Tomorrow, The World

Used to be, if you wanted to be a chef, the path was fairly straightforward. You begged to be allowed entry into a working kitchen, you slaved and learned, slaved and learned. After years of being too poor to eat anywhere but at work, you might advance in the ranks. Someday, if you were lucky and hard-working and imaginative and perhaps bold, you would find yourself the head of your own kitchen--maybe even owner of the restaurant.

Then you would do your magic and, if all the elements fell into place--if your decor pleased the senses and the food was up to snuff and in line with current tastes; if you were located where the rents weren’t prohibitive, the local business ordinances not too restrictive--customers from your city would flock, and your reputation would grow. If everything was clicking, positively humming along (Your Restaurant’s Name Here) would be a must for anyone who lived in or was visiting (Your Town’s Name Here)

Today, a chef’s life can be much more complex. It might not be enough to feed the town. With the onslaught of cable and satellite television, carrying a food channel as well as cooking shows on the Discovery Channel and PBS, today it might just be your desire to feed the world.

Witness Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken.

Starting in 1981 with City Cafe, a tiny restaurant on Melrose Avenue, these two have survived rocky economies and civil unrest and emerged as two of the hottest celebrity chefs on the national food scene. They have a popular radio show, an active Web site (one of the first restaurant Web sites in existence), a CD titled “Cocktail Hour,” a line of gourmet dried chiles that can be used in many of the recipes from their four briskly selling cookbooks, two cooking shows that are available to 30 million viewers many times daily, and plans for multi-location signature restaurants.

In an industry with a nasty divorce rate, they have survived a 16-year partnership spent finishing each other’s sentences and traveling the world. And in a town not known for praising famous women, a town where success breeds either fawning or hopeful animosity, everyone loves the Too Hot Tamales.

At this moment they are on the fourth floor of the L.A. Mart in downtown Los Angeles, in a room large enough to accommodate a good-sized senior prom, rushing. There isn’t a sense of panic, merely a fast-paced, complicated choreography that includes perhaps a dozen people. They are preparing a presentation for the well-behaved mob--owners of gift-basket companies and fine-food shops from around the country--waiting outside the ballroom. It is just before 1 in the afternoon; the line of conventioneers started forming at 10. Susan Feniger scans the table laid out on a stage, a makeshift kitchen--too close to show time, there appears to be an absence of garlic.

Feniger, 44, is the smaller of the two, the one with darker hair, a brasher countenance, seemingly louder--the one with the more pronounced Midwestern accent. She assesses the problem with that constant state of distraction particular to busy empresses. So much to do, so little time.

An assistant is dispatched to retrieve from the adjacent service kitchen a bowl containing a small mound of peeled garlic cloves. These are placed on the table with bowls, cups and platters filled with, among other things, olive oil, chopped Roma tomatoes, diced red onion, cotija cheese, cilantro, rock shrimp, fish stock, limes, Italian parsley, fresh cactus paddles, ancho and serrano chiles.

Feniger’s partner, Mary Sue Milliken, 39, emerges from backstage, tying an apron around her waist. She is the one with blond hair in a sensible bob cut, the one who smiles a lot. There’s a distracted focus about her. She climbs up onstage and the two make last-minute preparations, sharpening knives, placing hand towels on their persons, just so. It’s like watching Troy Aikman and Deion Sanders in the Dallas Cowboys locker room, minutes before the game--taping their ankles, adjusting the tightness of a shoe’s laces. There are rituals involved here, instinctual preparations. Each woman produces a list, against which the ingredients are triple-checked.

Someone reminds everyone that it’s a quarter after 1. Feniger and Milliken unconsciously draw a deep breath, in unison, and together exhale. The matter of whether to be on or off the stage as the crowd files in is briefly discussed, and the decision is made to enter after the crowd does. While only a demonstration, this is, after all, a show, and there are expectations for shows, roles for the audience and certain conduct becoming the stars.

After the two are safely offstage and out of view, the doors to the ballroom are opened and 200 assorted people file in and take their seats. They are made to wait an additional five minutes to let anticipation build. When Feniger and Milliken finally are introduced, they enter and take the stage to thunderous applause.

The Too Hot Tamales are getting used to applause and are at home with the idea they have fans. They’ve published four cookbooks, including “City Cuisine”; “Cantina,” part of a Sunset books series titled “Casual Cuisines of the World”; “Mesa Mexicana”; and “Cooking With the Too Hot Tamales,” a tie-in to their show on the TV Food Network. (A new show, “Tamales World Tour,” premiered in September.)

Their two shows run four times daily on weekdays and twice a day on weekends. To date there have been about 250 episodes. It’s almost as though whenever one tunes into the Food Network, these two women are there, explaining the mysteries of cooking to anyone who listens. Together, they have covered more terrain of the Latin American food landscape than anyone had thought possible--shows dedicated to Oaxacan Barbecue, marrow, pig’s feet, kidneys, an all-mint menu. (Toward the end of the last run of shows, programs included the “Liver Lovers” episode and an entire segment devoted to offal.)

At 1:30 p.m. at the L.A. Mart, Milliken is cheerfully talking up the virtues of cactus, dismissing its okra-like gooey-ness. She’s holding a paddle of cactus and describing the process by which the needles are removed (tweezers), turning it into a salad ingredient. Feniger, chopping and seeding tomatoes for the red rice, chimes in whenever it strikes her. That their speech tends to overlap seems to bother no one, including the stars themselves. It is, as they say, their way.

There is no small amount of friendly bickering and teasing; Milliken usually bears the brunt of Feniger’s humor. They could be roommates or sisters. Though both are classically trained chefs and skilled practitioners, they exude no sense of superiority. Rather, their approachability might be the secret to their success, the element that separates them from the legion of celebrity chefs with television shows, cookbooks, food and product lines. They exhibit a patience, a palpable love for their work.

From the outset, the audience is encouraged to ask questions, which they do, in the process interrupting the show. Milliken is asked about the best way to cut an onion to avoid tears. She hasn’t a clue, really. She and the audience swap homespun strategies, including keeping a piece of bread in your mouth while you chop, or not breathing in through your nose, or running the tap water near the chopping block. While Feniger chops onions (they do, after all, have only 50 minutes to prepare three dishes, and while one talks, the other has to get down to business), Milliken tells us about a food scientist she once spoke with on this very subject.

“He said that the onion has a self-defense mechanism that emits molecules when it’s cut,” she tells us. “And these molecules are attracted to water, so I guess the tap-water theory could work. It would explain the crying--the molecules going straight for the water in your eyes. But I always wondered, he said it was a self-defense mechanism. And, I mean, what’s an onion worried about?”

Laughter from the audience. The two continue to talk and joke, chopping and blending and sauteing. Mouth-watering aromas fill the giant room. Feniger instigates a discussion of chiles that consumes 10 full minutes of the presentation, not unintentionally. Chiles are passed around for the audience to touch, to smell--the same chiles that the Too Hot Tamales feature in their new product line, essential ingredients to many recipes in their cookbooks--four-packs of which will be available for mass-order in the meet-and-greet session directly following this presentation.

Minutes later, the food is passed around. And yes, the cactus is gooey, but it’s good. The rock shrimp, cooked almost crunchy with garlic and lime and ancho chiles, are delicious, and, as we have all just seen, not all that difficult to make.

And so another 200 people--this time purveyors of fine food in tiny shops around the country, in mail-order gourmet food catalogs, in gift basket companies, are hooked. Another battle won in the effort to feed the people of the Earth.

*

It is difficult to imagine the two apart, as separate entities with different lives. They each started cooking in high school, Milliken in Michigan, Feniger in Ohio, after which they slaved and learned in various restaurants in the Midwest.

The two met in 1978 in Chicago, where they were the first women to work in the kitchen of Le Perroquet. Feniger came out to California in 1979 to work with Wolfgang Puck at Ma Maison. The next year, they met again in France. At the time, Milliken was working at Restaurant L’Olympe in Paris and Feniger at L’Oasis on the French Riviera. In 1980, Feniger got a letter from Puck saying that he was leaving Ma Maison to open Spago, asking her to join his staff there. But she had other plans.

She came back to L.A. in 1981 to help some friends--Barbara McReynolds, Gai Gherardi and Margo Willits--who had opened a small cafe next to their burgeoning business, L.A. Eyeworks. A few months later, Milliken joined Feniger. And six months after the opening of Spago--a benchmark in the history of American cuisine--the two were running the City Cafe on a stretch of Melrose that was quite different than it appears today. The boutiques were few and far between, the rents weren’t yet astronomical and the street had years to go before it would be a destination unto itself. There, in less than 1,000 square feet, with the help of their partners at L.A. Eyeworks and a coterie of local investors, Feniger and Milliken began what has become, in essence, an industry.

“We were doing it off a hot plate,” Feniger says. “And we did everything out of that tiny little kitchen--all the food, all the pastries. And we had a hibachi outside on the ground in the parking lot.”

Milliken laughs, remembering, though considering the press coverage the two have received over the past 16 years, she’s probably retold this story 100 times. “We’d get an order for grilled fish, and one of us would run up the stairs and out to the parking lot and grill the fish and come back down. And the health inspector would come out sometimes, routinely checking, and ask, ‘What’s the hibachi for?’ ”

The cafe, with 35 seats, soon served 150 dinners per night. Waiting lines stretched into the street. The two chefs were acquiring a reputation in a city fast becoming the center of a revolution in American cuisine. What started in 1971 in Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in Berkeley was evolving into nouvelle cuisine, with an emphasis on food’s natural flavors--dispensing with heavy butter and cream in favor of fresh herbs and smaller portions. Chefs such as Wolfgang Puck, Ken Frank, Michel Richard, Michael Roberts and Joachim Splichal were making waves and changing L.A.’s tastes and were becoming famous countrywide. There was a heightened interest in food, an interest approaching frenzy. L.A.’s top restaurants were packing them in, each kitchen capable of having a segment of the population buzzing, clamoring for reservations.

In that atmosphere, Milliken and Feniger embarked on what would become that rare restaurant that defines a certain time, a certain place. In 1985, in what had been a carpet store, they opened City Restaurant. The name that they had made for themselves--and the patch of culinary territory their work on Melrose assured--caught the attention of the people at KCET, who invited them to be the subjects of a documentary on the opening of a restaurant.

“That’s how naive we were,” Feniger says. “PBS calls us about doing a documentary, and we said, ‘We’re too busy.’ ”

“It was really nice,” Milliken says, overlapping. “We both look like we’re 14 years old. There’s one scene where we weren’t getting our [health] inspections on time . . . .”

Milliken covers her face with her hands. All these years later, it still makes her uncomfortable. And Feniger finishes up. “We didn’t want to be bothered, but we finally said OK.”

With 125 seats in 5,000 square feet and a kitchen they built from scratch, these two women served 400 dinners a night and dispensed food that seemed to offer something for everyone. On one hand, their menu effectively represented a sampling of the many ethnic cultures that make up L.A., from Indian and Thai to Chinese, Mexican and Korean. On the other hand, they didn’t so much reinvent or reinterpret American food but brought to it a deep knowledge of the ingredients and how to best prepare them.

Diners became fans, as loyal as fans of movie stars or sports heroes, because in those days, most of La Brea Avenue was not a restaurant destination. It was a place one came with a brochure that needed typesetting, or to shop for a new car.

“Unlike most women at the time, they weren’t practicing a cuisine de mere,” says Ruth Reichl, at the time restaurant critic of The Times. “It was not just refined home cooking, food you’d expect to get in a mother’s kitchen. These were technically well-trained chefs, doing the kind of cooking that, until then, only men were doing. And they had a sympathy for non-European food. They did Third World cooking in a professional way. They’d been to Mexico and they’d been to India, and they came back and were doing things with ethnic food--incorporating spices and ingredients that were virtually unused until then in American cooking--it was amazing. It was important work and worth doing and worth knowing about.”

The restaurant was designed by architect Josh Schweitzer (“an old friend” is how Feniger describes her then ex-husband, now married to Milliken) with spare lines and soaring head space. City had no art on the walls. They had nothing against art per se, but in its absence the focus was on the plates, the chairs and the individual spice platters at every table. The functioning of the restaurant and the newness and general excellence of the food were the real show.

“Typically you get these restaurants that are trendy-looking but they don’t have good food--or they have really great food but they’re kind of stuffy and pretentious,” says Sean MacPherson, owner of some of the city’s more fashionable bars and restaurants, including Bar Marmont and El Carmen. “But at City you had the best of both worlds.”

The old City Cafe on Melrose became Border Grill in 1985. In 1990, Feniger and Milliken and their partners then opened another Border Grill on then-untrendy 4th Street in Santa Monica. The Grills were successful, but City was their flagship. However, that which defines a time is necessarily vulnerable to changing times, and during the economic downturn of the early ‘90s, after nine big years, the customers thinned out. The 1992 riots struck just down the street. People ate out less often. The food revolution quieted down, moved to New York and stayed.

In 1991, Feniger and Milliken split with their L.A. Eyeworks partners, who got the Border Grill on Melrose, while Feniger and Milliken kept City and the Santa Monica Border Grill. With profits at an all-time low, the responsibility of running two large restaurants became more than they could handle, and in 1994, Feniger and Milliken closed City in order to, they said, focus on the Santa Monica Border Grill. It seemed then that their empire was crumbling, or at least shrinking down to a manageable size. Certainly they had no aspirations to feed the masses.

Then, in 1995, the still-young TV Food Network invited Milliken and Feniger to do the show “Chef du Jour.” They were an instant sensation. Mail flooded the network offices, and they were offered their own show, paid for by the Food Channel. While the two chefs were well-known among foodies in the West and restaurateurs nationwide, it wasn’t until the debut of “Too Hot Tamales”--the moniker chosen by Feniger and Milliken--the following year that they became available in millions of homes across the nation.

If that sounds like a lot, if it sounds as though they can now afford to stay out of the kitchen, the two say it isn’t so. They’re not going to quit their day jobs. A cable network show is not prime-time television. Yet they love teaching, and it gives them and their restaurant great exposure, but they like working in that kitchen.

*

That kitchen is where Feniger and Milliken are most comfortable being seen. Feniger lives in Santa Monica, close to the Border Grill, and Milliken lives with her husband and their son in Mid-City, in the converted Aloha Swim School redesigned by Schweitzer.

They are very much celebrities in that they navigate the waters of what is personal and what is business very well. When they speak, little is revealed about spouses, children or outside interests. They talk about their work.

And their work gets them around. They travel to New York several times a year to tape their shows, shooting as many as six a day. Their appearance at the L.A. Mart show was but one of many such guest shots in cities as spread out as Honolulu, Chicago, New York, Dallas and Miami. The two are active on the L.A. benefit circuit, most recently having catered the L.A. Outfest, and host “Good Food,” a show on public radio station KCRW, on Saturdays at 11 a.m.

On a recent Thursday, in the distinctly collegiate KCRW studios on the campus of Santa Monica College, a few minutes drive from the Border Grill (where, when you call and are put on hold, you’ll hear this week’s segment of “Good Food” piped in), the two chefs interviewed an odd variety of people. Included were professor Peter Eneroth, speaking by telephone from Sweden about his new energy drink, Majik, made from the South American guarana plant, a natural source of caffeine, and Chicago Tribune food and wine columnist Bill Rice, who has written a new book on beef titled “The Steak Lovers Cookbook” and who bemoans “the avalanche of pasta” that has consumed the country.

Next, with the band in an adjacent studio playing so loud it bleeds through the walls, causing the engineer to scramble to adjust volume levels and filters, a food scientist with a new book from William Morrow talks for 10 minutes about baking, the precision needed, the right amounts of eggs and flour, protein to set the structure, and sugar and fat, the tenderizers to wreck that structure. After that comes Dave Lustig, a home winemaker, and the chefs pepper him with questions about the hows and whens while sampling his wares. (Here Feniger takes the opportunity to joke about Milliken, telling us that if Mary Sue made her own wine, she would save a lot of money.)

A woman calls in from the Santa Monica Farmers Market, telling us what’s good and passing on a little wisdom about melons--persimmon, musk, cantaloupe. There is a quiz, and when it’s over, they stay to tape a promo, all the while looking as though they are genuinely having fun.

Their day doesn’t end there. In another hour they’ll be at their Santa Monica restaurant, supervising the kitchen staff, milling about on the floor, stopping at tables to say hello. They are hands-on owner-operators, on the premises four or five nights a week, periodically teaching cooking classes there during the day.

They do have ambitious plans for expansion, tempered with a distinct lack of hubris. “We opened Border Grill with the concept of doing eight or 10 of them,” Feniger says, “and then the economy dropped, and we made the decision to close City, and everything sort of went on hold.” She’s sitting at the Border Grill at 5 in the afternoon, in front of a table positively laden with fresh tamales, chicken panuchos, bowls of ceviche, brightly colored and freshly made tortilla chips and three kinds of salsa, the likes of which one seldom sees in the average Mexican restaurant. “We still feel like Border Grill is a great concept to do, and now we’re looking at doing maybe four or six of them. Beyond that, we don’t have any big desire to do 50 of them and go public. We don’t know where it’s going to go.”

Right now, Border Grill is a limited partnership. Feniger and Milliken decline to name their investors (the restaurant, they say, is not about the investors), mentioning only that they are local, and as for celebrities, they have their share. The investors and others from City have maintained their interest in backing any expansion.

“It’s about the people,” Milliken chimes in. “If, for some reason, we don’t have the right people to grow faster, we’ll grow slower.”

“One of the most rewarding things about these restaurants is to feel like you’re maintaining a very high quality of food and that you’re known for that,” Feniger says. “It’s a challenge. Maybe you can do that with 20 or 30 locations. I don’t know.”

The two chefs are currently in negotiations to open restaurants in downtown Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Milliken says she would love to open one in London. And they’ll soon start searching for a new location to open an updated version of City.

There doesn’t seem to be any hysteria. It’s not that it isn’t a priority; it’s that they aren’t insane about the proposed expansion. The two maintain their busy schedule --touring to promote their cookbooks and expanding food line, taping shows in New York, scouting locations for new Border Grills, researching subjects for their radio show, testing recipes, updating their Web site--all with a marked lack of self-congratulation. There is dedication, sure. There is a love for what they do. But there is no evidence of having given up anything in exchange for their fame and success. Doing well is a natural thing to them, an expected consequence of their work.

Which is still very much rooted in the restaurant experience itself. At the end of the interview, the two of them begin to go about their night’s work. Feniger stops by a table and talks to k.d. lang. Milliken autographs a cookbook for some fans seated across the room. Feniger checks the progress of orders coming into the kitchen. It’s getting dark outside. The tables begin to fill.

Time to feed the world.