Remembering the Revolution : Ten Years After: The Critic’s View

The year 1978 was not a good one for restaurants in Los Angeles. The same cannot be said for any year since. In fact, over the next decade our eating habits would change more dramatically than at any other time in recent history.

Looking back at my notes from 1978, I seem to have existed on a constant diet of pate, duck a l’orange and coquilles St. Jacques. For dessert there was chocolate mousse and creme caramel. It’s not that I tried to order the same thing every time I reviewed a restaurant--that’s just what most good restaurants were serving.

There were, of course, exceptions. The best places were immersed in nouvelle cuisine--and drowning us in beurre blanc. (In that year and the years to come I ate so much beurre blanc that the very thought of the stuff still turns my stomach.) In reviewing Ma Maison I seem to have eaten oysters in beurre blanc, saumon en croute in beurre blanc, spinach-wrapped halibut in beurre blanc . . . .

But my diet was about to change. So was yours. In the next 10 years we would acquire a taste for raw fish, start buying arugula and radicchio in the supermarket, learn all the varieties of Italian pasta and routinely sit down to lobster tacos and wild mushroom pizzas. We didn’t know it then, but in 1978 we were on the brink of a culinary revolution.

1979: When the opening shots were fired. For on April 22, Michael McCarty opened his Michael’s to almost hysterical excitement. I should know: I spent most of April at the restaurant site, writing an article about the opening. The telephone company had mistakenly listed the number of the pay phone in the ladies’ room as the restaurant’s number, and every time I went in there it was ringing insistently. Weeks before there was even a stove, people were dying to make reservations.

Why was everybody so worked up about a Santa Monica restaurant whose owner was 25 years old, whose chef (Ken Frank) was 24 years old and whose sous-chef (Jonathan Waxman) was an ancient 28? A restaurant with “haute nouvelle” food and a menu that even the owner admitted was “not the world’s most interesting”? Because the owner also said that his specials were going to “knock your socks off.”

“I want to do the weirdest things,” said McCarty. Looking back, it wasn’t so weird; Michael’s food was not dramatically different from that found at Ma Maison or L’Ermitage or any of the city’s other good French restaurants. I remember sitting in the kitchen eating test dinners--poached salmon trout, veal with beurre blanc, rib-eye steaks in Cabernet sauce. Not exactly earthshaking edibles.

But Michael and his chefs had an attitude that was refreshingly new. “This is not going to be like other restaurants,” said Ken Frank in those pre-opening days. “It is going to be a California restaurant. We want California produce, California employees, California wines.” California cuisine had not yet been invented--but it was about to be.

1980: Ken Frank didn’t stay at Michael’s very long; he soon moved on to open his La Toque. So now we had two restaurants run by young American chefs. But one of the things that distinguished Ken Frank from the other smart young Americans in the kitchen was his appreciation for sushi. In fact, Frank liked sushi so much that when he came down with what later turned out to be Guillan-Barre syndrome, people in the food business began whispering that his real problem was that he had eaten too much raw fish.

But in 1980 a lot of us were eating too much raw fish; sushi seemed like the perfect food, and we spent hours in sushi bars. We learned the rules of ordering, idolized sushi chefs, visited the sushi bar as if it were a sacred temple of food. We followed sushi chefs from restaurant to restaurant and entrusted ourselves to their care as if our souls depended on it. I still love raw fish, but all that idolatry seems a little bit silly now. Still, it taught us a great deal about fish and brought better-quality seafood into the marketplace.

But the sushi craze did something even more important. For the first time we were seriously considering a cuisine that was not French. At restaurants, such as La Toque, appetizers that looked a lot like sashimi began showing up on the menu. It was the beginning of what was to become cross-cultural cooking.

1981: The two big restaurant events of 1981 were Trumps and Rex. Trumps was the first flat-out, self-conscious Los Angeles restaurant, the first to turn unabashedly to its American roots. The look was ultramodern: white walls, good art, concrete tables. And the food was decidedly un-French. 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. As I wrote then, “The menu is so inventive that you’re afraid you’ll miss something if you don’t keep coming back.”

Rex was something else again. Rex set out to be--and was--the city’s most luxurious restaurant. And it wasn’t French either. When Mauro Vincenti started serving nuovo cucina, cooked in copper pans by four separate chefs (one for each course), he opened the way to the literally dozens of sophisticated Italian restaurants that would open in the next few years.

But Rex was more than just a restaurant offering us sophisticated Italian food. It was the first of the new places to offer eating as entertainment. As I wrote when the restaurant opened: “The spotlight is shifting from the one who mans the stove to the man who runs the show.”

1982: And nobody ever ran a show quite like the one at Spago. The main point about Spago, right from the start, was that it was fun. The open kitchen put the chefs right into the dining room; the open dining room made all the stars visible. It was the first place where you were as comfortable in black tie as you were in blue jeans. As I said then: “If you really want to be in these days, you don’t dress up and go out for Champagne and caviar; you dress down, roll up your sleeves and dig into a pizza.”

Looking back, the food itself was not really all that startling. In my review I said that the “appetizers read like a checklist of what is fast coming to be called ‘California cuisine.’ ” Puck himself said: “I made up the menu a couple of days before we opened. I didn’t want to do the same food I did at Ma Maison, and I followed my instincts.”

His instincts were good. This French-trained chef unwittingly opened the door to all the great little Italian trattorias that opened in L.A. in the ‘80s.

1983: “Ten big egos in one small kitchen--it’ll never work “ was the general reaction when the fledgling American Institute of Wine and Food announced that it was going to hold a $250-a-head fund-raising dinner in San Francisco cooked by “the new generation of American chefs.” I was sent to cover what everybody was sure would turn out to be a total fiasco.

It wasn’t. To everybody’s surprise the dinner for 372 people was a roaring success. (It remains one of the most exciting meals I’ve ever eaten.) The dishes, cooked by Larry Forgione (then at New York’s River Cafe), Jeremiah Tower (then at the Santa Fe Bar and Grill in Berkeley), Alice Waters (Chez Panisse in Berkeley), Mark Peel (then at Spago), Jonathan Waxman (then at Michael’s), Mark Miller (then at the Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley), Paul Prudhomme (K-Paul’s in New Orleans), Bradley Ogden (then at the American Restaurant in Kansas City), Jimmy Schmidt (then at the London Chop House in Detroit) and Barbara Kafka (then owner of Star Spangled Foods in New York) were all innovative and superb.

But that wasn’t the surprising part. The chefs themselves were the surprise: They got along beautifully, cooked cooperatively, helped each other out. They proved that while French chefs might deserve their reputation for being temperamental, American chefs were different. They liked each other. They knew how to work together. It was the last we heard of too many chefs spoiling anything--and the start of an almost absurd number of multichef charity meals.

1984: Early in the year I wrote, “We are becoming so secure in our eating habits that I would not be surprised to find meat loaf on the menu of an expensive restaurant.” At the end of the year, 72 Market Street opened and obliged me by serving meat loaf to celebrities. American food had come of age.

It was the Cajun craze that paved the way for this. Paul Prudhomme became a national hero, a sort of food missionary, and in Los Angeles both Orleans and the Ritz opened their doors to hungry hordes. Blackened food became a cliche, redfish was so popular that the fish actually became an endangered species and nobody who cared about food would have cared to admit that he didn’t know what gumbo or jambalaya contained. Sophisticated eaters--the people who had been laughing at the notion of American food for years-- suddenly became home-grown chauvinists. People began wondering what other good things there were to eat in America, thereby paving the way for our interest in Southwestern foods--and the trend of ’87.

1985: Lots of restaurants opened in this year. Foremost among them were Max Au Triangle, the last really elegant French restaurant to open in L.A.; Primi, which made grazing official by encouraging us all to eat a lot of little courses, and City, which proved that Los Angeles really did have a style all its own.

But 1985 was also the year we all started chasing food fads with a vengeance. Upscale restaurants saw the writing on the wall; many of them opened little, less-expensive offshoots--and some of them did better than their parents. “People who once felt powerful walking into the luxury of a great restaurant now feel more powerful when they can walk past a gaggle of waiting people and be immediately seated in a busy restaurant,” I wrote. I worried that fine dining might die in Los Angeles. “Do we really want all of our great chefs to be making pizza?” I wondered.

1986: “Five years ago,” said Joachim Splichal, as he sadly closed Max au Triangle, “what was good in town was expensive. Since then so many interesting, less expensive places came up that people are no longer attracted to spending $120 for dinner so often.”

This was certainly the year of casual chic. Cha Cha Cha was an overnight sensation. It was the first restaurant to take Third World cooking upscale. Then Rebecca’s came along and trumped that card: In the halcyon atmosphere created by Frank Gehry’s design, trendy people from all over town found out how delicious Mexican food can be when it’s carefully made with top-of-the-line ingredients.

It was good to finally have food from south of the border being treated with respect. Still, people who cared about cuisine shook their heads over the closing of Max and worried that elegance was becoming obsolete in Los Angeles.

1987: Elegance certainly took a back seat in 1987. Yes, Citrus did open, serving the most exciting food that had come onto the scene in quite some time. But it was almost unique: The big news that year was dinermania.

It started in 1986, but by 1987 everybody seemed intent on serving us hamburgers and malts. Even people like Ma Maison’s Patrick Terrail, who opened (and then closed) the Hollywood Diner. We had downscale diners (Johnny Rocket’s), upscale diners (Kate Mantilini) and the granddaddy of diners, Ed Debevic’s. It was nice that we were all getting back to our roots, but you couldn’t help but hope that we would soon acknowledge the wonder of hamburgers--and move on.

1988: And we did. For the three big restaurants that opened this year all paid homage--in different ways--to the extraordinary food news of the last 10 years.

Pazzia acknowledged our interest in authentic Italian food--but gave it to us in a typically laid-back Los Angeles atmosphere. The food is serious and very Italian--with none of the stuffiness of owner Mauro Vincenti’s original Rex.

Fennel went back to basic French, but with a difference. Owned by four actual French chefs who fly in on a rotating basis, this is French food--served in a casually California atmosphere. The opening of the restaurant announced the birth of bicontinental cuisine--which we can expect to see a lot more of.

And DC 3 finally took American food out of the diner era. This is a boldly designed, sophisticated big-city restaurant serving fairly straightforward food. Unlike most of the American restaurants that preceded it, it is not a nostalgic copy of the past, but rather a restaurant that looks straight into the future.