Inside the California Food Revolution. Joyce Goldstein
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every restaurant in town wanted a pizza oven, a grill, and its own version of California pasta, where angel-hair noodles were tossed with goat cheese and broccoli or used as a bed for squab or trout, combinations that no Italian would consider.
Wolfgang followed his growing culinary curiosity, taking traditional recipes and tweaking them to suit his palate. “What is great about California is that it’s new and there’s not much tradition, so if I’m going to make pizza, I can give it my own twist that reflects what I like. Instead of having pepperoni we made duck sausage and put it on. And we put goat cheese on pizza, which at that time was completely new. Even sun-dried tomatoes were new. It’s crazy to think how many things have become everyday staples that were completely out of this world at that time.”
Wolfgang bought a smoker to air-dry his version of Peking duck but wound up using it to make cold-smoked salmon. “I put it on a pizza and sent it out to Joan Collins. She said, ‘Oh, that’s my pizza!’ Robin Lynch, who at the time had the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous show, said Spago and Le Cirque were the two most important restaurants in America. We made the smoked salmon pizza and he called it the ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Pizza.’ The funniest thing is that I went to Lyon to hang out with Paul Bocuse and went to one of his restaurants, his brasserie. He had a partly open kitchen, and I saw a smoked salmon pizza. I said, ‘Paul, what is that?’ He got the menu and it said, ‘Spago’s smoked salmon pizza.’”
When Wolfgang opened Chinois in 1983, it was the first fusion restaurant in the country. He wanted to bring Asian influences into his cooking, but as he had done with pizza, he created his own interpretations. “To me, cooking is an evolution, and as I grow, my cooking style changes. I am bored very easily, and I don’t want to be boxed in with one thing.”
Michael McCarty was another important restaurateur whose culinary foundation and technique were French. At his namesake restaurant, which he opened in Santa Monica in 1979, he presented dishes inspired by those he had eaten at his favorite places in France. His early cooking was based on nouvelle cuisine, with its emphasis on freshness, simplicity, and lightness. “Almost all of my recipes are prepared quickly,” he wrote in his 1989 Michael’s Cookbook, “showcasing the natural quality of the ingredients I use, many of which come from or have been popularized by the innovative food suppliers and cooks of California.” The cookbook is illustrated with nouvelle cuisine– inspired plate presentations: elaborately fanned vegetables with slices of grilled meat, and pasta topped with hieratically arranged strips of seafood and geometrically placed dollops of caviar. The nouvelle look to the food eventually evolved into simpler plating.
Self-taught chef Bruce LeFavour was originally influenced by the French three-star chefs who popularized nouvelle cuisine, according to an interview he gave Marian Burros in 1986. But when he moved to the Napa Valley to open Rose et LeFavour, he became “bored with France” and more taken with California. “There are more exciting things going on here, more ferment, more eclectic cooking,” he said. Rose et LeFavour was a jewel of a restaurant that opened its doors in 1980 in St. Helena. There Bruce offered a single five-course menu each evening that was French in conception but Californian in its incorporation of fresh, local ingredients and ethnic touches. On the entry hall table there might be a basket of fraises des bois from Napa farmer Lynn Brown, a hint of the deliciousness that was to come inside. On April 24, 1985, guests dined on Muscovy duck breast in a salad of local greens, a Thai-style soup with Monterey squid, gray sole with spinach, chives, and basil, steamed New Zealand venison with morels and wood ear mushrooms, a cheese tray, and a sweet from the dessert cart.
BRUCE LEFAVOUR
Rose et LeFavour, St. Helena
I still miss chef Bruce LeFavour’s tiny, personal, and idiosyncratic restaurant in the Napa Valley. Bruce opened Rose et LeFavour in 1980 with the charming Carolyn Rose at the front of the house. Cindy Pawlcyn, who later opened Mustards Grill, was his first sous chef. The French-inspired California food was so wonderful that we would drive all the way from San Francisco to St. Helena just for dinner.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bruce worked in American Army counterintelligence, stationed in eastern France. On weekends he would go down to Burgundy or Alsace or into Paris to see the sights and, of course, sample the regional cuisine. In 1961, he came back to the States and got married. Three years later, he opened a restaurant in Aspen, Colorado, called the Paragon. “I had never really worked in a restaurant before. But our rent was $300 a month, so we could afford to make mistakes.” Bruce served his interpretation of nouvelle cuisine in a series of private rooms, where guests could sit in their own little dining room with a curtain. The restaurant was very successful. “We got a pretty good reputation, but as Aspen started to grow, it wasn’t a place I wanted to bring my two kids up in by the time they were eight and nine.”
He sold the Paragon and moved his family to an isolated two-hundred-acre ranch on the Salmon River in central Idaho. They were fairly self-sufficient. The growing season was short, but they were able to cultivate lettuce, broccoli, and other cold-weather crops. In addition, they had about a hundred chickens, eighty ducks, some lambs, and two Jersey cows. They made their own butter and had wonderful heavy cream. Bruce said he’d probably still be there if he and his wife hadn’t gotten divorced and been obliged to sell the ranch.
After the divorce Bruce came to Northern California and looked for a place to open a new restaurant. He settled in the Napa Valley because “all my experience had been that you need a fairly sophisticated audience to do the type of cooking that I was doing at that time.” He met Carolyn Rose, and in 1979 they became partners in the intimate Main Street site that they named Rose et LeFavour. Carolyn, known as “C,” ran the dining room with warmth and quirky authority. Bruce didn’t have enough land to grow anything aside from herbs, but he found that he didn’t need to. “I realized that in California you don’t need to raise it yourself. You have everything here that you need.” He drove an hour to Berkeley to buy seafood from Paul Johnson at Monterey Fish and fruit and vegetables from Bill Fujimoto at Monterey Market. He also had a close relationship with Lynn Brown and Pete Forni of Forni-Brown Gardens in Calistoga, and they supplied him with produce a few times a week. They grew what he asked for, so he’d bring seeds to them and patiently await the results: little fraises des bois and unusual varieties of carrots and beans.
“We changed the menu every day and set the menu that day. We just rolled with whatever looked good. Carolyn always handwrote the menu with her elegant script.” The menu was terse, and Bruce didn’t list most of his sources, since the practice was not yet common. He did mention a certain Mrs. Herb. “Mrs. Herb was a retired detective from Chicago who raised snails. She was a tiny lady, maybe 5 foot 2 inches in sneakers and thin as a rail. She would make her rounds in town. If you didn’t use poisons in your garden, she would ask if she could come into your property early in the morning and pick snails. She had a big greenhouse in the back of her house and she’d raise the snails, purge them, and deliver them in strawberry boxes to the restaurant.” Bruce had a standing order with her, and her name always appeared on the menu.
Bruce bought Carolyn out in 1986 and renamed the restaurant Rose et LeFavour Cafe Oriental. He switched to an à la carte menu that offered light French food with an Asian twist. But he tired of cooking the same things every night and felt burdened by the paperwork and other responsibilities of sole ownership. In 1987, he sold the lease to a man in town and retired.
As a whole, the new restaurant chefs in Northern California did not embrace nouvelle cuisine. Unlike their counterparts in Los Angeles, most of whom were formally trained, chefs up north were largely self-taught and independent and did not readily buy into any doctrine. There was a period in San Francisco when classically trained French chefs such as Jacky Robert at Ernie’s and Hubert Keller at Sutter 500 practiced this new style of cooking, but they were in the minority in a world of traditional French restaurants, old-fashioned Continental and Italian family places, and the budding new California establishments. At this time, cooks at Chez Panisse, Bay Wolf, and Narsai’s were still recreating classic French recipes, and their plating style was straightforward, direct, and traditional.
Rose et LeFavour menu from March