The wild success of both these chain restaurants gave negative associations to the term “California cuisine,” and many in the business shied away from using it. When Patricia Unterman wrote restaurant reviews in the 1980s she avoided using the label because she saw it as slightly derogatory. “It was associated with fusion, food not based in logical technique. When the California Café and the California Pizza Kitchen opened, I saw that as a terrible trend. I think that California then meant some kind of unfettered experimental cooking that had no foundation or roots and really wasn’t very good.”
Hiro Sone and Lissa Doumani of Terra in the Napa Valley refused to identify their cooking as California cuisine because, according to Lissa, “it was permission to do anything. It was the more, the better—twenty ingredients in a dish. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, and that’s what happened. The people who were really cooking California cuisine weren’t promoting it. The press and writers were. But when the chains saw that there was business to be done, they adopted the name.”
Expanding It: The 1990s
The 1990s was a decade of over-the-top creativity and odd juxtapositions. Fusion cooking thrived. Chefs dreamed big, and fifteen ingredients on one plate were not too many for some of them. Press coverage spurred chefs to be expressive with their cuisine, and the dining public got caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment.
At this adventurous time, genuine Asian food also came into the spotlight, and soon other types of ethnic restaurants entered the arena. As diners became more accepting of regional and authentic cuisines, chefs could present their food as it was served in their country, without having to make compromises to please timid diners. Indian restaurants no longer needed to tone down their flavors, Asian restaurants didn’t need to serve bread, and at Mourad Lahlou’s Kasbah, he didn’t have to offer ketchup as a condiment alongside harissa.
MOURAD LAHLOU
Kasbah, San Rafael; Aziza, San Francisco
Mourad Lahlou came to the Bay Area from Marrakesh to pursue a PhD in economics. “I had no plans to cook. I was going to be somebody who had a degree, then go back home and make everybody proud—the typical immigrant story.”
Living so far away from where he had grown up made Mourad nostalgic for Morocco and homesick for his family’s food. “I would go home to my apartment and miss getting together around a table, everybody yelling, the kitchen all upside down. It was quiet, there was no smell. There was nothing that made me feel alive, so I started to cook.” Working from the memory of his mother’s kefte with tomato sauce, he bought some tomatoes and paprika and started experimenting. Soon he was cooking for others, and after he got his master’s degree, he decided to start a small restaurant with his brother while he worked toward his PhD. They found a space in San Rafael and financed Kasbah by putting $300,000 on Mourad’s credit cards. On opening night, there were no menus. Mourad told the servers, “Go to the table, tell them to give us $40, and we’ll cook for them.” He improvised, and the guests were happy. The restaurant was busy from day one. Within four weeks it started getting rave reviews. After one year he realized he was in it for the long haul.
Mourad initially intended to make recipes that he remembered from home: his mother’s chicken with lemons, his aunt’s lentil soup, the bastilla his family served at special events. But when he could not manage to make his food match his memories, he started to doubt his abilities as a chef. A visit to Morocco revealed the reason for the differences. “Our Moroccan chicken took an hour and a half to cook; here it takes thirty-five minutes. It’s not the same tomatoes; it’s not the same lamb; it’s not the same spices. It’s not the same hands. This is not made by somebody who made it for thirty years, over and over again.”
It dawned on Mourad that people who were able to recreate dishes from the past were considered the best cooks in Morocco. Nobody talked about innovation or about tweaking recipes. In the United States, traditional ethnic restaurants rarely evolved. “I was getting bored making couscous the same way. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t do just this for five years.’” He decided that there were enough restaurants serving standard Moroccan cuisine. “That stuff was not going to be endangered if I didn’t do it anymore, so I thought I might as well take a chance, see where it was going to go.”
He began eating out to see what other chefs were doing. He went to Chez Panisse and Zuni Café. He realized that the chefs at those restaurants were cooking with a wide variety of ingredients. “But when I went to the market, I was just looking for tomatoes, carrots, beans, stuff that I recognized from Morocco. I began adding arugula, cress, and goat cheese to Moroccan food and cooking it in a way that still had some link to the foundation, but at the same time was branching out.
“Moroccan food has layers of flavor. It’s a stew that takes six hours, a tagine that takes twelve hours, a couscous that needs five or six steamings, pancakes that have to be proofed three times.” The problem was that these methods robbed individual ingredients of their unique flavors. Mourad was investing in quality products—lettuce from Annabelle Lenderink at Star Route Farms, chickweed from Jesse Kuhn at Marin Roots Farm, rabbits from Mark Pasternak, chickens from Hoffman Game Birds, lamb from Niman Ranch, and produce from GreenLeaf—but when cooked in traditional Moroccan fashion, “what you taste is the spices, so the flavor of the carrot is masked by the cumin, the flavor of the rabbit is like paprika, the flavor of the chicken is merely preserved lemons and cracked olives. Why was I spending this much money on produce if people couldn’t tell the difference?”
He began to simplify traditional Moroccan preparations so that the flavors of his ingredients would stand out. “Not as much cumin, not as much spice. We don’t need to put seven vegetables in the same pot and cook them at the same time. Why don’t we cook them one at a time so we can have each one perfect and then put them together? It was the Chez Panisse influence; you go there and get a garden salad that tastes like a salad, it tastes like lettuce. My role is to know when to stop, to show restraint, and not to spoil the taste of the carrot.”
Mourad’s goal was to find a middle ground where he maintained the integrity of the ingredients without sacrificing the flavor of the dish as a whole. “I would be lying to people if I said I’m making Moroccan food. I’m making food that is a compilation of everyone who has influenced me, including you, Joyce, and Judy Rodgers and Alice Waters and Paula Wolfert, and more recently Pierre Gagnaire, Michel Bras, and David Kinch. I try to understand what they do and apply it to what I’m doing. Food that has an idea behind it and food from the soul—that’s what I try to do. I try to find a place in me where that food resides.”
People came to California from all over to taste this distinct and special cuisine. It was difficult to define, yet people were eager to experience it. It had iconic dishes—Chez Panisse’s goat cheese salad, Wolfgang Puck’s California pizza—but it was characterized by its ever-changing, all-encompassing nature. This is a story about how communities evolved and the kitchen culture shifted. How immigrants arrived and created California versions of cultural staples. How growers and artisans made their way to the table. All of this took place in the context of a productive push-pull between Northern and Southern California.
2
One Revolution, Two Ways
Northern versus Southern California
You can always tell the difference between a San Franciscan and a person from LA because the San Franciscan cares about what’s on the plate and the LA person cares who’s sitting next to them.
—Restaurant publicist Andrew Freeman
In my many years of living and working in the Bay Area, I looked forward to slipping away to sample the food in Los Angeles and see what my colleagues were up to. On one trip, I was dazzled by a visit to Chinois on Main, with its dramatic open kitchen, fanciful dining room, and glorious wall