Napa center’s power grab

There were no tears when the Napa Valley vintners running Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts learned that America’s leading food society, the James Beard Foundation, was reeling from an internal financial scandal. A crisis at the vaunted Beard Foundation? At Copia, they’re calling that “timely opportunity.”

The moment the news about financial improprieties at the Beard Foundation began circulating last summer, Copia’s board of trustees set to work on an ambitious series of new ventures.

At the top of the list: a splashy food and wine awards gala, intended to replace the Beard Foundation’s long-standing awards as the leading industry honors.

Copia, the 3-year-old West Coast cultural center founded by Robert and Margrit Mondavi, is jockeying to become not just America’s culinary tastemaker, but its preeminent food and wine institution.

Besides the awards gala, Copia also plans a slew of other ambitious projects, including producing a children’s television program and turning the center into a destination resort.

Yet Copia has been struggling financially. A $20-million founding gift from the Mondavis is the institution’s cornerstone financing. But it took a $70-million public bond to build the 80,000-square-foot facility and 3 1/2 acres of gardens. Copia is strapped with an annual bond payment of $5 million.

To put the center on the right track, Copia recently hired a new president and director, known for his strong fundraising record: Arthur Jacobus, a former director of the San Francisco Ballet and Oakland symphony. Most recently, Jacobus has been president of the Kentucky Center for the Arts in Louisville.

“I have to hit the ground running on fundraising,” says Jacobus, who will assume the directorship July 5. Most of Copia’s projects have the potential to create income, but nothing pays for itself right away, he says.

Meanwhile, to capture the gastronomic flag from New York City-based Beard, Copia has to take on Manhattan, which is not only the capital of food media and the headquarters for legions of food magazines, cookbook publishers and food television but also the most formidable restaurant scene in the country. Perhaps partly because of the food media’s proximity to them, New York’s Euro-centric restaurants have largely defined fine dining in America.

The foundation’s headquarters, the Greenwich Village town house that belonged to the late James Beard, the iconic American cook and bon vivant, had become, since the foundation’s founding by Julia Child and Peter Kump in 1985, a kind of private club for the city’s foodies.

Copia, on the other hand, is pure California; it bears the imprimatur of this coast’s most famous cook, Julia Child. The late television personality and cookbook author was a founding advisor to Copia and allowed its restaurant, Julia’s Kitchen, to use her name at a time when she required the International Assn. of Culinary Professionals to remove it from its cookbook awards program.

Child was instrumental in the decision to make Copia a nonprofit public institution with a mission to educate people about food and wine.

Since last fall, when then-Beard Foundation President Leonard Pickell Jr. was indicted and subsequently pleaded guilty to grand larceny after an internal investigation revealed as much as $1 million in questionable expenses, the Beard Foundation has been reorganizing.

It has reconstituted its board of trustees, hired Edna Morris as executive director and separated the awards organization from the rest of the foundation.

Compared with the Beard Foundation, “Copia is a bigger, broader institution,” says Lauren Ackerman, chairman of Copia’s board of trustees. As a result, “Our venue has more to offer. We have more potential.”

California chefs have long grumbled that the Beard Awards were too New York-centric. “I don’t think what we’ve done has been recognized by Beard,” says Mark Peel, chef-owner of Campanile.

It would be a refreshing change, say several L.A. chefs, to see the West Coast approach to food reflected in prestigious national food and wine awards. “There is greater diversity on the West Coast,” says Peel. “We can get the same great meat and fish they have in New York but the quality of our produce is so much better all year round.”

“It’s not bad to give Beard a run for it,” says Josie Le Balch, chef-owner of Josie in Santa Monica. “Competition is good.”

Copia’s board members say they hope to do that, and much more. But first they plan to transform Copia into a destination resort.

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In the works

Copia is planning, with Intrawest, a leading real estate developer, a four-star, 160-room hotel along the nearby riverfront.

Copia will have a close association with the hotel, but it won’t own it. For an indoor farmers market and food emporium it’s designing with a Napa Valley-based developer, Copia will lease out a site it owns to the west of its north parking lot.

The market will be home to butchers, bakers, fishmongers and assorted artisan food purveyors. To get the crowds, the plan is for daily bus service to ferry visitors from a proposed Copia satellite museum and wine store at San Francisco’s Pier 39 to Copia’s Napa campus, about a two-hour trip.

While Copia earns 60% of its $14-million annual operating budget from its restaurant, gift shop and other sources of revenue, attendance has been disappointing.

Copia could easily handle 300,000 visitors a year but attendance has stalled at 180,000 visitors. And roughly 85% of those folks are neighbors from California.

To create a much-needed endowment as well as to finance the new projects, Copia needs to raise at least $50 million, according to board member Garen Staglin, who has been instrumental in cultivating new deep-pocketed board members such as San Francisco money manager Frank Husic and Los Angeles businessman Darioush Khaledi.

Copia also needs to revitalize its exhibits to create more excitement within the museum’s walls, says Jacobus.

“They need to enhance the visitors’ experience, make it more active, impactful,” he says.

Helping Jacobus is another new Copia hire, Christopher Conway, the former director of development at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Smith & Hawken, Viking, KitchenAid, Tiffany & Co. and Target are among the first of what Conway hopes will be a long line of Copia corporate sponsors.

This is California, Conway says with a smile, “It’s build it.... Do it.... Make it happen now! Never phase it in. Never go slow.”

There is no complete list of Copia’s plans, according to board members who say that new schemes are proposed every day. But among the more serious ventures is a children’s educational television series called “Gaspergoo”; a line of Copia kitchen implements and cookware; a new Copia magazine; and, ultimately, a national chain of Copia museums and stores.

“We have projects that will establish Copia as a trusted authority, like the new Good Housekeeping seal, a nationally recognized brand,” says Staglin.

But a televised awards show is the linchpin needed to give the institution a national profile that establishes the brand, says Copia board member Jackie Applebaum, a cosmetics industry entrepreneur who also sits on the Los Angeles Opera board.

As soon as she heard the news of financial improprieties at Beard, Applebaum started pushing the idea of a Hollywood-style food and wine awards show. She introduced Michael Seligman, the veteran associate producer of the Oscar and Emmy telecasts, to the rest of Copia’s board.

Last month, Seligman and his partner Vic Garvey signed a contract with Copia to produce what some board members tentatively are calling “The Julia Child Awards” (though the name has not been approved by Child’s estate).

If all goes as planned, Seligman says, next spring Copia will be televising an awards show with celebrity hosts feting celebrity chefs and winemakers. With the right movie stars, he hopes to sell the show to a cable network.

“We’ll get the established chefs, the guys with restaurants in Las Vegas, to pick the hot, young chef of the year,” says Seligman, reading from preliminary notes scratched out on a yellow legal pad.

“We’ll make these celebrity chefs part of the show, tape them cooking in their restaurants,” he adds, talking through the various ways he’d like to bring Food Network-style action to the show.

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The opposition

If many California chefs would welcome a Copia awards show, not all agree. Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse and an honorary trustee at Copia, says, “I’m philosophically opposed” to a Copia awards show. “Copia doesn’t have the reputation” necessary to attract the country’s top chefs, food writers and cookbook authors, she says.

The Beard Foundation helped build the reputations of many young chefs, Waters says. “There is a loyalty to Beard. If it doesn’t continue, it diminishes the legacy.”

“The Beard mess is tricky,” says Suzanne Goin, chef-owner of Lucques and AOC in West Hollywood. “I don’t know if it’s just one person. Is it an organization worth saving? Or is it too tainted? It’s the question all of us are asking ourselves.”

This year the Beard Award nominees, of which Goin is one, were announced April 6, with the winners to be named Monday. The Los Angeles Times and its writers suspended all associations with the foundation.

As Copia creates its awards program, the burden of designing a nominating process that assures the legitimacy of the honors is paramount, says Peggy Loar, who is leaving her job as Copia’s founding director. “It has to be an unbiased jury, and it needs to be secret.” Exactly how Copia will do that hasn’t been decided, says Loar, who has moved to New York.

With a broad mandate to be an educational institution as well as a museum that celebrates not only food and wine but also the visual arts, lofty goals often have been difficult to turn into concrete realities at Copia.

“In the early days when there was lots of money around, the feeling was, ‘Let’s share our good life,’ ” says Loar. “Over time, that evolved to ‘Let’s make the good life accessible to all.’ ” But by trying to appeal to a broader audience, she says, “a rudderlessness came in.”

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A full program

Loar says that figuring out the tastings, demonstrations, classes and lectures key to democratizing food and wine connoisseurship was fairly straightforward. The corkscrew and cookbook collections, exhibits deconstructing common foodstuffs like chocolate and mustard, and the cultural history of marketing campaigns (such as “Got Milk?”) that fill the exhibition space also came naturally.

After a lackluster opening year, business at Julia’s Kitchen picked up when Joachim Splichal’s Patina Group took over.

But one aspect of Copia’s mission -- fine art -- has continued to prove problematic.

“When we heavily endowed Copia,” says Margrit Mondavi, “art was an important part of what we wanted to see. And it still is.” While Mondavi says she is enthusiastic about Copia’s new projects, she says she continues to wait for the fine art element to be realized.

Mondavi may be waiting in vain, according to new Copia board member Frank Husic. Copia, he says, is crippled by an identity crisis. “If I want wine, Napa is one of the top seven or eight places in the world,” he says. “If I want food, it’s one of the top 20. But for art? I wouldn’t think about Napa for five seconds.”

To raise the money Copia needs to make “Napa a cooler place,” Husic says, “we’ve got to go where the money is. And that’s Las Vegas. Creating this linkage is why I got involved with Copia.” A close friend and investor with casino tycoon Steve Wynn, Husic says Las Vegas developers, with their understanding of the allure of fine dining and good wine, are natural partners for Copia.

This month, as Copia begins knocking on corporate doors looking for a sponsor to underwrite the $1.3-million cost of its glittering awards show, it’s a safe bet that an envoy will be dispatched to Nevada.