Inside the California Food Revolution. Joyce Goldstein
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butters and salsas.) Students take turns working at all of the kitchen stations in the traditional brigade: commis (prep), garde manger (cold station), entremetier (vegetables and sides), poissonier (fish), rotisseur (roasts), saucier (sauces), and tournant (a rotating position). They also learn how to bake bread and make pastries and desserts. Some schools have basic classes in wine.
Finally, as part of their studies, culinary students apprentice at an approved restaurant, usually one run by a graduate of the school. If their school has a restaurant on the premises, they work there in both the back and front of the house. Their training is rigorous, usually of two-year duration, with a codified curriculum. In the United States and Europe in years past there was no in-depth study of “foreign” cuisines, such as Asian or Italian. Nor was there any attention to creativity or originality. For years, culinary school was a highly regimented and competitive environment dominated by men.
The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, produced many notable graduates, including Northern California chefs Michael Chiarello, Gloria Ciccarone-Nehls, Gary Danko, Todd Humphries, and Bradley Ogden and Southern California chefs Susan Feniger, Anne Gingrass, David Gingrass, Jeff Jackson, Joe Miller, and Roy Yamaguchi. The CIA, as it is known, opened in 1946 as the New Haven Restaurant Institute, with fifty students, many on the GI Bill, and three faculty members: a chef, a baker, and a dietician. In 1972, the thriving school, now called the Culinary Institute of America, moved into a larger campus at the former St. Andrew-on-Hudson Jesuit novitiate in Hyde Park, where it grants associate and bachelor’s degrees in the culinary arts, baking and pastry arts, and culinary science. In 1995 the CIA opened a West Coast campus at Greystone, the former Christian Brothers Winery in the Napa Valley, which offers a global cooking program and in-depth studies in wine.
While the CIA is perhaps the best-known culinary school in the United States, a host of other schools taught notable chefs as well. David Kinch of Manresa studied at Johnson and Wales in Providence, Rhode Island. Bruce Marder attended Dumas Père cooking school in Illinois. Emily Luchetti went to the New York Restaurant School. Mark Peel of Campanile studied in the hotel and restaurant department at California Polytechnic University at Pomona. Others studied abroad. Michael Roberts attended the École Jean Ferrandi in Paris, and Cindy Pawlcyn went to both La Varenne and Le Cordon Bleu after finishing hotel and restaurant school in Wisconsin. Michael McCarty did stints at the Cordon Bleu, the École Hôtelière, and the Académie du Vin in Paris and rounded off his education at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration in upstate New York. Wendy Brucker was one of several women who attended culinary programs before opening places of their own, along with Suzette Gresham, Heidi Krahling, Jennifer Millar, and Maria Helm Sinskey. Wendy graduated from the California Culinary Academy and then extended her training through jobs at Ernie’s, Square One, Eddie Rickenbacker’s, Stars, and City Restaurant before finally opening a place of her own.
WENDY BRUCKER
Rivoli Restaurant, Berkeley
Like many California chefs, Wendy Brucker was inspired by travel abroad. “I grew up in Berkeley, and my father was an Italian historian, so I spent a lot of time in Italy and France eating really good food. There was a lot more good food in Berkeley than probably almost anywhere else in the country, with maybe the exception of New York.”
She spent several aimless years before deciding to pursue a career in food. “I went to cooking school at nineteen, sort of by happenstance. My brother worked in the same building as the California Culinary Academy. I was a high school dropout, cleaning houses, painting, not going anywhere, but I had started cooking at home and doing dinner parties for wealthy ladies at the Berkeley Tennis Club. My brother said, ‘Wendy, you should check out this school.’ And I loved it. I asked my dad, ‘Would you send me?’ I think he was so happy that maybe I would find a career that he was like, ‘Hell, yes!’”
The standard culinary school curriculum was still firmly entrenched at that time, even in California. “When I started in 1980, all of the chefs at the CCA were European, predominantly Swiss or German, and the food was very old-school Continental, not a hint of nouvelle anywhere. They had all been cooking since they were ten and were bitter and unhappy people. First semester, most of them were fired, and the second batch was European and classically trained but younger and more open-minded, a breath of fresh air. Nouvelle cuisine was the big thing then, so we were doing carrot mousse and scallops in beurre blanc. Flour-thickened sauces were a thing of the past. They started getting in really good chefs to do six-week classes, including Wolfgang Puck, Jeremiah Tower, and Ken Hom.”
After graduation, Wendy landed a job at Ernie’s in San Francisco and fell under the spell of chef Jacky Robert. “He became one of the great influences in my cooking career because he was the first chef to hire women at Ernie’s. He did not care if you were black, white, male, female, Asian—he had the most diverse kitchen I have worked in to this day in terms of experience and age and sex. He was an amazing teacher because he knew how to do everything and was really, really talented. You didn’t get to work on the next station until you knew how to do the first one. So by the time I left, I had done all the stations, which included prep, pastry, butchering, sauté, and grilling.”
During her time at Ernie’s, the restaurant was changing over from traditional French to nouvelle cuisine. “It was real old school/new school,” said Wendy. “We used orange juice concentrate in the sauce for the classic duck à l’orange. We were getting gorgeous Dover sole from France and freezing it, yet we also got in gorgeous fresh scallops and served them as they came in. The food went from the ridiculous to the sublime. The favorite nouvelle cuisine [dish] was seared scallops in a vanilla beurre blanc, and each scallop was topped with a slice of kiwi. Some of the old dishes were lovely, like we did a beef Wellington that was exquisite. So it was a funny, in-between thing.”
Wendy worked at several restaurants over the next few years, each of which gave her new insights. “Square One opened my eyes to another kind of cooking and food and sensibility. Ingredients had not been a big deal in the restaurants that I worked at up until that point. Baking the bread, getting fresh seafood from Monterey Fish, the menu changing every day, pastas—that was an amazing experience.
“When I left Square One, I worked one year at Eddie Rickenbacker’s, which was a nightmare. I learned a lot about organization and writing menus, but it was a crazy place. Then I went to Stars, which was another revelation. Square One was doing authentic food, which was a great grounding for me, and at Stars, we had a lot of leeway, and dishes would be more vaguely Asian, or Moroccan. Then I worked at City Restaurant for Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken. Again, a very different cuisine. They were true to each dish, they were doing international, not fusion.”
In keeping with her sundry cooking experiences, Wendy opened two stylistically different restaurants. Her first was Rivoli, a special occasion restaurant that she established in 1994 with her then husband, Roscoe Skipper. At Rivoli, Wendy started out serving Mediterranean standards but then broadened the focus to offer an eclectic menu. Wendy said, “Right now I’ve got a pot roast with potato pancakes, blue cheese, and bacon and a quail dish that is Italianish—it’s got a hazelnut stuffing and we’re doing it with farro and mustard greens and a Bing cherry sauce. I’ve got an appetizer that’s kind of southern—a corn spoonbread soufflé but with prosciutto instead of southern ham and succotash and a grilled peach. We do what I think of as truly California cuisine. It isn’t Mediterranean, because you wouldn’t see pot roast or spoonbread soufflé.”
Corso, which Wendy and Roscoe opened in 2008, is based on the Italian trattoria, a more casual place where you get a carafe of water on the table to pour yourself. “It’s very straightforward. Order a whole grilled fish, you get whole grilled fish. They don’t bone it for you; you’re going to bone it yourself.”
The two restaurants illustrate two different styles of California cuisine: one eclectic and inventive, the other more orthodox, using local ingredients. “Rivoli has a smaller menu and is more about presentation. We’re going for whatever I feel like cooking. Corso is more about trying to recreate a kind of food that I know and love, and the dishes are very traditional. Our classic meat sugo came from a tenth-generation Florentine man, and it tastes like when you go to a trattoria in Florence.”
In the 1970s