Naming It: California Cuisine in the Early 1980s
According to Victoria Wise, the first chef at Chez Panisse, “The tipping point for California cuisine began in the late 1970s. By the eighties, it was on the road. I had a conversation with a journalist from the London Observer along about 1988 who asked the question, ‘Do you think there’s such a thing as California cuisine?’ I said, ‘Yes, there certainly is.’ He looked a little startled because at the time, many others, including Alice [Waters] and Jeremiah [Tower], were denying this. I guess it was too scary to name yet.” Maybe not so much scary as premature. Most chefs were saying it did not exist and did not want to be labeled or pigeonholed. (In fact, until recently, Chez Panisse did not identify itself as a California cuisine restaurant.)
While Sunset was exemplary in depicting how we ate in the West, offering multicultural recipes made with ingredients grown in the region, it did not brand these recipes as California cuisine. Bon Appetit, the only other mainstream food magazine published in the state at the time (though it relocated to New York after the demise of Gourmet in 2009), was the first to raise the topic of California cuisine with chefs when interviewing them for restaurant profiles. Barbara Fairchild, the longtime editor of Bon Appetit, said that around 1980, “we used the term ‘California cuisine’ in the magazine, and riffed off that as a new way of cooking. I don’t remember using it with regard to Wolfgang Puck, but I do distinctly remember talking to Michael Roberts about it when I wrote an article about him at Trumps. And he said, ‘There’s no such thing,’ which is, of course, what we all said.”
Trumps was an idiosyncratic LA restaurant that occupied a former gas station with concrete floors and polished concrete tables. In keeping with a Southwestern design theme, the waiters wore string ties along with European-style long white aprons. A formally trained chef with broad-ranging tastes, Michael served dishes such as beet and watermelon soup, sweet pea guacamole, fried plantains garnished with sour cream and caviar, seared tuna with mint, dill, and cilantro pesto, Asian chicken salad with grapefruit, and buckwheat noodles with potatoes and smoked salmon. In other words, his California cuisine menu was all over the culinary map; it was multicultural, eclectic, and personal.
Barbara Fairchild thought that applying a label got people to talk and think seriously about California cuisine. For her, the term “California cuisine restaurant” conjured up “food with a dreamscape lifestyle behind it.” The image was of casualness, ease, warmth, and leisure—attractive people sitting outside, perhaps around a pool, eating something off the grill and sipping California wine. Restaurants such as Michael’s, Mustards, and West Beach Café enabled people to slip into these fantasies.
Clark Wolf is a restaurant consultant now based primarily in New York. I call him “Mr. Soundbite” because he always says something eminently quotable. Clark lived in Northern California during the early years of California cuisine, first opening a pioneering cheese shop and then managing the San Francisco Oakville Grocery. For him, California cuisine was best exemplified not downstairs at Chez Panisse in the 1970s, but upstairs at the Café, which opened in 1980. “It was at Chez Panisse Café that California cuisine got a focus in the nomenclature. Downstairs was experimental and emotional and metaphorical; it was too intellectual, it was university. It was based on French structure and codification. At the Café, cooks thought, ‘I’m going to make a simple salad but every time I touch these leaves, they will be special.’” Upstairs worked from the produce sheet, whereas downstairs worked from a concept of French food.
“I always say that restaurants are one of two things,” added Clark. “They make you feel either very much where you are or very much someplace else. Downstairs was taking you away to someplace else, a magic France land, and upstairs was so much of where you were in a particular way, and that’s what got translated to what people called California cuisine. It came to New York, oddly, as a concept, with quotes around it and capital letters. It sailed instantly and permeated totally.
“When I moved to New York in 1982, if you wanted a great piece of grilled fish and a great salad, the only choice was the Grill Room at the Four Seasons, and lunch was 160 bucks for two. Fresh food was simply not in New York. I used to joke—and it’s still very much true in a lot of cases—that things percolate and develop in the Bay Area, and when it’s named by New York media, it becomes a trend. Sometimes it goes to LA to become a business.”
Indeed, it was the New York Times that applied a label to California cuisine and gave it official status, and Marian Burros gets the credit. She wrote about California cuisine in the Times first in 1982 and then again in 1984. She identified several trends: “grilling, especially with mesquite; combining cuisines that scarcely had a nodding acquaintance before, such as Japanese and French; replacing stock-based sauces with compound butters or no sauce at all; using baby vegetables to garnish almost every plate; serving fish, chicken, squab, and quail rather than red meat; and elevating country food to the status usually reserved for truffles and caviar. Freshness [is] always the cornerstone.” Some trends came and went, like the use of baby vegetables and compound butters, while others became lasting characteristics of the cuisine. She noted that in America, “there had been nothing like it before. We finally learned that cooking and eating were important. We did French, then nouvelle cuisine, and then cuisine minceur, but it was still very French-oriented. Here were people taking the ingredients they had, and cooking with those ingredients, and making something that was unique to California. It was something that gave the rest of the country an idea [of] how to make uniquely American food, whether you were using French techniques or not.”
Chez Panisse Café menu from October 30, 1981, with the iconic Sonoma goat cheese salad.
In 1983, Marian gave an example in the New York Times that demonstrated how things were changing. The president of the United States at the time, Ronald Reagan, had come to California to fete the queen of England. A dinner was held at the St. Francis Hotel, which had a German Swiss chef by the name of Norbert Brandt, who had been hired in 1979 to replace the hotel’s ossified Continental cuisine with the new California style of cooking. “The White House social secretary described the dinner as a ‘toast to the cuisine of California,’ and said that it was ‘California nouvelle cuisine internationalized,’ using only fresh and local fruits and vegetables. Salmon poached in zinfandel, lamb salad with lentils, radicchio and enoki mushrooms with raspberry vinegar and walnut oil dressings, sweetbreads with hot mustard sabayon, and balsamic vinegar shallot sauce.” The dinner featured many ingredients that were so overused in the early days of California cuisine that they became clichés: raspberry vinegar, walnut oil, and the newly available imported balsamic vinegar, which were poured with impunity on everything.
One of the first cookbook authors to make the newly emerging California cuisine accessible to home cooks was Diane Worthington. In her 1983 cookbook, The Cuisine of California, she praised California chefs and their food. “They are youthful, daring and inquisitive in their attitude; they have created a spirit that has resulted in an identifiable cuisine. This movement toward freshness, simplicity, and originality defines itself by the use of the freshest local produce, herbs, fish, and dairy products; lighter marinades and sauces; California wines as both ingredients and accompaniments and an astounding array of ethnic and indigenous ingredients.”
In her 1994 follow-up book, The California Cook, Worthington noted that chefs in both San Francisco and Los Angeles were experimenting with new ethnic ingredients and combinations while continuing to use classical techniques. She also observed that grilling had become prevalent. She mentioned Zuni Café and Chez Panisse in Northern California, and Spago and West Beach Café in Los Angeles. “Although California cuisine is in its formative stages, it rests upon several fundamental principles: First, brief cooking releases fresh flavors while retaining the desired textures. Vegetables are briefly cooked so that they still have some crunch when served. Second, combinations of ingredients are chosen so that natural flavors are heightened and balanced rather than masked. Third, the simple and elegant presentations that began with ‘nouvelle cuisine’ continue as California chefs bring their varied and eclectic training