A chef who led the way

Michael Roberts strode through life with the jaunty, slightly decadent air of a recently displaced count. Everything he did he did with style and grace and a heaping dollop of wit.

The chef and co-owner of the landmark 1980s West Hollywood restaurant Trumps, Roberts died last week in Philadelphia at the age of 55 after a lifelong struggle with a progressive neuromuscular disease.

He was a key member of the first class of restaurateurs to establish Los Angeles as a prime attraction on the national dining scene, along with Wolfgang Puck at Ma Maison and Spago, Ken Frank at La Toque, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger at City Cafe, Piero Selvaggio at Valentino’s and Michael McCarty and his rotating cast of all-stars at Michael’s in Santa Monica.

But for such an important pioneer, he was remarkably unpretentious about his cooking. Roberts was serious about food, but he never let that seriousness overwhelm his spirit of play. He will be remembered by restaurant lovers for dishes that always seemed to balance whimsy and deliciousness on a knife’s edge.

He concocted combinations that may have sounded outlandish but somehow always satisfied -- dishes such as a “guacamole” made from pureed frozen peas, a quesadilla stuffed with Brie and grapes, or lobster served in a sauce scented with vanilla.

Wacky perhaps, but this was the 1980s and at the time the carefree spirit of fine dining at Trumps typified the Los Angeles restaurant revolution as much as Puck’s serving pizza at Spago. This definitely was not your parents’ idea of fancy dining.

“Trumps was the first flat-out, self-conscious Los Angeles restaurant, the first to turn unabashedly to its American roots,” wrote former Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl in a 1989 story looking back on the decade’s revolution in food. “Michael Roberts’ menu was filled with dishes, such as potato pancakes with goat cheese and sauteed apples, cornbread-covered catfish in grapefruit sauce, and double-crispy duck with vanilla and sassafras. The menu is so inventive that you’re afraid you’ll miss something if you don’t keep coming back.”

Perhaps more important, he never lost sight of the fact that a restaurant is more than a place where people come to feed, no matter how witty or delicious the cuisine. Socially, Trumps was one of the quintessential restaurants of that decade, a place where the most unlikely combinations of people could bump into each other in a way that seemed purely Southern Californian. Action stars, drag queens, and ladies who lunch all regarded Trumps as a second home.

And unlike Spago, where the seating arrangement was as carefully stratified as the British royalty, Trumps was cheerfully egalitarian.

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Secret ingredients

Besides Trumps, Roberts was chef and partner at Twin Palms during its first couple of years of operation. And he wrote four well-regarded cookbooks. These were not typical celebrity chef restaurant recipe collections, but were essay-driven and displayed his knack for the written word. Probably the best were the first, “Secret Ingredients,” which centered on his ideas about pairing and accenting different flavors in surprising ways, and the last “Parisian Home Cooking,” which was full of his love for that city, its markets and its cooks -- both home and restaurant.

He was proud of graduating from the prestigious-sounding Ecole Jean-Ferrand cooking school in Paris, yet he loved confiding to friends that it was really a vocational school, and telling stories about being picked on by his high school-age classmates because he did so much better at all of his other classes than they did (he had already graduated from New York University with a degree in music composition and theory).

Further, he would allow, his French was better than theirs. This may, in fact, have been true. He picked up a complete set of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” while he was in Paris and vowed not to leave France until he had finished reading it. In Roberts’ telling, this resulted in his working for several months after graduation in Brittany at what he described as a diner surrounded by muddy pig farms. But, he said, as an American speaking colloquial 19th century French, he was the marvel of all the locals.

Roberts spoke French with a lovely, slurry growl. And though he was justifiably proud of his accomplishments in the kitchen (he was a member of the first class of the James Beard Foundation’s “Who’s Who in American Cooking”), I don’t think I ever saw him happier than when I told him that the French chef Michel Richard had referred to him as “that friend who speaks such beautiful French.”

Roberts may have been an aesthete, but he was no snob. In fact, if you looked very deeply into his cuisine, you quickly would find a bedrock of solid home cooking -- French and American. At one point, he dabbled -- not entirely humorously -- with what he was calling “nouvelle cuisine Juive” (“nouvelle Jewish cooking”) the prime example of which was a clear consomme served over an assortment of well-braised root vegetables. It reminded him of what he loved best about his mom’s chicken soup. I also remember a Seder in which he served a lovely terrine of foie gras paired with Mogen-David wine. It was a gag, but it was also a perfect match.

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Online pioneer

In the late ‘80s, he joined several noted cookbook writers in pioneering food content on the Internet, hosting question-and-answer sessions on Prodigy. I was editing the panel and as I recall, Roberts was the first chef into the barrel.

And his first question was not from someone asking about the finer points of haute cuisine, but wanting the recipe for Bob’s Big Boy’s fudge cake. I was aghast, but Roberts quickly supplied what he thought was a close approximation.

Roberts’ life and accomplishments would have been remarkable for anyone, but they were made all the more so by the fact that through his entire adulthood he was battling a debilitating, wasting disease similar to muscular dystrophy.

And battle is the right word. For years he struggled to get around with only a cane and the patient help of his longtime partner Daniel Adams. Well past the point of reason, he refused to consider getting a wheelchair, even when his legs had grown so weak he needed to physically lift them one at a time by the trouser leg to get over even the lowest step.

He finally gave in when he moved to Philadelphia in 2001, to be near his brother Clifford, a noted violin maker who suffers from the same disease. There, he threw himself into supervising the renovation of a 19th century row house. The centerpiece of the furnishings was a reconstructed leather-upholstered dentist’s chair that he could raise and lower to get into more easily.

His plan was to return to writing, focusing on fiction rather than recipes. Predictably, his goal was to become a great novelist.

And right up until the moment the disease finally beat him, no one who knew him was betting against it.