When she was in the kitchen at Chez Panisse, said Barbara, she observed that “a lot of really good people were not trained and, in some ways, weren’t interested in being trained. To some extent at Chez Panisse, there was no respect for technique because they were anti culinary training. You couldn’t possibly have a palate if you had technique; if you were technically good there was something wrong with you. They were interested in the sensual experience of something that reminded them of something else. They considered ingredients more important than technique.” The Chez Panisse staff put down technique because most of the culinary school alumni they tried out or worked with had no sense of food history and were taught only to execute, not how to taste and explore ingredients. Most trained chefs did not understand how to put flavor first, which had become the mantra of California cuisine.
Janet Fletcher worked on the line at Chez Panisse Café in 1982 and is now an accomplished reporter and prolific cookbook author. She credits Alice Waters for much of the sea change in the public’s perception of restaurant work. “Cooking became a respected profession partly because of the kinds of people Alice had in that kitchen. Until then, most professional cooks and chefs had come up through the apprenticeship system. Alice not only disregarded it; she disdained it. She was looking for cooks with an educated brain and some exposure to a broader world, someone who knew the history of food and culture. So that kitchen became a very stimulating place to be. I think it reinforced the notion that this is an exciting profession and a profession of prestige.”
In the early days at Stars, said Emily Luchetti, “PhDs were prepping three cases of tomatoes and were thrilled. These were bright, educated, artistic, creative people with raw enthusiasm and passion. Their overall goal was producing great food.” Many big-name chefs learned their craft on the job, including Loretta Keller, Mark Miller, Nancy Oakes, Catherine Pantsios, and Amaryll Schwertner in Northern California and Ken Frank, Octavio Becerra, Suzanne Goin, Evan Kleiman, and Nancy Silverton in Southern California.
A daring few opened their first restaurant with no restaurant experience at all, including Sally Schmitt, Bruce LeFavour, Daniel Patterson, Alice Waters with Victoria Wise and Lindsey Shere, Michael Wild, and Jesse Cool. They were ardent home cooks with refined palates who took great pleasure in cooking for others. This intrepid band also includes several chefs who were born abroad: Charles Phan and Mai Pham from Vietnam, Mourad Lahlou from Morocco, and Hoss Zaré from Iran. They taught themselves to cook because they missed the flavors of their homelands and then opened restaurants to share their culinary heritage. They embraced entrepreneurship and the do-it-yourself model. All four also saw their cooking styles evolve over their years in California. Like many foreign-born chefs, they incorporated new local ingredients into their basic dishes. Both Mai and Charles began to expand beyond the repertoire of traditional Vietnamese cuisine, Mai reaching toward Korean and Indian food, Charles adding Mediterranean tastes. Mourad became interested in mastering new cooking techniques, with his food taking on a more modernist California style. Hoss started delving more deeply into his native cuisine, introducing more Persianinflected dishes to his menu.
HOSS ZARÉ
Zaré at the Fly Trap, San Francisco
Hoss Zaré grew up in Tabriz, a region in northern Iran famous for Persian rugs, agriculture, and hospitality. “We had a farm about ten to fifteen minutes’ walking distance from our house, and from the beginning of spring to the end of fall, we had all kinds of fruits and vegetables. We had chickens, lamb—everything grew there. When I tell people we had forty-five kinds of grapes and fifteen kinds of apricots on one farm, they can’t believe it. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.” Before dawn store owners used to go to the farm, pick the ripe fruit, pay, and by 9 o’clock, all the stores were stocked with produce. Every herb was cut the morning it was sold. Hoss grew up with freshly harvested seasonal produce.
He was twenty-three years old when he came to California in 1986. “The first few years I was unhappy because the food wasn’t good. Everything was picked too early. The big supermarkets put green tomatoes in the stores. Everything was money, money, money—big and cheaper products. I was used to eating a tomato like an apple, but here I lost interest in tomatoes in the market. The flavor was not there.”
Hoss went to Skyline College and then UC Davis, where he took pre-med classes. While attending school, he hung out at the Billboard Café in San Francisco, which was run by his brother. “My passion for cooking started there. I had no idea about cooking before. I was watching and learning.” He started working at the Billboard, and then moved on to the Fly Trap, an old-time San Francisco restaurant. “For a year and a half, I commuted an hour and a half every day to the Fly Trap. It was a battle between going to school and cooking. Cooking took over.”
Eventually Hoss bought the Fly Trap and renamed it Zaré at the Fly Trap. He was nervous about changing the menu because the restaurant was a San Francisco landmark. “It’s been there a hundred years, and it was an Italian immigrant’s story. I thought, why not do my best to make it another immigrant’s story?”
He described Zaré as a Mediterranean restaurant with a Persian influence, a combination he felt comfortable with because Mediterranean cuisine is widely accepted in San Francisco. Hoss borrows flavors from the Mediterranean and incorporates them into his Persian food. “Some spices I mix, we didn’t have in Iran, and I’m enjoying it. Persians, they never use spicy food—spices, but not spicy. But charmoula and harissa are my favorite tools right now. I make buckets of harissa fresh. It gives a nice subtle heat but doesn’t overpower.”
At the same time he is teaching himself to cook more authentic Persian dishes. “I’m learning from myself actually, from taste memories of my childhood. Even though I have the cookbooks and recipes, if it doesn’t taste the same as my mom used to make, I don’t like it. I do it again. I am taking the backbone of the cuisine that I have, and twisting it a bit with the others, as long as it works. When I did a traditional dish like gormeh sabzi, a stew with beans and vegetables, to make it more appealing, I put a braised short rib on top. The presentation was beautiful, people saw the meat, and underneath was stew. It started selling. But if I had put just the gormeh sabzi and rice, it would be a hard sell. Or the fesenjoon; I did the chicken separately, flavored it, put sauce on the bottom, and added a timbale with the wild rice. I introduced people to fesenjoon and later, when I did it the traditional way, it worked.”
Hoss could give a primer on how to acquaint people with unfamiliar foods. “When I try a new dish, I give it to my staff first, and a small audience next. Then I put it on the menu. For example, with rosewater, no matter how much you try and train Americans, it’s hard. You have to go very subtle. Like yogurt, I put it in barely. I don’t want to give up, but I put it on the side. But some other flavors, I try and incorporate them into my dishes so I can bring in more authentic Persian flavor.
“It’s fascinating to me that if you compare California and Iran, it’s the identical climate and agriculture. Bergamot is in the north of Iran near the Caspian Sea, where we have oranges, tangerines, like California. You can get drunk from the smell of citrus when you’re driving there. So for me California is coming home, but in a different way.”
Professionally Trained Chefs
In traditional culinary schools in the United States and abroad, students learn the basics that will prepare them for their profession. Not all of them go into the restaurant field. Some become food writers, stylists, caterers, and private chefs. In the classroom they study food safety, business practices, and food history. In the kitchen they learn knife skills: how to butcher meat and poultry, fillet fish, turn vegetables to create even surfaces for cooking, cut foods into uniform dice for mirepoix and brunoise, and chop herbs into tiny fragments. They study cooking techniques: how to poach, steam, braise, roast, sauté, and grill. In recent years sous-vide cooking has been added to the curriculum. Students learn to make clear and flavorful stocks and master the sauces: espagnole, velouté, béchamel, mayonnaise, hollandaise, and aioli. (In contrast, in the early