The United States of Arugula (48 page)

Kennedy wasn’t thrilled about the custom in Mexican American restaurants of serving premeal chips and salsa—real Mexicans did no such thing, and she felt that the chips would fill up a diner while the salsa would dull his palate, rendering him unable to fully enjoy the food to come. But the very fact that Americans were growing amenable to salsas, fresher and less glutinous and salty than the commercial ketchups, mustards, and steak sauces that had long dominated the condiment market, was an indication that the American public was less intractable in its tastes than it was thought to be. David Pace, a Texan who, in 1947, founded what would become America’s largest salsa manufacturer, Pace Foods, in the back of his San Antonio liquor store, marveled in 1992 that “in the seventies, the business exploded when the hippies came along. No question, this health stuff made the whole category explode, and it just tickles me to see these people take the ball and run with it.”

For Miller, this was his moment to further the work of the Gang of Five, with whom he was friendly, and to help Americans achieve a deeper, richer understanding of Mexican-influenced food—which, to his chagrin, was too often thought of as
muy picante
jalapeño nachos or Gerberish combo plates of tacos, enchiladas, rice, and beans with shredded cheese on top. “With chilies, it was interesting, because here was a common spice that was really vastly misunderstood,” he says. “Everybody just thought of them as
hot
—as part of the interruptiveness of the Western palate, this thing that
spices something up. When I worked with chilies, I saw them as shadings and variegations, like the weave of a textile, in terms of the ability to be expressive and be used as an aesthetic tool within the cuisine.”

It’s debatable whether or not his diners grasped his lofty anthropological lessons, but there’s no doubt that Miller’s Coyote Cafe, which he finally opened in 1987, was a remarkably successful assimilation of cultures into a coherent whole, rather like Santa Fe itself. His wild-morel tamales, based on a recipe from pre-Columbian times, sat comfortably on the menu alongside his own inventions, such as quail in a hibiscus-blossom marinade (inspired by the purple hibiscus water sold as a thirst-quencher in Mexican markets) and tamarind barbecued ribs.
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In his educational zeal, Miller also convinced Berkeley’s Ten Speed Press to print his “Great Chile Poster,” featuring photographs of chilies of different sizes, shapes, and degrees of heat, attractively arranged in botanical-guide fashion. Released in 1989, the poster was to food-mad yuppies what the Farrah Fawcett poster had been to adolescent boys a decade earlier, and it earned Miller a small fortune.

Perhaps there was something about Mexico’s mystery and untapped complexity that drew intense, questing types, for the Chicago-based restaurateur Rick Bayless made even Miller look like a laid-back, Bermuda-shorted tourist. Originally from Oklahoma City, Bayless was, like Miller, a child of preternatural precocity—his parents, who ran a down-home barbecue restaurant, were alarmed when, at age ten or eleven, their boy got into the habit
of watching
The French Chef
, taking notes, and immediately trying to reproduce Child’s recipes in his mother’s kitchen, “making things like the classic napoleons, with all the puff pastry made from scratch.” Obsessed with travel, the young Bayless set his sights on Mexico as “the closest foreign country that spoke another language,” and, at age fourteen, mapped out a Mexican vacation for his family, which his compliant parents dutifully went on with him. “When I got there, I felt totally at home, and I loved it,” he says.

Like Miller, Bayless chose to study anthropology (forsaking cooking for a time in his teens “because of peer pressure”), and, like Miller, he eventually put aside his promising academic career to pursue a culinary career. In 1978, when he was twenty-five and teaching cooking classes, Bayless benefited from a stroke of luck when he heard that a small, student-run public-TV station in Bowling Green, Ohio, had planned a series on Mexican cooking, “and that the person who was gonna do it had bailed on them at the very last second. They were actually looking for a host for a public-television series on Mexican cooking!” Bayless seized the opportunity to win the job, and, though the TV program was only on for two years, he and his wife, Deann, ended up living in Mexico for almost five years in the early 1980s.

Bayless’s goal at the time was to come up with a great, usable cookbook that showed Mexican cuisine for what it was, rather than for what it was misperceived as—usually as Tex-Mex, which, he says, is to authentic Mexican “like what Vietnamese food is to Thai food, about that closely related,” or as Cal-Mex, which Bayless deemed “Chicano food, really not very Mexican.”
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He wanted to introduce people to
posoles
, the rich soup-stews made with hominy, and to the seven moles of Oaxaca, the delightful cooked sauces that came in black, green, yellow, two versions of red, one gravy-like version called
chichilo
, and a mild, fruit-flavored sauce called
manchamanteles.
The obvious
hurdle was that Diana Kennedy had already been down this route. “I didn’t want to just rewrite one of her books,” Bayless says. “Then I realized that I’m a restaurant person, and she’s a home cook. That’s one of the big differences between the way we approach things: a lot of my recipes come from people who actually are preparing food for sale, and she is looking for the one person in the community that makes the very special whatever.”

Bayless had mixed feelings about Kennedy. He found her books to be “overly complex in one way, and yet they don’t give you enough information in another,” but he still appreciated the fact that she’d blazed the trail for him. Early on in his time in Mexico, he felt it only appropriate to track her down so he could pay homage and perhaps soak up some knowledge. “But Diana’s very difficult,” he says. “She did everything but just chew me up and spit me out. I’d never been so poorly treated by any person. She said, ‘This is over, I think we’re done,’ and kicked me out of her car and left me on a road. I had to walk back to town.”

“The thing was this,” says Kennedy in response. “I had just bought some land but not yet built a house, and he sort of trailed me there, and the day he arrived, somebody had cut down two trees on the land that I’d just bought, and I was furious. And then, you know, being young, he was sort of damned opinionated, and he kept saying things like, ‘Well, why didn’t you translate the Spanish titles in the tortilla book?’ I said, ‘Well,
for goodness’ sake!’
He was being very brash, and I was getting annoyed, so that was it: I gave him the bum’s rush.”

In any event, Bayless recovered from this episode to emerge triumphant in 1987. That year, he and his wife came out with their first cookbook,
Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking from the Heart of Mexico
—whose foreword contained a sly dig at Kennedy, promising readers a respite from other Mexican cookbooks “with peculiarly ‘authentic’ preparations and incomplete directions”—and their first restaurant, Frontera Grill, which they set up in Chicago because Deann’s family was there.

“The first customers who walked through our door got up from the table and walked out, telling us, ‘You will never make it. This isn’t Mexican
food,’” Bayless says. “They wanted burritos and nachos, and we didn’t have either one of them on the menu.” For a few months, Bayless sought to lure diners in with more Miller-ish, Gang of Five–ish Southwestern fare—“grilled fish with, you know, mango salsa,” he says—but such diversions soon proved unnecessary. Marian Burros of
The New York Times
reported in May of 1987 that Frontera Grill was “packed” within weeks of its opening, and her article resulted in the restaurant being still more packed. Burros even elicited a faint-praise quote about Bayless from Kennedy: “He has certainly done his research. To me, it doesn’t demonstrate that he has a real grass-roots knowledge of the different cuisines of Mexico. But at least he does something valid.”

RIGHT ABOUT THE TIME
that the Frontera Grill and the Coyote Cafe were awakening diners to sophisticated culinary experiences outside the bounds of Eurocentrism—urging them, as Miller puts it, to “look at flavors as a perceptual cultural system”—Nobu Matsuhisa was setting up shop in a little dive spot on La Cienega Boulevard at the edge of Beverly Hills. It didn’t take long for LA’s ever vigilant foodie clique to discover that this modest place, simply named Matsuhisa, wasn’t just a sushi bar, but, as Caroline Bates wrote in
Gourmet
in 1988, “the only Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles that cooks with a Peruvian accent.” After enduring the requisite apprenticeship for sushi chefs in his native Japan in the 1960s—novices aren’t even allowed to handle the fish the first two years—Matsuhisa logged time at various sushi bars in Tokyo before he decided to visit a friend in Peru, a country with a large Japanese population and a fantastic variety of fish off its shore. Matsuhisa was so bedazzled by this latter circumstance that he decided to stay, taking a job at a sushi bar in Lima in 1974, when he was only twenty-three years old.

“The first time I ever ate ceviche was in Peru,” Matsuhisa says. “I loved it, but I wanted to apply Japanese technique.” In Latin countries, ceviche was traditionally prepared by marinating pieces of raw fish in citrus juices and chopped onion, “cooking” them for several hours until the acids in the juices
had turned the translucent fish cubes opaque. But Matsuhisa, already California-nouvelle in spirit, preferred to essentially flash-“cook” his ceviche, drizzling his fish pieces in citric acid at the last minute and using yuzu, an especially sour Japanese citrus fruit—“not like Sunkist lemon, which is too sweet,” he says—to achieve greater piquancy. Expanding on this idea, Matsuhisa also fooled around with a Peruvian-Japanese preparation called
tiradito
, in which thin slices of sashimi-grade fish are aesthetically fanned out like petals and dotted with a spicy chili sauce—a compositionally gorgeous mix of coolness and heat.

While Matsuhisa was in Peru, sushi chefs in America were already fiddling with tried-and-true formulas, adapting to the ingredients that America had on offer. The starting point of sushi in America was the Little Tokyo section of downtown Los Angeles, near the city’s municipal government buildings. There, the first sushi restaurant in the United States opened in 1960, a tiny six-seat bar called Kawafuka, followed in short order by two more places, Eikiku and the larger Tokyo Kaikan, an American sibling of a Tokyo restaurant. It is Tokyo Kaikan’s two sushi chefs in the sixties, Ichiro Mashita and Teruo Imaizumi, who are usually credited with creating the first cross-cultural sushi concoction, the California roll. “It wasn’t because we were trying to make something more palatable for Americans, but because of the poor variety of fish back then,” says Imaizumi (speaking in Japanese, with his daughter, Nana, translating). “The tuna was just a seasonal thing in LA, available in the summertime, and so we were thinking ‘What else can we use? What else can we look for?’”

What Mashita and Imaizumi found in 1964 were avocados, which grew plentifully in California and were available in the grocery store right next door to their restaurant. Cut into little cubes, ripe avocado flesh had an unctuousness that approximated the texture of fatty fish, and the two sushi chefs combined it with king crab, cucumber, and ginger, serving their creation as a hand roll. Their Japanese diners were wary, Imaizumi recalls, “because there wasn’t raw fish in there. They were going ‘What is this?!’” But as Tokyo Kaikan started to attract more Caucasian diners—executives and
financiers who had business with Japanese companies, and fearless diners emboldened by the new spirit of ethnic adventure afoot in the seventies—the California roll was popular precisely
because
it didn’t contain raw fish. (Tokyo Kaikan also claimed to be where the inside-out roll was invented, to placate round-eye customers who didn’t like the texture of the seaweed wrap, but Imaizumi, a purist, doesn’t make them in his current Little Tokyo restaurant, Sushi Imai.)

For Caucasians, the California roll proved to be an ideal gateway drug to the hard stuff; once you got over the weirdness of a cold piece of something-or-other brushed with wasabi and rolled in vinegar-seasoned rice and seaweed, it wasn’t so crazy to try sushi made with uncooked scallops or slices of velvety, high-quality raw tuna. In the early seventies,
Gourmet
still considered sushi and sashimi to be sufficiently exotic that both words were italicized in the magazine’s pages, denoting their foreignness, but the magazine’s New York critic at the time, Jay Jacobs, wrote, “With Japanese restaurants proliferating apace, New Yorkers are learning to knock back raw fish with the equanimity of so many gannets and to brandish a pair of chopsticks as if to the manner born.” In 1980, the popularity of sushi received an unanticipated boost when tens of millions of Americans tuned in to the TV miniseries
Shogun
, based on the James Clavell novel and starring Richard Chamberlain, which spurred a faddist mania for all things Japanese.

The eighties were the time in which Japanese food came of age in the United States, with diet-conscious Americans warming to sushi as “pure, clean, healthy, something that goes with organic,” as Clark Wolf puts it,
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and status-conscious Americans eating raw fish just because it was cool to do so; it was a mark of the hipness of Alex Cox’s dystopian LA comedy
Repo Man
, one of the signature cult films of the decade, that one of its street hoodlums
uttered the improbable line “Let’s go get sushi and not pay.” Jean-Georges Vongerichten remembers eating sushi for the first time in New York City at the surprisingly late date (for a well-traveled chef) of 1985.

“It was mind-boggling to me,” he says. “I had worked all this time in Southeast Asia, but I had never been to Japan.” Though his own cross-cultural experimentation would borrow more from the flavors of Thailand—ginger, lemongrass, Thai basil, curry paste—Vongerichten loved the possibilities that the new American embrace of Japanese food suggested. “Everything felt so wide open,” he says. “I thought, ‘Wow, everything I experienced in Thailand, in Asia—let’s push it.’”