STAR CHEFS: The Next Generation

Tim Goodell

Tim Goodell stares at the produce arrangement at the Chino Ranch farm stand like a suburban bride at Tiffany’s. Irresistible stuff, but he’s on a budget.

His wife, Liza, handed him a wad of cash and a stern warning when he left Aubergine, their little Newport Beach restaurant, that morning. Goodell has a habit of getting carried away. It wasn’t long ago that Liza was overheard complaining to customers that he spent $30 on a flat of strawberries.

But here he stands now, taking the measure of the half-dozen lettuces, gazing wistfully at walnut-sized golden and red beets, popping some English peas from their shell. “They’re pretty sweet for this early in the year,” he says. “I’m going to have to get some of those.”

So he does. All of them, in fact. There’s another couple asking about them--retirees from Rancho Santa Fe who pulled up in a big Cadillac, but Goodell just grins apologetically.

And he takes some of the beets, too. Oh, and a tray of fennel bulbs, several bunches of red-tinged spring onions, a lot of lettuce and some radishes. He asks how much all of it will be. He’s got a couple of dollars left over, so he takes the change in more onions.

Then a truck pulls up with another case of peas. Back go some of the onions, and still more peas are added to the plastic bag. By the time he’s done, he’s nearly filled the trunk of a car and spent almost every dime Liza gave him.

Aubergine looks more like a house than a restaurant, and the Goodells--he’s 31, she’s 28--act less like entrepreneurs than they do a family. But entrepreneurs they are, having over the past two years converted the place from a florists’ shop to a fairly chic little (36-seat) restaurant, largely by their own labors.

It’s that kind of attention to detail that is necessary if you’re going to “make a difference,” says Goodell, repeating it like a mantra. From fixing the plumbing to shopping for the vegetables, they are hands-on restaurateurs.

Goodell’s cooking is French-influenced, but he says he tries to keep the technique from overwhelming the ingredients. The menu changes daily, much of the produce comes from Chino Ranch and the fish is flown in from France.

“It’s all about the ingredients,” Goodell says. “It definitely makes us cook differently. I’d almost say we nurture the products we get. Like these golden beets--we just roast them in the oven and peel them afterward. That way it concentrates the flavor and preserves everything inside.

“I’ll use those with some roast John Dory tonight. After they’ve cooled, we’ll peel them and marinate them in a little bit of lemon juice and olive oil. I still have some mche left from earlier in the week, and I’ll serve that on the side.”

He also bakes all the bread, using a wild sourdough starter, and the desserts are made on premises. The wines are nicely chosen, and there’s even a pretty good cheese course. Goodell--who got his first cooking job at the age of 14 at a pizza place not far from Aubergine--graduated from the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. But he says he really learned to cook, to pay attention to ingredients, while working with Gary Danko at the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton.

“That definitely rubbed off on me,” Goodell says. “When you’re going to school, you don’t even know what a Meyer lemon is. Then, when you get into a position where people care about ingredients and search out the best things, you can’t help but pick up on it, even if you’re not that interested at first.

“There’s such a difference between someone who just goes through the motions and people who really appreciate where stuff comes from and how things are raised. In San Francisco, you can go up and see how the vegetables are raised, how the wines are made, how the lambs are raised. That’s harder to do down here.

“But we can take the morning and go down to Chino and get a feel for some good vegetables.”

Lee Hefter

Lee Hefter is so charged up he practically glows. As he bustles around the then-unfinished back kitchen at the new Spago Beverly Hills on Camden Drive, his words, in a clipped New Jersey accent, emerge so rapid-fire that they blur.

“We’ve got three walk-in refrigerators, one just for vegetables and produce, one for meat and fish, the other for dairy, cheese and pastries,” he says. “Every piece of equipment is state of the art; the design is state of the art.”

He explains why there are two lines of ranges: This way the back line can do the initial work on a dish--such as sauteing a piece of fish--and then pass it through to the front line for final touches--such as adding sauces, garnishes and vegetable accompaniments. He walks to his spot in the center of the front line and glares back through the pass-through.

“From here I can see everything in the back and the front,” he says. “I can have total control. I need that--complete focus, complete control.”

Obviously. Hefter, 29, is the executive chef at the new Spago. Not only is he supervising the most-anticipated restaurant opening in Southern California in the last five years, but Hefter says he and chef-owner Wolfgang Puck are getting ready to set the menu for American dining in the 21st century.

Never mind that this is the first restaurant Hefter has ever opened (Puck, of course, has opened a few). He’s ready to go. In fact, he’s so ready to go he has a hard time restraining himself.

“I know, it’s scary,” Hefter says. “But actually, I think I’m pretty calm about it now. I know the kind of food we can do, and I know we’ll be able to execute all of our visions, and I know we’ve assembled a great team, and I know we have a great kitchen to do it in. It’s just a question of really finding what we’re going to do that’s going to be different from what everybody else is doing.”

That’s all.

And three weeks before the April 14 opening, Hefter and Puck still had not settled on a menu; in fact, Hefter says, they’d barely talked about it.

“We’ve both got legal pads full of ideas, but we don’t have an actual menu,” he says. “The menu is the easy part. What Wolf and I have talked about is how we’re going to take what we have at [the original] Spago and move it into the new millennium.”

While they may not have agreed on specific dishes, they’ve got the vision thing down pat.

“We’re really going to focus on an elegant menu with not too many sauces, not too many reductions. It’s kind of hard to explain what we’re envisioning, but it’s sort of about the way we utilize the product itself. If I’m cooking a piece of loup de mer, I want to taste loup de mer. And if I’m cooking a rouget from France, I want to serve it simply, so people understand about rouget.

“We’ll take vegetables and make oils and infusions and emulsions and make it simple, not overworked. It will be simple, honest and fresh and take advantage of the harvest. That’s what Wolf’s whole vision is and my vision is.”

All this is a long way from the cuisine that first made Hefter fall in love with cooking--namely, New Jersey takeout Chinese.

“My mother is the worst cook in the world. And I thank her for that, because we always brought in food. I became infatuated with Chinese food because that’s what we had. Every Sunday night was Chinese food, and I loved it so much.”

So much, in fact, that at 14 he started bicycling to a local Chinese restaurant after school to wash dishes and peel vegetables. Eventually, they began to pay him. After that, he worked a series of jobs at restaurants, Chinese and otherwise, around New Jersey, eventually winding up the well-paid executive chef at a country club when he was only 21 years old.

That was when he decided he had to take a chance. “I knew I needed to learn so much more,” he says. “So when I was 231/2, I packed my bags and moved to San Francisco to work with Barbara Tropp at China Moon Cafe. She’s so passionate and such an authority on Chinese food, it drove me crazy.”

While blending Asian influences is sometimes done clumsily, with loud, over-the-top flavors, Hefter--who was executive chef at Granita in Malibu for 20 months--promises that at the new Spago, it’ll be Pacific Rim with a difference.

“We might put a little Chinese flavoring on a dish, but it won’t mask the ingredients. We have ObaChine right next door, so we don’t really need to do any Chinese cooking. But if I want to take a little ginger and lemon grass and galangal and steam some great wild Copper River salmon with it, then I think we’ll have a nice dish that’s not really Asian or French. What I’d like to do is harness the extreme freshness of the product and put it on the plate.

“It’s all about balance and passion,” he says. “Every day we’re going to put out what we believe in.”

Gino Angelini

Gino Angelini is at home, fixing salad for lunch--one, he says, much like what his mother used to fix for fieldworkers when he was growing up in Rimini, on Italy’s Adriatic Coast.

Well, it’s not exactly the same, the chef concedes as he slips a couple cloves of unpeeled garlic into a skillet to flavor the hot olive oil. Her mix of greens depended on what she found and what she grew, not what a supplier stuck in the bag. And the guanciale (pepper-cured hog jowl), slivered, sauteed with wine vinegar and served on top--hers was cured for three months to get the creamy texture that Angelini says he achieves in one week.

And OK, if you want to be picky, her salad didn’t have seared asparagus and green onions and that chicken breast--rolled in plastic wrap and slow-poached at 120 degrees for almost an hour until it has a texture more soft than tender. That’s Angelini’s, too.

But, he insists, those differences aren’t nearly as important as the similarities to the traditions of authentic Italian cooking.

“He’s always saying ‘My mother made this,’ and I’ll say ‘Not like this, she didn’t,’ ” says Maureen Vincenti, Angelini’s partner in the upcoming Vincenti and the widow of Mauro Vincenti, Angelini’s boss at downtown’s late, lamented Rex Il Ristorante. It was Mauro who brought Angelini to Los Angeles in 1995 from the Grand Hotel des Bains in Riccione, south of Rimini. At Rex, Angelini was lauded for such dishes as his long-simmered tripe and spicy all’arrabbiata sauce, studded with his homemade guanciale. Mauro Vincenti, no mean judge of pork products, once called Vincenti’s guanciale “a miracle.”

“The first time I came here, I had cooked the pasta al dente, and some customers thought it was raw. I was hurt by this, but Mauro said, ‘No problem--continue cooking the way you know how to cook and you will be successful. Don’t change.’ ”

That’s right in keeping with his own philosophy of hewing close to the food he remembers from his youth. “Always for me, the first thing is original Italian cooking. I have a lot of recipes from my mother, I have just changed them for Southern California.”

Now, with their new restaurant, Vincenti, set to open on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood in August, Angelini is having to balance authentic flavors with Westside dietary concerns. “Salads, salads, salads,” says Vincenti, sighing. “That’s what everyone asks me about.”

“Salads?” asks Angelini, stepping away from the stove. “Yes, will have salads. We will have salads with meats, salads with fish, salads with chicken, salads with . . . . “ He sounds like he’s trying to convince himself. It’s when Angelini talks about authentic Italian cooking that the responses are heartfelt and in rapid Italian.

“Always, in the Italian kitchen, the most important thing is maintaining the original ‘flower’ of the food,” he says. “That’s very important. I remember my grandmother--she would cook the duck a very long time to remove the fat; then she would cook it with just a little bit of rosemary, garlic and white wine. The intense flavors were there because they’re really very simple and very straightforward. Things aren’t mixed in with other things and complicated.”

There is a directness even to complex dishes, such as long-simmered rags, that Angelini attributes to time and material. “We always have a lot of things cooked in terra cotta,” he says. “You would place that in hot ashes; that way it would cook very slowly. In terra cotta, the flavor is more intense because it remains inside the pot.

“In Italy, we tend to eat things that are cooked longer. My mother always wants to know what’s going on when I’m cooking for her, because my cooking is so much quicker than it used to be. She always asks me, ‘Are you done already?’

“A ragu, if it didn’t cook for five hours, it just wasn’t done. And that way, you start with three types of meat, four kinds of vegetables, and when you’re done, you can’t tell them apart.” He pauses. “I suppose it’s probably not all that good for your health.”

But it’s good. It’s so good.