In the sixties and early seventies the variety of fresh fruit and vegetables available in grocery stores was limited, and most restaurants in both Northern and Southern California used commodity produce from wholesale markets or flew in food from Europe that arrived in less than pristine condition. Chasen’s, Perino’s, Ernie’s, L’Etoile, La Bourgogne, and even the famed Pot Luck in Berkeley, known for its regional French dinners, resorted to serving canned and frozen foods. Fortunately for them, culinary technique and complex sauces concealed a multitude of sins.
The original Pot Luck was opened by Ed Brown in 1954. He gave it that name because diners literally took pot luck—whatever he happened to feel like cooking that day. Wine maven Henry (Hank) Rubin bought the restaurant in 1962 and brought in Narsai David as the kitchen manager. At the time, it was considered the most sophisticated place to dine in the East Bay. Chef Mark Miller was an admirer: “Pot Luck was doing regional French menus on Monday nights way before Jeremiah Tower or Alice Waters did. The food was better, and the menus were more interesting.”
People still talk about Pot Luck with reverence, so they may be surprised to learn the inside scoop from Narsai David. “The soups were made with hundredpound drums of chicken soup base. We used dehydrated onions and powdered garlic. I could not use raw garlic because customers, particularly the lunchtime customers, were angry the first couple times when they went home and their wives complained about the garlic smell in their breath. The main course was served with rice and a vegetable, using frozen vegetables. We dumped two-and-a-halfpound boxes into a large sauté pan with some Kaola Gold margarine.” That Pot Luck was able to draw a devoted following in spite of these shortcuts is evidence of the talent and experience of Narsai’s kitchen staff. But by 1972, when Narsai opened his eponymous restaurant, his five-course menu was prepared with fresh ingredients. “There was not an ounce of chicken base in the house, or dried garlic or onions. Absolutely everything fresh,” he said. One force behind this growing interest in freshness was a new culinary movement from France.
The Influence of Nouvelle Cuisine in the 1970s
Nouvelle cuisine freed French chefs from the strictures of classic cuisine, which had been codified by Escoffier in the early 1900s. The fad seems passé today, but it had a revolutionary effect at the time and was an important precursor to California cuisine. It was introduced to the general public in 1973, when French food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau published “Ten Commandments of Nouvelle Cuisine” in their publication, Le Nouveau guide. Several practitioners of this new style of cooking—Paul Bocuse, Roger Vergé, Alain Senderens, Alain Chapel, and the brothers Troisgros—became the world’s first superstar chefs.
But established French chefs were swept up in the movement as well and began to fundamentally change their approach to cuisine. The commandments urged chefs to be modern and inventive, to not drown the flavor of foods in marinades or heavy sauces, and above all, to begin with fresh, quality products and not overcook them. As a result, cooking times were greatly reduced. A la minute preparations were preferred over long, slow cooking. Vegetables were no longer thoroughly cooked—crisp and crunchy became de rigueur. Recently harvested, premium products replaced canned or frozen ingredients.
Chefs bid adieu to béchamel and sauce espagnole and started to make greater use of broths and vegetable purées. This was done not for dietary reasons but to make food taste brighter and more vibrant. Sauces were still enriched with copious amounts of butter. More attention was paid to dietetics, meaning that on the whole the food was lighter than that of classic cuisine and portions were smaller. (Because it hit the press at the same time, cuisine minceur, a style of low-calorie cooking created by chef Michel Guérard at his spa in Eugénie-les-Bains, was occasionally confused with nouvelle cuisine.)
Fresh, in the parlance of the time, did not necessarily mean seasonal or local, however. While chefs in some fine-dining restaurants in France shopped at neighborhood markets every day, many did not. And with respect to seasonality, traditional haute cuisine training advised the professional chef that once he had created a dish, he should perfect it by cooking it the same way 365 days a year. Disciples of nouvelle cuisine still followed this principle, so if a chef was making a dish with asparagus, where formerly he might have used the canned version in the winter, now he had it flown in from South America. Fresh, yes; seasonal, no.
Highly stylized plate presentations showed off the new dishes. Paul Bocuse and Pierre Troisgros had taught at the École Technique Hôtelière Tsuji in Osaka and drew inspiration from Japanese aesthetics. Large white plates displayed small, dramatic food vignettes, and creative food combinations were encouraged. Yet one of the downsides of nouvelle cuisine was that for a while portions were absurdly small and the food was overly arranged. Dishes such as fanned duck breast with three raspberries and three snow peas artistically arrayed on an oversized plate became a target for parody and complaints.
The era was also infamous for producing some bizarre and unfortunate food combinations in the name of creativity, and ingredients such as kiwifruit and raspberry vinegar overstayed their welcome and became culinary clichés. However, regardless of its sins, the movement was liberating for French chefs, enabling them to break away from the constraints of French haute cuisine.
Nouvelle cuisine entered restaurant kitchens in California via French-trained chefs and restaurateurs based here. In Los Angeles, many followed the movement’s doctrine to a T, but others created their own interpretations, such as Michel Blanchet at Jean Bertranou’s L’Ermitage, Gerard and Virginie Ferry at L’Orangerie, Bernard Jacoupy at Bernard’s, and Wolfgang Puck at Ma Maison. Given LA’s interest in style and presentation, nouvelle cuisine met with a warm reception there, and by the early 1980s, its precepts had become associated with California cuisine.
In a 1982 article in the New York Times, food columnist Marian Burros wrote that Wolfgang Puck might be “the link between nouvelle cuisine and this new California cooking, between the formal and the informal. The new California food, he says, ‘is Schramsberg and pizza with grilled Santa Barbara shrimp instead of caviar.’”
WOLFGANG PUCK
Spago, Beverly Hills; Chinois on Main, Los Angeles; Postrio, San Francisco
Wolfgang Puck was born in Austria, apprenticed in France, and worked at the three-star restaurants L’Hôtel de Paris in Monaco, Maxim’s in Paris, and Raymond Thuilier’s L’Oustau de Baumanière in Provence. In 1973, he emigrated to the United States. After two years at La Tour in Indianapolis, he moved to Los Angeles to become chef at Patrick Terrail’s nouvelle cuisine restaurant Ma Maison. The rest is history with a capital H. “For the first six months at Ma Maison we were so poor, I used to buy lobster shells to make lobster soup base,” said Wolfgang, but once the restaurant started attracting the who’s who of the entertainment industry, he could afford to buy whole crustaceans and began turning out warm lobster salads topped with caviar along with other luxury dishes, such as salmon soufflés with mustard sauce, trout fillets in puff pastry with beurre blanc, and veal medallions with onion marmalade.
After a few years in Los Angeles, Wolfgang became fascinated by the city’s ethnic enclaves. “I got very excited. This is such an interesting city with so many different cultures, so many different cooking styles. You could eat at a lot of restaurants. And I was thinking, ‘You know, our food should reflect a little bit the cultures we have.’” At Ma Maison, the salade niçoise was made with canned tuna, which Wolfgang thought was crazy. He bought fresh tuna at the Japanese fish market, marinated it, and served it rare, either grilled or poached in olive oil. People would eat the vegetables but skip the tuna because they thought it was not cooked. They told him he didn’t know how to prepare fish. Of course, “now you cannot go to a restaurant where they don’t serve some kind of raw tuna,” he added.
In 1981, Wolfgang left Ma Maison and opened Spago on the Sunset Strip. It was an instant sensation and a magnet for celebrities, who came to have Wolfgang cook something special for them. Spago did things differently. The cooks wore baseball hats instead of chefs’ toques. You could see them because Spago had one of LA’s first open kitchens, and its giant grill and wood-burning oven were visible the minute