Joachim Splichals’s menu at Patina Restaurant, January 13, 1994, with the famed potato lasagna and Asian touches on the French-Inspired cuisine.
Roland’s friend and former sous chef Gerald Hirigoyen is another Europeantrained chef who embraced the California produce-centric approach to food. Unlike Roland, who had worked in Michelin-rated restaurants with fine fresh ingredients but no commitment to changing food according to the time of year, Gerald grew up in a family of good cooks who always followed the seasons. “When I first came [to California], we didn’t quite have seasonality. I’ve seen the evolution of the product and of seasonality. When I worked at Lafayette restaurant, I was very limited in what I could use—I had spinach and carrots and frozen foods.” As a professionally trained chef, he simply made the best of what he had.
GERALD HIRIGOYEN
Le St. Tropez and Fringale, San Francisco
Gerald Hirigoyen started out as a pastry chef in his hometown of Biarritz. His father told him, “Pastry is going to give you some discipline. Once you know pastry, you can switch to the other side and do both.” When he was only thirteen, Gerald moved to Paris on his own. “When I look at my boys at thirteen, I can’t believe I was working at this age. But it gives you a good perspective. You go through all the emotions and the difficulty. In Paris, I caught the infectious disease of wanting to cook and wanting to learn. It was perfect for me.”
At twenty-one, Gerald was at a crossroads in his career. Should he stay with his boss in Paris, where he was getting rudimentary kitchen training along with the pastry work? Or should he follow his heart and go to California? A Basque friend and mentor set him up with some contacts on the West Coast, and Gerald seized the opportunity. When his intended job in a commercial bakery on the Peninsula did not pan out, he came to San Francisco with suitcase in hand. At the first French restaurant he approached, he was told to go to Le Castel, where there was a new young chef, Roland Passot. “Roland was a driven young man,” recalled Gerald, “and he’s driven to this day, like we all are, very dedicated to his profession. We had a five-minute interview. He asked me what I wanted to do and I said, ‘Listen, I’ll do anything for you. I can cook. I can do desserts.’ I was a perfect candidate for him. It was only the two of us in the kitchen, plus the helpers, so he used to do the meat, and I used to do the fish, and that little restaurant got some attention. We tried to elevate it and do something different. It was a fun experience, and I felt like I was back into that groove of being professional and wanting to do my best.”
The stint at Le Castel lasted only about a year, and then the owners sold the restaurant. After a brief tenure at a new restaurant, Le Vaudeville, which folded, Gerald tried but failed to get a job at Chez Panisse. Jean-Pierre Moullé was already there, and Gerald suspected that Alice Waters was wary of hiring another French-trained chef, preferring someone with a less structured approach to food. He was hired instead as chef at Lafayette on Pacific Avenue. It had a tiny kitchen and an even tinier budget, but Gerald managed to cook excellent food there. That brought him to the attention of restaurateur Jean-Baptiste Lorda, who was in need of a chef. He partnered with Gerald at Le St. Tropez on Clement Street and later at the very successful Fringale, where Gerald served bistro fare along with a few Basque dishes from his heritage.
Gerald credits his parents for his passion for cooking and exemplary ingredients. They were avid cooks and canned their own vegetables and fruit. “My uncle had a farm, and I grew up with seasonality. We didn’t eat green beans in winter except [for] the canned ones that my father was so proud to have [put up] in the summer.
“I’m very conscious of the freshness of the product, like everybody else. I am moving away from the heavy sauces. In France, people are used to eating in certain ways, and they’re more difficult to change. Here, people don’t necessarily have a foundation [in technique], which can be difficult because they don’t understand certain things, but the good thing is that they’re open to anything. European chefs are sort of restrained, and they know not to put crazy stuff together. Here you can evolve because you know that if you try to do certain things, it probably will work, because in the end it’s good food.”
In spite of an abundance of fresh produce in European markets, Gerald found that much of it didn’t show up on the plate in restaurants. “In Europe you get fish and a potato, but you don’t get a lot of vegetables. Spain is even worse—you get unripe tomatoes. In California, no matter what you order, you’ve got vegetables on that plate. It’s funny, because my vegetable bill is more than my fish bill.
“In California we include the vegetables in the profile of the dish. When you compose a plate, you think about what the vegetable is going to be, and how its flavor works with the other things. All my dishes have different vegetables. The lamb comes with braised fennel and little confit potatoes. The chicken comes with parsnips. The sea bass is with Brussels sprouts right now. You work with the season, then balance the flavors. It’s a whole composition. Fruit’s also important to the composition throughout the season.”
After years of running classic French restaurants, in 2002 Gerald returned to his roots and opened the Basque-inspired Piperade. The cuisine has been a part of California’s culinary landscape for a long time, mostly associated with Basque immigrants who opened casual family-style restaurants to feed their communities. Gerald’s goal was to raise Basque cooking to the level of fine dining. “It was interesting for me to put [a cuisine] like that on the map, to revive it and keep it alive. People were intrigued. There’s a generation of older people who grew up with their parents going to the Basque dinner, and to this day, they’re still coming. It’s funny because when I go to the Basque regions in Spain or France, I look forward to coming back here, where there’s a healthy way of eating. California has been a great place for me.”
A small but significant contingent of chefs trained in Asia. Kazuto Matsusaka, Hiro Sone, and Udo Nechutnys studied in Osaka at the esteemed culinary school École Technique Hôtelière Tsuji. There they received impeccable training, especially in knife skills. They learned the Asian cooking techniques of stir-frying, grilling, frying tempura, preparing sushi, pickling, and preserving. They were taught the traditional ingredients and plating styles of Japan and the fundamentals of the rich and varied cuisines of China, Singapore, and Thailand. Given the status of French cooking in the culinary world, they were instructed in European cooking techniques and recipes as well.
While most European chefs who came to California became established in Eurocentric restaurants, usually French or Italian, Asian chefs often did not end up in traditional Asian restaurants. Kazuto Matsusaka worked with Michel Blanchet at Jean Bertranou’s L’Ermitage and with Wolfgang Puck at Spago and Chinois on Main before opening Zenzero and then Beacon, where he served Asian fusion food. Alex Ong, who undertook a formal apprenticeship at the Shangri-La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, trained in French cuisine at the Ritz Hotel chain, and then brought his knowledge of Asian flavors to Stars. Hiro Sone collaborated with Wolfgang Puck at Spago before he opened the eclectic Terra in the Napa Valley.
HIRO SONE AND LISSA DOUMANI
Spago, Beverly Hills; Terra, St. Helena
Hiro Sone owns Terra in St. Helena with his wife, Lissa Doumani, whom he met while working for Wolfgang Puck at Spago in 1983. Hiro studied in Japan at the École Technique Hôtelière Tsuji, where he trained under Paul Bocuse, Pierre Troisgros, and Joël Robuchon. For Lissa, the restaurant life was “bred in.” Her father, Carl Doumani, was owner of Stags’ Leap Winery as well as two Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles, and she always knew she would have a restaurant of her own someday. She moved to LA and talked Wolfgang Puck into hiring her when Spago was only a couple of months old. “The first day, I peeled a case of asparagus, and the next day I went to work with Nancy Silverton, making desserts and pastries,