Inside the California Food Revolution. Joyce Goldstein
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to Emily Luchetti, the early years of California cuisine presented unique opportunities. “When I took over at Stars as the pastry chef,” she said, “I had no pastry training. But Jeremiah Tower knew me, I knew him, we agreed on the style of food, and the rest I figured out. If you had a restaurant like Stars today, you would never put someone in there as pastry chef who did not have pastry training.” Ironically, Jeremiah himself would not be hired by most restaurants today due to his lack of professional culinary training.
The California cuisine revolution occurred at a time when the restaurant world was not as competitive as it is now. Before the modern phenomenon of the celebrity chef and the constant media focus on restaurants, being a cook was not considered an impressive career, so there were fewer highly trained culinary students. This helped make California in the 1970s a fertile ground for iconoclasts. Some cooks had formal training or restaurant experience, but others were completely inexperienced. Many skipped the slow and predictable career climb and clambered straight to the top to run their own kitchens or become chef-owners. They were caught up in the spirit of the revolution, which saw more unique restaurants open and their seats fill with appreciative diners. As chef-owners, they could cook a more personal type of food and develop their own culinary style. Responsible only to themselves and their investors, eventually they became celebrities in their own right.
Self-Taught Chefs
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of the chefs weren’t trained. That was freeing. You weren’t tied down to a set of rules and told, “You have to go this way.” No, I don’t, because I don’t even know what those rules are.
—Tom Worthington, chef and partner at Monterey Fish Market
Many of us early California chefs were food-obsessed college grads or dropouts from other fields. We read cookbooks voraciously, dined out frequently, and cooked constantly. Since we did not have any formal training to rely upon, we would make mistakes, but we learned from them and kept going, trusting our palates and passion to guide us.
Culinary instructor Barbara Haimes described the diversity of these new chefs’ backgrounds. “Back then, people came to cooking with college degrees, with some intellectual curiosity. People had traveled, and that sensibility came with them into the kitchen. Not everybody went to cooking school. A lot of people came in from other careers. They were smart people who had a range of knowledge. It wasn’t the European model of you’re fourteen, you go through an apprenticeship. It was a really different model, and it was more of a West Coast thing than an East Coast thing because the East Coast was still impacted by the European model. It was the usual California thing—the Wild West. You just do your own thing.”
It was a remarkable phenomenon, with lawyers, nurses, brokers, and artists moving into cooking. Mark Miller was in anthropology, Jeremiah Tower came from architecture, Alice Waters taught at a Montessori school, Bruce Marder was in dental school, and I was a painter who had studied with Josef Albers. The common bond is that we all were crazy about food.
Despite our initial naïveté, we persevered, and those of us who succeeded did so by dint of single-minded devotion and determination. California applauds and supports rebels and entrepreneurs, especially those willing to work ridiculous hours to accomplish their goals. We autodidacts were driven by our love of food and flavor.
Catherine Pantsios, former chef-owner at Zola’s, took no offense when a reviewer called her restaurant “amateur.” She explained that the word amateur comes from the Latin amāre, “to love.” “I probably had more restaurant experience than a lot of people. But at the time people just jumped in because they really wanted to do something. They didn’t want to open a restaurant and sell a predictable kind of food. They wanted to create a particular environment, a particular type of experience.” These amateur lovers of food and cooking made homes for themselves in the new California cuisine movement. One passionate novice was Margaret Fox, who raised the culinary bar in rural Mendocino, 150 miles north of San Francisco, when she gave up her academic career plans to run a rural café.
MARGARET FOX
Café Beaujolais, Mendocino
Margaret Fox liked to bake and cook from an early age and in her teens would throw dinner parties at the drop of a hat. Her mother was a self-taught cook whose creative recipes were published in Sunset magazine. Margaret remembers her mother telling her, “If you can read, you can cook.”
Despite her early interest in food, Margaret was expected to go to college. She graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in psychology, “fully intending to go to graduate school.” But what she did instead surprised everyone. She decamped to Mendocino, hoping to find a job in a bakery, and wound up taking over the drowsy Café Beaujolais with friends who knew even less about the restaurant business than she did. “My mom burst into tears when I told her I had done this. But I was twenty-four and full of spunk, and you don’t know what you don’t know, which turned out to be a very good thing. My mom did at one point say something like, ‘For this we sent you to college?’”
Like many other Northern California chefs at the time, Margaret had no formal experience, but she was wholly committed to baking and had the stamina to succeed in a tiny coastal town that was not on anyone’s fine-dining radar. “It was a slow beginning,” she recalled. “It was like, if an omelet is made in the forest, does anyone hear it? I was in this remote place and I was doing breakfast, which was really unusual. People weren’t used to going out for that.”
She started off serving breakfast and lunch. Little by little, the news got around, and Margaret was able to buy out her partners in 1977. However, it was still somewhat slow going, and to drum up business she launched a weekend summer cooking series with guest chefs. Marion Cunningham, longtime assistant to James Beard and author of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook and Fannie Farmer Baking Book, was one of her first guest instructors. Alas, it was the year of the gas crisis, and only about five people showed up in the dining room, three of whom were friends. These were hard times, and Margaret admitted to feeling “disheartened.”
Then, in December 1983, Ruth Reichl came to Café Beaujolais on assignment for New West magazine. At the time she was writing the “Best of California” column, and she included Café Beaujolais in her list of the best breakfasts in the state. When a photographer called to ask Margaret if he could come do a photo shoot, she was taken by surprise, since no one had told her about the article. After that, as she put it, “the flood gates opened.” People would drive up for the weekend to sample her coffee cake, muffins, and egg dishes.
In 1984, Chris Kump came on as executive chef. In the late 1980s, Margaret and Chris began to host a farmers’ market on their property, which introduced them to an expanding number of local growers and prompted them to start putting the names of farms and farmers on their menu. At that time this was an unfamiliar practice and people would ask why they did it, to which Margaret would respond, “We’re proud of getting what they’re proud of selling and we want to pass that on to you.” In 1989, they invited well-known oven builder Alan Scott to give a workshop, and the outcome was a fantastic outdoor brick oven on the property. In this showcase oven Margaret and Chris baked bread and pizzas and roasted tomatoes that they then froze for the winter. They offered daily specials based on freshness, availability, and seasonality and a menu that changed every month or so. Not every item changed, though. “We had certain things, like that darn baked goat cheese salad, you never could take off.”
Margaret marveled that forty years after the start of the California cuisine movement, “you still see this amazing energy and enthusiasm and celebration of ingredients. People who have grown up in more recent years probably take this as a matter of course, but we who have been around for longer look at it and say, ‘Oh my god.’”
Like Margaret Fox’s, many parents were shocked when their children selected careers in the restaurant industry. They hadn’t sent their kids to college to become kitchen workers. Barbara Haimes, one of the rare chefs who studied in a culinary training program, said, “My parents cried—sat in front of me and cried for hours when I told them. ‘My god, what are you doing with your life? It’s manual labor. It’s blue-collar stuff.’” Barbara disagreed, and went on to a successful