Napa’s adopted chef

KEN Frank -- onetime wunderkind, longtime enfant terrible of the Los Angeles restaurant world -- is alive and well (very well, thank you) in Napa Valley.

Frank, as many of you may recall, was the chef/proprietor of La Toque on Sunset Boulevard from 1979 to 1994 and, before that, he was one of the opening chefs at Michael’s restaurant in Santa Monica. A brilliant saucier, he was -- like so many good chefs -- almost as well-known for his temper as for his culinary skills. Indeed, he had so many brutal battles with his bosses at various restaurants that I always thought it appropriate that he made his first splash here at a restaurant named La Guillotine.

It was Frank, back in the ‘70s, who first introduced many here (myself included) to rare duck breast, and it was Frank who stunned the traditionalists among us back then with his all-garlic and all-truffle menus -- each ending with ice cream (garlic ice cream?). But Frank was simultaneously cocky and shy in those early years, and it took both maturity and a move to Napa Valley, where people go to restaurants to drink good wine and eat good food, not to see and be seen, for him to find both happiness and success.

Frank is 47 now, and his once rail-thin, 6-foot, 2-inch frame carries 192 pounds -- 27 more than when he opened his Rutherford restaurant four years ago and 74 pounds more than he weighed in 1981, after a six-month bout with Guillain-Barre syndrome ravaged his central nervous system and left him temporarily paralyzed “from the eyebrows down,” as he put it at the time.

But Frank still has the skin-so-soft, choirboy face he had when he burst onto the restaurant scene here in the mid-1970s. His blue eyes still sparkle with energy and enthusiasm, and he still looks so young that I was momentarily startled when he said over breakfast one recent morning in Yountville, “This is my 30th year in the kitchen, dating back to the first potato I peeled.”

Frank -- born in Whittier, raised in Pasadena -- started cooking in restaurants in Los Angeles when he was 17, two years after spending his sophomore year in high school in the 16th century walled village of Yvoire on the banks of Lake Geneva.

He fell in love with French food in Yvoire and worked there as a dishwasher and kitchen apprentice before returning home, where he quit college three months into his freshman year to work full time in restaurants.

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Frank worked in 18 restaurants in eight years here in the 1970s and ‘80s -- leaving one after the other in disputes over money or because of personality conflicts or because his high standards were incompatible with the owner’s limited budget and/or limited vision.

Early in his career, Frank threatened to kill a waiter he caught nibbling food from the plates the kitchen was sending to the dining room; when the waiter replied, “I’ll kill you first,” Frank grabbed the biggest knife he could find.

He didn’t use it, but the waiter’s two brothers owned the restaurant; unemployment soon beckoned anew.

He’s had no such problems in Rutherford, where he leases his restaurant from the adjacent Rancho Caymus Inn. The restaurant is also called La Toque, but that’s where the comparisons end.

Frank was something of a cult figure in Los Angeles in those years -- widely praised by the critics, passionately admired by the cognoscenti but largely ignored by the dining public. I first met him in 1976, when, barely 21, he was cooking at La Guillotine.

Rave reviews prompted the owner there to overbook and look for shortcuts, at which point Frank stalked out. Every time I heard he was cooking at a new restaurant, I’d make a reservation.

In time, he returned to La Guillotine. Except that it was no longer La Guillotine. It had a new name and a new owner.

Frank bought the place and changed its name again, to La Toque. But old debts, a kitchen fire, Frank’s illness and continuing financial difficulties ultimately led to Chapter 11 proceedings. These problems -- plus Frank’s cockiness -- kept him from traveling and learning much about what other chefs were doing and how contemporary cuisine was evolving. He didn’t grow as much as his fans expected, and, talented though he was, a certain sameness took hold in his kitchen -- sure death in Los Angeles, the capital of “What’s new? What’s different?”

But in Rutherford, while Frank has not suddenly become humble, he has lost some of his youthful arrogance, and he’s clearly more eager to learn and more able to travel -- and he’s never been happier or cooked better. It’s no coincidence that what he calls “my favorite new dish” -- nuggets of braised oxtail in a rich red wine sauce with wild mushrooms and a layer of Parmigiano flan -- was inspired by a recent trip to Tokyo.

Divorced, Frank remarried in June and his life in the wine country is, he says, “very, very good.”

La Toque is open only five nights a week -- closed Monday and Tuesday -- and it doesn’t serve lunch. The restaurant has just 62 seats, and the menu is always a prix fixe, six-course tasting menu, changing weekly. Basically, Frank cooks what he wants, when he wants.

“I worked 100-hour weeks most of my life,” he says. “I didn’t want that anymore, and I didn’t want what I had to deal with in Los Angeles -- people who came in and wanted everything their way ... a meal of grilled vegetables, with no sauce and no dessert and maybe a little diet soda.”

My most recent dinner at La Toque in Rutherford featured a spectacular dish of panko-crusted frogs’ legs, as well as Sonoma foie gras with broiled Hamada Farms figs; North Sea turbot with braised mushrooms and toasted leeks, and pan-roasted squab with port and green peppercorns.

The food was superb. So were the wines -- a different one with each course, paired by Frank and his sommelier, Scott Tracy, who offer their optional pairings every night, adding $45 to the $85 menu.

Frank has always enjoyed wine, but in Los Angeles, he never had the money to buy much. In Rutherford, his wine list is 18 pages long. Although it’s far from the biggest -- or the best -- in Napa Valley, it is infinitely better than what he had here.

His list features many of the big names of Napa and Sonoma -- Harlan, Dalle Valley, Diamond Creek, Araujo, Peter Michael -- as well as such French superstars as Jayer, Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, Latour, Lafite, Chateau Rayas and Zind Humbrecht.

“Scott and I taste wine together every Wednesday and Thursday from anyone who wants to come by and try to sell us their wine,” Frank says.

He laughs that familiar boyish laugh.

“I love it.”

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.