The United States of Arugula (44 page)

The Union Square Greenmarket in New York was slower to take off, mainly on account of the square’s reputation in the late seventies as a drug dealers’ bazaar, “more famous for needles than nettles,” as the restaurateur Danny Meyer puts it. Just a block east of the third location of Delmonico’s, where Charles Ranhofer had prepared an elaborate banquet in honor of a visiting Charles Dickens in 1868, Union Square had by the early 1970s become a scary place, with the closing of S. Klein’s, the department store on the southeast corner, seeming to be the final nail in its coffin.
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“A dealer in the park came up to me with concern,” says Benepe, “and literally told me, ‘You don’t want to come in here, it’s not safe.’”

But, as in Syracuse, an unassuming farmers’ market proved to be a catalyst for urban renewal. Meyer, a travel agent’s son from St. Louis, had been nurturing a dream of opening a casual restaurant that would serve an American version of the type of food he’d enjoyed in trattorias on his college-age trips to Rome. “I was determined to offer excellent value,” he says, “and I knew that I would have to be in an emerging neighborhood to do that. Given the fact that Union Square had the Greenmarket, it was a slam dunk.” In 1985, when he was twenty-seven, Meyer opened the Union Square Cafe
half a block west of the square, quickly developing relationships with the farmers who sold at the Greenmarket. Within five years, with Meyer’s restaurant as the anchor tenant, the whole complexion of the neighborhood had changed—lofts, playgrounds, commerce that was actually legal—and the Union Square Greenmarket was the city’s most celebrated.

For Larry Forgione, the advent of farmers’ markets was a complement to his own network, “another way that we went back to dealing with suppliers.” It meant that the philosophy of “fresh, local, seasonal” was not exclusive to California, and that California cuisine was morphing into something called New American cuisine.

“For me, it was always an absurd association, of ‘California foods’ being fresh food,” says Thomas Keller, who would nevertheless come to represent the apotheosis of Californian brilliance at the French Laundry, the pull-out-all-the-stops country restaurant he opened in Napa Valley in 1994. In the early eighties, Keller, who grew up in Florida, was working at high-end restaurants in New York City and upstate, “and in the kind of restaurants I was working in,” he says, “the food was always fresh. It wasn’t about a certain geographical place, but a certain standard. I always dismissed the whole California thing. That was just propaganda.”

IN 1983, FORGIONE
was ready to leave Buzzy O’Keeffe’s employ to open his own restaurant, where he would take his indigenous-ingredient sourcing even further: the goal was nothing less than to open an all-American fine-dining restaurant that had no French airs about it whatsoever (though Forgione was taking over the Lexington Avenue town house previously inhabited by a renowned French restaurant called Le Plaisir). James Beard, with whom Forgione was now enjoying hour-long telephone conversations nearly every morning, suggested the name: An American Place, after the gallery that the photographer Alfred Stieglitz had opened in 1929 for the then radical purpose of highlighting the works of young American artists.

The pull of American tradition was evident on the menu, but the
preparations were progressive enough, and the prices high enough, to dissuade anyone from mistaking An American Place for a Colonial Williamsburg theme-food trap, or, as
Town & Country’s
James Villas put it, “a chicken pot-pie place.” It was Villas who had seven years earlier called for a “formal codification” of American cuisine in his bicentennial-celebrating article “From the Abundant Land: At Last, a Table of Our Own,” and though he now concedes that this was an absurd idea—“That was a long time ago, and I was young,” he shrugs—he credits Forgione for being “the only person to stick to his guns on that, to try to be exploiting so many regions of American food in this country that it’d make you blow your mind out.”

Forgione’s spoon-bread griddlecakes and cornmeal pancakes were straight out of Amelia Simmons’s
American Cookery
, but his accompaniments to them—respectively, duck sausage and spicy roast duck with cilantro—bore traces of Wolfgang Puck. The cream biscuits in his berry shortcake were made according to one of Mary Beard’s old recipes, and the after-dinner cheeses were proudly declared to be from “independent American cheese producers,” which, in 1983, was really saying something. “We served a lot of things in American cooking that you might have heard about but never tried,” says Forgione. “Like, we were the first ones to serve buffalo in probably fifty years. It was fresh buffalo from a farmer in northern Michigan who had the largest herd east of the Mississippi. And then just little things, like fried whitebait.”

MEANWHILE, JONATHAN WAXMAN
was itching to get out of California. For years, even before Michael’s, he’d had a “New York jones,” a desire to run his own place someday in the Big Apple. Way back in 1980, when Michael McCarty told him that he’d found an ideal location for a New York Michael’s—an old Italian restaurant in midtown that actually had a back garden space, just like the Santa Monica Michael’s—Waxman thought his ship had come in, and mentally started preparing for a move east. But the real-estate deal fell through at the last second, and McCarty wasn’t interested in any other Manhattan
space; every other year, he called the Italian restaurant’s elderly owner, fruitlessly, to see if he was willing to reconsider.

By 1983, Waxman had grown tired of waiting for McCarty’s New York opportunity and decided to create his own. (The old Italian man finally relented in 1989, selling the property on West Fifty-fifth Street to McCarty, whose New York version of Michael’s instantly become a lunchtime haunt for publishing and media folk.) Waxman quit his job at Michael’s and found a business partner, Melvyn Master, an effervescent Englishman and expert schmoozer who had done public relations for Paul Bocuse, run his own wine-importing business, and helped launch Sonoma County’s Jordan Winery in 1980. The two men spent much of the summer of 1983 tooling around France in Waxman’s Ferrari, discussing their grand plans for a New York restaurant.

The result, in 1984, was a new restaurant on the Upper East Side called Jams, an acronym for Jonathan and Melvyn’s. “Melvyn actually coined it,” says Waxman, “because there’s a phrase in French that means, ‘Life is not worth living without jam.’ And ‘jam’ also means ‘money’ in Aix-en-Provence dialect.” The basic philosophy of the restaurant was that Waxman would adapt his signature dishes from Michael’s “but be as seasonable as possible, as market-driven as possible, even more so than Michael’s.” Given the agricultural limitations of New York vis-à-vis Southern California this was a tall order, but Waxman leaned heavily on Forgione, who was so generous with his sources that Waxman’s running joke was that Jams should have been called Another American Place.

More surprisingly, Waxman even received the blessing and sourcing help of the greatest working French chef in New York, Lutèce’s André Soltner, who did not wholeheartedly embrace the press’s gush over all things American. Over the course of modern culinary history, Soltner says, “It happens that the French cuisine was the best. You cannot go against that. We don’t say we are the best to go to the moon. But in cooking, we are the best. You Americans, for a long time, seemed to me a little bit frustrated that it was the French, you know? So when the young American chefs came—Alice Waters and so on—you were so happy that you went a little bit over-board.”
Still, Waxman recalls that “André was like my uncle. He was very respectful of me, for some reason. Maybe because I sought him out; maybe because I spoke French.”
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The first
New York Times
review of Jams, written by food correspondent Marian Burros in the interregnum between the reigns of Mimi Sheraton and Bryan Miller, made clear the degree to which New York’s interest in California had been piqued. “Cognoscenti and would-be cognoscenti have been flocking to Jams on the Upper East Side for the last six weeks, eager to be among the first to sample the California cuisine they have heard so much about,” wrote Burros. “For the untutored, New York’s first restaurant to offer this minimalist style of cooking in a minimalist setting may come as something of a shock. At $25 for a small piece of fish and some vegetables, New Yorkers expect something more elaborate, but in many ways the simplicity of the dishes is even more exacting than haute cuisine.”

Decor-wise, Jams’s debts to Michael’s and Spago were obvious. Orville Schell, moonlighting as
California
magazine’s reviewer of New York restaurants—a telling reversal of publishing norms—observed with amusement, “Terrazzo tile, black-and-white linoleum, clean white walls with gaudy but not too interesting modern art … all proclaim to a Californian that he is home-away-from-home. Guests can watch chefs clad in white in the open, very clean kitchen laboring energetically over their work, like a crack surgical team in an operating theater. After coming in off the streets of New York, it’s as if one were viewing a diorama of contemporary California life in the Museum of Natural History.”

The simplest yet most celebrated (and most celebratedly expensive) of
Waxman’s dishes was his mesquite-grilled half chicken, an update of the one he’d been doing at Michael’s. “I think maybe New York restaurants thought chicken was mundane, and it was sort of relegated to the back of the menu,” says Waxman. But these weren’t just any chickens; they were the jumbo freerangers raised by Paul Kaiser, Forgione’s guy upstate. “The chickens that Michael had were more like the equivalent of Bell and Evans chickens—which are nice chickens,” Waxman says. “But they weren’t these massive, free-range, gnarly birds that Paul Kaiser had. He delivered them, basically, warm from the Chinese butcher up there, and they were fantastic. The first time I put them on the grill, the skin started to cook under that intense, perfect heat of the mesquite wood, and the fat started bubbling, and the skin got crispy—wonderful! At Jams, I cooked everything to order, so people had to wait the thirty-five or forty minutes for half a chicken to cook. But once they got it, with those french fries, I think it was kind of orgasmic for them. People flipped out.”

At $23 per order, in 1984 dollars, no less, there was no way Waxman’s grilled chicken could afford
not
to be orgasmic. “The chickens cost me a lot of money in those days, eight or nine bucks, almost as expensive as the chickens I buy now,” says Waxman. “But let’s face it: it’s like charging a lot for a good wine. If you believe in your product and you want to make money, you’ve got to charge a lot for it. So I became notorious for charging that much money for chicken. Some people thought I was arrogant, some people knew the story. But I think it helped build the spin on it.”

“You can’t find a chicken like that anywhere in New York today—I still remember the taste of it, and I’m gonna tell you what it tasted like,” says Bobby Flay, literally licking his lips at the memory. “It tasted like the crispiest, juiciest, and most perfectly, simply seasoned chicken you ever tasted.” Years before he was a Food Network star and the owner of the quasi-Mexican Mesa Grill, among other restaurants, Flay was a wet-behind-the-ears protégé of Waxman’s. A native New Yorker, he grew up around restaurants; his father was the business partner of Joe Allen, the restaurateur behind the theater-district standbys Joe Allen and Orso. But those places
served unexceptional if reliable food to hurried diners with an eight o’clock curtain to catch, whereas Jams and the two other New York restaurants that Waxman and Master opened in rapid succession—Bud’s in 1985, and Hulot’s in 1986—were kaleidoscopically mind-blowing to the young Flay. He took a cooking job at Bud’s in 1985 and served tours of duty at each of the three Waxman-Master restaurants.

“Jonathan’s influence is still prevalent in my cooking,” Flay says. “I do stuff at Mesa Grill today that we were doing at Bud’s. You know, shucking fresh corn and making a relish out of it with fresh lime juice. And chilies and cilantro. And using avocados to make relishes with the chili peppers. Blue cornmeal. Roasted poblano peppers to flavor things. He was the first person to introduce me to that kind of stuff. I didn’t know anything about that then. No one on this coast did.”

“The West Coast was seminal at that time, and the young New York chefs picked up on it—it took the California phenomenon to open their eyes,” says Bryan Miller, whose tenure as the
Times
restaurant critic began in 1984, just as the Waxman-led Californification of New York was unfolding. “It was exciting. I loved it—grill, grill, grill. There wasn’t much grilling in New York up to then. And the side dishes: the composed salads, just the beautiful ingredients that you didn’t have before. It took a while, but then, all of a sudden, it was also happening in Chicago, Boston, Atlanta. It was a blast.”

MILLER’S ASCENT COINCIDED
all too neatly with Claiborne’s decline. The former had been contributing to the
Times
food section on a freelance basis for a few years when, suddenly, he was thrust into the position of collaborating with Franey on the “60-Minute Gourmet” column after Franey and Claiborne had a massive falling-out.

Recalling the beginning of the end of his friendship with Claiborne, Franey wrote in his memoir, “I felt the need to cut back on the seven-day cooking weeks, which is what they had now become. I wanted to spend more time with my family in leisure activities, and to go fishing and hunting.
My children needed me more, I felt. So I told Craig I wasn’t going to work weekends anymore … and that I really meant it, although I would still certainly work with him on other days.”

Claiborne didn’t absorb this news well, interpreting it as an outright rejection. The churning psychological torment that Claiborne had long kept at bay with a busy work schedule, and an even busier social schedule, bubbled up to the surface and erupted. “Craig got a load on one night and told off Pierre’s wife, Betty,” Miller says.