On the Rise

Cook” and “chef” are four-letter words that both start with C. Otherwise, they’re different species.

Guess which one describes Nancy Silverton. She reads cookbooks as if they were novels, and when she brings dessert to a dinner party, she carries her own ice cream maker--hand-cranked, no less. Her husband says she has the gastronomic equivalent of perfect pitch.

“Like some people have perfect pitch, some people have a perfect sense of taste, and not just about flavor but about texture and the look of a plate,” says Mark Peel, who should know. He’s the chef behind the acclaimed restaurant Campanile, which he runs with Silverton.

Silverton, in turn, has staked out her territory as the bread maven of Los Angeles and as the discriminating taster--and baker--behind La Brea Bakery. The deceptively tiny store attached to Campanile has seeded a $10 million business in a mere seven years, plying foodies from San Diego to Santa Barbara with the luxury comfort chow of the back-to-basics ‘90s--bread, 30,000 pounds of it a day.

“It’s an extraordinary thing she’s done to create this kind of luxury product out of an ordinary product, out of the commonest and most ordinary food there is,” says Mark Furstenberg, a Silverton disciple and owner of Marvelous Market in Washington, D.C. “That’s not to say her bread isn’t good, because it’s wonderful.”

Indeed, the food world is agog that Silverton has come so far despite La Brea’s sometimes exorbitant prices and word-of-mouth marketing. But Silverton’s intense will to bake may take her even farther--across the country, in fact, as La Brea experiments with special baking techniques for shipping out of Southern California.

And now Silverton has detailed recipes for 45 of her basic luxuries--as well as the odd dog biscuit and sourdough waffle--in her third and latest cookbook. “Nancy Silverton’s Breads From the La Brea Bakery: Recipes for the Connoisseur” (Villard) was written in collaboration with L.A. Times food Editor Laurie Ochoa.

One of Silverton’s not-so-secret ingredients for success is her admitted obsessive streak. This is a woman who cares so much about the “hole structure” of her loaves that her culinary compatriots have dubbed her “Her Holiness.” Silverton is the rare bird who finds the perfect loaf of bread frankly thrilling.

At the moment, however, Silverton is less than thrilled.

“You missed all the mulberries!” foodie Steve Cohen bleats as he suddenly appears before her, surrounded by the fragrant stalls of the Santa Monica Farmers Market. It’s a typical Wednesday morning for Silverton--every week she shops for Campanile, trailed by a couple of disciples who help her taste and lug. What’s not typical is the specter of a mulberry crisis.

“She was sold out,” Cohen continues. “Swear to God. Prepay for next week. I was there 30 minutes waiting. She flagged me to the front of the line, and I said, ‘I’m Jewish.’ I couldn’t do it. Guilt. By this time, I’d prepaid, so the gelt took care of the guilt.”

Silverton, 42, frowns. She weaves her way through the stalls to a white Dodge Ram parked in an alley. She plucks a small round loaf from her goodwill arsenal on wheels and takes it to the Mulberry Lady.

“If someone said, ‘What should a berry taste like,’ a Persian mulberry is what it is,” Silverton says, her Pre-Raphaelite curls tucked up in a swatch of plaid fabric.

Just not today’s Persian mulberry. Even though the berry lady is in fact out of mulberries as billed, three stragglers nestle in a small bowl, which she proffers to Silverton. She lifts one to her lips, thanks the woman and leaves.

“They’re not that good,” she says later. “They’re not ripe yet. They need another week.”

Not quite up to Silverton’s standards.

She has virtually banned commercial yeast from her bakery. She starts her crusty breads with a mixture spawned by wild yeast culled from the skins of grapes. And she blows off bakery equipment dealers trying to sell her bread-shaping machines, opting for the old-fashioned technology of human hands because it affects the taste.

“That bread is very cheap to produce because you’re constantly turning out bread,” Silverton says. “We can only turn out bread once a day. And that’s why a lot of it is very costly, and it’s also hand-shaped, which is also very costly.”

Perhaps too costly? Furstenberg, who apprenticed at La Brea, admires Silverton’s methods but is in awe of her prices.

“What is unique about Los Angeles is La Brea has stood alone in that city and has dominated the [upscale] market,” he says. “And what is also unique in Los Angeles is the prices La Brea charges seem fantastic to those of us in the baking business. The prices are beyond comprehension to the rest of us.”

Competitor Il Fornaio, the San Francisco-based restaurant and bakery chain, agrees. “They have an excellent product, but their breads are extremely expensive,” says director of marketing Michael Mindel. “To charge $5 for a loaf of bread is pretty much inconceivable.”

Mindel also disputes La Brea’s dominance over the Southern California market for artisan-style bread. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were bigger than we are in terms of total volume, but with [Il Fornaio’s] 500 accounts we wouldn’t concede the dominant brand identity to them.”

Silverton agrees that La Brea breads can call for top dollar, but she says you get what you pay for. La Brea’s prices start at $3.50 for a country white, and zoom up to a lofty $9 for a desserty fruit-and-nut bread.

“I think they’re right that they’re really high,” she says somewhat disarmingly. “What’s expensive is our specialty breads as opposed to wheat-flour breads. We’re talking about fruit-and-nut breads--pecans, raisins, currants, sour cherries, candied orange rind and white raisins. There’s so much fruit and nut in there we make no money off a bread like that.”

Of course, aficionados can now make their own fruit-and-nut bread from a blueprint in Silverton’s new cookbook, which lifts the lid on every baked thing from a simple white sandwich to her notorious chocolate cherry. The fact that she has been so open about her recipes amazes some people.

“When has it ever been a good thing to not share something that helps everybody? A lot of people have because they felt it wasn’t smart business, but I didn’t really see it that way,” Silverton says. “[Bread-making] is a tradition that was dying even in France.”

Silverton has also spread the word by opening her bakery doors to burned-out neurosurgeons and other grown-ups looking for a second career, who have gone on to open their own bakeries in D.C., Chicago and Atlanta. She used to give admirers free clumps of her starter, although she now encourages people to make their own.

You might call Silverton a food ecologist, helping to save a once-endangered species of edibles. She’s considered among a half-dozen of the country’s most influential bakers, mostly in California and New York, who have recently taken bread to new heights.

“Nancy’s operation is a very, very good one, and she happens to be one of the more progressive operators in realizing that you can turn out larger quantities of high-quality bread,” says Ed Lee, editor of the trade monthly Modern Baking. “That’s why she’s more recognized.”

*

Silverton had more than drive behind her. She was lucky enough to be in the right industry at the right time, coming of cooking age in the restaurant-mad ‘80s. Silverton was there at the dawning of some of L.A.’s great restaurants--Michael’s and Spago.

This, despite a somewhat inauspicious beginning--the specialties of her Los Angeles youth were fried bologna and sauteed canned potatoes with paprika. The daughter of successful lawyer and real estate entrepreneur Larry and former “General Hospital” writer Doris, Silverton grew up with a limited culinary repertoire.

Then she fell in love. “When I moved up to Sonoma State [College], I lived in the dorms. I decided there was a guy there who I was madly in love with, and he was cooking in the dorm kitchen, running the vegetarian food program. So I told him I was a vegetarian, which I wasn’t, but I loved to cook--actually I’d never cooked before--and I’d love to help in the kitchen.”

She dropped out of college in her senior year, signed up for the Cordon Bleu course waiting list in London and knocked on the door of the 464 Magnolia restaurant in Marin County, where she offered to work for free.

But she soon decided there were riper opportunities in Los Angeles. So in the late ‘70s, she knocked on another door, this time, a new Santa Monica restaurant named Michael’s. After a brief stint operating the computer ordering system, she happened upon the first leg of her baking journey--head chef Jonathan Waxman recruited her, initially against her wishes, to make pastries.

She soon vowed never to return to entrees. And even though she sharpened her sweet craft at the Gaston LeNotre school outside Paris, she never considered baking bread professionally.

Until she hit Spago’s kitchen. Wolfgang Puck recruited her as a pastry chef when he opened his iconic West Hollywood restaurant in 1982. Silverton came recommended by one of her Michael’s co-workers, new Spago chef Mark Peel, now 41.

Shortly before the restaurant opened, their friendly relationship took an even friendlier turn. When an intruder climbed into Silverton’s window one night, Peel, who lived across the street, was summoned by her screams.

Despite marathon hours at Spago, she and Peel managed to squeeze in some relationship time. Their daughter, Vanessa, now 13, was born a year later.

Still, Spago was so demanding that the couple didn’t manage to marry until Vanessa was 1 1/2 years old. It happened on a 1984 trip to Truckee for a cooking course in the Sierra--natch.

The couple stopped in the Little Chapel of the Flowers in Reno and plunked down $50 for their nuptials. Their only present was a complimentary gift package of samples--a box of Tide, mouthwash, Tampax and a certificate for two free cocktails at the airport lounge. “We never got to that bar, but little emergencies would come up over the years, and we would need that sample box of laundry detergent,” Peel says.

By 1985, the couple had made their mark on the L.A. cooking map, prompting Maxwell’s Plum owner Warner Leroy to lure them to New York to revamp his menu. Even though Silverton still hears the big city’s siren song and thinks about retiring there, they stayed less than a year. Customers balked at wholesale menu changes.

The pair decided to open their own restaurant, so they moved back to Los Angeles for its sumptuous produce. While they were scouting possibilities, they returned to Spago. Puck, unhappy with the bread available in Los Angeles, urged Silverton to bake on-site for the restaurant. She whipped up an olive bread at his request--now one of her star breads--and learned to shape dough with the help of a grain mix Puck had discovered.

“I think she’s fantastic,” he says. “Whatever she puts her head into will be successful because she loves what she does.”

Meanwhile, Silverton and Peel were investigating a site for their restaurant on Melrose Avenue. The building was owned by “Catwoman” Julie Newmar, but the deal was not meant to be. “Apparently Mercury was in retrograde,” Silverton says, “and she was unable to do any business for the next week.”

That gave fate the window to send Silverton’s mother down La Brea Avenue, where she happened upon a funky building with a for-lease sign and a fake Moorish tower. The 1927 complex built by Charlie Chaplin’s ex-wife Lita Grey housed a Korean massage parlor, artists’ lofts and the Larchmont Chronicle’s offices. What’s more, it was larger than the Melrose site.

Thank God for Mercury. If it hadn’t been so fussy, there might not have been a La Brea Bakery.

*

Starting from scratch, Silverton perfected a batch of breads--country white, rye, walnut, olive and a baguette. And in January 1989, La Brea Bakery opened its doors, followed by Campanile five months later.

That meant the couple rarely closed theirs. For the first four years, the family lived upstairs from the restaurant and the Peel brood--Vanessa and Ben, 11--were never far from their constantly working parents. (Oliver, 2 1/2, has since joined the family.)

“For the most part, Benny and Vanessa were raised at the restaurant,” says Silverton’s lifelong friend, Margy Rochlin. “And I’ve been there where you’ll see this flash of nightgown or PJ and it will be a kid coming to talk to them.”

Silverton had a vision of the kind of bread she wanted--a combination of the sourdoughs produced by the pioneering Acme Bakery in Berkeley and Poilane of Paris, as well as the crusty ethnic breads she had savored in New York.

“At that time there was so little available on sourdough bread-making that on the one hand, I had no sources to turn to to help me. But I had no sources that told me that I couldn’t do certain things, so I did everything.”

She read manuals explaining the intricacies of yeast and water and the effect of heat on bread. She grilled the flour salesperson about over-mixing. Then she closed her books and “started to fool around.” One of her first discoveries was that despite her attempt to master the art of French baking, overseas baguettes didn’t necessarily translate to California.

At French baking school, “I said, ‘Oh, great. I love this baguette.’ So I came back here, made this baguette using our flour, and it was just vile.”

In the early years, Silverton would go to bed at 6 p.m., awake at midnight, run downstairs to bake and grab a nap at 8 in the morning before overseeing Campanile all afternoon.

“For three years I didn’t know what time of day it was, what day it was, who was where. And you know what it’s like when you take afternoon naps, those weird dreams that you have? I mean every single day. It was just very hard on me for the first three or so years, really hard.”

Meanwhile, the upstairs living quarters were tight, and it was tough on the young Peels having to tiptoe so as not to disturb the diners below with the patter of their little feet. So the family moved to Hancock Park.

And as La Brea expanded, the bakery moved as well in 1992, to a cavernous space 10 times the size of the old one. La Brea’s 20,000-square-foot facility is five minutes away on Washington Boulevard. The first batches of bread were disastrous.

“I learned a very big thing. When you change the environment you’ve got to change the method in which you make your bread. Anyway it took me a good six weeks to get the bread back on track.”

After six months, Silverton weaned herself from going to the Washington Avenue facility because it was too tricky straddling two locations. Now the first thing she does every day is walk from the parking lot to the retail bakery to “read” the bread. If anything doesn’t look right, she gets on the phone to head baker George Erasmus.

“I know what I want and that’s what I expect,” Silverton says crisply.

So does Manfred Krankl, who manages the wholesale bakery, supervising the 180 bakers, truckers and others who work round the clock to produce enough La Brea bread to supply 350 bakeries, supermarkets and restaurants.

As for Silverton and Peel, they watch over Campanile, Silverton by day and Peel by evening. The couple share a taste for food that’s “not meant to impress, that’s very simple, food based in tradition that we would serve you if you were coming to our house for dinner,” says Silverton, who wears her lack of pretension well, favoring men’s undershirts and loose pants.

Working together is predictably stressful. “Most people have a separation,” says the athletic-looking Peel. “You can be having a really bad day at work and you leave it behind. Usually when I’ve had a bad day at work, Nancy is involved, and we have a bad day at home. It’s one day at a time.” Sunday is their only day of rest--when they’re not working benefits or special events.

Silverton’s dedication--and uncompromising palette--may eventually have an impact farther afield. La Brea is experimenting with sending parbaked bread--partly cooked and then frozen--to restaurants in San Francisco and Las Vegas. With that technology, La Brea could become a national brand.

And if it does, don’t expect Nancy Silverton to become the Mrs. Fields of bread. She finds the idea of being a celebrity chef frankly distasteful.

“The way the food business is now, people can say when they’re 18 years old, ‘Let’s see, do I want to be an actor or do I want to be a chef? I will be able to achieve equal notoriety.’ When I started cooking, which was in 1972, it wasn’t a prestigious field. People might say, ‘Someday I want to be an owner of a restaurant and I want to travel everywhere and I want to be a celebrity.’ But that’s not why I got into this business.”

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Nancy Silverton

Age: 42

Native?: Yes. Born in Sherman Oaks, now lives in Hancock Park.

Family: Married to chef Mark Peel, 41. They have three children--Vanessa, 13, Ben, 11, and Oliver, 2 1/2.

Passions: Good food, travel, New Yorker magazine and life as a restaurant owner and parent.

On the true soul of bread: “I think the only breads that are the for-real breads are just made with wheat flour or rye flour. Not the chocolate sour cherry and not the fig anise, although these are classic breads. The true baker makes just a bread with wheat flour where you can really taste that person’s craft.”

On Sundays with the Peels: “Because we’re so preoccupied all week, we don’t make plans for it, which is sometimes a mistake because we’ll all get up, and if nobody’s feeling inspired, before you know it, it’s 2 o’clock and all you’ve done was prevent the kids from fighting too much.”

On the demands of the restaurant business: “It’s a tough business, really tough. You give so much of your life and your sanity away.”