The United States of Arugula (40 page)

The well-to-do son of a General Electric executive, McCarty fell in
love with French food and culture while spending his junior year of high school living with a family in Brittany. “They were a large Catholic family with a beach house and a little château that was nine hundred years old, but they had no money,” he says. “The count, the head of the family, had polio and was in really bad shape, and he made his money repairing TVs and radios. It was really madcap. But the way they kept their château was that they had six farmers who were sharecroppers. And when it came to events, which they had all the time, they knew how to party. It was a continuation of my parents’ life, the joy of people getting together, having a great time. So I thought that I wanted to run an operation that could provide that.”

Audaciously for a boarding-school product (he attended the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania), McCarty dropped out of college after just nine months and made his way back to France, devising his own curriculum for becoming a restaurant owner, which took the form of a whistlestop tour of Paris’s hospitality schools. In short order, he attended L’École Hôtelière de Paris, L’Académie du Vin, and the Cordon Bleu. “I lived in Paris during the first half of the seventies, which was a very timely thing, because that was right in the middle of the nouvelle cuisine revolution,” he says. “Right in front of your eyes, you could see the French changing their years of reliance on Escoffier. I knew both Troisgros brothers, Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and then the guys who were just a little older than I was, like Guy Savoy and Michel Rostaing.”

Upon his return, McCarty took a summer course at Cornell University’s hotel school—“which, if you were a graduate of a hotel school in Europe, was like a little Americanization refresher course,” he says. He spent a few years in Colorado before he followed his parents out to their new home in Malibu, where he lived while devising his plan for the ultimate French-informed American restaurant. It was during this period that he attached himself to Jean Bertranou, learning the L’Ermitage chef’s tricks and going into the duck-breeding business with him. McCarty also busied himself with trips back to Europe, where he performed such essential “research” as repeatedly visiting the eponymous restaurant of Frédy Girardet, a Swiss chef
and adjunct member of the nouvelle crew who had taken over his father’s modest bistro in a suburb of Lausanne and turned it into what many connoisseurs considered the best restaurant in the world.
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“I’d go to Girardet for a whole week,” McCarty says. “I wouldn’t work in the kitchen, I’d eat. Lunch, dinner; lunch, dinner; lunch, dinner; lunch, dinner. And through that process, I learned the restaurant business.”

In 1978, McCarty fell in love with a thirties-era residential building on Third Street in Santa Monica, on the west side of Los Angeles, that happened to have a huge backyard—ideal for putting in a garden. Approaching bank after bank, he finally found a loan officer who happened to be a foodie and enjoyed McCarty’s spiels about cooking—“He said, ‘I got a piece of swordfish at home; tell me about that sauce?’ and I knew that I had him hooked”—and he was on his way.

“Michael really had his act together—I think the term wunderkind is not inappropriate,” says Jonathan Waxman, who was one of McCarty’s first hires. As word got out among California’s restaurant community that some flashy kid was opening up a nouvelle cuisine–inspired restaurant, talented young chefs from all over started showing up at his Third Street door like wolfhounds drawn to a poodle in heat. One of them was Ken Frank, who was even more of a wunderkind than McCarty. In 1977, when he was just twenty-one, Frank had been the chef of a small restaurant called La Guillotine that spectacularly crashed and burned. It had only been open a short time when the LA critics discovered it, rhapsodizing over Frank’s langoustines in mustard sauce and sweetbreads with morel mushrooms. This inspired the foodie herds to converge on the place. La Guillotine’s owner responded to the rush by cramming in more seats and taking more reservations than the restaurant could handle, causing Frank to quit in frustration and the
Los Angeles Times’
Lois Dwan to take the extraordinary step of retracting
her earlier rave. “Restaurants should understand their own abilities and not be flattered into accepting commitments they cannot fulfill,” she wrote in a re-review that, she later conceded, helped put the restaurant out of business.

Frank made no secret of his desire to open his own place in the old location of La Guillotine. “He was biding his time,” McCarty says, “and he said, ‘I’m gonna open my own restaurant. Can I come to work for you for three, four, five months?’ And I thought it would be good to have Ken, because he knew all the purveyors in town.” Frank effectively served as the restaurant’s rocket booster, helping propel Michael’s into orbit before falling away to do his own thing; he left as planned and founded his own place in LA, La Toque, a version of which he operates to this day in Napa Valley. Waxman, who grew up in the Berkeley area, was the steadying force at Michael’s, someone who had gone to cooking school in Paris and worked at Chez Panisse during its immediate post–Jeremiah Tower era, when Jean-Pierre Moullé was running the kitchen.

At twenty-eight, Waxman was, incredibly, the oldest guy in the kitchen at Michael’s, the granddaddy of a group that also included Billy Pflug, a nutty young graduate of the Culinary Institute of America who had worked at the Boston restaurant Dodin-Bouffant; Jimmy Brinkley, who had been Bertranou’s pastry chef at L’Ermitage; and Mark Peel, who had trained under Puck at Ma Maison. (Peel followed the reverse track of Waxman, going to work at Chez Panisse
after
his time at Michael’s. Momentarily considering an alternative life to chefdom, he moved north to Davis, California, to pursue a degree in agricultural economics and worked at Chez Panisse part-time. In 1981, Peel was lured back to Los Angeles by Puck to be the chef at Spago. It was during the frenzied run-up to Spago’s opening that Peel and Spago’s pastry chef, Nancy Silverton, who had worked at Michael’s as Brinkley’s assistant, fell in love and got married.)

“In the photograph the restaurant’s PR agent circulated to the press, Michael looks more like the lead singer for a surly new rock group called The Chefs than a serious cook,” wrote Reichl in
New West
, having sniffed
out the story of the incredible new joint in the works in Santa Monica, which finally opened for business in the spring of 1979. She was right: Waxman, with his wavy mane and beard, looked like the missing Doobie Brother (he had indeed been a rock musician, playing in a band called Lynx), while Frank, with his skinny build and longish, center-parted hair, could have been Jackson Browne’s kid brother. Reichl asked their frontman, McCarty, why such gifted cooks would roll the dice on a place whose leader was so untested. “Because I’m not a fifty-year-old Frenchman who owns the restaurant and is mean,” he replied. “They’ve all been working with these crusty old bastards who treat them like assholes and don’t let them do anything creative. If you were a second or third chef in Bertranou’s kitchen and you wanted to do something, do you think he’d let you? Never. We’re doing something different here. There’s tons of room for creativity. I want to do the weirdest things.”

Looking back on this statement, McCarty says his goal was nothing less than to upend the time-tested apprentice system that old-timers like Pierre Franey and Roger Fessaguet held dear, which he found barbaric. “How brutal was the system of learning how to be a chef in France?” he says. “It was, take an unruly bunch of fifteen-year-olds, and the only way to discipline ’em is to beat ’em with spoons and shit like that. Or punish them by giving them fifty pounds of potatoes to peel. One of the things I did for the restaurant business in America was change all that.”

Indeed, the gathered cooks couldn’t believe their good fortune, even if their young boss was occasionally given to bouts of flakiness and imperiousness. “There was a lot of ego around, but it was more about how exciting it was than a we-can-do-no-wrong sort of thing,” says Waxman, who was delighted to be asked to join McCarty on one of his “research” trips to Frédy Girardet in Switzerland. With Frank there only temporarily, Waxman would have a chance to be the star for the first time, and within a couple of years was living in Malibu and commuting to work every day in his Alfa Romeo—until he bought his Ferrari.

The whole Michael’s package was seductive. The exterior and interior
walls of the 1930s house were done up in pale shades and mostly stripped of adornment—Lois Dwan thought the restaurant looked “Moorish, Bauhaus, Southern California.” The waiters wore pink prepster shirts. The paintings on the walls were by Jasper Johns, David Hockney, and Richard Diebenkorn. The silverware was by Christofle, and the plates were gigantic and white (which soon became standard practice at all fancy restaurants with “nouvelle” or “California” pretensions). The wine list, compiled by
New West’s
former wine writer, Phil Reich, was heavy on California vineyards, no small feat in 1979, when the state’s wines were only just coming into their own.
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Even more astonishingly for the era, the list was distributed to customers as a computer printout that offered an up-to-date reckoning of the cellar’s inventory.

All that aside, plenty of early reviewers were put off by what they perceived to be McCarty’s rich-kid snottiness. Bruce David Colen gave the place a reaming in
Los Angeles
(in an article headlined
MICHAEL, THROW THE GLOAT ASHORE)
, expressing disgust that, when he asked McCarty if his party might be seated at an unoccupied corner table, the proprietor responded, “Oh, no, that’s reserved for some very special friends of mine.” “Repeating the exact words cannot, however, capture the smiling condescension with which they were uttered,” Colen added. Sandra Rosenzweig, in
New West
, made fun of McCarty’s “more-perfect-than-the-French French” and wrote, “Someone has to teach the rudiments of hospitality to these very bright but rebellious teenagers.”

But there was no getting around the fact that amazing things were coming out of the kitchen: slices of charcoal-broiled lamb painted with a red currant sauce; a salad of boned, grilled squab served warm over endive and spinach with a raspberry vinaigrette; seared hot scallops served on baby
greens, with the warmth of the scallops wilting the tender leaves underneath; a grilled chicken breast stuffed with the livers of McCarty-Bertranou “mullard” ducks and covered with morels; a simple but perfectly executed crisp-skinned, juicy-inside grilled chicken, served with watercress and french fries.

“There was a French-nouvelle base, but all the barbecuing and grilling of things, that was an American sensibility,” says Waxman, for whom the grilled chicken would become a culinary signature, toted from restaurant to restaurant over the next twenty-odd years. (“That was actually a dish Michael got from Bertranou,
poulet et pommes frites
, just a traditional bistro thing,” he says.) Most of this grilling was done on charcoal made from mesquite, a hardwood native to Mexico that California chefs liked because it burned hotter than regular charcoal and imparted a sweet, slightly acidic flavor to the foods cooked over it.
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Like Chez Panisse, Michael’s put an emphasis on procuring the best possible ingredients and not getting in their way. But Waxman, a veteran of both places, differentiates between the two restaurants by saying “Alice’s approach was more intellectual, delving into old recipes and French tradition. Whereas Michael was more about the dynamic of the present, looking forward, and more American in outlook.” McCarty seconds this assessment, calling his place “a modern American restaurant” in comparison to Waters’s “nostalgic, literature, south-of-France thing.”

Among the most impressed visitors to Michael’s was Jeremiah Tower, who recalls being “choked up by seeing and sitting in the future.” He loved Waxman’s grilled chicken—“the perfect spirit of French cooking, but better than most in France could do it”—and the fact that “the waiters, the umbrellas in the open garden, the curtains, the walls, the tablecloths, were all the color of Michael’s suit—off-white toward cream.” Never a fan of Berkeley’s
mud-brown aesthetic to begin with, Tower was further dazzled by two other blanched, spare LA restaurants in this new vein, the West Beach Café in Venice, a sort of Spago-by-the-sea overseen by the young chef Bruce Marder, and Trumps in West Hollywood, the creation of a rising culinary star named Michael Roberts, whose bright ideas, like a “guacamole” made from pureed green peas, outweighed his ridiculous ideas, like a lobster salad made with pickled watermelon.

Another new booster of the LA scene was none other than Julia Child, who, reclaiming her Pasadena heritage, compared the Bay Area scene unfavorably to that of “her” Southern California. “We’re adventurous,” she told
The New York Times
in 1984. “They are a bit self-satisfied. We don’t have to worry about standards as much.”

The reporter who elicited this quote from Child, Marian Burros, didn’t take a side in the northern-versus-southern debate, but, in the same article, she attempted to codify California cuisine as she understood it, and her definition sounded more Spago-Michael’s than Chez Panisse. The cuisine’s primary characteristics, Burros wrote, were “Grilling, especially with mesquite; combining cuisines that scarcely had a nodding acquaintance before, such as Japanese and French; replacing stock-based sauces with compound butters or no sauce at all; using baby vegetables to garnish almost every plate; serving fish, chicken, squab, and quail rather than red meat; [and] elevating country food to the status usually reserved for truffles and caviar.”

WHICHEVER WAY YOU LOOKED
at California, the truth was that its most celebrated restaurants were perpetuating their own family trees just as Henri Soulé’s Le Pavillon had begotten an entire generation (or two) of great French restaurants. “He worked under Wolf”—or, alternately, “He worked under Alice”—became the new “He worked under Soulé.” The ascent of California was a mixed blessing for James Beard. On the one hand, the shift it augured toward trend-chasing and compulsive dining out ran counter to his embrace of good ol’ home cookin’ and America’s foodways. The chef and
winemaker David Page—who lifted the name of his New York restaurant, Home, from the Beard aphorism “American food is anything you eat at home”—makes the case that Beard’s slow-selling would-be masterwork, the breadbox-sized
James Beard’s American Cookery
(1972), suffered from coming along at the wrong time. “He wrote this beautiful tome on American cookery, drawing together all of these different ideas from every region of the country,” Page says, “and it got ignored because everyone was obsessed with Provence and nouvelle cuisine. It was a missed opportunity for American cuisine, and one that’s only been righted in the last ten years.”