Mark Miller thought LA’s chefs were the cream of the crop. “When you look at Southern California, you have Wolfgang Puck, Michel Richard, and later Joachim Splichal at Patina—the three best and most experimental chefs all in one city at the same time. [In] Northern California, there was nobody equaling what they were doing.” It’s no wonder that East Coast chefs relocating to the West Coast initially tended to gravitate to LA. Southern California was viewed as more modern and permissive, while the Bay Area seemed more closed to outside points of view.
Restaurateur Piero Selvaggio of Valentino, an Italian immigrant who moved to Los Angeles via Brooklyn, suggested that “California was the laboratory of new ideas. Chefs felt that they had to be here to be part of this process, not necessarily from an economic viewpoint, but as an evolutionary moment.” Piero saw LA as the embodiment of “the new great West, the land of opportunity for culinary genius.”
But a restaurant scene fueled by fashion and novelty makes for inconstant customers. Readers of winemaker Randall Grahm’s newsletters know that he is fearlessly outspoken and not easily flustered, but he acknowledged that the capriciousness of LA diners unnerved him. “There is something about Southern California that freaks me out. The restaurant patrons are infinitely more fickle. They are into novelty, and dining is a form of entertainment in the extreme. Dining is also far more of a social statement about where you rank in social class, so being able to secure reservations at a particular place—getting the right table—is a major status thing.”
This flightiness caused Michel Richard, former owner of Citrus in LA, to close his doors and move to Washington, DC, in 1998 to open Citronelle. “Los Angeles was a great town. But the life of a restaurant is very short there, except for Wolfgang. Or McDonald’s. Very trendy. You’re good, you’re busy, and then, when a new restaurant opens, say good-bye to your business.”
MICHEL R ICHARD
Citrus, Hollywood
Michel Richard was born in Brittany and worked his way up through the apprentice system in France, beginning as a baker at the age of fourteen. He advanced to train as a pastry chef under the famed Gaston Lenôtre and in 1974 moved to New York to open Lenôtre’s Chateau France pâtisserie. When it closed in 1975—“Americans weren’t ready for Lenôtre’s pastries,” said Michel—he moved to Santa Fe to run The French Pastry Shop in La Fonda Hotel. In 1977, he made a last move, to Los Angeles, where he opened a bakery of his own. When he found that selling dessert was not enough to sustain the business, he built an adjacent café, where he offered salads, terrines, and a few other dishes. He went on to launch his restaurant Citrus in 1987.
“At first I was very French. While I was cooking in my pastry shop, I would have conversations with my guests. Most of them were not very happy about French food; they were telling me it was too creamy, too rich, had too much butter. When I opened Citrus, I didn’t use cream or butter.” Michel labeled his cuisine “French in California” and described it as “a combination of simplicity, lightness, and tasty food.”
“Los Angeles is my Provence. It’s hot, and people want to eat lighter food. And I’ve been thinking about what is California food. Fresh, fresh, fresh. More vinaigrette. More spice in the food. In most of my sauces, I stopped using stocks. I was using roasted chicken jus or miso. The miso was like consommé—it had a lot of flavor. I used to love that umami.”
Part of Michel’s menu changed every day, but not all of it, because he thought the cooks needed time to perfect a new dish. The dishes he served were his ideas, but today he says he welcomes input from his staff, whose diverse backgrounds and life experiences enrich the restaurant’s offerings. “I was in Paris last year, talking with Joël Robuchon. And I was thinking of a great thing we had in California: most of my chefs in the kitchen, they’re college educated. It’s a big change. When I left school, I was fourteen. Most of the young people working in my kitchen, they start to work in a kitchen at twenty-two.”
Citrus was a dramatic white space with umbrellas and a glassed-in kitchen. “The decision to have an open kitchen was mine. The [design of] the entire restaurant was mine. In LA, every French restaurant was dreary and dark. I managed to create a restaurant that would make you feel like you’re in Provence—bright, open, green, unpretentious. I remember going to the Troisgros restaurant in Roanne. It was real good, but the kitchen—it was spectacular. So gorgeous, but nobody was able to see it. At Citrus, I came up with that nice open kitchen.” Because his kitchen was installed in what had been an outdoor patio, it had to be enclosed in glass due to building code requirements.
“To succeed you have to be the owner,” said Michel, “and you have to work all the time. You have to introduce new things. When I go to a market, I harvest not only the vegetable, I harvest ideas. And it’s exciting for me. I need to go to a market two times a week and see what’s going on. And I’m proud—and I just love my profession. Sometimes I feel like I’m a kid when I go back to my kitchen and create a new dish.”
Restaurateur Michael Dellar, who grew up in Los Angeles, was critical of the pomp at restaurants such as Citrus and St. Germain, where he found the food “very overdone, very over-manipulated.” But chefs were trying to impress, and this was true at all the better restaurants, which were “places to see and be seen. Southern California people didn’t care about the food as much. They cared much more about the pretense.”
This apathy toward quality food and ingredients demoralized some chefs. Wendy Brucker worked at Square One and Stars before going down to Los Angeles to cook at City Restaurant in 1990. She found that the fish and meat were as good as what she was used to, but the produce was another story. “LA was about ten years behind as far as produce. And not just produce, but the sensibility about how to treat the ingredients—really taking care of the food. Ingredients were not nearly as important as they were up here. In terms of popularity of restaurants, it was really about who went there. It was all about being seen. The quality of food did not have much to do with whether a restaurant was successful because there were a lot of really crappy restaurants that did tremendous business. I think that people who live in LA don’t know nearly as much about food, and don’t care. Everybody’s on a diet of some sort.”
Jeff Jackson, a former chef at Hotel Nikko in Beverly Hills, admitted that cooking there was disheartening for a professionally trained chef. “In LA, everyone eats out every meal of every day, it seems. No one cooks. Consequently, people tend to eat very light, too. I’ve never made so many salads in my life. I was coming from classical French kitchens in Chicago, and here I was making Caesar salad with a chicken breast on it, and I was pulling my hair out. It’s all how you look, the car that you drive, and all of that stuff.”
“We’ve got good restaurants, but they’re still places for entertainment,” Russ Parsons said of LA. “Chez Panisse has a completely different ethos than Spago, which is basically ‘Come on in, have a great time. You’re gonna see amazing people, and yeah, the food’s gonna be great.’”
Mark Miller was more impressed by the playfulness and daring of Los Angeles than what he saw as the conservatism of Northern California. “Southern California has no history, no ritual, no heritage. It’s Hollywood. Southern California embraces food as fashion, food as lifestyle.” Mark sees Wolfgang Puck as the quintessential California chef. He believes that one of Wolfgang’s important contributions was to take popular dishes and elevate them. People liked pizza, so Wolfgang added prestige by topping his pizzas with costly ingredients like smoked salmon and caviar. Expensive ingredients were essential to pleasing the status-hungry LA audience.
MARK MILLER
Fourth Street Grill and Santa Fe Bar and Grill, Berkeley
Mark Miller is one of the most intelligent, well-traveled, and opinionated people I know. We did not work at Chez Panisse at the same time, but over the years we have taught and cooked at some of the same venues and have become friends.
Mark