Inside the California Food Revolution. Joyce Goldstein
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called Vintage 1870. Their little café had the first espresso machine in the Napa Valley, to the delight of the local Italian community. Sally offered a simple menu of hamburgers from the grill and a couple of sandwiches. It was hard to get people off the highway in those days because the Napa Valley and Yountville were not known for food, but Sally’s delicious cooking led to a line out the door, and the Schmitts realized they needed a second restaurant to accommodate the hungry diners. When a space became available in the main building at Vintage 1870 in 1968, they opened the Chutney Kitchen, a lunchroom that quickly became the hottest spot in the Napa Valley. Soon Sally was cooking regularly for the St. Helena Ladies Luncheon Group. “They took me under their wing. They taught me how to set a lovely table and that the salad could be served after the main course. I owe them a huge debt.”
Next Sally and Don added a once-a-month dinner series that grew to twice a month. There was one menu and one seating, by reservation only. “We ended up cooking for seventy,” recalled Sally. “I don’t know how I managed. I was young and had more energy, but the thought of cooking a five-course dinner for seventy people frightens me today. We have five children, and the two oldest girls were able to help in the kitchen and serve, and [our son] Johnny, who now runs the Boonville Hotel, was the designated omelet man. The menus were all hand done, one for each table, with nice little drawings on them. Our daughter Cathy was very good at that.”
Sally was a locavore before the term was even coined. “I remember somebody was bringing people from France over, wanting me to do a special dinner and suggesting that I make French food for them. But my idea was to have Dungeness crab and artichokes, because that’s California.” She had grown up on a small farm, so it made sense to her to source food from as close to the restaurant as possible. However, there were few small farms that could provide quality ingredients back then. Neighbors would come to Sally and inquire, “What would you like me to plant?” but they wouldn’t follow through. She asked one man if he could supply her favorite beans, Kentucky Wonders. “I loved the flavor. That was before we ever had heard of haricots verts. He said, ‘Oh, anything you want,’ and then he dropped out of sight.”
Ten years later, after a dispute with their landlord, Sally and Don left Vintage 1870 and, along with a good friend, purchased a building that had previously housed a French laundry. The people of the community continued to refer to the building as “the French laundry,” so the Schmitts kept the name. They worked hard to maintain the property’s charm during the restoration. As Sally said, “It was a simple building, built by people who did not have any money. In our restoring it, we respected that and didn’t gussy it up, partly because of our belief that simple is better, but also because we couldn’t afford it. It turned out to be lovely.”
The French Laundry opened in 1978. Sally wanted to offer a single daily menu, but at first she wavered about the concept. “I talked this over with my family and said, ‘Maybe we should have a little steak in case somebody can’t eat what we present, or maybe offer them one choice.’ My children and Don said, ‘No, stick to your plans.’” She did, and her menu consisted of a selection of appetizers, a soup, a main course, salad and cheese, and a choice of desserts. The appetizers always included one fish, one vegetable, and perhaps a pâté, “so if anybody couldn’t eat lamb or was a vegetarian, we could substitute an appetizer for the main course or make them an omelet—that was the secret weapon. We tried to make the French Laundry as much as possible like entertaining at home. You don’t get a choice when you go to someone’s house for dinner; you are served whatever the lady of the household is preparing.”
Sally had one part-time assistant, who cleaned during the day and then went home, changed her clothes, and returned to wait tables at night. “We operated with a tight staff and our own girls. The French Laundry is on two floors, so we had one waitperson on each floor, one person to help me in the kitchen, a dishwasher, and Don to greet people and pour wine. We served mostly Napa Valley wine, although we snuck in a few outsiders, like a couple of Chalone wines that we particularly liked.” Of course, there weren’t very many wineries in the region at that point, so the French Laundry represented almost all of them.
The Schmitts ran the French Laundry nonstop for seventeen years, then decided to sell because, as Sally said, life in the Napa Valley was getting fancier and that was not their style. When Sally and Don read Thomas Keller’s proposal to gather investors and learned about the vast array of kitchen equipment and the anticipated number of staff, Sally was astounded. “It was night and day. I thought it could never happen in this small building, but he loved the building as much as we did.” Thomas’s transformation of the French Laundry into a world-renowned three-star dining destination put the tiny town of Yountville on the map. The Schmitts moved to Boonville and opened the Apple Farm in Philo. Today Sally and Don have retired to Elk and their children run the farm.
While most of the established restaurants in the 1960s and early 1970s were content to cook with generic commercial ingredients, supplemented with canned and frozen products, the new chefs wanted to serve fresh, seasonal food that could be cultivated locally, ideally by people who shared their passion for flavor and quality. Although the majority of restaurants had not been sourced this way in the past, it was not a wild or impractical dream. California had the rich soil and ideal climate to grow a wide variety of ingredients. But to change the existing supply chains, wherein restaurants were limited to a standard array of commodities offered by large producers, chefs had to first find and then support like-minded small farmers and ranchers.
Driving the produce revolution forward required the efforts of a diverse group of individuals working in different corners of the state’s food system. The pioneers included Georgeanne Brennan, who imported seeds from Europe so farmers could raise specialty produce; growers such as Warren Weber, Rich Collins, Lynn Brown, Bob Cannard, and Jeff Dawson, who slowly built up alternatives to produce grown on an industrial scale; Jameson Patton, Steve Walton, and Sibella Kraus of GreenLeaf Produce, who helped create a distribution network that could get local produce into the hands of chefs quickly; and Bill Fujimoto of Monterey Market, who connected growers and buyers and educated both groups in the process.
Chefs supported ranchers and poultry farmers who raised animals sustainably and humanely, and they encouraged artisans to revive the traditional arts of making cheese, curing meats, and baking bread by hand. A few artisans went to Europe to observe time-honored techniques. They longed to learn from cultures that had a rich history of experience, although their reverence was usually accompanied by the California desire to tweak the original. John Finger studied oyster aquaculture in Ireland, France, and Spain, and Cindy and Liam Callahan researched the making of sheep’s milk pecorino in Italy. Laura Chenel, one of the most widely respected early artisans, briefly apprenticed to a cheese-making family in France.
LAURA CHENEL
Laura Chenel’s Chèvre, Sebastopol
Goat cheese producers around the country refer to Laura Chenel as the mother of them all. Laura Werlin, the author of award-winning books on American cheeses, thought that “Laura Chenel’s goat cheese was the start of the artisan movement.” Her initial effort yielded a soft, creamy fresh cheese, and as her skill grew, her offerings included olive oil– marinated cabecou, aged crottin, and ash-coated taupinière.
Laura Chenel was born and raised in Sonoma County. Her interest in the back-to-the-land movement led her, in the 1970s, to start a small farm in Sebastopol with bees, chickens, a couple of goats, a vegetable garden, and fruit trees. “The idea was that if the world was going to come to an end, I wanted to be able to produce my food. I made kefir and yogurt and all that stuff. I fell in love with the goats, a deep connection that exists to this day.”
Her goats provided so much milk that Laura decided to make cheese. “I mailed away for the government pamphlet on how to make cheese. It never worked out—it was horrible. I kept trying and trying.” One day someone brought her a piece of French goat cheese, and as soon as she tasted it she knew that this was what she aspired to create.
Laura went back to school to learn French and then wrote for advice to Jean-Claude Le Jaouen, who had recently published The Fabrication of Farmstead Goat Cheese, his now-classic book for artisanal cheese makers. He invited her over, and she found