Inside the California Food Revolution. Joyce Goldstein
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California cuisine was, but the background sounded French, and I had experience with that, so I thought maybe I could cook it.”
Hiro was brought to California for training at the original Spago. To educate himself, he asked everybody what California cuisine was, but nobody could give him a clear answer. He started studying what they were cooking and what products were available in the kitchen and at the market. Like Wolfgang Puck, Michel Richard, and Joachim Splichal, Hiro began eating out in LA, and not just in restaurants featuring California cuisine. “I tried Thai restaurants, Vietnamese restaurants, Mexican restaurants, understanding the culture and background of each, and kind of melding everything on a plate. I started understanding what’s going on here, but I still didn’t know how to explain California cuisine.”
After training at Spago LA, Hiro returned to Japan to open the restaurant’s Tokyo outpost, but he found that California cuisine could not be transplanted to foreign soil. “Wolfgang used to make angel-hair noodles with goat cheese sauce,” said Hiro. “He used goat cheese from Laura Chenel. When I tried to do exactly the same food in Tokyo, that goat cheese was not available, so I had to use French goat cheese. Then I asked, ‘Is this California cuisine?’ Even if the recipes are exactly the same here and over there, the availability of ingredients is different.”
“It’s the purveyors that aren’t available, the little growers,” said Lissa. “There aren’t farmers’ markets and things like that. So if you think of California cuisine as farm-to-table, and pairing with your purveyors, in this case, your purveyors are Japanese, and what you’re doing is not California cuisine because you’re not in California.”
After getting Spago Tokyo off the ground, Hiro returned to the States to become chef at Spago LA. In 1988, he and Lissa, then married, left to open their own restaurant, Terra. “We found this location in St. Helena,” Hiro recalled, “and the minute we looked at the building, we said, ‘Wow, this is a great spot.’ We told Wolfgang, ‘We are leaving.’ We had a really short time to move from Los Angeles to St. Helena.”
“Everybody told us to do pizza,” said Lissa. “And we were saying, no. It’s been done. We don’t need to do it just because we’re both from Spago.” Hiro added, “At Spago, everything is fresh, basically a showcase for ingredients. A simple way to prepare vegetables, very à la minute, just sauté quickly, then add a simple sauce. Instead I want to do ragù because it cooks a long time—a classic approach. More rustic, too.” Lissa chimed in, “We wanted bigger flavors, more developed, because the other side had been like a grilled veal chop with baby vegetables with a very light sauce, which was delicious, but we had moved on from that. We wanted more depth to what we were making.”
That style of cooking suited Terra’s Napa Valley clientele. “The Napa Valley has many immigrants from Italy,” said Hiro. “They ate mom’s cooking, so Italian cooking was great for us to do. Ragù, innards, tripe, tongue, sweetbreads—they loved those things.” Lissa added, “Napa was much more open to that than people would’ve been in Los Angeles, probably even at that time, in the late 1980s.”
When Terra opened, only a few dishes on the menu had Japanese elements, because Hiro didn’t want Asian flavors to dominate his Napa Valley cooking. “Hiro is Japanese,” said Lissa, “so some of that comes into the food. He might know if you put soy sauce here, even though it’s a Western dish, it’s going to develop a deeper flavor. He did an eggplant dish where you deep-fried it, then blanched it with water to take the oil out, and then cooked it again with the sauce. It created a lighter eggplant, the way they do it in Japan. That went with the veal, and people were crazy for it.”
Restaurant guides and newspapers had trouble categorizing Terra’s cooking. “Each year, we were in a different category,” they laughed. “One year was best Italian restaurant. (Good friends of ours in Los Angeles said, ‘Congratulations?’) Then one year was fusion. Also best California or best American. Mediterranean a couple times. We’ve been just about everything.”
In the days before California cuisine, once a French restaurant, always a French restaurant. Whether they were professionally trained or had forged their own path, the new California cuisine chefs resisted labeling. They did not want their restaurants to be categorized and constrained. Stars started off serving hamburgers and andouille-infused gumbo alongside French- and Italian-inspired dishes, added salsas from south of the border, and eventually assimilated more Asian ingredients as Jeremiah Tower expanded his restaurant domain into Singapore and Hong Kong. Conversely, at Square One we opened with a California menu with global touches but over the years focused more on the Mediterranean. Our restaurants were a work in progress, a voyage of discovery, and our customers were delighted to come along for the ride.
4
Women Chefs and Innovation
The New Collaborative Kitchen
In California no one said to a woman, “You can’t run a restaurant—you’re a woman.” Look how many women chefs we had here.
—Sherry Irene Virbila, Los Angeles Times restaurant reviewer
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