Panisse the week it opened. He knew Victoria Wise, the opening chef, and after dining at the restaurant he would hang out in the kitchen, trading gossip and food stories. He was hired at Chez Panisse by chance several years later. He had been writing a food newsletter, “The Market Basket,” and said, “Alice was aware that I was knowledgeable and passionate about food, and that I was what I would call a good home cook.” In 1977, Alice asked if he could fill in at the restaurant for two weeks, even though, as he recalled, “I had no background in the restaurant business besides my prep school summers scooping ice cream in New England.”
About his time at Chez Panisse, he explained, “I liked the restaurant—it was easy to. Alice was always interested in people having a passion for foods she didn’t know about. She wanted to learn, and if you pursued your passion, she saw that as a good thing. In 1977, it was Jean-Pierre Moullé, Alice, and I. The format was always one cook did one course all night, 120 guests, two seatings. Tom Guernsey was basically running the restaurant as the general manager and maître d’. Jerry Budrick was around. Lindsey Shere was doing desserts.”
In those early days, the food at Chez Panisse was not yet the California cuisine that the restaurant would become known for. “It was simple French bistro food. It wasn’t any different from bistro food in San Francisco or stuff that I had had in Europe. I do not believe that Chez Panisse as a restaurant—the structure and food—has ever been revolutionary. To me it’s always represented cuisine bonne femme, the woman who cooks home-style food in a small Provençal restaurant and is the center of community life. It’s never been a commercialized restaurant business.”
Mark said that Chez Panisse opened after the ideological philosophy of the time had already been set. “Alice became an acolyte of what was going on in Berkeley at the time: the free speech movement and political activism of the 1960s. To me, San Francisco is conservative, wanting to preserve the past and [concerned with] history and status. The food in Northern California has always been ideologically based. It’s not been based on setting new precedents, new styles, new fashion, new restaurants, and it’s not based on commercialism. Alice is the ideological person who represents Northern California and its arts and crafts and its sort of purity.”
Mark found greater inspiration in the innovative restaurants of LA. “Wolfgang Puck is the most important chef in the history of the world. He is the revolutionary. He has more business than any other chef ever has done or does today. So why do people think that California cuisine is Alice Waters? This is where you have to get a little philosophical and psychological. The American people want to have safe, good, pure food; they don’t want to have really, really great food. They are puritans at heart, and the ideological argument of pure, good food that’s locally sustainable is an ideological message that they find they can identify with. Michael Pollan is a minister of pure food; he is not a chef, he doesn’t represent culinary history, he doesn’t represent the complexities or understand what is possible or the meaning of cuisine, of ritual, of flavor, of mythology. He wants to take that away and have pure food, and so do most Americans. People are motivated to make an ideological choice.”
Mark departed from Chez Panisse in 1979. “Susie Nelson was the hostess, and she had found this site on Fourth Street in the redevelopment and rail yard area. She wanted to leave Chez Panisse and open her own restaurant because she thought Chez Panisse was getting too snooty, and I wanted to leave, so she said, ‘Why don’t we become partners, fifty-fifty, and open the restaurant together?’ So I opened Fourth Street as a 50 percent partner, and it cost us $70,000. I put up half of it, the restaurant was a hit, and we paid off our investors in four months.”
At Fourth Street Grill, Mark was able to cook his own food. He changed the style of food frequently. For a while he was doing Moroccan, Italian, English, American, and regional dishes, and then he turned to Southwestern food. Two years later, he and Susie Nelson opened a second Berkeley restaurant, Santa Fe Bar and Grill. “I decided to do no more European food, only Cajun, Caribbean, and Southwestern. That was a big success. I wanted to do big-flavored food of everyday life and explore ethnic flavors in their richness and kaleidoscope of intricacies.”
In 1985, Mark had been in Berkeley eighteen years, and “it was time to go.” He left both the Fourth Street Grill and Santa Fe Bar and Grill, moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and opened Coyote Cafe, where he again concentrated on Southwestern cuisine. Today he does consulting work for restaurant companies and travels widely to study diverse cuisines. He believe his life’s work is to raise the level of ethnic food to where it receives higher esteem.
The opening menu at Mark Miller’s Fourth Street Grill, 1979, featuring classics and shoestring potatoes, with a nod to Mexico in the hot chocolate.
Word about the innovations occurring in California’s restaurants was traveling eastward. Danny Meyer, who had just opened Union Square Cafe in New York City, decided to come out and see what was going on. He traveled to California with Ali Barker, his chef. “We went to Los Angeles first. We got off the airplane and went to Michael’s for lunch. We went to Trumps. We went to Piero Selvaggio’s place, Primi. We went to Angeli Caffe. We went to Spago. We got a taste of what Los Angeles meant, and it was, because of the clientele, a flashy version. It was a big party.
“Then we went to San Francisco. We went to Square One, Washington Square Bar and Grill, Hayes Street Bar and Grill, the Post Street Bar and Grill—everything was a bar and grill. I even went to Perry’s to try to understand the San Francisco ethos. And I found that San Francisco was more focused on food.
“Stars was a bridge for me between the party of LA and the food of San Francisco. Stars and Spago pushed the boundaries. They were the first places I had gone to in this country where the party did not mean that the culinary experience had to be dumbed down. The experience I had had in my early twenties in New York was that the people who knew how to do really good food didn’t know how to have fun, and the people who knew how to have fun didn’t know how to do really good food. I was trying to piece it all together: the club, family, fun, excellence. I can say that in the absence of California, there could never have been a Union Square Cafe. What a refreshing gift that California gave the country, gave the world.”
3
Defying Kitchen Convention
Self-Taught Chefs and Iconoclasts
Something we have here [in California] that they don’t have in a lot of other areas is that entrepreneurial spirit, the passion. Passion can overcome a lot of shortcomings. As the people with the passion gain the skills and knowledge, look out, because they will set new highs.
—Winemaker Michael Mondavi
I was forty-seven years old when Alice Waters asked me to fill in for Steve Sullivan, the bread baker at Chez Panisse, while he took a six-week vacation. Although I had taught cooking classes for eighteen years, I had never worked in a restaurant. Suddenly I found myself making thirty loaves of bread, four buckets of pizza dough, and thirty pounds of pasta a day. When Steve came back, Alice asked me to stay on to cook in the Chez Panisse Café, where I later became chef. As word got out about the good food at the café, our volume of business increased dramatically. We went from serving 45 lunches and 80 dinners daily to 150 lunches and up to 340 dinners.
Three years later, I left Chez Panisse to open Square One. Today it’s hard to imagine that someone would enter the demanding restaurant field with so little experience. But in California, from the 1970s through the early 1990s, passionate amateurs, many of whom hadn’t gone to cooking school or even worked in a restaurant, jumped eagerly into the business. How did so many of us dare own and manage restaurants with so little practical knowledge? All I can say is that ignorance is bliss. We had no idea what we were getting into.
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The model for the kitchen brigade was developed by Georges Auguste Escoffier in the late 1800s. For the next century, the typical restaurant kitchen, both in Europe and abroad, was run by trained culinarians who had either gone to cooking school or come up through the ranks of the brigade, with its specialized stations for prep, fish, seafood,