the mid-1960s through the 1980s, starting with small groups in my kitchen and moving on to open the California Street Cooking School in 1972. I worked as a chef at Chez Panisse Café from 1980 to 1983, and then opened Square One restaurant in 1984 at the age of fifty and ran it for twelve years. I was also a founding member of Women Chefs and Restaurateurs and a recipient of a James Beard award for Best Chef in California.
Over the past forty years I have developed personal connections with most of the chefs and restaurant owners associated with California cuisine and many of the purveyors who supplied their restaurants. In preparing this book, I recorded the stories of more than 190 of them. They shared inspiring accounts of success, provocative revelations, enlightening facts, intriguing points of view, and a few angry tirades. Unfortunately, space considerations meant that I couldn’t include everyone, and I apologize to those whose stories don’t appear in these pages.
While I was conducting the interviews, I quickly realized that it would not be easy to get to the bottom of some of the stories. Who came up with the label “California cuisine”? Who created California pizza? Was Chez Panisse Café inspired by Tommaso’s Restaurant in North Beach or a trip to Italy? In these cases, there were several legitimate claims to the truth, and I gave each the benefit of the doubt. In the face of conflicting claims and gaps in the record, I dug deeper and talked to more people, but there will continue to be discrepancies as memories fade and myths grow.
This is not a tell-all filled with juicy gossip about affairs, drugs in the kitchen, or accusations of culinary plagiarism. Those titillating tales have already been told, or are, in the broader history, trivial aspects of an important time in California’s culinary development. You won’t find recipes from famous chefs in this book, either, though sample menus are included. Most of the chefs who are part of this history have written signature cookbooks and you can find their recipes and philosophy there.
What you will find in this book is a community of passionate, openhearted, and talented people who together discovered a new way to appreciate food. I feel proud to have been among them.
Introduction
Like the rest of America, California is unformed, innovative, ahistorical, hedonistic, acquisitive, and energetic—only more so.
—Wallace Stegner, Saturday Review, 1967
Perhaps because California has no past no past, at least, that it is willing to remember—it has always been peculiarly adept at trailblazing the future.
—Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows, 2003
When you go to a supermarket today in many parts of the country you are not surprised to find twenty kinds of extra virgin olive oils, some made from California olives. A plethora of mustards and salsas in the condiment aisle is to be expected. The produce section has bags of salad-ready baby lettuces and bins filled with radicchio, arugula, golden beets, haricots verts, and bouquets of fresh herbs. You could get lost in the cheese department while making up your mind what to buy. You can select pastured eggs, grass-fed beef, and old-fashioned pork from a Berkshire pig that bears little resemblance to the commodity-raised “other white meat.” When you go out to a restaurant, you don’t consider it odd to find goat cheese or smoked salmon on a pizza that was cooked in a wood-burning oven, or to be served soft polenta with a stew of just-harvested chanterelles or a Moroccan spiced lamb tagine on a bed of couscous. You have come to expect diversity of ingredients and flavors, and above all, you expect the ingredients to be fresh, seasonal, and to a large extent locally grown.
In the 1960s, things were very different. Supermarket produce selections were limited, and what little there was often had been shipped from far away, tasting a bit tired by the time it arrived. Bags of assorted lettuces or arugula did not exist. Herbs were packed in small jars, dried, their perfume lost. Most mushrooms were canned, and wild mushrooms were unknown to all except for a few hobbyist for- agers. In homes and even in high-end restaurants, many ingredients came from cans, jars, or the freezer, and rich, heavy sauces compensated for their lack of flavor. What caused the landscape of food to change so radically during the last quarter of the twentieth century? Many of us eat very differently than people did in the 1960s because of a new approach to cooking called California cuisine. It changed our expectations and opened up a new world of possibilities.
What Is California Cuisine?
The restaurants that I really like are the ones that don’t try to make you believe that you’re somewhere else. They tell you this is it, this is California.
—Chef Mourad Lahlou, Aziza
The world’s classic cuisines, such as Chinese or Italian or French cuisine, developed and evolved over centuries as part of a traditional culture. These cuisines are not monolithic—they are in turn broken down into many unique regional cuisines. Their recipes are rooted in the specific culture and environment in which they developed.
California cuisine, in contrast, developed recently and grew rapidly. For the most part it was unfamiliar, innovative, and electrifying, and yet, like traditional cuisines, it reflected its setting. It shares with classic cuisines a crucial feature: it is the food and cooking of a particular, unique place. In chef Paul Bertolli’s poetic rendering, “A cuisine is based in a place where food is wedded to people and soil and what can grow there and what can be made there from the natural resources, the land.” The state of California is extraordinarily diverse geographically, culturally, and ethnically, and California cuisine is a cuisine of diversity, open to multicultural cooking styles, flavors, and traditions. Our chefs may cook food of other cultures, but their ingredients come mostly from the same larder, stocked with the produce, fruits, and grains grown in our fields, the animals grazed in our pastures, and the fish pulled from our waters. California cuisine is the product of the state’s geography and climate, its abundant ingredients, its history of immigration, its support for entrepreneurs, and the ingenuity of its chefs.
Those who are interested in food will recognize its components: Baby vegetables. Gathered greens. Goat cheese. Pizza. Salsa. Other characteristics are equally familiar: Fresh. From the farm. In season. Local. Organic. Pasture-raised. Ingredient-based. Live-fire cooking. Open kitchen. Daily menu. Eclectic menu. Fusion cooking.
All of these are aspects of California cuisine, but most are not requirements. To belong to the California cuisine community, chefs do not have to have an open kitchen, although many do. They do not have to use a wood-burning oven or mesquite grill, although many consider that equipment essential to their cooking. They do not have to change their menu every day; they can change one or two things or just the sides. They can choose to list all of their suppliers and farmers on their menu, or not. They can focus on the Mediterranean, Asia, or Latin America, all of these, or none. They can spoon a Mexican salsa on an Asian fish. They can use Parmesan cheese from Italy instead of California and not find picketers outside their restaurant. California cuisine is a cuisine of options. It has wide parameters and no rigid rules. The one common element is that California cuisine uses fresh, seasonal ingredients, preferably raised nearby.
Unlike traditional cuisines, which have their roots in the home and community, California cuisine originated in restaurants. “There was no California cuisine at somebody’s house,” said Gary Jenanyan, who headed the kitchen at the Great Chefs program at the Robert Mondavi Winery. “No one said, ‘We’re going to Joyce’s house for California food.’ No one asked, ‘Are we going to have Italian or Californian tonight?’” Instead, California cuisine arose gradually, set in motion by a group of pioneering and passionate chefs who wanted to run new kinds of restaurants. Many were self-taught, while others had the finest European training. An unprecedented number were women.
In 1978, Sally Schmitt opened one of the first restaurants to offer what would become identified as California cuisine—the original French Laundry in the Napa Valley. This history is about people as much as food, and in these pages they share their stories.
SALLY SCHMITT
French Laundry, Yountville
Today anyone who loves food has heard about the French Laundry. But there was a French Laundry well before Thomas Keller bought the building and turned it into one of the most