The permissive restaurant culture allowed for many culinary points of view. While the East Coast continued to be Eurocentric, the wide parameters and flexible rules of California cuisine gave chefs the freedom to cook in ways that reflected their individual predilections and cultural bent. When chefs cooked traditional food—based on flavors, ingredients, and dishes they had tasted and wished to eat again—they were cooking the food of memory. They had a benchmark for flavor imprinted on their palate. Their goal was to try to match the original dish: the beef daube they ate in France, the spaghetti alla carbonara in Italy, the romesco sauce in Spain, or their family’s version of Vietnamese pho or Moroccan tagine of chicken with preserved lemon and olives. While they could not reproduce it using ingredients cultivated in the original country’s terroir, they sought the best ingredients they could find and used tried-and-true techniques to get as close as they could to what they remembered. They might put their personal imprint on the recipe, but it was still recognizable. The resulting dish could be predictable and boring, right on the money, or sublimely inspired, depending upon the chef’s larder and skill at the stove, and the accuracy of his or her memory.
Other chefs wanted to break away from cooking traditional and predictable food, wanting instead to create dishes they had never tasted but only fantasized about—the food of dreams. Yet they could not work in a vacuum, so they took familiar and available ingredients and combined them in unusual ways or tried out innovative techniques to make a dish with their personal imprint. They had no flavor benchmark or taste memory to match, but ventured into the unknown with every dish. Their success was dependent upon their technical skills, culinary experience, and creativity in transforming an idea into an edible reality. The resulting dish could be anything: confused, terrible, challenging, interesting, or pure magic.
Chefs took chances either way, but that freedom to take risks was one of the keys of California cuisine. California celebrated iconoclasts, which enabled often inexperienced newcomers to open restaurants, create new artisanal food products, and make wine. “They could start up a business and not be slapped down because they didn’t fit into a mold,” said Bob Long of Long Vineyards. “They could experiment and try their ideas out. And they had a relatively accepting audience because the people here were saying, ‘Well, okay, why not?’”
At a time when upscale European and North American restaurant culture was dutifully following the classical conventions and recipe strictures of the influential French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier, Californians were doing their own thing. In the 1970s and 1980s, said restaurateur Narsai David, “you’d have had a hard time in a French restaurant finding fresh ginger. Escoffier taught that ginger is this powdered stuff you put in spice cake. California cuisine made an impact because we were not bound by the traditions of the French. Here on the West Coast, we were open to ideas. We just did the things that were appealing to us.”
Although in many respects California cuisine was beholden to European know-how, “California itself, as the end of the western ideological expansion of America, represents the getting away from the status and class system of Europe to celebrate the idealization of individualism and the power of the individual,” according to chef Mark Miller. “California cuisine, by its nature, has to be revolutionary in terms of not only its fashion, its style, but also its culinary ethos. It cannot be a repeat. The Chinese have a saying, ‘you can hold on to the past or you can create the future,’ and California was about creating the future. It was America’s frontier.”
The Revolutionary Years
This history focuses on the years 1970 to 2000, which were the most transformative in the development of California cuisine. The movement had repercussions in agriculture, the wine industry, and restaurant design. Developments during those thirty years had an enormous impact on the quality, freshness, availability, and diversity of the raw materials at chefs’ disposal. The California restaurant wine list became a model for restaurants all over the country. The open kitchen allowed a more casual but still professional style of service. By the late 1990s, California cuisine had begun to influence every aspect of the food universe: home as well as restaurant cooking, what was grown, how it was grown, how fresh it had to be, and where it could be purchased.
Calling California cuisine a revolution implies a note of finality, as if it’s over and the changes are accomplished and goals achieved. But it continues to evolve. This history stops at 2000 because in the years that followed, food writers and food entrepreneurs, competing in an increasingly dense and crowded arena for the attention of diners and consumers, have tended to make every little change, every new chef or restaurant trend, every novel farm or ingredient seem important and groundbreaking. This has obscured the fact that the pace of change in the culinary world has slowed since the turn of the millennium. Compared to the revolutionary changes in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, what’s happened in the culinary world over the past fifteen years or so has been mostly evolutionary, with variations on and extensions of earlier innovations.
Over the years, California has influenced the rest of the country. In the early 1980s, when California chefs Nancy Silverton and Mark Peel were hired to revamp Maxwell’s Plum restaurant in New York, pickings were slim for seasonal vegetables. Today, the selection at the Union Square Greenmarket is much improved, although it still seems limited compared to the abundance and variety found at the San Francisco Ferry Plaza or Santa Monica farmers’ markets. In 1998, Suzanne Goin of Lucques reported that, after four days of dining out in New York, she despaired of getting a decent salad or seeing any vegetables on the plate. “They weren’t part of the dining culture. It was protein and sauce, protein and sauce,” a reflection of the lingering European influence on East Coast cooking.
For years it drove East Coast chefs crazy to visit California, see the markets, and listen to their California counterparts rhapsodizing about ingredients, especially when they had to place orders with California produce companies to tide them over during the months when their walk-in refrigerators were bare. Even as recently as 2009, David Chang of New York’s Momofuku made the calculated press-grabbing remark that “fuckin’ every restaurant in San Francisco is just serving figs on a plate,” implying that California chefs lacked culinary chops. We don’t need Freud to recognize produce envy. But I suspect that by now Chang has forgiven us for flaunting our figs. Because today, thanks to the California culinary revolution, chefs all over the country have closer connections to farms and ranches. Farmers’ markets have expanded. We are all eating better, fresher, and more varied food.
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Thirty Years of Food Revolution
A Historical Overview
California has always been as much of a state of mind as a state of the Union. . . . Other places have decent organic produce, or so they say. But California promises something more: transformation. The state is the repository of America’s frontier spirit, the notion that a better life is possible for anyone who wants it regardless of the circumstances of her birth. You can leave your past at the border and reinvent yourself here.
—Peggy Orenstein, “The Coast of Dystopia,” New York Times, January 15, 2010
On May 9, 1984, I was waiting for the electrician to turn on the power so we could cook our first dinner at my restaurant, Square One. Although the official opening was not until May 14, we had invited friends to come for a few trial meals to help us get used to the kitchen and refine our timing. Square One’s manager, Max Alexander, had hired more waiters than we needed because he knew that not all of them would make the grade. I was still learning their names and their handwriting, because in those days before computer ticketing systems, the orders were handwritten in duplicate.
Sous chef Paul Buscemi and I had been in the kitchen prepping like mad with our staff. Barbara Haimes and Amaryll Schwertner had followed us from Chez Panisse, as had pastry chef Craig Sutter. We had made pea and lettuce soup, a tuna and white bean salad, gorgonzola- and ricotta-stuffed ravioli with sage butter, and saffron fettuccine