MICHAEL MCCARTY
Michael’s, Santa Monica
The first time I met Michael McCarty, he was wearing red snakeskin boots, had his hair slicked back like a 1940s movie star, and was talking about his “little Latinos” in the kitchen. I was with Barbara Tropp of China Moon, and we asked each other, “Who is this guy?”
When Michael opened his eponymous restaurant in Santa Monica in 1979, the dining world took notice. Jeremiah Tower said, “If there really is a California style, it’s Michael’s. Michael’s was all beige and umbrellas, waiters in pink shirts and chinos, the garden, the sunlight, the light food, and modern art on the walls—it was style.”
“In 1978,” said Michael, “if you asked any hotel concierge in any major city, ‘What’s the best restaurant in town?’ the response would be a classical French restaurant or an Italian restaurant serving Continental food. Our revolution was creating modern American food and modern American restaurants. I think one of my most important contributions was the creation of a modern American restaurant that embodied many different components.”
From an early age Michael knew he wanted to be a restaurateur. He grew up in Briarcliff Manor, New York, in a family that valued fine food and the good life. In 1969, he enrolled in the Cordon Bleu. “Before I left [for Paris], my father, my mother, and I went to Laurent, a classical French restaurant—art deco, everybody dressed to the nines, great scene. We’re having this great meal, and the owner walks in the door. The electricity level in the room just ratcheted up. I had an epiphany. It was like one of my parents’ parties, where the mix of people was perfect, they’re all eating and drinking and enjoying it. It was this pure moment of light. And then, within two or three minutes, the captain brought over the bill. That’s what a restaurant is, the whole experience, which is always what drove me here at Michael’s. That’s why I don’t own ten restaurants and places in Dubai.”
Instead, he owns the original Michael’s restaurant in Santa Monica and Michael’s New York. “I love my New York, I love my LA. The crowds that I get in both places are the people I want to talk to, and that’s a very important part of what we do.”
Michael didn’t waste a moment of his time in Paris. “I went to get the grand diplôme, and the pastry diplôme—every diplôme they had [at the Cordon Bleu]. At the same time, I enrolled at the École Hôtelière. Steven Spurrier and Jon Winroth were starting the Académie du Vin. I did everything simultaneously, and it was such a wonderful experience to live the first half of the seventies in Paris. Les Halles was still there, and it was just switching over to Rungis market.”
One of Michael’s instructors sent him to restaurateur René Lasserre. “I worked at Lasserre one night and said, ‘I want to come back here for dinner. This is how I’m going to learn.’ It was faster and more efficient to eat in all these restaurants than it was to go to school, [because] in those days, you spent the year in the kitchen as a slave. So I’m absorbing all of this. I’m learning the old, the new, the Escoffier, the Gault-Millau. We’re down at Bocuse, and at Les Frères Troisgros, and it’s all fabulous.
“Then I come back and go to the Cornell School of Hotel Administration for the summer program. Cornell was a very good program because it Americanized you. You could learn everything from business and tax law to how the Americans cut their meat differently to Vance Christian’s California wine class.”
After Cornell, Michael moved to Los Angeles and made a connection with Jean Bertranou at L’Ermitage. Together they invested in a duck farm in the high desert north of LA. “We took the Peking duck and mated it with the Muscovy duck to create the moularde. We [used the] legs and thighs for confit, the breast for magret, and made foie gras in my house in Malibu in the basement.”
Michael spent over a year looking for a site where he could open his own restaurant. “I finally found this beautiful, funky old California bungalow built in the 1930s, with a huge backyard that was totally overgrown. I wanted to make it look like a house. It was all part of what we were trying to accomplish here. A big part of it was eating outdoors, and having that indoor-outdoor feel. My wife was a painter, so we became very involved in the art community. There were all these artists in Venice; we started to build our collection.” Michael bought paintings from Richard Diebenkorn, Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Jim Dine, and Frank Stella. Their works, along with paintings by his wife, Kim, adorned the restaurant walls.
Every aspect of the ambience was carefully considered. “I said to Jerry Magnin, ‘I don’t want [our staff wearing] tuxedos. I want a modern American designer. Who do you have?’ This guy named Ralph Lauren. I go over to his shop. He’s got the pink shirts, khaki pants, Top-Siders—that’s our uniform.”
Michael went on to assemble an all-star kitchen staff. “Ken Frank came to me and said, ‘I’ve heard a lot about this place. I’m in between gigs.’ Billy Pflug comes in. The next day Mark Peel walks in. The next day Jonathan Waxman walks in. And I go, this is it, we’ve got enough, I’ve got my line designed here. Then Jimmy Brinkley walks in. There’s my opening team. Phil Reich, our sommelier, worked the floor for a long time, until he could no longer deal with humans.” “Michael created a magnificent stage,” said chef Jonathan Waxman. “And he was smart enough to let me and the boys and the girls go and cook while he did his thing in the front.”
“In those days,” said Michael, “we wanted to do modern American with French influences because that’s where our roots were, but we wanted to change it. We wanted to use more California greens. My wife was a salad nut—a very big influence on the salads and vegetables here. We continued to bring in most of our greens from France. We were the exact opposite of the locavore program, but still to this day, I do both. I’m still gonna have my Dutch white asparagus every season.”
Michael’s menu from the 1990s, listing the provenance of every item and the ingredients for every dish.
Although professionally trained chefs and restaurateurs like Michael McCarty dominated in Southern California, this did not result in a more rigid or formulaic cuisine. To the contrary, Lucques’s Suzanne Goin remarked, “in LA, I feel that there’s a little more freedom, more influences, more people going off in different directions than in Northern California.” A few years ago when cooking at the Napa Valley wine auction, Suzanne observed a certain uniformity in the approach to cooking in Northern California that was perhaps stifling creativity: “Focusing mainly on the ingredients contributes to this sense of sameness. Down here I feel like there are more people following the beat of their own drum. A lot of the LA chefs are into supporting the markets and local farmers too, but they’re going in different directions rather than echoing each other.”
Food columnist Marian Burros applauded LA’s creativity as early as 1984, in a story about California cuisine in the New York Times. “These days the focal point of culinary innovation in California has shifted from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where foods are combined with wild abandon.” She quoted Julia Child, who lived in Santa Barbara in the winter, as saying that San Francisco cooking was now “hidebound.” Julia asserted, “We’re adventurous; they are a bit selfsatisfied. We don’t have to worry about standards as much.” “Julia always exaggerated a little,” laughed Marian in our interview.
On the other hand, too much creativity and freedom could produce some clunkers, as the New York Times article went on to point out. “Judging by some of the combinations recently sampled, however, Los Angeles could use some standards. There should be no place for lobster salad with watermelon pickle on the menu at Trumps, where the chef, Michael Roberts, is supposed to have a good palate. And sole garnished with ginger, three kinds of caviar, and a shrimp sauce spiked with vodka at Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois on Main cannot be assimilated in one mouthful.” Even the most talented chefs can create ill-conceived dishes in their desire to be original and imaginative.
Mark Miller, food scholar, chef, and critical