The United States of Arugula (50 page)

But it’s a very different world than the one that Meyer entered as a young man in 1985—-just as the eclectic Union Square Cafe was very different from Le Pavillon, La Caravelle, and the other restaurants from which it then seemed a radical departure. (Meyer remembers an old-time restaurant consultant telling him, “This’ll never fly. When New Yorkers go out to eat, they want to go out and eat French, or they want go to out and eat Chinese, or they want to go out and eat Italian.”) The gears of food history turned more slowly in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. But since then, it’s been warp-drive.

Nearly every big-name fine-dining chef in the New York–LA–Bay Area triangle has more than one restaurant, a presence in Las Vegas, and some kind of line of retail products. Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, Rick Bayless, and Todd English compete against one another and the clock in the Food Network’s
Iron Chef
program. The smoulderingly dreamy English and the brooding David Bouley made
People’s
“50 Most Beautiful People” list in different years, while the cherubic Rocco DiSpirito went them one better by making the magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive” list. Anthony Bourdain, the chef at a middling steak frites place in New York called Les Halles, got laypeople interested in the surly, druggy, foul-tempered backstage of restaurant life with his best seller
Kitchen Confidential
(2000), while, less wittingly, DiSpirito did the same thing in the NBC reality TV show
The Restaurant
(2003), letting viewers peek in as he (temporarily) torpedoed his own promising career.

The idea of chefs as
literal
entertainers may be a step too far at this point. Lagasse’s 2001 attempt at an NBC sitcom,
Emeril
, died a quick death,
as did Fox’s hopes in the autumn of 2005 for a hit with their TV-series version of
Kitchen Confidential.
And the renowned director James L. Brooks’s cinematic homage to the French Laundry’s Thomas Keller,
Spanglish
, starring Adam Sandler as a gifted New American chef, stiffed in 2004. (Keller was listed in the credits as the film’s “culinary consultant.”)
*

But none of this has stopped the food people from pursuing crossover success. As this book was being prepared, HBO announced that it was developing a TV series based on Ruth Reichl’s memoirs
Comfort Me with Apples
and
Garlic and Sapphires.
And Wolfgang Puck, always two steps ahead of everyone else in terms of synergy and business acumen, had not only signed on for a recurring role as himself in the NBC drama
Las Vegas
but “opened” a new place in the show’s fictional Montecito Resort and Casino—a fully operational soundstage restaurant that serves as an excellent promotional tool for his six real Vegas restaurants. If James Beard were alive now, he’d be giving Philip Seymour Hoffman tips on how to play him.

“I think chefs and restaurants became what they are today because when people finally woke up from the cocaine buzz of the eighties, they had to find another form of entertainment,” says Tom Colicchio, who collaborated with Meyer on Gramercy Tavern before establishing his own restaurant group under the Craft name. “The club scene was dying out, and restaurants became the new entertainment, the new opiate.”

Nina and Tim Zagat were coming to the same conclusion at the dawn of the nineties. A lawyer couple, they had cultivated a taste for dining out when they lived in Paris in the late sixties, and had gotten tremendous response from their American friends when they circulated a mimeographed roundup of their favorite places to eat there. Returning to New York, the Zagats decided, as a hobby, to launch a formal survey of New York’s restaurants that allowed consumers—at the beginning, Tim and Nina’s urban-professional acquaintances—to rate and comment upon the city’s restaurants.

In 1979, the Zagats distributed their debut “1980 NYC Restaurant
Survey” of “over 100 people” on two sides of a legal-size piece of paper, with homely, handwritten block lettering on the top and a spreadsheet-style layout that recorded numerical scores for the food, decor, service, and cleanliness of each rated restaurant, plus one short line of written commentary. (It verged on the salty in the early days; Charley O’s was succinctly described as “Bar for middle lvl execs trying to lay their secretaries.”) In November 1982, the Zagats self-published their first for-profit, booklet-length survey, with the now familiar burgundy cover. But it wasn’t until 1990 that both Tim and Nina quit their law practices to become full-time food-guide people. The tipping point for Nina came “when people would call me in the office and say they had a big, important question for me,” she says. “I’d think that they were having some legal problem—and they were trying to decide where to have dinner.”

AS THE ZAGATS
broadened their mandate in the nineties, publishing guidebooks for other cities and states, the standard-bearers in their surveys were Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, Bouley in New York, and the French Laundry in the little Napa Valley town of Yountville. The three chefs behind these three places—Trotter, Bouley, and Keller, respectively—weren’t so much expansionists or exhibitionists, as some of their colleagues were, but lone-wolf perfectionists, less inclined than most chefs to
par-tay
into the wee hours with their colleagues.

Their ascent was a measure of how far American cookery, American ingredients, and American drive had come. All three men were American-born and never went to cooking school, yet all three willed themselves over to France to get work experience in the kitchens of Michelin three-star restaurants. And all three men decided, upon getting their main chance in America, to shoot the works. Trotter was inspired mostly by Frédy Girardet and La Pyramide, Fernand Point’s old place; Keller, too, upheld La Pyramide as his model; and Bouley wanted to emulate Le Moulin de Mougins, the flagship restaurant of his mentor, Roger Vergé. The quest they had in common was to create in the United States the kind of European-style restaurant
where you came in, sat down, stayed for three or four hours, and ate a multiple-course degustation, or tasting, menu of the best food you’d ever eaten in your life.

Trotter and Bouley opened their restaurants within months of each other in 1987 and both hit their stride in the early nineties, but otherwise, they had little in common. Trotter, baby-faced but preternaturally self-assured, came from the wealthy Chicago suburb of Wilmette—a preppie John Hughes–movie character come to life. Working at forty restaurants in four years—not counting the Monastery, where he earned money as a waiter while an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, “where we actually had to dress as monks,” he says—he pronounced himself ready at age twenty-seven to run his own place.

Bouley, by contrast, was a handsome but haunted little fellow with a furtive, Ratso Rizzo–like demeanor. He rode motorcycles and was old enough to have experienced the terror of having a low draft number during the denouement of the Vietnam War, which played a significant role in his wanting to get over to France in the mid-seventies. (His family’s French ancestry qualified him for a French passport.) He opened Bouley after bolting Montrachet a mere thirteen months into its existence, finding himself unable to co-exist with the owner-frontman, Drew Nieporent. Bouley won’t comment on the reasons for the split from Montrachet, but Nieporent, with whom the chef has since patched things up, says it was simply a matter of stubbornness. “Like, for example, we opened one time on Mother’s Day, and he refused to cook eggs,” Nieporent says. “He says, ‘I don’t do eggs.’ I said, ‘Paul Bocuse does eggs! An egg is a culinary miracle! What the fuck is this about you don’t want to make an egg?’ And so the first omelet that goes out, goes to a friend of mine. I looked at it. You couldn’t find a worse omelet at a diner! I go in the kitchen, I’m like an umpire, I’m up in his face:
‘If one more fuckin’ omelet comes out like that, I’m closing the fuckin’ restaurant!’”

At Bouley, the food was a fantastic synthesis of the chef’s Vergé training and American-market influences, but it was his way or the highway. If you didn’t finish the rabbit terrine course on the tasting menu, the waiter
would warily take your plate back to the kitchen and return moments later, asking, “The chef wants to know why you didn’t finish this.”

Though he’s mellowed since those days, Bouley is unrepentant about his “the customer is always wrong” approach. “An old customer just reminded me of the time I stood up to his mother,” he says. “I had real wild salmon, which we’d walk around the dining room whole to show people what a wild salmon looks like. The meat’s so beautiful, and when you cook it, it doesn’t turn white, like it does with farmed salmon. Good wild salmon stays red. And this guy’s mother said it wasn’t cooked, and she wanted it cooked white, no color. And the captain explained to her that this is wild salmon, it’s different, it doesn’t pale out. She said, ‘No, I want my salmon cooked.’ And so, nothing happened for ten minutes. I wasn’t gonna corrupt that salmon. I sent out the captain to tell her to choose another dish.”

It was at Bouley that the term “dayboat fish” entered the menu lexicon. As much as this term is lampooned as the height of culinary pretension—rather like calling a trout “line-caught” or a cheese “farmstead”—Bouley insists it was a matter of pride, an emphasis on the lengths to which he went to get the freshest fish possible. Growing up in Rhode Island, he spent his summers in Cape Cod and got to know the fishing families there, even working for them sometimes as a deckhand. For Bouley, the restaurant, he went back to Cape Cod to make good on these connections.

“In those days, most of the fish you ate was on a boat out to sea for many, many days,” Bouley says. “They had ice machines on the boat to keep the fish cold. Then it came in and sat a day. And then, by the time it got to the restaurant, that fish was well over a week out of the water. The Bouley fish, particularly from April to December, was from the fishing boats, mostly out of Chatham, that would go out at four thirty in the morning and come back with their catch by one o’clock. My waiters and captains took turns driving up to the Cape. We’d have fish in the restaurant twelve, thirteen hours after it was killed.” Pointedly, affrontedly, Bouley practically spits out his conclusion: “There was a
huge
difference with the dayboat catch! The people that
mocked
us, thinking it was a
gimmick
, had
no clue.”

Trotter was capable of being every bit as fearsome a character as Bouley, but more in the way of a formidable Fortune 500 boss than a hunched, mercurial street tough. A natural CEO, he recommended Ayn Rand’s
The Fountainhead
to his staff, used the Michael Jordan–led Chicago Bulls teams of the nineties as a model of teamwork (with a benevolent dictator in charge, of course), and embraced the corporate credo of “the pursuit of excellence.” Whereas Lagasse read books on excellence by motivational gurus, Trotter
wrote
a couple (with co-authors),
Lessons in Excellence from Charlie Trotter
and
Lessons in Service from Charlie Trotter.
Some of Trotter’s lessons within the books were upbeat, such as “Be a Cheerleader and Recognize Employees”; as a pastry chef struggled to keep ice cream from sliding off a warm fig turnover, Trotter told her, “Stick with it, you’re doing great!” and then, addressing the whole kitchen, shouted, “Let’s see some energy, people. Help your teammate! What do they need? Figure it out!” But in a more eyebrow-raising lesson entitled “Don’t Be Afraid to Fire Customers,” Trotter explained, “It’s not that I don’t appreciate our customers, but sometimes it’s better for me to take care of those who really understand this type of dining and not to worry about trying to satisfy everybody. We have deliberately, definitively cut off more and more segments of our customer base.”

Trotter is not unaware of how strangely this comes off in relation to the eco-hippie-crunchy ethos that still pervades much of the American food world, but he doesn’t care, either.
“Chicago
magazine did a list several years ago of the Ten Meanest Chicagoans, and I came in at number two, after Michael Jordan,” he says. “Their definition of ‘mean’ was just being intense—like, Michael Jordan playing harder on the rookies in practice sessions than he would play against, you know, Charles Barkley during the game. I told my staff”—and here, you sense Trotter isn’t speaking entirely in jest—“ ‘This is unacceptable. I am not accustomed to being number two.
At anything.’”

“I’m a free-market advocate and a staunch libertarian,” he says. “I don’t feel like I’m part of the New American cuisine movement. I have no tolerance
for the left-wing embrace of food politics and things like that. I think you can support farmers’ markets and that you don’t have to do it with a Berkeley sensibility. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not on the other end of the spectrum. But everybody who’s against genetically modified foods and against big corporate food production, I think they could be a little more open-minded in how they look at all these things.”

And yet, there was no chef more masterful with vegetables in this country, both in terms of creativity and just making them taste good—complementing grilled Treviso radicchio with spicy, cinnamony, autumnal matsutake mushrooms, or mixing asparagus and basil to surprising effect in a chilled soup. “Fish and meat are kind of unidimensional in their texture and flavor, whereas I’ve always felt vegetables were the most interesting part of what’s on a plate,” Trotter says. “You don’t need ten ounces of meat. You could have two ounces of meat and all these wonderful support components.” Trotter was the first chef to offer an all-vegetarian tasting menu, and, what’s more, one that a carnivore could enjoy without missing meat.

Trotter’s interest in vegetables played a big role, in fact, in the success of the Chef’s Garden, what is now the largest boutique farm in the Midwest, run by an Ohio family, the Joneses, who had lost their property to foreclosure in the early eighties, another set of victims of big agribusiness. Starting over on a modest six-acre plot, with the elder Farmer and Mrs. Jones moving in with their son, Lee, because they’d lost their house along with the farm, the family made a go of selling vegetables in Cleveland’s farmers’ markets, “mudding the license plates over, because they were invalid and we couldn’t afford the registrations,” Lee Jones says.