Inside the California Food Revolution. Joyce Goldstein
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curried lobster—was bold and original.
On the same trip I luxuriated in the gorgeously restored 1928 art deco building in downtown LA that housed Mauro Vincenti’s Rex. The glamour was backed up by a serious menu that offered the first alta cucina—Italian high cuisine—on the West Coast. Rex’s chef, Filippo Costa, had brought many dishes with him from celebrity chef Gualtiero Marchese’s eponymous restaurant in Milan, where he had trained before being hired to work in California. I had the chilled lobster with a purée of red peppers and the veal medallions in Vernaccia. While the flavors were familiar, the presentation of the food was modern and elegant. It proved to me that Italian cuisine did not always have to be rustic.
Northern California restaurants did not have such high-style design concepts. Nostalgia and tradition were our vernacular. We had better ingredients to cook with, but our plate presentations remained simple and direct. LA gave me a respite from the rustic and a glimpse into an exciting new dining culture.
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As far back as the 1850s, critics have suggested that Northern and Southern California be divided into two states to reflect the regions’ political and cultural differences. The chasm was particularly broad in the sixties and seventies, when Californians elected the charismatic and conservative Ronald Reagan in 1967 followed in 1975 by the liberal Jerry Brown, who was derided by Republicans as “the granola governor, appealing to flakes and nuts.” Reagan came out of Tinseltown, Jerry Brown from UC Berkeley. The Hollywood/homespun dichotomy prevailed in California cuisine as well.
In Northern California, in the formative years of the new cuisine, politics was on the plate. People took their food seriously. Using fresh, local, “politically correct” produce and artisanal products and having a philosophy behind the food were of primary importance. Restaurant publicist Andrew Freeman, comparing dining in Los Angeles and San Francisco, said, “When people dine out in Los Angeles there’s a chance that there’s something else going on in their evening, and that dining out is a part of the experience. In San Francisco dining out is the experience.”
In Southern California, the film and music industries dominated, so glitz and appearance determined which places were popular. Diners wanted restaurants to be showy and to confer social status. Because the quality of the food did not determine success, LA restaurateurs cared less about getting their hands on the best raw materials and were slower to join the crusade for better ingredients. While fine-dining restaurants in Northern California tended to be traditional in format and based on the classic flavors of the Mediterranean, Southern California restaurants offered a broader array of ethnic flavors and were more concerned with style and innovation.
The North: Food as Politics
In Northern California, the cooking of the 1960s grew out of the counterculture. Barbara Haimes, an instructor at San Francisco City College Hotel and Restaurant School, observed that at the time, “the people who had an understanding of food’s place in culture were part of the hippie movement and the communal farms, going back to the land and eating together. You had the beginnings of the food collectives, the co-ops, health food, organics, and recycling. Thinking of food in a political way came out of the 1960s, and coming into a kitchen was desirable as opposed to being just a job.”
Rachel Carson’s authoritative 1962 book Silent Spring alerted the public to the dangers of pesticides in food. In 1971, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet awakened Americans to the costs of industrial meat production, urging people to do what was best for the earth as well as themselves. In the face of these warnings about the despoiling of the land and water, people were eager to be “part of the solution.” Many eco-conscious eaters became vegetarians, and many farmers switched to organic practices. Progressives and intellectuals promoted ethically raised “natural” foods and rebelled against big business and mass-produced convenience foods, which had become ubiquitous following World War II.
A university town like Berkeley served as a perfect locus for a new kind of cooking—adventurous and fresh. Berkeley’s constantly changing population of professors and students, many of whom had traveled or come from abroad, contributed to a vibrant environment for the exchange of culinary ideas. This community nurtured the shops that made up the Gourmet Ghetto, which included the first Peet’s Coffee in 1966 and the Cheese Board Collective in 1967. “The first week I got to Berkeley,” said restaurant critic Sherry Virbila, “I met some anthropology graduate students who made what I thought were incredible dinners. It seemed like an incredible dinner when somebody didn’t use a packaged mix to make spaghetti sauce or use that little seasoning mix for the salad dressings. You asked yourself, ‘What is the point of all this convenience food when it’s so easy to make it from scratch and it tastes so much better?’”
The person who brought change from the home into the restaurant arena was Alice Waters. “There always has to be a catalyst,” said wine writer Gerald Asher, “someone who starts things off, and Alice Waters got things started up here. She [had] a political interest in food. Tying [it to] politics had a lot to do with getting the thing going.” What followed was an active crusade to promote the cultivation of local ingredients, preferably grown without pesticides (organic certification would come a few years down the road, with organic practices codified in 1979 by the California Organic Food Act). Not only was there a high regard for natural foods and ingredients per se, but to be morally and politically correct many restaurants later put a statement on the menu that said, “We serve organic or sustainable food whenever possible.”
According to Los Angeles Times writer Russ Parsons, “There’s a certain reverence that goes with Northern California, a conservatism, which is a funny thing to say about Northern California. When you go to Chez Panisse, you need to bow at the knee when you approach. Chez Panisse comes out of the 1970s—what’s political is personal, what’s personal is political.”
ALICE WATERS
Chez Panisse Restaurant and Café, Berkeley
Alice Waters founded Chez Panisse, an influential, world-famous restaurant that has been running successfully for forty years. She is not a chef and doesn’t claim to be one, but rather works closely on menu concept with the chefs she hires. She has an impeccable palate, and if you pay attention when she critiques your cooking, you will learn about balance and flavor.
I worked for Alice as chef of Chez Panisse Café for three years and came to know her predilections and passions well. Though not the most practical person I’ve ever met, she is a visionary. Her genius is that she inspires people to help her realize her dreams, and those dreams are big ones. Underneath a whispery voice and flirty manner lies a will of steel. She has stayed on message for forty years, driven not by money but by an unflagging commitment to make better food available to all. In 1996, for the restaurant’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Alice created the Chez Panisse Foundation, whose mission is to teach, nurture, and empower young people. The goal of “cultivating a new generation” led to the development of the Edible Schoolyard Project at a nearby school, which includes a garden and teaching kitchen. Alice serves as a public policy advocate at the national level for school lunch reform and universal access to healthy organic foods. In 1997 she received the Humanitarian of the Year award from the James Beard Foundation.
“The big movement that we’re all a part of is local, organic, sustainable, and seasonal. I don’t think anything touches a buffalo mozzarella like I’ve had in Naples, but I’m not going to bring in buffalo mozzarella from Italy even if I think it’s better. Our goal should be to try to produce our own versions of these things. We’ve succeeded in a gigantic way in terms of bread; I think we have in this country the best bread on the planet. And we have some of the great wines of the world. The olive oil is getting really good. It’s just that we haven’t had three hundred years to perfect them—we’ve got work to do.”
The few exceptions to sourcing local products, according to Alice, “have to do with friendships—that’s the bottom line for me.” One example of this is her tie to Chino Farms, a small specialty produce grower in San Diego County. Founded by Japanese immigrants Junzo Chino and Hatsuyo Noda