An Elitist Society’s Food Fetish : Meals for the Chaine’s Local Branch Aren’t Always Ritzy but the Members Are

They wear black ties and tuxedos and drape around their necks chains that would shame Sammy Davis Jr. Their ranks are swollen with millionaire entrepreneurs, doctors and lawyers. Their society is a centuries-old group devoted to the finest food and wine.

Yet Harry Axene, a founder of the Newport Beach branch of this international gourmet society, also founded, of all things, Tastee Freez, the chain of ice cream and fast-food stands.

A prominent member of the same branch is Carl Karcher, founder of still another fast-food chain: Carl’s Jr.

And the president of that local branch says his great passion in life, aside from his wife, is not beef Wellington, not oysters Rockefeller, not veal beurre blanc, but onion rings.

Welcome to the Confrerie de la Chaine des Rotisseurs--Orange County style.

“Obviously, we are an elitist society,” Hal Stayman said from New York, where he holds forth as a senior vice president of the society, which bills itself as the world’s largest organization of gastronomes and which maintains its world headquarters in--where else?--Paris.

“For the most part, our dinners are black-tie, with pomp and circumstance.”

Been to the West Coast lately, Monsieur Stayman?

Several months ago, the Newport Beach chapter gathered not at Antoine or the Ritz for a black-tie dinner, but at an Anaheim Carl’s Jr. A recent dinner of the Chaine’s South Coast branch, also in Orange County, had an Australian theme, with members wandering around in shorts and bush hats. And the Laguna Niguel chapter held a July dinner at a Thai restaurant in Costa Mesa. They didn’t bother to dress for that one, either.

The Chaine, which has only those chapters in Orange County, traces its history to 1248 and the gathering of a batch of men who cooked the king’s goose. The king was Louis IX of France, the geese were well done, and the cookers were the king’s chefs.

Chaine members have such titles as bailli, vice conseiller gastronomique and chambellan. Some members are entitled to wear a silver medal and chain, some a gold medal and chain. Others rate a silver medal and chain on a blue-bordered purple ribbon, while still others are limited to a silver medal and chain on a ribbon of purple--hold the blue.

The group’s brochure proclaims its members to be “knowledgeable men and women who--due to their interest in learning or their more traveled backgrounds--are in a position to enjoy the pleasures engendered by good cuisine, good wine and good company.”

It sniffs that “other societies, by comparison, tend to promote the wines of a given region, restrict their membership to a single social stratum or are active in a limited number of cities or countries.”

Members “are affluent people,” Stayman explained. Membership “requires a certain financial involvement.”

The social stratum that pushes up new members in Orange County is distinctly at the top end. Dues and payments for the dinners run to more than $1,000 a year for Newport Beach chapter members. Their ranks include, in addition to Karcher, Alan Rypinski--the man who marketed the Armorall car cleaner from coast to coast and sold his company for $50 million a few years ago--and a clutch of doctors and lawyers.

Yet Hans Prager, one of Orange County’s best-known chefs, said that members of the Chaine’s South Coast chapter, to which he belongs, agreed “that not all meals have to be expensive meals. It’s a lot of fun to get together and sit down together and have boiled beef and horseradish sauce, or pot au feu, as the French call it.”

While noted for the elegance of the meals he serves, Prager described himself as a “very plebeian eater. I love Chinese food, and I don’t mean elegant Chinese food. I mean Chinese street food, where you sit in front of a Lazy Susan . . . and shove (the food) into your mouth.”

And although the group says it strives to balance its memberships between professionals like chefs and restaurant owners and amateurs whose only connection with food is eating it, Prager’s chapter is composed almost entirely of professionals.

“It’s not quite as social as the Newport Beach one,” he said. “We have some events which are even business kind of events, where we get together and share opinions to make our professional lives better.”

Chapter president Hal Rosoff said the chapter is an anomaly in the Chaine in that it has several breakfasts a year--”very laid-back get-togethers.”

At one such breakfast last year, the head of the California Restaurant Assn. “came down to talk to us about what the restaurateur has in store for him for 1988 and beyond. That was a very nitty-gritty subject.

“But other times we’ll talk about ‘Who’s doing refrigeration great? The last guy who did my walk-in (refrigerator) didn’t do a great job. . . . Where do you get your fresh fish?’ It’s an exchange of information. It’s relatively unstructured.”

Larry Shupnick is head of the Chaine’s West Coast branch, which covers six states, and concedes that the West Coast isn’t as formal as the East Coast.

“I think overall in California we have more informal events than they do, say, on the East Coast,” Shupnick said from Avila Beach, where he owns the San Luis Bay Inn. “On the East Coast, the predominant functions there are black-tie functions.” When it comes to barbecues, clambakes and similar informal outings, “we have more of those type of events on the West Coast, and especially in Southern California.”

Which is not to say that these men and women don’t give a fig for good food.

When Bill Mathews, a Newport Beach anesthesiologist and member of the society for 20 years, lived in Arizona, he once flew his own plane to Guaymas, Mexico, and back to make sure the shrimp would be fresh when he made scampi that evening for two officials of the Chaine dining at his house.

Mathews also remembers the best meal he ever had, and after 18 years can recite the menu (Le Pavillon Restaurant in New York City, oysters Rockefeller, veal chop with morels).

Mathews said the chapter’s recent meals “have been 7s to 8s” overall. “I’m having trouble finding a 10 locally,” he said.

The Newport Beach chapter limits its membership to 35 and, like many other chapters, reports a waiting list of applicants hungry to join. Stayman said the Chaine now has about 6,000 members across the United States and chapters in 130 countries around the globe. Membership is by invitation only, with two members needed to sponsor the inductee.

“We are not out there on the corner looking for people” to join the Chaine, Stayman said. “On the other hand, we are not a bunch of snobs.”

Mathews agreed, characterizing the members as “basically people dedicated to fine foods and wines and good companionship.”

“I think the purpose (of the Chaine) is to heighten everybody’s appreciation of food and wine and the part that it plays in all our lives,” said Don Regan, a lawyer who is president of the Newport Beach branch. “I think just about every major event, from birth through marriage through death, is celebrated with food around the table and something to drink.”

Regan, who said that “next to my wife, my favorite passion is onion rings,” added that when he dines out he focuses on “veal, well-prepared, veal piccata or veal in a Marsala sauce.”

He said that despite the chapter’s occasional clambakes and barbecues, “the emphasis is on haute cuisine. “ And the Carl’s Jr. outing? That was “a little tongue-in-cheek,” he replied.

One member did complain about that dinner, Regan admitted, but “I’m not too sure he’s long on a sense of humor.”

And the food at Carl’s Jr. was better than the black-tie Christmas dinner one year at a restaurant in Orange that featured “a meat that was like eating your shoe,” Regan said. Then there was the out-of-county chapter dinner he attended where two of the three chefs rated at three stars in the United States “apparently got into an argument in the kitchen,” delaying the courses so long that “half the people left” before the meal ended.

Still, those clunkers don’t measure up to the one Regan heard about that involved a Midwest chapter dinner with a grand finale of souffle Grand Marnier.

“The chef got mixed up and put salt in instead of sugar,” Regan said, wonder in his voice.