The United States of Arugula (46 page)
Read The United States of Arugula Online
Authors: David Kamp
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As baffled as anyone by the kiwi’s sudden popularity was the woman who introduced it to America, a Los Angeles exotic-produce supplier named Frieda Caplan. She had started importing the fruit in the early sixties from New Zealand, when it was known as the Chinese gooseberry, and it was her company that suggested to New Zealand’s growers that they rename the fruit after their country’s flightless national bird, which it vaguely resembles. Over the course of the sixties and seventies, the try-anything Caplan successfully established other exotic items as supermarket staples—such as fresh mushrooms, papayas, mangoes, horseradish roots, spaghetti squash, “burpless” cucumbers, and Jerusalem artichokes (which Caplan’s company, Frieda’s, successfully rebranded as “sunchokes”)—but it wasn’t until the early eighties that the kiwi unaccountably took off, earning Caplan the epithet “Queen of Kiwi Fruit” in the supermarket trade press.
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David Bouley, though American, had spent so much time training under Roger Vergé in France that he had much the same experience as Boulud when he came back to the United States. “I worked at several restaurants, La Côte Basque, Le Périgord, Le Cirque, and I couldn’t find any place to fit my training already,” he says. “There was completely a generation gap.”
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In
The Taste of America’s
second chapter, entitled “Onward and Downward,” the Hesses offered a grouchier take on Giorgio DeLuca’s rejection of subjectivism and relativism: “
‘De gustibus non dis-putandum est’
(there’s no arguing about taste) is a notion that we shall dispute to our dying breath. It implies that we cannot maintain that Bach is better than the latest noise on the Hit Parade, that Tolstoy is better than Herman Wouk, that homemade bread with Jersey butter is better than Wonder Bread with margarine.” Were they not accursed with such tin ears vis-à-vis popular culture, the Hesses might have jettisoned their put-downs of the talented Mr. Wouk and rock music and still made their point about Wonder Bread.
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For a good view of Union Square at its most decrepit, watch the climactic scene of the 1974 film
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
, the ultimate cinematic depiction of New York’s darkest hour. The film’s plot concerns a band of criminals that hijacks a subway car.
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In her introduction to
Chez Panisse Vegetables
(1996), Alice Waters tells a story that has entered foodie lore as the greatest example of the Frenchified old guard’s wariness of the California-fresh upstarts. “Not long after Chez Panisse began to acquire a national reputation,” she writes, “we were invited to prepare one course of a charitable benefit banquet in New York City. We flew to the East Coast with boxes and boxes of absolutely fresh, organic, hand-picked seasonal greens from which we prepared a simple salad. One famous chef looked at our contribution and remarked, with mock censure and perhaps a little envy, ‘That’s not cooking, that’s shopping!’” In a similar outburst, the irrepressibly Gallic Christian Millau ridiculed the New American culinary idiom as
“la grande folie”
(the great folly), cracking, “Americans not only search for their roots, they eat them.”
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Like Michael Field, Kump initially made his name in another realm, having risen to the rank of educational director of the Evelyn Wood speed-reading school, a position that found him teaching this skill to members of the Nixon administration, among them John Dean, John Ehrlichman, Jeb Magruder, Rose Mary Woods, and Ron Ziegler. But after taking cooking classes with Beard, Simone Beck (at Beard’s house), Diana Kennedy, and Marcella Hazan, Kump decided to run his own shop. With Beard’s blessing, Kump was by the late seventies running the most prestigious cooking school in New York.
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Beard attended Reed College in 1920–21 but was expelled midway through his second semester. His biographer, Robert Clark, says that there is no official explanation on record for the expulsion, but notes that Beard had quickly established himself as a flamboyant campus celebrity, given to Jazz Age high jinks and flapdoodlery, and that “at some point [he] became lovers with one or more male students and a professor.”
ALL OVER THE MAP
Mexican-food guru Rick Bayless (left) and Japanese visionary Nobu Matsuhisa do kitchen prep in their pre-entrepreneurial days of the 1980s.
Let’s go get sushi and not pay.
—Duke,
Repo Man,
1984
JAMES BEARD WENT TO HIS GRAVE AN OPTIMISTIC MAN BECAUSE HIS PET CAUSE
,
American food, was enjoying its fullest flowering since his barbecuing days of the 1950s. The New American idiom was taking hold as the alumni of the seminal California restaurants fanned out. “I absolutely remember the day I heard ‘New American food’ instead of ‘California cuisine’ or ‘nouvelle cuisine’—the first time I heard the word ‘new’ instead of ‘nouvelle,’” says Judy Rodgers. It was in 1980, when, after she’d left Chez Panisse but before she took over Zuni Café, she was recommended by Marion Cunningham for a job at the Union Hotel in Benicia, a quaint little town on the San Francisco Bay. Given a mandate by the hotel’s owner to make the menu “American,” Rodgers embarked on a Larry Forgione–like exhumation of forgotten cookbooks and Junior League fund-raising booklets. She opened shop with a menu that included fried chicken, quail with wild rice, celery soup, pickled beets and eggs, homemade plum jam, and Mississippi mud cake. “Opening night, Marion brought James Beard and Barbara Kafka, for God’s sake!” Rodgers remembers. “Three days later, his nationally syndicated column is all over the United States, talking about the great Union Hotel.”
A year before that, Mark Miller, at his wit’s end at Chez Panisse, where he felt restricted by what he calls Alice Waters’s “French Provençal 1928” menu dictates, left to open the Southwestern-inflected Fourth Street Grill in the faded maritime district of Berkeley, then known mostly for its lumberyards and the vestigial presence of Spenger’s, an old seafood market and
restaurant of “Ar, matey” ambiance. The Fourth Street Grill’s success was so lightning-quick that he soon opened another American restaurant in another dicey Berkeley locale, the Santa Fe Bar and Grill (in the derelict Santa Fe Southern railroad station). Like farmers’ markets, good restaurants were turning into agents of gentrification; the very presence of the Fourth Street Grill triggered a renaissance for Fourth Street itself, which eventually out-gourmeted even Shattuck Avenue in its number of restaurants, food shops, and kitchenwares retailers.
In LA, Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, Midwesterners who’d cooked together in Chicago before becoming part of Puck’s Ma Maison team, opened up the City Café in 1981, cooking “whatever we wanted to eat,” says Milliken. “The menu would be, you know, salad with confit of duck, goat cheese, and lentils, and then shrimp and Pernod with pasta, and then beef carpaccio. And a vegetarian plate that had eggplant-spinach curry, raita, a chutney, and pickled tomatoes. It was all good, but it didn’t really go together. But the thing is,
everyone loved it!
One of my favorite dishes we did from my Chicago days was lamb kidneys with fried spinach, which we’d sell maybe one a month in Chicago. Suddenly, we couldn’t even get enough of ’em! I remember thinking, ‘I’m so thankful to these people in this period of LA, ’cause they’ll order anything we cook!’”
Less successful was the nine-month stint of Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton, the sweethearts of Spago, at Maxwell’s Plum, the famous New York City swingles-scene place that had opened in 1966, laying the groundwork for the “fern bar” craze of the seventies. By the mid-eighties, the restaurant and its eclectic pub-grub menu had grown stale, and its flamboyant impresario, Warner LeRoy, who also ran the Tavern on the Green in Central Park, imported Peel and Silverton to New York in a high-profile, George Steinbrenner–style bid to outright purchase the Spago magic. The New York foodies were thrilled, but Peel and Silverton, an uncommonly attractive, photogenic couple who seemed to embody the exposed-brick yuppie dream, chafed under LeRoy’s dated, Tiffany-lamp tackiness and his failure to follow through on his promises to let them have free rein with the
menu.
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Still, their flight from New York and return to Los Angeles set the stage for Peel and Silverton’s own triumphs of New Americanism: the rustic-Italian-by-way-of-California restaurant Campanile and the “artisanal” juggernaut that was the La Brea Bakery.
It wasn’t just people from the Chez Panisse–Spago–Michael’s orbit who were making the case for New American, either. Barry Wine, the self-taught chef behind the most celebrated of the
New York Times
four-star restaurants of the eighties, the Quilted Giraffe, was downright chauvinistic about what he was doing. “We used to have a saying that if you didn’t know who Howdy Doody was, you couldn’t cook at the Quilted Giraffe,” says Wine. “In my perspective, the Quilted Giraffe was the first restaurant with serious ambitions, run by Americans, that looked to be the equivalent of the Michelin three-star-chef restaurant. We were out to compete with, and beat, the Lutèces of the world.”
A securities lawyer who caught the cooking bug in the days of
The French Chef
and
The Galloping Gourmet
, Wine, with his wife, Susan, opened the original Quilted Giraffe in 1975 in the exurban town of New Paltz, New York, ninety miles up the thruway from the big city. In New Paltz, Wine was cooking “right out of Julia Child,” he says; the early print ads for the Quilted Giraffe explicitly described it as “An Elegant French Restaurant.”
But shortly after he and Susan moved their operation to Manhattan in 1979, Wine became as obsessed as Forgione with all-American sourcing, even if, unlike Forgione, he often used French culinary paradigms to inspire his dishes. “If Michel Guérard had leg of lamb baked in hay,” he says, “we had leg of lamb baked in local corn husks.” If the Quilted Giraffe was serving foie
gras, it wasn’t imported, like everyone else’s, but from ducks raised near the Wines’ New Paltz home by Michael Ginor and Izzy Yanay, two young men who were starting up an operation called Hudson Valley Foie Gras. The American sourcing didn’t stop Wine from charging French-restaurant prices, though, nor did it prevent him from serving Russian caviar in his famous “beggar’s purses,” little crepes filled with beluga eggs and crème fraîche and knotted shut with chive strings. Among those paying attention to the show was Charlie Trotter, a young kid from the Chicago suburbs who bluffed his way into the Quilted Giraffe’s kitchen to meet Wine, and who recalls the restaurant as “definitively, the most sophisticated New American cuisine restaurant in the country”—that is, until Trotter opened his own place in 1987.
Down in New Orleans, twenty-six-year-old tyro Emeril Lagasse was creating similar waves at Commander’s Palace, a century-old landmark in the city’s Garden District that had been purchased in 1974 by the siblings Ella and Dick Brennan. Under the Brennans’ ownership, Commander’s Palace had become famous for its “Haute Creole” cookery, a spruced-up rendering of such traditional regional dishes as shrimp remoulade, seafood gumbo, and trout amandine. But by 1983, the Brennans decided to freshen up the menu, controversially tapping the non-native Lagasse, a self-described “street guy from Fall River, Mass.,” who had graduated from the Johnson and Wales culinary school in Providence, Rhode Island.
As “street” as Lagasse was, with his stevedore’s build and honking locutions, he knew his stuff. “In the seventies, the kitchens in New York City were predominantly run by either the French, the Swiss, or the Germans,” he says, “so here comes a cocky young American kid, and they laughed at me. They were like, ‘What do you know about food? You’re an American—you just know about hamburgers and hot dogs.’”
So Lagasse packed off to France,
staging
in restaurants in Lyons and Paris, including La Tour d’Argent. He also kept a close eye on the progress of Forgione. “I would chase restaurants back then, check ’em out, and I’d been chasing Larry since the River Café,” Lagasse says. “In my early years at
Commander’s, every time I would come to New York City, which was often, An American Place was the first restaurant I’d go see.”
Inspired by Forgione’s New Americanisms, Lagasse decided to attempt nothing less than what he deemed a “New New Orleans” cuisine. “I went to Ella Brennan and said, ‘Have you ever run lamb here?’ and she said, ‘It’s impossible, it’ll never sell—New Orleanians hate lamb,’” Lagasse says. “So I asked her to at least let me try it as a special: rack of lamb with Creole mustard crust, apple mint relish, and rosemary mashed potatoes. And we sold out the first night. I ran it again the following week, and it sold out again. A couple of weeks go by, and I got Ella coming to me saying, ‘You know, Dick and I decided we’re gonna give you this right-hand side of the menu. Be creative, but don’t be out there.’”
Meanwhile, Lagasse’s predecessor at Commander’s Palace, the roly-poly Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme, was gaining national attention at his new restaurant in New Orleans, K-Paul’s, for initiating the eighties’ most absurd food trend, although, in his hands, it actually tasted good: blackened redfish. More of a project for a smithy shop than a kitchen, Prudhomme’s cayenne-and black-pepper-spiced preparation of the Gulf fish, also known as red drum, required him to dip the fillets in clarified butter and then sear them in iron skillets heated up to near moltenness—a bit of nouvelle flash-cooking technique wedded to his Acadian heritage. Prudhomme was such an adept self-promoter, appearing on all the morning talk shows and pushing his “Magic Seasoning Blends,” that by 1987, his provisioners could barely keep up with the demand for redfish, especially with imitative chefs across the country demanding redfish of their own to blacken. By decade’s end, the redfish population of the Gulf of Mexico was so depleted that regulatory action was required to protect the species, whose numbers would only return to pre-Prudhomme levels at the turn of the twenty-first century.