed, mingling on a plate with tiny jewel-box tomatoes, diced avocado and chives in a frothy wine sauce. That's a far cry from the traditional presentation, sautéed on the bone and served with brown butter.
Or take George Morrone's heirloom-tomato soup at the Fifth Floor in San Francisco. The green of Zebra-Stripe tomatoes swirls with the deep yellow of Golden Jubilees and the brilliant red of Beefsteaks, yet their colors remain distinct. A delicate arrangement of chives, avocado, green tomato wedges and cilantro floats on the surface. A splash of jalapeño oil adds a hot-sweet edge.
"It's like jazz," summarizes Waters. "You have to respond to the music around you. And you have to have some good players to improvise like that."
Not only does California have the players to make beautiful music with its food, but the rest of the country clearly has listened to California's tune. From New York to Seattle, Chicago to Miami, American dining is more rewarding because of what happened in the farms, vineyards and kitchens of California.
For the complete article, please see the Mar. 31, 2001, issue of
Wine Spectator magazine, page 40.
Where to Find California Cuisine
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Chez Panisse
1517 Shattuck Ave., Berkely
Telephone (510) 548-5525
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Chinois on Main
2709 Main St., Santa Monica
Telephone (310) 392-9025
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Gary Danko
800 North Point St., San Francisco
Telephone (415) 749-2060
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Fifth Floor
12 Fourth St., San Francisco
Telephone (415) 348-1555
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The French Laundry
6640 Washington St., Yountville
Telephone (707) 944-2380
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Joe's
1023 Abbott Kinney Blvd., Venice
Telephone (310) 399-5811
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Lark Creek Inn
234 Magnolia Ave., Larkspur
Telephone (415) 924-7766
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Michael's
1147 Third St., Santa Monica
Telephone (310) 451-0843
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Spago Beverly Hills
176 N. Cañon Drive, Beverly Hills
Telephone (310) 385-0880
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Stars
555 Golden Gate Ave., San Francisco
Telephone (415) 861-7827
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