Ten Years After: The Chef’s View

“No. Never. Impossible,” said the famous French chef.

“Butter you haven’t. Fresh foie gras is impossible. Game is impossible. I want fresh tarragon, fresh chervil, fresh basil. We search everywhere and do not find them. We do not find sorrel. We need port, Malaga, Madeira, Marsala. You do not have them. There are no chefs here . . . and your stoves are terrible.”

No, Denis Lahana--the chef who cooked an infamous $4,000 dinner for New York Times food writers Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey--would not consider opening a restaurant in Los Angeles. . . . At least, that’s what he told the Los Angeles Times in 1978.

Ten years ago, even some of L.A.’s staunchest defenders agreed with the East Coast-generated stereotype of Los Angeles as culinary wasteland--”the kiss of death,” said S.J. Perelman. But in 1978 things were changing.

It was the year before restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton would officially bless Los Angeles restaurants in the New York Times--she declared that L.A. restaurants had come of age.

It was the year after an important gourmand--the former chairman of the board of Standard Brand paints--had told restaurateur Piero Selvaggio that his food at Valentino was “awful.” After a trip to Italy, Selvaggio agreed and immediately started the changes that transformed Valentino into L.A.’s premier Italian restaurant (until Mauro Vincente’s Rex il Ristorante joined him at the top in 1981).

It was the year before the formation of Los Angeles’ first important restaurant run by Americans.

It was three years before Italian food would come to dominate the restaurant scene--”The French had been out in the lead only to be caught snoozing,” says La Toque chef Ken Frank.

And it was the year that the Los Angeles Times would change the way it covered restaurants: instead of a short review column called Roundabout, followed by a list of events, restaurants would receive lengthy, more thoughtful reviews.

By 1988, chef Lahana’s reaction to Los Angeles would have to be different. Butter we have. Fresh foie gras is not impossible. Even grocery stores stock fresh herbs. Good ports and specialty wines are easier to find. And these days, there are plenty of chefs-- some say too many. (The stoves, according to some chefs, are still terrible.)

In 1978, Los Angeles had fewer good restaurants than it did professional sports franchises. Continental cuisine (flaming shish kebabs, sole royale) was in its declining years, and little French restaurants were everywhere. A few from this era (Au Petite Cafe, La Guillotine, Club Elysee) were good and even experimental, but they were short-lived; most were mediocre.

“At that time restaurants had to be French or you couldn’t get any recognition,” says Wolfgang Puck, who was chef at Ma Maison in 1978.

(Even though Valentino was already serving its now familiar light cuisine with exotic ingredients, Selvaggio says his restaurant did not receive an important review until 1982.)

It was up to the French then to define the local cuisine. The late Jean Bertranou took the lack of good raw ingredients as a challenge: He started a local duck farm, grew his own herbs and imported whatever essentials he couldn’t find close at hand. “Bertranou inspired all of us who were around. Of course, now, things have gotten to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised to find someone growing candy cane-striped cucumbers locally,” says Ken Frank. He was the only prominent American working as head chef in a Los Angeles French restaurant in 1978 (at Club Elysee).

“Americans went to college and pursued careers--professional, academic, whatever--they didn’t become chefs,” says Michael McCarty who worked on Bertranou’s local farming projects and opened Michael’s in 1979.

“Chefs were thought of as cooks, and that’s all,” Frank says.

In 1979, McCarty would bring Frank to Michael’s to head the All-American toqued team of Jonathan Waxman, Mark Peel, Jim Brinkley and Bill Pflug. “It was a pioneering era 10 years ago,” McCarty now says. “When we opened, most of the established restaurants were on La Cienega or Melrose. We fixed up a trashed old building on the side of Santa Monica that in 1978 was not considered trendy, but it was all part of the program.”

The program McCarty is talking about was nothing less than the creation of what he calls the modern American restaurant.

“The food was light, and new and beautifully presented. We grilled almost everything--it was almost Oriental. But food was only a part of it.

“It was a life-style thing,” McCarty says. “Waiters weren’t in tuxedos--I had Ralph Lauren do the uniforms--and all of them were young. Menus included descriptions of the ingredients, and decor was important. There was modern art in the dining rooms and we turned the lights on--it wasn’t dark like a traditional restaurant. And it wasn’t stuffy.”

Patrick Terrail had made casual decor with serious food an accepted idea in L.A. during the early ‘70s, but Ma Maison’s Astroturf and patio chairs were simply what Terrail could afford when he first opened. McCarty didn’t have a lot of money to spend either but the interior was meticulously planned. Three years later, Barbara Lazaroff’s design for Spago, and Waldo Fernandez’s for Trumps, would take restaurant decor another step further these dramatic interiors set design standards for California restaurants to come.

“The old French restaurants had come to the end of their era--and their customers had come to the end of their own eras, too,” McCarty says.

Or as French chef Alain Dutournier put it in 1979, “These restaurants, they flame no more.”