Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

  Dedication

  In loving memory of Therese Friedman and

  Joan Bredin-Price, who encouraged me in all things,

  great and small.

  And for Josh Ozersky, who loved chefs,

  and whose last meal came much too soon.

  Epigraph

  Gastronomy and cooking for me have always been about being a link in a chain, taking from the past, making my contribution, working hard on creating a legacy. I’ve had a lot of people show me a lot of different things, to make me who I am. And I try to do that to my younger cooks. They’re going to be much better cooks than I am; that’s just how it works. You get better and better, just being a link in the chain. In a culinary endeavor, where the traditions are so rich, it benefits you to know what happened before you; to study it and learn about it, to read about it and be fascinated by it. You have to understand who these people are, so you can move forward.

  —David Kinch

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Staff Meeting

  Introduction: Prep Work

  1. New World Order

  2. The Otto Syndrome

  3. On the Waterfront

  4. French Resistance

  5. The Stanford Court Gang

  6. California Dreaming?

  7. She’s Not There

  8. A Room of Their Own

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Author Interviews

  Sources

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Andrew Friedman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Staff Meeting

  Okay, gather ’round, everybody. Just a few things before we open the doors.

  This first note is for the kitchen: What follows is intended as a narrative, impressionistic summary of the transformation of professional cooking in the United States during the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s. While many prominent chefs from the era are profiled, this book by no means constitutes a comprehensive survey of everybody who contributed to the industry over the twenty-plus years it covers.

  In our interview, Patrick O’Connell, chef-proprietor since 1978 of the landmark hotel and restaurant The Inn at Little Washington in Washington, Virginia, made a helpful point: “We all have so many parallels. We had a party at Per Se for [the great French chef] Paul Bocuse; it was about thirty American chefs that Thomas Keller had invited and everybody was asked to stand for a moment and tell their story, and it usually involved some inspirational intersection with Bocuse and the great Michelin-starred restaurants of that era when we had nothing comparable yet in America. You would listen to their stories, and except for your own idiosyncrasy and personality, it was Oh my God. You had no idea we were all on the same trip and didn’t even know each other.”

  With those parallels in mind, I have focused primarily on the broad historical strokes and on the central hubs where the most chefs were concentrated—the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City—and on game changers rather than those generally acknowledged to have been cooking the best or most influential food, although they are often the same. The example of La Côte Basque says a lot: Readers who were around in the 1970s and ’80s will be surprised, if not scandalized, that Jean-Jacques Rachou casts a longer shadow here than André Soltner, but New York City cooks who were there will understand, and that decision should make sense to one and all by the time the dust clears.

  With all of this in mind, many godlike talents, including some who took precious time to treat me to deeply revealing interviews, are scarcely mentioned, if at all, and related developments, such as the contemporaneous expansion of the American wine industry, have been necessarily relegated to the sidelines and footnotes.

  Logic aside, please know that making these decisions caused me great personal anguish and was responsible for at least one lapsed deadline. And please accept my sincere apology if I failed to find the right spot to pay respect to you or your mentor.

  For the dining room: In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I have collaborated on books with many of the chefs in this story—though I have avoided it while working on this project—and count many more as friends and acquaintances. And so while I was fortunate to gain access to the breadth of people interviewed, I’m also inclined toward discretion. All of which is to say that this book, despite its title, isn’t by any means a “tell-all,” and that certain people known industry-wide for a range of illicit behaviors and weaknesses don’t show any powder on their noses here, either because they wouldn’t cop to it themselves or denied it on the record.

  My wish was to write a strictly oral history, with the story told exclusively in the voices of the participants. But too many memories proved incomplete or flawed. So I consulted a mountain of books and periodicals and did more writing than originally planned, although the story is still largely carried by the words captured in a few hundred interviews. Quotations from those interviews (listed at the back of the book) are cast in the present tense (“he says”), whether the subject is living or deceased, while those from third-party sources are in the past tense (“she said”). Additional sources are listed by chapter at the back of the book as well. With everybody’s best interest at heart, and with the consent of the participants, I have performed some minor editing on some quotations from my interviews to eliminate false starts, confusing colloquialisms, and the like; for elegance, I have avoided the use of ellipses to indicate omitted portions of quotations except where considerable text has been deleted. In no cases have my adjustments altered the speaker’s meaning.

  Okay, thank you. Let’s have a good service . . .

  Andrew Friedman

  Introduction

  Prep Work

  We all had the same acid flashback at the same time.

  —Jonathan Waxman

  You could begin this story in any number of places, so why not in the back of a dinged-up VW van parked on a Moroccan camping beach, a commune of tents and makeshift domiciles? It’s Christmas 1972. Inside the van is Bruce Marder, an American college dropout. He’s a Los Angelino, a hippy, and he looks the part: Vagabonding for six months has left him scrawny and dead broke. His jeans are stitched together, hanging on for dear life. Oh, and this being Christmas, somebody has gifted him some LSD, and he’s tripping.

  The van belongs to a couple—French woman, Dutch man—who have taken him in. It boasts a curious feature: a built-in kitchen. It’s not much, just a set of burners and a drawer stocked with mustard and cornichons. But they make magic there. The couple has adventured as far as India, amassing recipes instead of Polaroids, sharing memories with new friends through food. To Marder, raised in the Eisenhower era on processed, industrialized grub, each dish is a revelation. When the lid comes off a tagine, he inhales the steam redolent of an exotic and unfamiliar herb: cilantro. The same with curry, also unknown to him before the van.

  Like a lot of his contemporaries, Marder fled the United States. “People wanted to get away,” he says. Away from the Vietnam War. Away from home and the divorce epidemic. The greater world beckoned, the kaleidoscopic, tambourine-backed utopia promised by invading British rockers and spiritual sideshows like the Maharishi. The price of admission was cheap: For a few hundred bucks on a no-frills carrier such as Icelandic Airlines—nicknamed “the Hippie Airline” and “Hippie Express”—you could be strolling Piccadilly Circus or the Champs-Élysées, your life stuffed into a backpack, your Eurail Pass a ticket to ride.

  Marder flew to London alone, with $800 and a leather jacket to his name, and improvised, crashing in parks and on any friendl
y sofa and—if he couldn’t score any of that—splurging on a hostel. He let himself go, smoking ungodly amounts of pot, growing his hair out to shoulder length. In crowds, he sensed kindred spirits, young creatures of the road, mostly from Spain and Finland. Few Americans.

  Food, unexpectedly, dominated life overseas. Delicious, simple food that awakened his senses and imagination. Amsterdam brought him his first french fries with mayonnaise: an epiphany. The souks (markets) of Marrakech, with their food stalls and communal seating, haunt him. Within five months, he landed on that camping beach, in Agadir, still a wasteland after an earthquake twelve years prior. He lived on his wits: Back home, he’d become fluent in hippy cuisine; now he spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him, like the couple in whose van he was nesting. Food was as much a part of life on the beach as volleyball and marijuana. People cooked for each other, spinning the yarns behind the meals—where they’d picked them up and what they meant in their native habitats. Some campers developed specializations, like the tent that baked cakes over an open burner. Often meals were improvised: You’d go to town, buy a pail, fill it with a chicken, maybe some yogurt, or some vegetables and spices, and figure out what to do with it when you got back.

  Marder might as well have been on another planet. “This was so un-American at that time,” he says.

  He was supposed to become a dentist, but his heart was never in it; it was just one of those non-dreams foisted on him and his friends by tradition-bound elders. Back in L.A., he’d been a stoner, but a motivated one, laying the groundwork for independence—caddying, pumping gas, anything for a buck. And so he was primed for a course correction when he dropped acid that Christmas and a new, previously unimaginable path materialized: “I’m sitting in the back of the van and I’m whacked out,” Marder says. “I’m always thinking about my life. What am I going to do? Obviously I’m not going to be a dentist. I can’t go back to school and take organic chemistry. I just sit up and go, ‘God! I know what I want to do. This is what I want to do. I want to learn. I want to be a chef.’”

  I met Bruce Marder as I met many of the chefs and industry veterans interviewed for this book: in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. So it’s hard to fathom how young they were—scarcely in their twenties—when they began shaping the professional cooking trade in the United States. Now they are gray, their edges sanded, their stories perfected through years of retelling. But once upon a time, even the most iconic of the lot were impulsive, sometimes irresponsible, occasionally self-destructive—just living their lives.

  Marder isn’t famous, but he’s been successfully operating as a chef-owner for four decades. His clubby Santa Monica Italian charmer, Capo, commands one of the highest check averages in the greater Los Angeles area. He’s also a partner and guiding culinary light in a handful of other restaurants and Red Rooster Bakery, where he honors a late-career fascination with breadmaking. At his West Beach Cafe, which he opened in 1978 in a barren bunker of a space a half block from the sands and surf of Venice Beach, Marder was churning out template-shattering food before many of his contemporaries who have attained legend status, yet he remains relatively anonymous. His improvisational eclecticism, juxtaposing American, French, and Italian influences in dishes such as oysters topped with California caviar, porcini risotto with fresh thyme, basil linguine with morels and walnut oil, duck breast tacos, and stuffed calamari and steak with fries, made stodgy French restaurants—the only serious game in town in those days—look instantly stale. Wolfgang Puck protégé Kazuto Matsusaka says that many chefs used to eat at West Beach Cafe for the express purpose of pilfering Marder’s ideas; Jeremiah Tower, one of the titans of his generation of chefs and no slouch in the influence department himself, considers Marder an underappreciated visionary and frequently cites the restaurant as transformative. In his youth, Marder was attractive and confident enough for celebrity: Two female contemporaries confess they had crushes on him once upon a time, and former New West magazine and Los Angeles Times writer Ruth Reichl described him in print as possibly the most handsome chef in Tinseltown.

  And yet, Marder has never been especially well known, or even popular among his peers, many of whom just plain don’t like him. Why is not a mystery: He’s antisocial, even to customers. He doesn’t cavort with fellow chefs, doesn’t make the charity rounds, doesn’t play the PR game, doesn’t give a hang what anybody thinks. For all his influence, he’s never been nominated for chefdom’s Oscar, a James Beard Foundation Award.

  “I just think he’s not a self-promoter,” says Reichl. “He just isn’t. He’s missing that ego piece. If I were him, it would drive me crazy. He kick-started this before anyone. West Beach Cafe was a game changer in L.A. You want to talk about California cuisine? Nobody was serving it before him. Nobody. That casual, grilled, pared-down, unadorned, looking-to-California-as-opposed-to-France-or-Italy food. And that laid-back space. Look at what he did.”

  Marder shrugs. “The image I have in my mind is of the guy who was the owner of [Paris’s] Taillevent, [the late Jean-Claude] Vrinat. I met him in Burgundy at a winery. He wanted to be in his restaurant and he wanted to take care of his customers. That’s who I am. All these stars, you go to their restaurant and they’re not in their restaurant. I don’t feel that anybody’s as passionate about what I do as I am.”

  Marder is given to frank pronouncements, and not just about his colleagues. He met the woman who would become his first wife at the wedding of a mutual friend. When he asked her out, she protested that she was married. He didn’t mince words: “You’re not happily married and you know it.”

  My first meeting with this notorious figure was at the bar at Capo in October 2013. Based on reputation, I feared a hostile witness. I needn’t have worried: When I thanked him for making time, he disarmed and amused me by deadpanning, “Well, I just thought this might be more fun than less.” After the interview, we spent hours sipping wines, sampling pastas, splitting a sublimely charred steak from a wood-burning fireplace behind the far end of the bar. To my surprise, I liked Marder, in part because his professed passion was manifest: He forensically detailed the selections in Capo’s bread basket, and recounted how he’d picked up his method of saucing pasta at Da’ Pescatore in Florence. I also admired his attention to front-of-house matters: Late in the evening he pointed to the paintings around the dining room, explaining how a master decorator once taught him the trick to illuminating artwork, letting the light itself show without too much, if any, emphasis on its source.

  We were joined for that interview by his girlfriend (now wife), Shelly Kellogg, a resolutely sunny soul. She was also with him in New York City more than a year later, to attend Marder’s daughter Olivia’s New York University graduation. We conducted a follow-up interview over breakfast at the West Village restaurant Buvette that week, during which I broached the subject of his personality, or lack thereof.

  “If I can be blunt, you’re not known as the most gregarious person,” I said.

  “Well, that’s true,” he rumbled. He likes the portrait of him Colman Andrews, prolific author and onetime editor of New West magazine, offers in his memoir, My Usual Table: “What I was like at West Beach Cafe: ‘First, you thought he was a jerk, and then when you get to know him, he’s really quite funny.’ I think that’s pretty accurate.” When I interview Andrews, who considers Marder a friend, he tells me that jerk was actually, if such a thing is possible, a euphemism. For asshole.

  Chef history, like any history, is told by the victors. And so this book begins with Marder to keep us—author and reader—honest, to add a grain of salt, a reminder of the role of promotion and politics in the allocation of credit. Marder has a seat at this table, but others who mattered are surely absent, swallowed up by the sea of time, whether through modesty, mortality, geography, or quirks of personality.

  I also begin with Marder because—let’s face it—you can’t beat
that van story, and also for a passing moment that occurred between us at Capo. He was deep into recounting the West Beach Cafe, the two of us leaning close over a votive, a little buzzed on red wine. Restaurants at some level are homes, imbued with life by their occupants, and spiritually transformed by those who succeed them. West Beach Cafe shuttered in 1996, but the space, just two miles down the coastline from Capo, now houses another restaurant, James’ Beach. That seems somehow impossible as Marder evokes another time and place—another world, really—of the canvases by Venice painters that hung on the walls, the art world clientele, the notorious after-service cocaine parties. (At some point around midnight every evening, he told me, it was “Katie, bar the door.”) Both of Marder’s adult sons, dressed in preppy ensembles, were working the dining room at Capo that night, and they periodically stopped by the bar to listen and chuckle along with the bartender at their old man’s sex-and-drug-laced recollections. Some might find this appalling; to me, it was touching.

  “West Beach was the bomb,” Marder growled, sotto voce, at the climax of the tale, lost in a reverie, a little disbelieving of his own success. “It was the bomb. It was the bomb. It was the bomb. I walked in there every night and it was the bomb.”

  I can still hear Marder’s world-weary voice, see his wonderstruck eyes and craggy, bestubbled face, flecked with candlelight, as he repeated that phrase. It reminded me of the last moments of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, released in 1982, smack-dab in the midst of West Beach’s heyday. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” says replicant ringleader Roy Batty as he sits dying before Rick Deckard, recounting the cosmic astonishments he’s witnessed. “All those moments will be lost in time,” he muses. “Like tears in rain.”

  Marder and his contemporaries, the chefs in this book, saw things we people wouldn’t believe. They took a centuries-old profession with no real American strain and made it their own. There’s a timeworn argument over whether cooking should be considered an art or a craft. Lost in the crossfire is that it’s more ephemeral than either. Many of these chefs fret that they and their contemporaries have been forgotten, when an eyeblink ago they were household names. I share their disappointment, but impermanence comes with the territory: Any chef will tell you that they have to prove themselves, from scratch, every day. By the same token, the dishes they cook don’t hang in a museum, can’t be ordered from Amazon, won’t pleasantly surprise you when you happen upon them on HBO. Meals pass through us. Restaurants close. Chefs, like General MacArthur’s old soldiers, just fade away. Save for menus, cookbooks, and—more recently—documentaries, there’s no element of cooking that won’t inevitably be lost to the ages, including those who savored it. Gone forever. Like tears in rain.