Says that “The restaurant business is changing beyond recognition” and “Blame technology, inflation and customers’ shifting habits.”

Is technology eating its children?

The article that has been showing up daily for a week. Must be serious. Certainly social media is filled noe with all the closings going in in the U.S.A.

I am not sure what good blame does or how informative and useful it is.

I do know however, that the expense, corporate or restaurant group feel and vibe, and the changing mores and habits and practices of friendly hospitality (no oxymoron there), have dampened my once spontaneous, spur of the moment, leaving my house for a restaurant.

“Do you have a reservation?” as the first and often Marine corps sergeant-major greeting at the door.

Is a bit rough.

‘Good afternoon and welcome to Stars, how may I help you” is what I used to say when I was working the door. That leaves it wide and friendly open for the customer to say ‘I have a reservation (or not) and my name is…’

I had already read the names on the list a few times, not so that I could remember it, but so when I heard a name, I would remember having seen it.

As for technology, don’t blame it, and don’t slavishly follow it. Has the restaurant owner had no part in the website and promotional videos except to send to the website creator that the group uses? And if not art of a group, have you given any of your individual input?

How many times do I have to see wine poured int a glass as part of the ‘who we are’ information on a website (if there is one an not Facebook). I assume your staff knows that or else why do I want to go there?

If I am interested in going to a hotel or restaurant the first thing I do is to use technology to see what it actually is. For a restaurant, what kind of food (menu and photos) and how much it costs. For a hotel what are the services (do they have full room service?) and how much for my dog to spend the night?

I each case, however, I am faced the website’s first image big with “BOOK NOW.”

Book what, is what I want to know.

This magazine had an article this week “Restaurants Have Disappeared from Parque Santa Lucia.”

Parque Santa Lucía sits at Calle 60 and Calle 55, Centro, Mérida, about three blocks north of Plaza Grande and dates to 1542, the year of Mérida’s founding.

“A palm-fringed plaza where a popular dance event called the Yucatan Serenade has been held on Thursday nights for decades. And dining at Mexican cantinas, Italian trattorias, and Argentinian grill restaurants. “

That was until recently. Hence the magazine article.

What it once looked like. And when I first saw it in 2005 (different cars).

I could not see inside behind the boarded up rooms, but since I am a sucker for arches, I lusted after what I knew would be a prefect restaurant setting. And I was told I would have to deal with the City.

That was a bucket of ice water.

Then after a few years here I saw this.

I knew I had missed the moment and was secretly relieved. My original lust had turned to mere infatuation.

As the magazine says, “That slowly changed as the Centro flourished with a full-scale restaurant boom. First came La Tratto, which seemed groundbreaking in 2013. Every new restaurant or coffee shop seemed more polished than we were accustomed to seeing in Centro.”

With dining in the park.

And dancing.

The photo from this week’s magazine article show this.

What happened?

For a few years the first restaurant, Pizzeria La Tratto, was my regular twice a week. They had a wood fired oven and Heineken on draft.

Very successful.

And then it was taken for granted by its operators. The manager using his or her laptop at the bar, having lunch, and during peak lunch hours. Nothing could be more kiss of death than that.

Blame

On the loss of customers.

Everything from Sargassum on the Caribbean beaches cancel the tourists on their way their through Merida. And to the too hot to visit Chichén Itzá.

As well as its commercialization and rules against climbing the pyramid.

One of its greatest pleasures was getting to the top, turning around, looking back down, and then being way too scared to move.

Almost like opening a restaurant.

Many times, in the past 25 years I have been asked what makes a restaurant great. And many times, I answered: “the customer.”

For when I opened my restaurants, I was tired of the ubiquitous “the customer is always right” because it is not true. I had this document to hand out to the staff. Here is a small piece of it, and what is true is that:

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS GREAT - or to be treated as such.

Consistency: Not a case of nothing changes – rather make the things that count remain the same. This does not include the menu.

Energy: The feeling that the place is alive with ‘something,’ that someone is watching every component of the business. Nothing is assumed. Every murmur from the customer is amplified and acted upon. No mistake is repeated. A restaurant is a living thing – stop feeding it and it will die. The customer wants to be part of this energy and commitment.

(I always waited until we were full before I had a busser drag the step ladder with me to the burned out bulb on the wall to change it. High drama that we cared).

Ideas aplenty: Can anyone see that the restaurant is driven by people who constantly observe trends, and understand their place in the history of food and service, in the U.S.A. and around the world? Nothing should be forced: let their ideas that become naturally part of the energy. All changes should have the customers in mind, not the ego of the people driving the ideas.

Value for money: The restaurant needs to find every ounce of profit, but remember the customer has a finite amount to spend. The best food and drinks in town for the average prices. And always VALUE.

Community awareness: Know the customer, when to entertain and when to leave alone. Support the community by knowing who they are, knows their names and needs, and stay involved.

Humility: We do not know everything – listen more.

The surprise factor: Delicious food and drinks, surprise, surprise, should not be a SURPRISE. But the occasional freebee, the generous gesture to the staff, remembering birthdays and following through.

The Stars bar of surprises, including some cocktails invented every week and put up on the mirror.

Quality of Ingredients: You get what you pay for, and the customer never forgets it. And the best ingredients do not have to be expensive: but then you have a high cost of intellectual capital, and technique.

Technical skills: The customers pay, and want what they ordered. In service it means you give goodwill, read correctly the needs of the customers whether real, unreal, unrealistic.

Décor: The impression as you walk in the door. It must be part of the culture of eating out in the world today. Also comfortable, sexy, and welcoming overall. Don’t spend too much capital and don’t try to outdo the customer. The décor is a backdrop to the customer and the community. Give it a place for pleasure and for business. Give me a welcome!

Service: The NUMBER ONE REASON FOR SUCCESS OR FAILURE. If there is a problem at a table with the food, the service staff and dining room management can make it right. No matter how good the food, inept, jaded, or cynical service will undo everything.

A GREAT RESTAURANT IS ONE IN WHICH EVRY DETAIL IS COVERED, not just the service, not just the food, the flash décor or the overly famous chef. It is all of the mentioned above.

One of my models was Harry’s Bar in Venice when Harry was still very much running it.

After my second visit the bartender knew to start my Bellini when I walked through the front door.

Prices: Marking It Up.

How to keep the prices own and still earn good profits.

I did not drink champagne at Harry’s so don’t know abou their marekups at the time.

Three times was the slavish hospitality rule when I was starting. Never one for rules, I rethought it. Because if a bottle of champgne costs wholesale $75 (let alone $300 for Dom Perignon) do I put it on my list for $225 and see it sit there for a month or more?

I added $30 to each bottle price and saw them fly out the door. And smiles on customers faces as it they had discovered my mistake. Then come back a week later and order another one.

Do the maths.

Apartfrm the customers leaving with a big smile on their faces and vowing to return,.

THAT is profit.

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It was a night in 1983 in San Francisco that brought together for the first time, at least in the memories of everyone there, chefs from all across the United States, to celebrate and define American cuisine.

But some defining moments had occurred before that.

My use of flowers in cooking, for example, that first appeared in a restaurant, as far as my memory goes, in the early days of my cooking at Chez Panisse.

The nasturtiums’ that I used to ‘borrow’ on the way to Panisse. From any growing over walls and within reach of the street. If I was caught, I thought, I could always invite them to dinner.

Thank you for reading JEREMIAH TOWER’S OUT OF THE OVEN! Free subscribers will receive an occasional publication. Paid subscribers will receive a weekly publication, as well as menus, recipes and full access to archives. Now including 200 articles, and growing.

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The title sounds like post WW2 rationing. Except there would have been one banana unless you had a tree.

And it was paw-paw.

Back then in Australia much bigger than these. More like small watermelon sized.

In Sydney as a child I picked passion fruit off the vine growing below my bedroom window after I had been wakened by the thousands of cicadas that my brother was keeping in my closet. That and the staccato racket of kookaburras in a gum tree nearby.

We had two banana trees both giving little Lady Finger bananas. Sydney was too far north for apples, and too far south for pineapple.

But we had a few paw-paw trees and lots of the fruit. The fruit we stored in an icebox for a short time after it was picked ripe. One into which we put a black of ice every 3 days. A benchmark. From then on, I could never fully appreciate fruit in which many of their perfumes and flavors had been deadened by mechanical cooling.

For mangoes we used special forks.

For years unique to Australia, but now on Amazon and there is no other so satisfying way to eat a ripe mango.

Leaning over a sink to catch the juices.

In tropical Queensland I was given a pineapple right from the plant. A local swiped the top leaves off with a machete and I scooped out the fruit with my fingers. No core. And was forever spoiled. That was another benchmark.

After leaving Australia and living in London, still with food rationing, and my daily trip was to Harrod’s Food Hall. To visit my pineapple. There was only one. On top of a 15-foot pyramid of fruit. Its price 28 shillings. Twenty shillings to a pound, one of which has the buying power today of about 50 dollars.

The crowd gathered daily to look at it were entranced.

Awe struck.

As for tomato soup, none in any form except black-market US Navy dried powder. Post war rationing at its worst.

I don’t remember tomatoes at all.

WAITER, THERE’S A FROG IN MY CURRY

“A recipe for “Australian Curry” in the 1981 Catholic Women’s League of Tasmania cookbook calls for “tinned pineapple, a granny smith apple, two bananas, meat, a tin of tomato soup, and one dessertspoon of curry powder.”

Hence the tinned pineapple title by Elli Benaiah, who is currently at work on Jewish food of the Indian Ocean.

Not a bad occupation.

He writes of “A Little India in a Jar,” and goes on abut one of my favorite cookbook authors. “One of the key English cookbook moments is 1747, in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. Her mention of curry was far more interesting than the more famous Mrs. Beeton and her Book of Household Management. “Who filed curry under cold meat cookery.” And has a section Recipes for Australian Dishes. “Soup from kangaroo tails, roast wallaby, parrot pie.”

I grilled a galah, or rose-breasted cockatoo, a la broche, on a beach in the Great Barrier Reef when I was six. My ‘parrot’was as uninteresting at the barracuda caught the next day.

No curry. I was a bit off it in those days after a incendary motuth-burning experience with it in Ceylon on the way to Australia.

Another writer, Collingham, said there was “virtually nothing the British would not stew in curry sauce, from ordinary cuts of meat to calf’s feet, ox palates, sheep’s heads, lobsters and periwinkles.”

Even Curried Wombat

Elli writes, “the colonial record carries iguana tail curry and curried wattle bird. And mentions that writing in the Melbourne Herald in 1874, journalist Marcus Clarke declared that a man who had not eaten curried wombat had not used his opportunities.”

But that was the British colonists who arrived in a land full of animals they did not recognize. How to eat them? Well, the answer was to render the unfamiliar familiar and they had their pots of curry powder with them.

Would one have had to be desperate to eat wombat? Not sure. but if you did, perhaps sous les cendres like truffles and potatoes.

SCOTT’S

https://scotts-mayfair.com

A great friend of mine just told me that she had a perfect Dover sole at Scott’s in London.

I spent my 50^th birthday there. A long time ago, and I wish it were now, because the menu is now one of the best I know of anywhere. I could eat there for a week and never respite an order. Apart from oysters and perhaps a repeat of the Dover.

Diving right onto the Potted Shrimp just for nostalgia (my London childhood) sake. And the Smoked Eel and Devon Cock Crabmight also be a repeat.

Tarragon Buttered Spring Vegetables a daily must whether with Sole or one day at least of Cornish Lamb. Or Fish for Two especially if Turbot Hollandaise just big enough for two.

After a glass of champagne promptly when seated, I would know that all my meal planning and choices would see on the horizon the perfect desserts.

Bakewell Pudding with Almond Ice Cream if a light main course preceded it. No beloved, Sticky Toffee Ginger Cake because of the Banana Ice Cream that comes with it, and I don’t believe in rearranging the kitchen’s food.

Always up for trifle.

And I adore freshly made perfect Petits Fours.

And a glass of Muscat Beaumes de Venise. Sometimes with an almond biscotti my only dessert.

Of course, I would sit at the counter.

And stare at the crab in various forms.

While I wold think of what was in my summer garden or local farm stand and whater I would cook at home.

THE HEIGHT OF SUMMER DESSERTS

First a simple, fast, and easy one.

Mixed Berry Compote with Ice Cream

This wonderful summer dessert can be cooked with any ripened fruit: mangoes, papayas, figs, peaches, plums, cherries- and of course berries. If you use raspberries, throw them in only for the last minute of cooking.

¼ cup water

½ cup sugar

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

1 cup strawberries, rinsed, cut in half

1 cup blueberries, rinsed

1 cup blackberries

4 tablespoons sweet butter, cut into cubes or softened

1 pint vanilla ice cream

Serves 4

Make a light sugar syrup by heating the water and sugar together in an 8-inch sauce pan, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Add the lemon juice and berries to the syrup and cook over medium heat 2 to 3 minutes, shaking the pan gently to coat berries with syrup. Add the butter and continue to cook, swirling the berries and butter around in the pan, until the butter is melted.

Spoon the fruit compote onto 4 plates and place scoops of ice cream in the center of each serving.

Summer Pudding

More work but ultimate satisfaction.

Not on the Scott’s menu because, although it can be made in individual protions, it never tastes quite the same, and certainly not the same visual impact as one of these brought to the table with a large bowl of the best cream you can find.

1 ½ cups strawberries, hulled

1 ½ cups raspberries

1 cup red currants, stemmed

1 cup blueberries, loganberries, or ollalieberries

1 cup sugar

Pinch salt

½ cup medium sugar syrup

2 cups fresh raspberry puree

10 to 15 slices dense white bread, crust removed

2 cups custard (creme anglaise)

Serves 6 to 8

Coarsely chop the strawberries and put them and the other berries in a saucepan. Add the sugar and salt and cook over high heat until the berries are heated and just beginning to bleed their colors, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and cool.

Mix the syrup and the raspberry puree.

Line a 2-quart pudding mold or other deep bowl with cheesecloth. Dip both sides of some of the bread slices in the berry puree and arrange around the sides and bottom of the mold. Soak the remaining slices in the berry puree and layer with the berries, ending with bread to completely cover the top.

Using a plate that fits just inside the top of the mold, place it on top of the pudding. Put the mold in a pan and weight the plate. Refrigerate the pudding overnight.

To serve, unmold the pudding onto a serving platter, slice, and serve with the custard.

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Actually, I don’t, unless it’s grilled and covered with the Key lime juice from my Mexican garden. Or from a summer farm stand, just picked and still warm from the sun.

Or dipped aged mezcal.

I read the other day about a Thai style watermelon salad with its dressing of lime juice, serrano chile, fish sauce, and peanuts. “It’s hot, sweet, spicy, salty, and savory, with a buzzing intensity that lingers long after your first bite.”

And that got my juices going, and made me think. Why, when on a salad it’s a dressing and not a sauce?

Here is my first watermelon salad from my 1986 cookbook Jeremiah Tower’s New American Classics.

And it definitely is dressed.

Watermelon and Onion Salad

If you can eat raw onions and like watermelon, this is a knockout in the summer, and is perfect for a lunch salad.

1 medium ripe watermelon

2 medium sweet red onions, peeled

¼ cup raspberry puree

¼ cup olive oil

salt and freshly ground pepper

3 TBS fresh lemon juice

¼ cup walnut oil

3 bunches watercress

Serves 6

Peel and cut the melon into 1-inch-thick slices. Cut around the line between the white and red part of the melon and discard all but the red. Remove all the seeds and cut the melon into cubes.

Cut the onions crosswise into 1/8-inch-thick slices.

Mix the raspberry puree, olive oil, and salt and pepper. Put the melon and onions in a bowl and pour the raspberry sauce over them. Mix thoroughly but gently. Let sit 15 minutes

Mix the lemon juice with salt and pepper and whisk in the walnut oil. Pour the dressing over the watercress in a bowl and toss quickly. Arrange the watercress on cold plates and put the melon and onions on top. Spoon any remaining raspberry sauce over the top of the melon and watercress.

Moveable Feast

Years later when cooking for PBS (Season 6, Episode 1 of “A Moveable Feast with Fine Cooking”) at a hacienda in the Yucatan, we grilled the watermelon. No sauce, just brushing it first with a little mezcal.

No garnish.

See the photo above with the pineapple and papaya. And further words about garnishes.

New York’s Waldorf Astoria

For the menu from in 1912 I would take a small army to prepare just the garnishes.

I love reading old menus, mostly to decide what I would have ordered had I been there for a lesiurely lunch.

This one is a challenge.

No Waldorf Salad so that let me off the hook for what I have always thought, after the first taste of one, an aberration. Like the American menus of that time and for 50 years later that started with celery, olives, and radishes (the big red peppery ones).

The original salad of was just celery, apples and mayonnaise. No walnuts.

Invented in 1896 by a non-kitchen man called “Oscar Tschirky, the maître d’hôtel at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.”

For a charity ball honoring St. Mary’s Hospital for Children.

Which explains the apples.

Often said to be the most famous salad in the world. My vote for that placement is the Caesar. Closely followed by Greek, Caprese, Cobb, and Niçoise. In all their versions.

And, of course, Mixed Green. I rather like this butter lettuce one with a little fresh tarragon cream, and chives.

But back to the menu which very civilly starts off with oysters and clams and no celery.

As I look over it, I am amazed at the wide selection of ingredients. This before refrigeration. Or was it? American Jacob Perkins build a system in 1834, but the first for home use as 1913 and then 1918 a home refrigerator for anyone who could afford it.

Nothing mysterious then about the fish except where did they get enough oyster crabs? And Eggs Bengalais. Who has ever seen those again? As for Eggs Careme, first you have to make a real Sauce Nantua with crayfish. HB eggs and black truffles in a pastry timbale. But as cold on the menu, so not sure.

More mysterious is where to get enough Sot-l’y-laisses, those twin nuggets in the chicken’s back. Two per chicken. But I would have had the Half Partridge, Bearnaise Sauce which at $1.75, was more than the Beluga Caviar, so perhaps unaffordable .

No problem with the cheese from France and England, unless it was booked as cargo on the Titanic.

Watermelon not as expensive as Malaga or Morocco grapes even though it was October.

I also love the “Extra Special Heavy Cream” which I would have poured over the Stewed Rhubarb before my Turkish Coffee.

Over my coffee this morning I found a new Substack.

GUTS MAGAZINE

“An offal forward, confession booth of a restaurant lifestyle magazine.”

Is owner says “Gareth Eoin Storey is probably my favorite chef whose food I’ve never eaten.” Sharing “an affinity for offal, movies, and sandwiches.”

He gets my vote, and I miss andouillette, though no shortage of tripes in Mexico.

This is from him:

“Ever since I can remember, I’ve tried eating things I haven’t eaten before. It started with school sandwiches. The first time I didn’t get ham or processed meat in the shape of a bear at the deli counter, I chose pressed tongue.”

Was he at the Walldorf Astoria for lunch?

Though he may have had to settle for the Calf’s Brains, Mayonnaise.

“Two weeks ago” he writes, “ I was back cooking at Casa Lhasa when this next dish came to me. In Catalunya they have a tradition of mar I muntanya, the sea and the mountains, originating from trade between fisherman and farmers across the two landforms. It includes dishes like chicken in lobster sauce or braised cuttlefish with meatballs. My mind was set on cooking the cuttlefish with meatballs.

The day before cooking the dish we had to prepare the cuttlefish by pulling out the insides, separating the head and body and removing the beak. One of the chef de parties [a kitchen station head] took care of it while I blanched tripe. Ten kilos of cuttlefish takes at least an hour to clean, five kg of tripe takes longer and uses more space on the stove. He finished the cleaning, put them away, and continued his other prep for that night’s service. I let the tripe bubble away while working the line until it started to get quiet and I had time to start cutting it. While cutting the braised stomach into bite sized pieces I ruminated on what way I would cook it - the mar I muntanya idea popped up, it made sense, who needs meatballs when you have tripe?

The next day I cooked the cuttlefish until it was tender enough to cut with a spoon. I took a ladleful out and into another pot, then added a few slices of tripe and simmered it for a while. After the flavours settled I took the spoon and tasted the slight salt and sweetness of the cuttlefish and the grass and earth of the tripe, the sauce brought the two together in the harmony of Catalunya’s mar I muntanya tradition.”

I may have to abandon Merida’s octopus tacos for Catalunya! Especially for the Chicken in Lobster Sauce. At Chez Panisse in the 70’s I served chicken breasts cooked in a very light Sauternes and sauced with a Nantua.

Using the shells from fresh Sacramento Delta crayfish.

Photo of a perfect Nantua from Alamy.

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This is one way.

The other is to cook summer menus and the other to read (or reread) The 1955

“Elizabeth David is the woman who changed the face of British cooking. She introduced post-war Britain to the sun-drenched delights of the Mediterranean and her recipes brought new flavors and aromas into British kitchens.”

“A selection of dishes, for table, buffet and picnic, that are light, easy to prepare and based on, looking back to the future, seasonal ingredients with recipes from a simple Salade Niçoise to Strawberry Soufflé.”

Inspiring me 15 years later to come up with these menus and enjoy a few made by friends.

June 1970 Summer Tenants Arrive: Time to Drink the Cellar

[The basement of my Sommerville Mass. House that I was subletting for the summer had no lock, so nothing for it but to loosen a few corks].

Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1924: Absolute perfection. After all this time and travel. I regretted opening it, and tears for the moment not matching its grace

June 1970 John Sanger, my Texan Friend Cooks in the Heat for a Friend.

[John, like me, was buying old wines from Sotheby’s and Christie’s. He had plenty of money, but this wine s was still cheap. And perfect].

Red Snapper, cold

2 bottles Dom Perignon 1959”

June 1970 Dinner with Annie Meyer

Mussels in mayonnaise

Cold duck

Melon

A German wine. Chateau Margaux 1963, pleasant, never a great Margaux.

1971 While Reading Montesquiou by Philippe Jullian,

“Men no longer wear (tight) breeches at balls, and one can’t tell what they are thinking.” And the phrase “A carnage of geraniums.” Must write a book with that name.

Ripe old Stilton

Sweet meal biscuits

Madeira 1915

Found (the Madeira) in the midst of a liquor supermarket in Revere, Mass!!

1971 Lunch by Myself at the Farm. Eating the Produce

[The farm in Pride’s Crossing, Massachusetts, during graduate school.]

Iced lemon Vodka

Cold roast pheasant

Vosne-Romanée 1961. Superb!

1971 Fancy Dress Literary Fete at Harvard Commons Room

Dressed as Radclyffe Hall, the first lesbian novelist, The Well of Loneliness.

Image: Mathew Lyons

Wearing my mother’s Patou suit from our trip to Paris for it in the 1953. When I fell in love with restaurants and markets.

Stingers and Sidecars

California Oysters

Amphetamines

1971 Michael Palmer at the Farm, Pride’s Crossing, in July Having Arrived from California.

Saturday lunch

Saumon Froid, mayonnaise verte, Ch. D’Yquem 1947

Fraises, Ch. D’Yquem 1966

Mayonnaise with lobster fat, salmon fat and fresh herbs. Superb. The ’47 was outstanding - chilled on ice it hit one’s tongue as too chilled – immediately warming up and releasing an infinite series of finite sensations. Some bitterness. ’66 very promising, delicious, strong.

Talked of the origin of the d’Yquem and roast beef. Told them the Felix Yusupov story of Felix assassinating Rasputin. As told to me by his cousin and fellow assassin Count Sheremetev.

Saturday Dinner

Parsley Pierogi

Pasta lobster marinara

Caesar’s salad

Gorgonzola with grapes

Iced vodka – 4 house flavors with the pierogi. White Côtes du Rhône from then on.

The Caesar a flop: cheese too young (moist) and impossible to find good lettuce. Must grow our own again.

[“Pierogi are filled dumplings made by wrapping unleavened dough around a filling and cooking in boiling water. Typical fillings include potato and cheese, sauerkraut, ground meat, mushrooms.”]

At the end of dinner Michael and I had Romeo y Julietas.

The cookbooks and a cat behind me

Sunday Dinner

Pasta, pesto sauce

Boiled beef, cold, horseradish sauce

Salad

Cheese & fruit

Bulk California Burgundy

1971 Summer Lunch at Albert Stockli, Stonehenge Inn, Ridgefield, Conn. “To celebrate the revolution.”

Stockli was the great chef that made the Four Seasons in NY famous. A genius chef, mostly now forgotten. The best in the US in his day. I talked with him for 4 months to plan this lunch. The California wine, after much discussion of French, were his idea. His passion. He wanted me to taste them side by side. He did not know the vintages before they were open because there were no labels. One of the great meals of my life, he was totally intrigued that a Harvard Student would take months to plan a lunch, and drive down from Boston to do it. The fact that the car was an Aston Martin DB 5 convertible made the journey easier.

[The ham with champagne was a no brainer, nor was the “Our own live Brook Trout, Classic Bleu served with sauce Mousseline”]

Jambon de Grisons

Bunderfleisch de Grisons

Truite au Bleu, sauce mousseline

Soupe de pommes de terre, Suisse

Carré d’agneau Armenonville (haricots verts)

Rosti

Choux fleur au gratin

Salade

Brie

Soufflé Grand Marnier

The wines were Dom Perignon 1959, Beaulieu Vineyards Georges de Latour Cabernet Sauvignon 1934 Park & Tilford Importers, NY, St. Julien 1934.

The ham was air-letter thinness – the beef also. Superb. The champagne was just right after a three-hour drive, fresh, not at all the Camembert bouquet of the ’61 or ’62 but it was deceptively smooth, and as ‘good’ as anything could be. Great color – soft gold. The kindest wine ever. A lovely, lovely thing.

[I would add now, that the air-cured beef sliced tissue thinly with champagne is still one of my favorite ways to begin a meal. They are meant for each other].

Then I saw the blue trout arrive, and my heart leapt at the sight of the three of them in a large sautéing pan in a swimming position, but in a inch of melted butter instead of the seconds ago hot court-bouillon bath. The first time I have ever had them – and although ‘farm-raised ‘from the pond outside, the flavor was full and light. No Purina Chow taste. The mousseline was pale gold, made by angels. Totally complimentary to the fish – a good lesson that the sauce only adds, is necessary to the appreciation of the fish in and of itself.

[This dish inspired me to find a trout farm in California when at Panisse, to import the live fish from Big Sur, kill them to order, and serve a 120 of them. Reminds me of the chapter in Alice B. Toklas’ cookbook about “Murder in the kitchen.”].

With the last drop of the ’59, the hot cream soup – delicious but fortunately whisked away before we could finish.

The lamb – baby cutlets carved from three racks. Superb, each just a mouthful.

The best ‘fried potatoes’ – grated slivers sautéed in a cake, the surface evenly golden brown without a blemish. [Later I would have Richard Olney teach me how to make this dish called a paillasson].

The choux fleur – done to perfection, the sauce light, slightly gratineed.

Salad – I don’t remember.

Brie – ripe but not runny.

How to describe the Beaulieu Vineyards Georges de Latour? It was the winner of the day.

Will I move on to California wines!

1972 Dinner at Locke-Ober – My Farewell to All the Harvard Young Things

Taittinger B de B 1964

Oysters Winter Place

Grilled sweetbreads

Peche Melba

Coffee and sidecars

Bollinger 1966with the oysters, a Grand Vin de Leoville 1937 with the sweetbreads.

August 1972 San Francisco Cocktail to go with Tripes a la Mode de Caen instead of a French 75.

Lemon juice

Calvados

Dash of Pernod

Triple sec

Shake over ice

Serve in frozen up glass

CALIFORNIA BEFORE CHEZ PANISSE

1972 Big Sur Dinner at Emile Norman’s for Elizabeth Gordon of House Beautiful.

With Brooks [Emile’s husband] and Emile. Eliz. Telling stories of Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin – the witch his wife – and Mies.

Alice B. with whom she travelled a few times, once to Venice when Alice was old. Even then great courage and knew where to find all the best food and restaurants.

Cannelloni

Persimmons with fenugreek mayonnaise

An unforgettable combination

Chateau Gloria 1966

Chapelle-Chambertin 1961: Superb, velvet

1972 Nightmare Dinner

Waking at 5 am in a dream of designing a restaurant, that I should work in one. I wake up. My 1955 Lafite present from John sits on the shelf.

This is what I dreamed of, all on a plate together.

Steak with marrow bone filled with marrow soufflé

Herb babu au rhum

Puree of celery root

Sauce perigord on steak

1972 A Pafty for Poets

Robert Duncan (on top form), Robert Creeley (drunk and fighting), and Bobby Creeley(who was satisfied after I told her she was one of the most attractive women I had ever met), Gerard Malanga (not as beautiful as I had heard and seen, but boys with him v. desirable), Michael Palmer. Ferlinghetti, and Burroughs (scary).

Cold salmon (decorated with persimmons and avocado leaves)

Rabbit pate

Smithfield ham

Spinach soufflé

Cheeses

Wedding cakes (light English fruit cakes)

Veuve Clicquot Pondsardin brut (oceans of it)

1972 After Reading De Profundis again

3:30 am

Write a suicide note “My silk shirts died”

Goose soup and Chambertin 1934 Cuvee Heritiers Latour.

Decide to live

1972 Letter to my sister from San Fellation

[I was a failure at getting hired as an architect, so was thinking of either a gardener or cook].

Dearest Mary,

Why is it that, inevitably, when I go to a party virtually brimming over with Indians from ancient jungles, smooth Chinese-Malays, Burroughs’ Japanese, Swiss dairy and Argentinian L’Uomo Vogue bathing –suit extravaganzas of boy flesh, I end up tangoing ‘til dawn in the arms of a Garcia Lorca lesbian from Cuba? The rich continue to not pay their bills, and to disappear their ideas and projects when I remind them of their brilliant ideas, once verbalized, to hire me as their field fertilizer, crop seducer, and Mellors extrordinaire.”

1972 What’s in the Refrigerator

Looking after the Michael and Cathy Palmer house

Jerry-

In the freezer there’s bread and vodka in the fridge champagne, et al., and ox-tails with grapes.

Beware of the cats; they try to suck one’s breath at night.

Spring 1972

The virtues of boiled garlic. Spread on new bread and butter. I put with marrow, a paste for toast.

Chateau d’Yquem 1967

Dinner at Cathy Simon and Michael Palmer after seeing the film La Grande Bouffe

Poached Salmon Trout, Horseradish Sauce

Guinea Fowl Vallée d’Auge

Dandelion Salad, Walnuts, Walnut Oil

Sacripantina cake

Taittinger, blanc de blancs, 1964

Chateau Haut-Brion 1962

Chateau Suduiraut, 1949

Calvados

[Vallée d’Auge is shallots, butter, Calvados, cider and cream]

CHEZ PANISSE YEARS

Heading my Journal: “Simple Pleasures are the Last Refuge of the Complex.” Oscar Wilde.

The Bibliography in my journal from 1973 say “Curnonsky, Olney, Elizabeth David, Ali-Bab, Le Guide Culinaire, Gerald Asher and Hugh Johnson.”

Wooed by Gene Opton

Gene the guiding partner at Chez Panisse these days and had put in the money and financial control to keep it going. This menu and evening the way she planned it shows the real sensibility that was moving Panisse forward. She hired me.

Before the Maria Callas and di Stefano last concert.

Turkey Sandwiches with Roederer Cristal 1966

After the Concert at Maurice et Charles restaurant, San Rafael

Salmon Pate en Croute

Vacherin

Lanson 64 (red label)

Back at Gene’s

Cherries

Chateau Suduiraut 1929

The Suduiraut the color of mahogany – but although thus severely ‘maderized’ – still balanced, sugar good, and quite drinkable. V. enjoyable.

June 1974 the Haldeman at Chez Panisse Incident Dinner

[HR during the hysteria of his being seated in the dining room and then coming into the kitchen and shaking my hand].

And the telephones being cut, the board members coming over and threatening to fire me, which they could not, the staff threatening to quit, the riot outside, the head waiter the only one who would take the food.

Pate of fresh duck livers with apples, shallots and port

Puree of fresh Jerusalem artichokes

Veal braised in white wine and cream

Salad or cheese

Fruit and coffee

Quick Trip to Paris

After a dinner at Au Pied du Cochon - where the Plateau Royale is 35 francs [now betwwn 90 and 160 euros per person] - and mediocre cooking at L’Escargot.

The materials are so superior to US produce, the food is that much more impressive. Must speed up the small farm idea and encourage local produce and shellfish, especially the oysters.

Return from this journey really pushing local growers and suppliers. Seems very important moment in the new American food movement. What about making our own house wine? See Phelps and to get a wine importer to bring in local and regional wines. See Kermit Lynch later as I get him to bring in Domaine Tempier and ask Richard Olney to introduce him to local wine makers.

1974 Dinner at an American Friend’s Apartment

All Americans at the dinner, all who live in France except me, and all of them saying why don’t you do this in California? Bring in the best of the local wine and food.

Salade au lardons – excellent

Cotelettes de veau au poivre vert a la crème -

Fromages

Tarte aux Pommes – flour and egg variety pastry, excellent also

Cerises au liqueur (homemade) – excellent idea

A great regional Puligny Montrachet. For 6 francs. Vin rouge de Bourgogne

Real veal! Wonderful veal, with taste, and pure white. Makes the “veal” US version ridiculous. Green peppercorns incredibly superior to US canned. Even though canned here also. Explanation? Sauces only with crème fraiche. The wines from the chic and becoming famous traiteur Lucian Le Grand. Must get Linton or someone to import regional wines to California – or do them ourselves.

Next morning ripped to the tits. Cocaine to wake up. Also, a Vouvray Cremant. And more of that cerises au liqueur. She’s [hostess] a Scorpio – I knew it after ½ an hour.

BIG SUR DAYS & VENTANA

1979 and “What is American Food, let alone Californian?” as my last comment on page 3.

DINNERS OUTSIDE OF PANISSE

1975 Winetasting lunch at Domaine Tempier in Bandol. JT, R. Olney, owners Lucien and Lulu Petraud, and family.

[After this day at the property, we did bring in Domaine Tempier at Chez Panisse, and I did later introduce Kermit Lynch to the wine. Then Olney and I wrote the menus for 2 weeks of Tempier at Chez Panisse, which were the foundation for the later nationally famous Zinfandel Week at Panisse, leading me to get the wine made locally rather than using local French. At the time of this visit Richard introduced me to the wines of Georges Duboeuf, gave me the address and advised me to bring them into California].

From the barrels and barriques we tasted 3 cuvees the 1975 reds, 3– one fabulous! Can get for Panisse?

Then the 74, 73, 72, 70, 64 and the 60.

Lunch at the Family Table

Rose 1964

Fresh bass with fennel grilled over vine cuttings

Sauce with roes, livers, lemon, their olive oil

Tomates provencales

Lamb’s lettuce with garlic oil

Frommages

Fruits

Coffee

The rose, 1961 – spoiled, 1968 rouge, 1964 rouge, Marc 1961

The 61 was the choice for the lunch, but since spoiled Lucien brought out a mystery, the 68, not considered very promising, but this one turned out to be better than should have been. The 64 was to “discover” with the triumph of the cheeses. Was excellent.

1975 Bread and Water with Richard Olney

After the long day with the Peyrauds, and a painful drive over the mountains back up the perilous goat track to Richard’s house we were hungry in that odd way one is after a long day of food and wine. So, we went out in the dark garden and picked some potatoes and onions. This is one of those moments when the food for the moment fit perfectly and becomes a memory that never goes away. Rare and true perfection.

The soup just water, potatoes, onions – finished with butter and salt & pepper and v. stale bread. A lifesaver!

Puligny Montrachet 1971 – very good.

1882 Richard Olney’s House

Krug rose (1^st release)

Eggs in crayfish sauce

Roast partridge

THE STARS YEARS 1984-1998

“Soft and precious flavors of the past” says Fellini, and marks on the first page of the 1984 Diary.

1995 Dinner for Richard Olney, Chuck Williams and SF Restaurateurs, at Stars San Francisco

Osetra

Herb timbale with mussels

Beef cheeks, Pasta filled with Corn and Foie Gras

Peaches, cherries

Almond pound cake

“J” Schram, Krug Salon le Mesnil, Kumeu River Chardonnay 1992, Corton, Doudet-Naudin 1964, Beaune, “Les Marechaudes” 1955

1996 Florida Winefest Founder’s Dinner ar Stars

I was the chef and chose the wines from the great Wilson Daniels Ltd. decided to put the chardonnay after the red Burgundy – it worked!

Smoked wahoo carpaccio with grilled Florida frogs’ legs

Pasta gratin with wild turkey

Confit of duck leg with Parsnip & pecan salad

Blue cheese soufflé

Caramelized apple with mangoes and Passionfruit sauce

Wiebelsberg Grand Cru Riesling, Marc Kreydenweiss 1990, Romanee St. Vivant DRC 1987, Kumeu River Chardonnay 1992, Brunello di Montalcino Riserva, Biondi-Santi 1983, Furst Lowenstein Beerenauslese 1989

1997 James Beard Foundation Dinner, Stars, San Francisco

[This was the last big dinner that I gave at Stars before I sold it to an Asian investor].

Champagne Audoin de Dampierre

Smoked sturgeon with devilled quail eggs

Roast chicken broth with ginger and Chinese black bean custard

Duck leg confit with parsnip-celery root-herb salad

White chocolate cheesecake with fresh lychees and passionfruit sauce

Veuve Clicquot Brut, “Magnificat” Franciscan, Oakville, 1994, Iniskillin chardonnay 1994, Vidal Icewine, Inniskillin, 1995

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I found some old journals which had survived the flooding in Katrina.

I was writing an article called “What Sauces Mean to Me.”But that will have to wait until next week. Other than a few sauce comments here.

And a note on the wines. I had bought them al at Sotheby’s and Christies and they were very inexpensive in those days. Very.

Some were on the fly. At the Big Sur store in the 70’s I found a 25-year old Chateau Lafite for $25. I guess they guessed the price by its age.

1969 I stocked up for the Black Panther Conference prices incase the revolution hit the streets. The Monterey Market, Carmel prices were 1959 Lafite $42.50 and 1963 Romanee-Conti $25.00.

The Champagne Palace 1961-63

At Harvard College freshman year,I found refuge at an apartment on Boston’s Beacon Hill, 20 Chestnut Street.

Inside everything the color of champagne. All Baudelaire and Bach. Owned by a teaching fellow who had just given me this outline of his course. “A Monologue of Reflections on the Critical Process and the Verbal Construct: A Problem of the Structures of Language and the Meaning of Meaning.”

I was 19 and the meaning of almost anything was beyond me.

Except when I cooked.

Usually steak au poivre when it wasn’t a Chicken Club or Omelet.

Always first a Jack Daniels, then the food with Chambolle Musigny followed by Courvoisier and Pills for more music and Baudelaire.

21^st BIRTHDAY PARTY AT LOCKE-OBER, NOVEMBER 6^TH 1963

Baked Oysters Casino

Grilled Filet of Beef, Perigourdine

Endive Salad

Mint ice

Coffee & Cognac

My father was paying so the wines were Pouilly Fume 1959 and Chateau Margaux 1955.

Sauce Périgueux and its sibling Sauce Périgourdine is a demi-glace (or better an Espagnol) finished with madeira and fresh black truffles. In the former the truffles are chopped and the latter in slices. Either is my favorite work-intensive sauce. They most famously adorn Tournedos Rossini.

1963 Allen Ginsberg in Our Junior Year Rooms

Image: Jason Hondall 1963

No women were allowd in the rooms. But no problems with Alan and his lover Peter Orlovsky camping out on our sofa. “Josquin des Pres playing I smoked marijuana for the first time. Not so exciting really (first time). I prefer a good champagne, Lafite-Rothschild or Otard any day. Offered them some.”

Senior Year Row House

A hot night with goose and Chateau d’Yquem

And after a note from my roommate Michael Palmer

“marrons glacés

ami aime

gracia bene”

With a present of

“Truffles brossées

Poems of HD”

1965 Dinner for Friends

Senior year was over and this was a farewell to Cambridge. Also in celebration of a New York News article called “A Growing Concern: Many British Lads Have Longer Hair than the Girls.” I had copied it to all the group, and reproduced for the menu the photo of long-haired and beautiful boys in a group on Carnaby Street corner, the caption “these may be boys watching all the girls go by – but who can tell for sure?”

And an occasion to drink the 1884 Madeira that Michael Palmer had given me for my birthday in 1964.

Frozen Buffalo Grass Vodka

Pate

Consommé Madrilene

Salmon en gelée aux truffes

Filet de Beouf Perigourdine

Strawberries & French Cream

Coffee

The wines were Pouilly Fume 1962 for the salmon, ChateauNeuf du Pape 1957 with the beef, Asti Spumante with the berries, followed by “Napolean” Armagnac, ending with the Sercial Madeira 1884

1965-67

Not much cooking since I lived either in England with my guardians (who had a cook) or in a rooming house in Epsom where I was so poor, I lived on cottage cheese and beer. A brief stint cooking for a local pub, and was fired when I put butter in the mashed potatoes, scoring massive complaints from the locals.

1969 Champagne while the world crumbles.

In April were the riots at Harvard. I dumped my public housing project and my final presentation at the Graduate School of Design was Films of the bomb, sounds, actors, boards, slides, improvisations, readings, projections, grass cookies. And my Underwater Habitat Molotov cocktails in Dom Perignon bottles.

It was a flop so my friends Cathy and Michael gave a dinner and Simenon in French to soften the blow.

Asparagus, sauce Alsacienne

Tuna, fresh, over charcoal

Salad, lettuce of the garden, mushrooms

Pie, strawberry, rhubarb

Scotches & soda

Sauce Alsacienne is a cold mayonnaise-like emulsion typically made with hard boiled eggs and mustard.” I love the chopped eggs with asparagus, and don’t need the “vinegar, shallots, capers, and fresh herbs” often called for.

Well maybe the herbs especially if fresh tarragon.

1969 Dinner with Friends to Write a Letter to Buckminster Fuller

To ask his permission to use his Geodesic Domes for my underwater habitations. And because I had some Corton Chambertin 1966 left.

Croustades de Champignons

Mousse de fletan, sauce crevettes

Asparagus

Pate de foie,

Boysenberry ice

Café, Calvados, Drambuie

The sauce crevettes a reduced stock of shrimp shells and white wine mounted with butter and perfumed with fresh tarragon. It was the only sauce since the croustades had just the mushroom hash.

1970 Private Hog Island in Maine having just read Ewell Gibbons’ Stalking The Wild Aspsaragus.

Image: Tripadvisor

“Found four nests of Eider ducks on the beach, each with four eggs. The eggs still wet. Took one. Found also samphire, sour sorrel, and lovage – or seacoast angelica. As well as young dandelion. Mussels, a bushel or so, some for salad.

Lunch

Asparagus with almond oil chopped Eider duck egg

Mussel salad mayonnaise sauce

Steamed mussels with samphire

Spinach-sorrel noodles

The mayonnaise was thinned by dry white wine and I added a little Dijon mustard, a touch of horseradish, minced shallots, and cooked sorrel puree.

Dinner

Roast Pork Loin Maderia Sauce

Lovage puree

Apple sauce

The wine was Chateau Rauzan-Gassie 1962 (Margaux).

The Lovage puree was lovage boiled about 5 mins, chopped and straight into béchamel, eat immediately.

Lovage cooking in water the best sea smell yet better than lobster or clams cooking. The broth is still to be experimented on.

Another Dinner

Lobster cream

Lobster salad

(sorrel garnish, fresh)

The wine was Bollinger, brut 1961.

The cream: lobster coral, the fat (lining the shell), liver made into a paste, add mixed with mayonnaise. Notes: Sea sorrel excellent with mussels and lobster, ‘excellent’ in that the taste of it admires the other. Rhubarb from garden for lunch. ½ hour from the garden. What to do with rhubarb tops?

Lunch: Sorrel Soup

Roux, add fine chopped sorrel, cook 5 mins. Add stock (here lovage broth – water it cooked in). Season, pat of butter.

Serve

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Said the NYTimes critic John Mariani ten years ago.

Happy that New York’s Eleven Madison Park was going “180 degrees in the direction of simpler food, fewer dishes, no card tricks, no smoke and mirrors, no long recitations.”

Or the “domes of smoke covering sturgeon blini” or, even worse, over my cold Manhattan “up’ now getting warm.

Anthony Bourdain was sitting at the long mahogany bar of the crusty New York institution Corner Bistro, a cheeseburger in one hand and a frosty pint in the other. “Well, you want it simple. You know, I don’t want a tower of foie gras with microgreens here. I want blood and grease on my fingers and chin. That’s what I want.”

I am not sure of the grease, but I am of the simplicity of it.

As simple as Ox Kidneys for breakfast.

Or the confidence that all would know about “Conserve.”

Following Mariani’s statement, a Facebook announcement declared that “Patter from servers will be stripped down to what feels natural and pragmatic.”

I am surprised anyone survived the shock.

Eric Ripert from the fabulous Le Bernadin pointed out that many diners just want to eat and don’t want to talk to the waiters.

It’s always been simple: A nice greeting, beverage delivers right away, and time to look at a menu that is two opposing ages at most.

For James Beard the opposite was true at New York’s Maxwell Plum, a declared favorite if only because he ate for free. The only time I was there was because he took me to present the idea I should apply for the head chef job. I had Stars at the time but partner problems made me open to his idea that I would be better off in the East.

We walked into the kitchen at the height of lunch to the most horrifying restaurant scene I have ever seen – except for the Peak Café in Hong King which, before I took it over, had more rats and snakes in it than customers.

What we saw at Maxwell’s was more sweat flying than food, tubs of food, three deep and bulging, lining the steps down to the basement, waiting to be delivered to the cooking line manned by a chef and his four cooks, sweat flying everywhere including into the food. All moving so fast they looked like cases of St Vitus dance.

The sight of all the sweaty chaos made the Chili Con Carne we had eaten turn sour in my stomach.

“Thank you, Jim,” I said as we left out onto the sidewalk, “but I don’t think this is not for me.”

I was horrified enough to cancel all my reservations for new restaurants I wanted to visit and flew home that night.

Maxwell Plum’s

Image and text from “Restaurant-ing Through History”

“Beard was fond of Maxwell’s Plum. He thought the restaurant was unique in being enormous yet having “really first-class food and service.” Beard denied being a food snob and said he liked the Plum’s chili just as much as most of their fancy dishes.

The menu had 140 items. Only an owner who had never cooked could conceive of this madness. To have all that and ask the cooks to make Chocolate Souffles.

Complete narcissistic madness.

Years later I took on the challenge of Tavern on the Green, another grandiose concept from the same creator as Maxwell’s. With the same disregard for operations.

As in no place in the kitchen to prepare and cook desserts, let alone eclairs competing for smoky oven space with browning beef bones.

I was much more used to menus like this one.

A Dinner for Chez Panisse Friends 1981

The superb Martine Saulnier of Martine’s Wines in the Bay Area, shared a passion with me for the wines of Fixin. When I wanted to cook a dinner at my house for Alice Waters and some of the staff from Chez Panisse a couple of years after I left the restaurant, Martine supplied the wines. So much for the so-called Alice-Jeremiah feud.

Salad of California Smoked Sturgeon

Bourgogne blanc, Rene Manuel 1978

Chassagne-Montrachet, Chateau de Maltroye 1967

Spaghetti with My Tomatoes Dried in the Sun.

Hermitage Rouge 1976

Sadie Kendall Goat Cheeses

Fixin, Clos La Perrière 1964

Platter of Indian Mangoes & Strawberries

Chateau Doisy-Védrines 1964

The South of France 1975

Richard Olney wanted to introduce me to the Bandol wines of Domaine Tempier owned by his owner friends Lucien and Lulu Peyraud. He knew I would be bowled over by them and the kind of hospitality that the Peyrauds offered. That I would want to introduce their wines to California. When I returned I did, and they were first then seen in the USA when I imported them through George Linton of Connoisseur Wine Imports.

Lunch at the Peyraud Family Table

Rose 1964

Fresh striped bass with fennel grilled over vine cuttings.

Sauce of its roe and liver

Rouge 1973, 1972, 1970, I960

Tomatoes provençales

Lamb’s lettuce with garlic oil

Chèvres or fresh goat cheeses

Rouge 1961, 1968, 1964

Fruits

Coffee

Marc de Tèmpier 1961

No notes about the food because the menu said it all. The wines, though, were a challenge since Richard, Lucien and I had tasted twelve or so from the casks before lunch.

While sipping the rose before lunch I saw our hostess Lulu Peyraud stocking up a fire of vine cuttings and dried wild fennel branches outside the back door of the kitchen for cooking the bass. I had not seen her making the off-white sauce that appeared on the table in an off-white sauceboat. But when tasted it was one of those few life moments. She had ground up the liver and roe of the bass with a mild, fruity extra-virgin olive oil and lemon juice, a bit of fish bone stock, lots of freshly ground white pepper. It did not look like much, but spooned over the moist, white, flaking flesh of the perfectly fresh and perfectly grilled fish, flavored by fennel and the lemon-like acid of the smoke from the vine cuttings, it was heaven on earth.

The drive back to Richard’s over the mountains was not so much. Too much if perfect Marc.

Followed by

Bread and Water with Richard Olney

After all that wine, the coup de grace of the marc (think French grappa), and a two-hour drive over the mountains back to Richard’s hillside house. I was more dead than alive. But, oddly enough, a few hours later a bit puckish. As one can be after a long day of food and wine. Casually and with sleight of hand, Richard produced a dish that, for the second time that day, created a memory which is perhaps even stronger now than the moment, perfect for its time, when I ate it. We went out into the garden in the fading light of the evening and picked potatoes, onions, and thyme.

Soup of Water, Potatoes, Onions

Puligny-Montrachet 1971

We added chunks of stale bread and French butter to the soup, salt, and ground pepper.

A lifesaver!

Even more than a much later Senate Bean soup back in Berkeley.

Or Baked Beans with Buffalo.

Cooking for James Beard

THE GUESTS were Cathy Simon, Michael Palmer, my Special Forces and Green Beret brother on leave from Vietnam, my love Gregg Lowery, and James Beard. His command had been to keep it simple, but that he felt like some great French wines (he had heard I had a decent cellar). Also, that he was pining for the fresh and chemically untreated bay scallops I had been bragging about now available in San Francisco.

I knew he would love the caviar and would understand my serving the pressed or paiusnaya, apart from the fact it was all I could afford. And beef was always safe when served with Lafite.

Dinner for James Beard, My House, San Francisco 1979

Caviar paiusnaya & toast

Champagne Jeanmaire, Blanc de Blancs

Tagliarini with bay scallops

Córton-Charlemagne, Louis Latour, 1970

Roast beef, Jerusalem artichoke puree

Château Lafite I955

Cheeses

La Tâche, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 1953

Fruit compote

Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese, J. J. Prüm 1950

Cockburn 1950

Jim wouldn’t hear of my putting a white wine with the cheeses. After a precautionary tasting of the old Prüm, the comments were “faded from opening, should have been aperitif, overpowered, badly placed,” so we put it with the compote. And drank the La Tâche, which turned out to be truly a great one, with the cheeses.

Two months later I cooked another dinner for him at my house, a menu to revive tired palates after a season of holiday feasting.

Post-Christmas Beard Dinner, for Tired Appetites 1979

Guests were Cecilia Chiang (of the great Mandarin restaurant in San Francisco), Marion Cunningham (Beard’s San Francisco factotum and minder in those days), Robert Finigan (restaurant critic and wine writer, now speaking to me after the lamb incident at Chez Panisse several years before), Alice Waters, my great love, companion, and rose grower Gregg Lowery, and Ken Duprey, my host in Nantucket.

I must have found some money from somewhere to pay for the Sevruga.

Champagne Pol Roger, Cuvée de Blancs de Chardonnay, 1971

Caviar Sevruga blini

Pol Roger, or Akvavit frozen

Smithfield ham in old 1950 Madeira

Pol Roger, or Malmsey 1920

Salad “Alice,” Chinoise

Compote of tropical fruits

Pol Roger, or Rieussec 1975

The salad was adapted from Escoffier’s Ma Cuisine (curly endive, lemon juice, walnut oil, olive oil), which I made “Chinoise” for Cecilia by using fresh water chestnuts. The fruit for the compote was mangoes, papaya, and stewed quinces, flavored with an essence of roses from Gregg’s garden.

Cooking for Lovers

THERE IS NOTHING like past and present relationship tensions and appreciations to spice a meal with friends. Alice Waters cooked this dinner at her house in Berkeley for two pairings: hers with Robert Finigan, mine with Gregg Lowery.

I brought the wines from my cellar.

The wine everyone was poised to taste was the sweet white wine made by Beaulieu Vineyard from botrytis grapes in the thirties. It was the gold color of a middle-aged Chateau d’Yquem, stunningly good, but turned out not to be sweet. It was more like a Chateau Grillet, or vin de paille. A bit oxidized, but beautifully, if you have that English taste. My notes say it “would have been perfect early in the meal—with fish. Memorable, haunting wine.”

As was the evening.

Mine with memories of Alice with me in the moonlight at the Gritti on the Grand Canal in Venice, of her coping with Gregg’s existence, and of several stories Bob related about Alice visiting three boyfriends in one night.

Funny only by the time we got to the Mount Veeder.

Dinner with Alice and Boyfriends 1980

Baby lettuces

Meursault Genevrières 1970

Grilled lamb chops

Beaulieu, Georges Latour Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 1974

Mayacamas, Cabernet Sauvignon 1969 Mount Véeder, Cabernet Sauvignon 1973

Asparagus

Coulis of strawberries

Beaulieu, “Chateau Beaulieu” 1930’s

Dinner with Alice and New Boyfriend 1980

This was a meal I cooked for Alice Waters and her new boyfriend to celebrate their being together. He was a wonderful guy, very good looking, not yet twenty-one and very complicated. They both were very nervous about the occasion, so I invited old friends in common with Alice, Cathy Simon and Michael Palmer, as well as Gregg Lowery, to show that we were not against the new one just because our common good friend Bob Finigan had been at the altar before him.

Vouvray Mousseux, Brut 1970

Veuve-Clicquot, Brut NV

Fettuccine with the first fresh white truffles

Chateau de la Maltroye 1967

Mixed green salad

Sonoma goat cheeses

Les Forts-de-Latour, en magnum, 1970

Dried fruits and nuts

Gonzalez & Byass 1970

Abundant white truffles have a way of conveying that all is right with the world.

Balance may be everything.

As it was not after a couple of Salty Dogs.

Or so it was said to me the day after the first of our American Regional Menus that I created and cooked at our Santa Fe Bar & Grill in Berkeley.

I tough the Guava Pecan Pie would soak them up.

Lessons in complex simplicity.

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Ruth Reichl’s Substack: “While we’re celebrating the 250th anniversary of our country I thought it might be a good moment to remember a few of America’s greatest restaurants.

Not the big fancy ones: the ones that served straightforward fare at very fair prices.

For instance, Howard Johnson’s. When the last one in New York City shut its doors in 2005 Jacques Pepin wrote a little ode to the American restaurant he once helmed. He reminisced about Mr. Johnson hiring him to revamp the food in 1959, and how he replaced margarine with butter, used fresh onions instead of dehydrated ones and made an astonishing ten tons of frankfurters every day from scratch.”

My first restaurant memory was going to the Howard Johnson’s in Stamford Connecticut, the one the Long Ridge road.

Right where we had to turn onto to Webb’s Hill road for our house. Sometimes we would turn into HJ’s for me, but always for the dog.

And his choice of cone.

If we were eating, before the ice cream the dog would eat half of my friend clams. For which they were famous. He also got mosr of the tartare sauce.

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Since the outdoor cooking season is about to go into high gear, and burgers will be on most weekend menus, I thought I would visit them again.

Andy, a bar menu burger cook at Stars, who went on to invent the Barteca Restaurant group, had this to say about our Substack burger article last week.

“As one of the earliest to work the Stars burger/oyster/pizza station, what really stood out to me was the act of scooping out the center of the top burger bun (white, almost Kaiser-roll shaped) where it sat on top of the lettuce and the slice of tomato and onion, so that they couldn’t “slide” out of the burger during the first few bites. I thought at the time, and still think, that was genius.”

Like this one that you know is going to shoot those pickles out onto your lap the minutes you bite into the bun.

Safer is the “Gyro Burger.”

“Wagyu beef and lamb with heirloom tomatoes, black peppercorn feta, sweet onion and Tzatziki on a grilled pita.”

But not a burger, however delicious.

And with so many chefs creating new burgers, let alone packed with wagyu and lamb, what is a fair price?

For any burger?

Let alone $10.00 extra for fries!

My friend Charles G. Thompson, from Substack’s “The Sharpest Tool,” has this to say. In one of our rants, this one: “Between a Taco and a Filet Mignon -- Rising Restaurant Prices Are an Uncomfortable Reality.”

Charles: “My husband and I have long enjoyed a nice meal out (preferably at a restaurant that has cloth napkins). We live in Los Angeles where we have a goodly number of places to choose from. To gauge prices, and our level of comfort in spending, we’ve used the price of a cheeseburger as our barometer. If a place has a burger on their menu at a price we’re comfortable with, that usually means the rest of the menu is priced accordingly.

The Price of a Good Burger Goes Up, Up, Up

Charles: “Which leads me to point of this rant.

The price of a good burger has jumped a lot over the last several years. Before COVID, the places we ate at, the burgers were between $10 and $13. Now, 6 years later, those prices are $20 to $25. At first, the reason for the increases was attributed to the effects of COVID. Since restaurants had almost no customers during the pandemic, they raised prices post crisis to make up their losses. We thought the higher prices were temporary. Although, I knew they were permanent, and would likely keep rising.

There would be no going back.

We had a hard time accepting that our cherished burgers were no longer at a comfortable price point. Through gritted teeth, we’ve been paying the higher prices.

It’s not only the price of burgers that has increased. Most dishes on today’s menus has gone up. As a consumer (and not a restaurant owner), I can say that we probably eat out less now. For us the prices have increased to an uncomfortable level. I always endeavor to find look at menu prices before reserving. The decision then becomes, is this a splurge meal or do we skip it? Is it a new place that I really want to try? Often, I’ll decide no. The burger as a pricing barometer is about a comfort level, i.e., how much I’m willing to spend. A $30 burger is likely a no-go for me. A burger is always still only a burger even with quality ingredients used to make it. Aren’t burgers a quintessential American comfort food? I say yes, they are. As such, they should be a lower priced item on the menu. A dish a diner might look at and think, oh, a cheeseburger and fries, that sounds perfect. And look, the cost is reasonable.”

The Stars Burger

Charles: “A burger I’m still chasing 40 years later. To read my take, click here to JT’s most recent post on burgers:

Jeremiah Tower's Out of the Oven

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JT: “And at the Santa Fe Bar & Grill which we took over and opened in 1982, with only 5 days to do it, no time to find a decent bun or cook them ourselves so we used James Beard’s without one, at $8.00.”

From the JBF now, the same as we discussed over a lunch sat the Stanford Court hotel in 1982 for the Santa Fe Bar & Grill and Stars. “James Beard’s iconic Hamburger au Poivre combines the richness of a classic French steak with juicy ground beef. To achieve the perfect blend of spice and flavor, you press crushed peppercorns firmly into the meat and flambé them with bourbon.

Ingredients

2 lbs. ground beef, chuck or fatty round

1–2 Tbsp black peppercorns, coarsely cracked

1 tsp kosher salt

1/2 small onion grated

2-4 tsp heavy cream

3 Tbsp butter

3 Tbsp vegetable oil

Bourbon or brandy for flambé

Burger buns or English muffins

Shape the Patties: Gently mix the ground beef with the grated onion and heavy cream. Form into 6- or 8-ounce patties. Do not overmix, or the burger will get tough.

Add Pepper: Crush your peppercorns using a coarse pepper mill, a coffee grinder, or a heavy object. Press a generous amount into both sides of the patties.

Cook: Heat the butter and oil in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Cook for to 5 minutes per side, depending on your preferred doneness.

Flambé: Once the burger is done, season it with salt. Pour a splash of bourbon into the hot pan, ignite, and shake the pan until the flame dies down.

Serve: On a toasted, buttered bun and spoon the rich pan juices right over the meat

The American Hamburger is a Way of Life

Charles: “I think part of the issue is that the American hamburger is a symbol of the American way of life – accessible to all, reasonably priced, a simple yet delicious dish. It’s long been a food item associated with affordability too. Whether it’s made on a backyard grill or comes from a fast-food emporium or from the corner diner. Because so many of us make these associations, when the prices increased so heavily, we were left scratching our heads. What happened to our affordable burger mainstay? “

JT: At Stars we kept the prices down, but found a way we though irresistible to get the burger eaters to spend. A few times with Château Lafite-Rothschild, but if not, there was this. Our ever-changing wines by the glass.

Restaurant Owners Deserve Equal Time

I would be remiss in not also discussing what it’s currently like for restaurant owners; it has to be a bit uncomfortable for them too. They’ve been forced by circumstances out of their control to raise menu prices. Everything costs more now, and so much influences these rising prices. From rising labor costs to labor shortages in the agricultural sector, to higher fuel costs, plus tariffs, severe weather patterns including drought. It’s seemingly an endless list. For the average consumer, grocery store prices are through the roof. They are too for restaurateurs. So, we do need to acknowledge that the uncomfortable reality applies to both sides of the restaurant equation. It can be difficult to keep a restaurant running successfully and to make a profit.

To close this out, I’ll just say that I still do go out to eat in nice restaurants despite rising menu prices. I probably do it with more thought than I used to. And a little less frequently too. I miss my comfortably priced burgers, but the new prices won’t stop me from ordering them. I’m way too American to give up a well-made cheeseburger and fries.”

JT: “Certainly not the fries.

Image: Food Faith Fitness

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My Substack fellow writer and friend Charles Thompson said that he wanted to write about his love affair with the Stars burger and fries for July 4^th. The burger as in San Francisco’s restaurant Stars and, before it. the Balboa Café and our Santa Fe Bar & Grill.

“I have been chasing that burger for years, “ he says, “ And haven’t found one to match!”

All this in play because I had seen a Substack article by Dan Perlman from June 19^th just passed called “Jeez, Another Burger Post.” “Everyone and their mother is opening a smashed burger joint. It’s the “new black”.

I read that “Smashburgers are all about that intense, caramelized crust.” And “Smashing the patty flat on a hot griddle maximizes the surface area, which means more crispy, caramelized, crust from the Maillard reaction. That’s where all the deep, savory flavor comes from.”

The only Maillard I knew was SF’s queen, Charlotte.

But all the talk of burgers made me think of the most famous ever. The 21 Club burger.

When it was $21.

When I opened Stars and wanted to do a burger for the bar menu, I thought of the 21 version. I had never enough money before stars to go there let alone the courage to face the maître d. My only experience was the very wimpy Wimpy’s burger in London, and decades later the very unwimpy Balboa Café burger.

The most famous in San Francisco.

It was cooked on a griddle, turned a couple of times, and served on a buttered and toasted baguette. Loved both by bar hounds and by socialite Anne Getty and her friends.

We sold so many that after an hour or so there would be beef fat dripping off my eyelashes back onto the griddle.

We moved on from the Balboa to Stars. Where its burger soon took over the title of the best and famous. Most of the credit going to the master grill chef Steven Vranian.

Steven: “In the Bay Area, Zuni’s burgers come close, but they started using grass fed/grass finished beef and the last one I had was too lean. Side note, Zuni’s Caesar salad came from Stars.

Its beginnings escape me; I do recall a moment during the first year at Stars when someone wanted to order a burger off the bar menu in the dining room (it was a Bar Menu only item!) and I went full Tasmanian Devil Vranian on Laurence De Vries [the maître d’] for allowing it.”

Jeremiah: Then we allowed almost anything as long as it was delicious, daring, and fun. Profitable was always appreciated. The various time we served a glass of Château Lafite with the burger on the bar menu was one of those moments.

Steven: “Stars didn’t have a griddle, only live fire grills. That meant all the fat (flavor) fell into the coals and not your mouth. And we purchased ground beef from 9th Street Meats and couldn’t customize the grind.

We started using shoulder clod, which is part of the chuck. Trim it out, cube and “kosher” it overnight. Grind it one time, in small batches, using the coarse grinder attachment.

But the clod, while inexpensive and flavorful, is too lean.

Since we were cutting NY Steaks in house, at the sirloin end of the NY Strip, there’s a band of grizzle, called the Vein End which doesn’t cook and is tough.

Instead of using that end for steaks, we would trim out the grizzle, cube it, add it to the chuck plus additional fat trimmings from the NY Steak portioning for the burger.

The goal was to get the burger fat percentage to 23-25%, knowing we lost a lot of it thru the grill grates. And to have tender NY Steaks and to control costs. And a great burger!

There are several factors in play. The cut and quality of the beef and fat. The overnight “kosher” process. A coarse, one pass only, grind. Slow and small batches when grinding.

Thick, 1”, eight-ounce patties. I think the size and thickness evolved from the James Beard Burger we did at the Santa Fe Bar & Grill. That was a different beast, no bun, purchased ground beef, pan seared with a bourbon peppercorn sauce.

During its travels the mixture changed, depending on the locality. For a while we kept the grinder attachments in the freezer so the meat would stay chilled and firm while grinding.

Koshering process-gets its name because we use Morton’s Kosher Salt.

Steven’s Burger Salt

kosher salt 1 box/3 pounds

sugar 1 pound

bay leaves ½ cup crushed

juniper berries ¼ cup smashed-crushed-chopped

thyme 1 teaspoon

black pepper 1 teaspoon

smoked paprika ¼ cup

msg 3 tbs

Mix and store in sealed Cambro container.

1 tablespoon per 5# of meat mixture. mix well and allow to marinate overnight.

Oh, and really massage the salt mixture into the beef, don’t just sprinkle it on top.

The grind is important. It can’t be fine or ground more than once. It’s the texture that really sets the burger apart from others.

For the beef: mix and match. Chuck (think pot roast), brisket, ribeye, NY. Depends on your budget. USDA Prime over choice, but choice works.”

More Stars Burger

Charles: “In my opinion, the cheeseburger and fries I was lucky enough to eat at Jeremiah’s San Francisco restaurant was the best I’ve ever eaten.

I recently told Jeremiah that I’ve been chasing that burger ever since. I never really have found an equivalent. A lot of amazing ones, yes, of course, but none to match the Stars burger.

The beef was sized perfectly, not too small, not huge either, cooked to my requested medium rare so that the juices ran down my arms. Served on a toasted buttered bun with the most amazing French fries ever (still chasing those too). I wasn’t a cook at Stars, so I wasn’t privy as to how the burgers were made. Jeremiah reminded me that a chef, Steven Vranian, a member of Jeremiah’s core kitchen team, came up with the recipe for the beef, the grind sized, and the cooking techniques. Now I understand that a combination of different cuts went into the grind to create that spectacular specimen.”

Steven and Jules Vranian and I Santa Fe Bar & Grill days.

Steven is now the exec chef and co-owner at Gianni’s Steakhouse in Wayzata, MN.

Gianni’s Burger

“Currently I’m using Australian Wagyu brisket and USDA Prime NY Strip vein ends, along with the trim of Australian Wagyu Ribeye. All have enough fat so additional fat isn’t needed.

Do not use tenderloin or top loin/bottom loin cuts. They are too lean and get mushy when ground.

Since the meat is “koshered” overnight, be careful not to over salt when cooking. And of course, do not push down and squeeze out the juices while cooking!”

Jeremiah: No smashing. And the lettuce julienne or chiffonade, so that a big piece of whole leaf doesn’t slide out from under the bun onto your lap after biting into the burger.

Steven: “For home cooks, kitchen aid has grinder attachments.

Now it’s down to the buns. I don’t like brioche buns; they crumble and fall apart. I use old school white burger buns, not the potato buns either, and per JT, whole salted butter on the top portion for the final “push”.

giannis-steakhouse.com

The Bread

Jeremiah: I still love a baguette, heavily butted and then under a grill, or put in the pan or on the griddled the the burger have been. But that is a lot to chew.

Thomas Original English muffins with the same treatment are also perfect and less of a bite to handle.

But no flimsy brioche for me either, and a great, classic, firm burger bun that absorbed the juices without falling apart is the easiest way to go.

The Fries

Steven: “The fries are another story! They [Stars] were thin, crispy outside, and soft inside – the best thing on the plate.”

Jeremiah: A great French fry should look like this.

And that’s because they were cut by us at 3/8-inch and not the finger-sized ones whose balance of sot interior to crisp exterior is out of whack.

We used Kennebec potatoes, hand cut, stored in water until needed, dried in the salad spinner, cooked to order unblanched in fresh best quality peanut oil (changed every day), drained, salted, and served immediately.

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“This,” I told my team, sweeping an arm over the landscape, “is the place for us, right in front of the press.”

100 food journalists from all over the USA.

We were in Newport at the Astor Mansion to make a light lunch before the big evening show with Guy Savoy featuring the latest culinary truth: no butter or cream in the food.

Turns out there was plenty of both, but first a lunch without any, unless you count fresh coconut ice cream in the dessert.

Six-foot grills were no mystery to us because “Greta” at our Berkeley’s Santa Fe Bar & Grill was that size, taking a whole bag of Mexican mesquite at a time. Along with, occasionally, a .22 bullet as a Mexican joke on us and to keep us on our feet. Or off them and onto the floor as our Master Griller, Steven Vranian (now at Gianni’s steakhouse in Wayzata MN) often had to do. I was on the cold station opposite the grill. When I saw Steven moving very fast, I would duck. As fast as I could.

We were supposed to have the Mansion’s kitchens for the morning hours, but the French arrived just after us and told us to get lost.

We did.

Outside on the lawn overlooking Long Island Sound.

Center stage.

We could not be missed.

I pushed the red sunglasses up on my sweating nose and got to work.

We lined up four five-foot grills just far enough from the press to keep the smoke from their eyes but close enough so they could see the color of ours. The grills were meant to have been kept out of sight; now they would be the focus of everything—a great stage and the center of our entertainment. I insisted that only the most beautiful things should show, that all the mechanics be stowed away under the tables, so the food would “appear” seemingly effortless.

Two hours later, the press materialized.

Their schedule gave them thirty minutes to wander around with glasses of wine before sitting down, so we served them a snack that I could cook and talk about simultaneously: the fresh fennel sausage coiled into large rings, skewered, and grilled whole, then cut into bite-size pieces on large wooden planks. They were served still sizzling from the grill with the juice from our newest exotic ingredient, Rangpur limes, and sprinkled with a salt we flavored with ground, oven-dried peel of lime and cumin seeds. On the side were bowls of grilled tomatillo salsa and a garlic smoked chile sauce.

The journalists took one look at us, one bite of sausage, raised their eyebrows with expectation, and away we went: salsa, ancho chiles, grilling, and California were suddenly it.

Roasted Garlic & Smoked Chile Sauce

Serves 4—6 ·

2 dried ancho chili pods

1 head fresh spring first-crop garlic

2 sprigs fresh thyme

^l/₂ cup mild extra-virgin olive oil

I ripe lime, zested and juiced

1 ½ tablespoon fresh oregano leaves, chopped

4 ounces unsalted butter

Salt

Grill the chilies over a charcoal, wood, or low gas flame until they puff up, about 3 minutes. Put them in a bowl with enough warm water to cover them. Weight them down with a small saucer, and soak for 2 hours. Drain, saving the water, and remove and discard the stems and seeds.

Meanwhile wrap the head of garlic loosely in foil with the thyme and a tablespoon of the olive oil. Cook over low fire or under a broiler until the garlic is tender, or about 20 minutes. Remove the stem and rough outer layers of the skin and discard. Put all the cloves in a food processor arid puree the garlic with the remaining olive oil. Pass through a sieve and discard the residue.

Puree the chilies with just enough of their soaking water to make a smooth puree. Sieve. Clean out the food processor.

Put the garlic and chili purees in the processor with the lime zest and juice, oregano, butter, and a teaspoon of salt. Puree until soft and smooth. Add more salt if necessary.

Serve on top of grilled fish and shellfish.

Tropical Fruit Compote

But they weren’t totally floored until we grilled the dessert.

After grilling 100 goat cheeses (the French would not let us use the ovens in “their” kitchen, )we were high on fatigue and adrenaline poisoning. I pushed the red sunglasses up on my head and commanded each cook to down a glass of champagne and pick up two huge sauté pans. On a signal from me, they filled them with the tropical fruits, passion fruit, and sugar syrup. Then all of us in unison tossed the fruit compote up in the air like master omelet makers.

That got a standing ovation.

We plated the tropical fruit ragouts, scooped fresh coconut ice cream into the center of each plate, added shortbread cookies—and we were done.

Serve the warm compote either with custard, vanilla or coconut ice cream, mascarpone, or English clotted or heavy cream. And cookies of your choice, like shortbread or warm gingersnaps five minutes out of the oven.

Serves 4—6

2 ripe mangoes, peeled, cut in quarter inch slices

1ripe papaya, peeled, seeded, cut in ¼-inch slices

2 ripe passion fruit, cut in half, pulp and juice saved

½ cup medium sugar syrup

2 limes, juiced

1 tbs unsalted butter

Salt

Shredded fresh coconut for garnish

Put the mango and papaya slices in a medium-size nonreactive frying pan. Whisk the passion fruit pulp with the sugar syrup for I minute to break up the pulp, and add to the fruit.

Warm the fruit over medium heat until just heated through—about 3 minutes. Add the lime juice, butter, and pinch of salt. Turn up the heat, and swirl the pan around until the butter is just melted.

Serve immediately in soup plates with the cream or ice cream in the center.

California Cuisine

The journalists and their 100 newspapers and magazines spread the word about “California Cuisine.” So much so that the word reached that hotbed of trend, Hong Kong.

The Mandarin Hotel wanted to transform its stuffy old-boy (they thought) Mandarin Grill.

That same year, 1983, they called to persuade me to introduce Santa Fe Bar & Grill’s what had just been called “New California Cuisine” at the Grill. As I talked to them, I could feel the starched heavy linen sheets in the suite with its own butler. I needed a rest. I sent them a list of 150 American Regional dishes, hinting that we should take the event beyond Califonia.

Some of which were:

Anaheim chilies stuffed with California goat cheese, Chinese black bean sauce

Warm avocado salad with shiitake and lobster mushrooms

Palm Beach crabmeat salad with pomelo

Duck prosciutto with pear and spiced pecan salad

Grilled oysters with crispbarbecued duck skin

Gumbo with crayfish, smoked duck sausages, fried pork belly

Grilled sweetbreads with sea urchin cream sauce

Buffalo steak with BBQ sauce

Astor Mansion Cranberry-glazed lamb loin

Turtle Cay bananas in rum with durian cream

Tropical fruit compote with coconut ice cream

Cornmeal blini with American caviar

The Mandarin’s press release said “Inspired by the superb natural produce and wines of California, and fresh Pacific seafood, Jeremiah Tower is leading a revolution in American restaurant kitchens with a highly inventive, highly personal style of cooking, giving new flair to ethnic and regional dishes, whilst maintaining their basic simplicity. Dishes are brilliantly eclectic blends of wholesome ‘country fare’ and exotic imported ingredients such as blood oranges, Maui onions, Oregon morels, nasturtium flowers, stone crabs, quail eggs, American caviar, and garden tomatoes.”

Well, that sounded like a trend.

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Recipe instructions are often vague despite Julia Childs’ obsession with regularizing everything.

“A spoonful.” Which spoon? If the recipe was early 20^th-century in UK or USA then every household had the spoon.

This one

A soup spoon when there were ones that didn’t spill (no rounded edges) consommédown one’s tie. When we still had those.

And that’s a hodgepodge of thinking because hochepot was a soup. A real mix.

Image: Wikipedia

And my thinking is often a “confused mixture, jumble, or random assortment of different things.” Like ideas.

Then there’s pinch and dash, a sprinkle, drizzle, and squirt. The latter now clearer now that there are special bottles.

A Handfull

And what is a handful?

Or two.

Image: Getty

We all know what it is when it’s an unruly child with chocolate covered hands running up and down the corridor of a plane that has been in the air for twelve hours. When it is a command in a recipe, it can produce despair. As in whose hand? But our answers to the problem should be Dorothy Parker’s:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

She is more the ‘what-the-hell’ school pf cooking. Or ‘how-bad-can-it-be’ attitude and go ahead and cook.

Remembering at the same time Mark Twain’s: The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is the difference between the lightening bug and the lightening.

Consistency

Where we expect to see consistency says a lot about human delusion.

Quite rightly we expect it from In-N-Out Burgers, Honda, Hermes, Lora Piana, Paris’ Chez Georges, Swatch, Swiss underwear, Mares dive regulators, Charvet handkerchiefs, Ralph Lauren alligator shoes, Kiehl’s, and Bentleys.

So why do we expect a restaurant to be at the same high level every day when we know perfectly well that everything conspires and is in league to make sure it does not happen?

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Photo by Sam Hanna

When I saw in 2016 that Anthony Bourdain claimed “Jeremiah Tower was the guy who transformed American menus from what they were to what they are now,” it occurred to me I should write a book to tell that story. “He’s the history of everything. It’s all there. It’s a great story.”

After starting the book that became (April 2017) Start the Fire: How I Began a Food Revolution in America, I realizedI had already told some of the story in 1986 with my James Beard Foundation Award winning “Best American Regional Cookbook,” Jeremiah Tower’s New American Classics.

But perhaps it was time for a tune up.

In the 20 years since New American Classics, several new and at the time astonishing things about it have now become every day stuff. Just as when the latest fashion fad of Madonna’s leather bras by Jean-Paul Gaultier had stopped shocking the fashionista world, in came Molecular Gastronomy to shake up the foodie culinary world.

Chef Jacques Pepin: “Molecular gastronomy is like Jean-Paul Gaultier coming down the runway. You ask yourself ‘who would wear that,’ but eventually it trickles down to become prêt-a-porter,” or what you wear every day. And that is how classics happen, the things that trickle down and stick, not just because of popular assent, but because they fit.

In other words, whichever new and brilliant approaches to food, ingredients, and cooking are introduced, the kick start for the new thinking comes from the original benchmarks. It’s been a long time since Escoffier, but he is still a good foundation for thought.

The Good Cook, Richard Olney with Time Life, London/France 1878-1980

After leaving Chez Panisse and escaping the Big Sur forest fires and so leaving Ventana Inn, I went to help Richard Olney with his new Time Life series, “the Good Cook.” We did a new book every 2 months. In the South of France and London I translated three centuries of French cookbooks and recipes, then cooked the food, and styled the photos. Then later did the same in the USA for its version.

Jeremiah Tower’s New American Classics: 1986

My first cookbook and James Beard Foundation Awards winner.

Jeremiah Tower Cooks: 250 Recipes from an American Master: 2002

The Great Book of French Cuisine: Edited & Revised Edition: by Henri-Paul Pellaprat, 2003

America’s Best Chefs Cook with Jeremiah Tower: 2003

California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution, 2004

A Dash of Genius: 2012

I have been obsessed with Escoffier since I was sixteen at England’s King’s College School near London. My drama teacher gave me “Ma Cuisine” for having played Algernon Moncrieff in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Ernest.” I thought it a curious choice, but I read it every night under the bed covers with a flashlight after my boarding school lights out. And was entranced. Later, in Harvard College and cooking for friends at our off campus house, I graduated from “Ma Cuisine” to his masterpiece, “Le Guide Culinaire.” I worked through it enough so that when I moved to a little house in Cambridge in my senior year, the first dinner I gave was pure Escoffier.

Dinner for Friends, Cambridge, 1965

Caviar Blinis

Frozen Zubrovka

Consommé Madrilène

Salmon en gelee aux truffles

Pouilly-Fume 1962

Filet de Boeuf perigourdine

Chateau-Neuf-du-Pape 1957

Peches Rose-Cheri

Asti Spumante

Coffee

Sercial Madeira 1884

On graduating in 1965 I bought the Vyvyan Holland English translation of Ma Cuisine. I thought it fitting that its translator was the son of the author of the play in which I appeared eight years before and for which I had been given the original book. Now I could read and understand all the technical bits in French that I had not understood before.

So, when Amazon asked me to write a book on Escoffier, I was primed. And called it “A Dash of Genius.”

“The day after France broke off diplomatic relations with Prussia, the War Ministry asked the “Societe des Cuisiniers de Paris” to provide the names of a dozen chefs in the reserve army to cook for the General Headquarters of the Rhine Army. One of the Moulin’s devoted customers was Colonel d’Andleau, who quickly scooped up Escoffier and his best friend and shipped both cooks off to the HQ. It was the time of “The Guns of August” and on the 14^th of that month the two men began to cook for generals.

The war lasted only eight months, but there were several narrow escapes. On his first day in camp the French Emperor Napoleon III, the Imperial Prince, and his chiefs of staff arrived in the early morning just as the Prussian artillery opened fire. As everyone in a panic broke camp Escoffier was able to grab a huge joint of beef from a late-night forager and some cans of food. Camped once again that evening he wondered how on earth he was going to cook the meat. Being surrounded by Prussian cavalry didn’t give much leeway because at any moment they would have to break camp again. He didn’t want to abandon his piece de resistance, and since he felt that “great danger leads to firm resolution,” he quickly decided that there was nothing for it but to prepare and cook it right away, even it took half the night. He and his assistant found some railroad ties blown up by the enemy to make the frame for a spit, a sword was used to skewer the joint, and a nearby hedge provided the fuel. As soon as the fire was just right, they set about cooking the meat. More swords were soon needed to fend off the curious spectators who, at the first aroma of roasting beef, turned into a band of thieves. Once the roast was cooked, they slept a couple of hours, and at 7 in the morning orders came in for a 9 o’clock full meal for the officers. Escoffier was rightly proud of his decision to cook the meat the night before, and with great panache drew up his menu using some eggs and potatoes from a farm 500 meters away.

Canned Sardines in Oil

Sausage

Soft-boiled Eggs

Roast Beef, Well Done

Potato Salad

My Sardines on Toast

Serves: 4

Beverage: chilled aquavit and pilsner beer

2 cans large sardines in olive oil

sea or Koshersalt

1 medium white onion, peeled, cored

1 Meyer lemon, seeded, finely chopped

½ cup fresh mint leaves, coarsely chopped

2 TBS extra virgin olive oil

4 slices white sandwich loaf bread, crusts removed

4 TBS salted butter

Tabasco sauce

Drain the sardines and sprinkle with a little salt.

Coarsely grate the onion and mix with the Meyer lemon, mint, olive oil, and a pinch of salt.

Toast the bread and butter the slices.

Divide the sardines on each of the toast slices, and spoon the onion-lemon mixture over the top of the sardines. Serve immediately. Pass the bottle of Tabasco separately.

To drink at Escoffier’s breakfast were several liters of muddy water from the horse trough that Escoffier had passed through a small filter that he had bought before leaving Paris. Coffee and Fine Champagne Cognac were served just before they fled for their lives in the morning attack.

I had lived Escoffier fairly thoroughly before I started cooking professionally, but the first time I got to know the world’s most famous chef really well was in 1976 when sixty people in a dining room were waiting for me to send out the first dishes from my “One Week of Menus” at Chez Panisse.

Every night was a different menu, the week in red ink, and the night of dining in black.

Cornmeal Pancakes with Smoked Sturgeon

Serves: 6

Beverage: chilled vodka or champagne

1 cup yellow cornmeal

½ teaspoon salt

1 ½ cups boiling water

2 eggs

1 cup milk

½ cup sifted all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons melted butter

¾ cup warm clarified butter

8 tablespoons sour cream

8 tablespoons fresh salmon caviar

18 thin slices smoked sturgeon

Mix the cornmeal and salt and stir in the boiling water. Cover and let stand for 10 minutes. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Slowly stir in the milk. Mix in the flour and 2 tablespoons melted butter. Beat until the mixture is smooth. The batter should be the consistency of heavy cream. If it is too thick, thin with a little more milk.

Brush a well-seasoned crepe pan with clarified butter and heat. When the pan is hot, pour in about 3 tablespoons batter and tilt the pan to distribute the batter evenly. Cook until the underside is lightly browned, 2 to 3 minutes. Turn and cook the other side another 1 to 2 minutes.

Put each blini on a hot plate and pour 3 tablespoons clarified butter over the blini. Put 1 tablespoon sour cream in the center of each blini, then 1 tablespoon salmon caviar in the center of the sour cream. Put 3 slices sturgeon around each blini and serve immediately.

Chicken Paillard or Minute Steak with Radish Salad

There is no mention of “paillards” in Escoffier’s most famous cookbook, Le Guide Culinaire, but he must have prepared a lot of them and perhaps, as with sardines, he had enough of them when it came time to write the book. My inspiration for paillards came from my steak Diane lunches as a child on trans-Atlantic crossings in ocean-liner Escoffier-trained dining rooms. I chose it as much for the tableside theatrical flaming as anything else.

“Paillard” refers to a thinly sliced or pounded piece of meat or poultry that cooks very quickly either grilled, broiled or sauteed. It could be veal, lamb, venison, pheasant, duck, wild boar and so on, using any cut unevenly-shaped pieces (like chicken breasts) in which the ends of dissimilar thickness would otherwise cook at different rates, or any cuts that will benefit from the tenderizing.

The whole dish takes minutes to finish, and the chicken steaks can be prepared in advance. If you don’t have watermelon radishes, use red radishes. Make sure that the plastic you use is good quality and odorless, or the chicken will taste exactly as the cheap plastic. If you are going to put the chicken steaks in the marinade right after you pound them, you can use grease-proof or wax paper. But using paper too far in advance will result in soggy paper sticking to the chicken. If you have only small breast pieces, pound out two per person for a main course and put them both on the large oval plate with ends meeting under the radish salad.

Serves 4

Beverage: a fresh, young cold rose or slightly chilled pinot noir

2 large chicken breasts, skinned, boned (4 pieces)

I tablespoon ground cardamom

1 pinch ground cumin

1teaspoon red chili flakes

¼ cup peanut or olive oil

8 large watermelon radishes, trimmed, sliced very thinly on a slicer

2 oranges, zested, juiced

1 lemon, juiced

2 tablespoons sesame oil

¼ cup fresh cilantro leaves, coarsely chopped or small whole

2 tablspoons basil oil

salt

freshly ground black pepper

Remove the ‘tender’ from the inside of each half breast, and reserve for another use. Cut out any tendon or ‘white skin’ from both the thick and the thin end and discard. Slice the half breast lengthwise, keeping 1/8-inch intact on one long side. Unfold the chicken pieces and put them between two pieces of heavy very lightly oiled plastic and pound with the side of a cleaver. Spend more time on the thick end until the whole piece is evenly ¼ inch thick.

Mix the cardamom,cumin, and red chili flakes with the peanut or olive oil in a flat dish just large enough to hold the steaks in one layer. Add them, rub them all over with the marinade, and marinate for 3 hours, turning occasionally.

Start the grill or preheat the broiler.

Put radishes in a bowl with the orange and lemon juices, sesame oil, and a generous pinch of salt. Mix well.

Salt the chicken steaks lightly and grill or broil for 3 minutes on each side or until just barely cooked through. Then put on hot oval dishes. Place the salad equally in the center of each steak. Spoon some of the liquid from the radish salad over the chicken and the rest around the plate. Sprinkle the orange zest and chopped cilantro on the chicken. Drizzle the basil oil around the plate, and add some drops of sesame oil

Peach Melba

Throughout my childhood whenever I was taken by my parents to Prunier in Paris, The Mirabelle in London, or some other grand French restaurant, I would demand “La Peche Melba” for dessert. When I became a chef in California and didn’t know how to make a lace of spun sugar to put on top of the peaches in their ice sculpture (didn’t know how to make that either), I switched to my new favorite Escoffier fruit dessert, “Peaches Rose-Cheri.”The same poached peaches but with pineapple ice and champagne sabayon. I added pink rose petals scattered on top. Here is a variation still using white peaches.

White Peaches with Raspberry and Blackberry Sauces

Serves: 4

Beverage: late harvest Semillon, ice wine, or Sauternes

2 ripe white peaches

salt

3 cups medium sugar syrup

1 cup fresh raspberries

1 cup fresh blackberries

1 cup custard or crème anglaise

Add the peaches and a pinch of salt to the sugar syrup and simmer until the peaches are tender, about 10 minutes. Remove from the heat, drain. Peel the peaches, cut in half, and remove the pits. Put the peaches back in the syrup for 2 hours with the pits and skins to add flavor. Chill the peaches until ready to serve.

Meanwhile make the two berries sauces by pushing the berries through a fine sieve by hand. Mix ¼ cup of the cold poaching syrup with each of the purees.

Spoon the custard on chilled plates and place a peach half in the center of each plate. Drizzle the raspberry and blackberry sauces over and around the peaches.

Table Manners: How to Behave in the Modern World and Why Bother, 2016)

Start the Fire: How I Began A Food Revolution In America, 2017

Thank you for reading JEREMIAH TOWER’S OUT OF THE OVEN! Free subscribers will receive an occasional publication. Paid subscribers will receive 2 weekly publications, as well as menus, recipes and full access to archives. I hope you like it!

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Tuscany’s very great Frances Mayes

Posted last week on Substack her article on “Summer Garden Food.” In which she says “Social life in a small Tuscan town makes me think of my father’s expression, “This will kill the weak and cripple the mighty.”

And dinner parties which she says are easier when done back to back, “if you have the stamina. As most dishes can be prepared at once for both parties.” Let alone as she says that “back to back the flowers, candles, cheeses” can be “handled once.”

As long as there is planning and time for it. For my first big dinner party in Italy there was neither.

In Umbria not Tuscany.

I had been reading Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe’s Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, which made me light headed and ready to dine. Bur first I begged a landlord showing me his villa, “Let’s go have a prosecco.”

Half way through the first glass his wife conjured up the idea of having a barbecue the next day for lunch since about 20 people wanted to meet me. She told me that her caretaker gardener and his wife would cook. I loved the idea, with visions of the 1973 film La Grande Bouffe trucks driving up to her villa and unloading wild boar, ortolans, and perhaps a suckling pig.

A series of her quick cellphone calls confirmed the guests. Minutes later, another call announced that the gardener and his chef wife were ill in bed.

“Not to worry,” she piped in “there is no shortage of chefs,” looking triumphantly at me.

“Well, OK,” I gurgled through another glass of wine, “we can go to the market in the morning.”

No such luck I was told.This was not Greve or Siena or even Florence.

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I have always admired Ruth Reichl. She was the inspiration for me to start writing for Substack. Admiring her even more now for continuing brilliantly since the recent death of her husband.

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With Memorial Day over, it is traditionally time to think about summer. And a garden or farm stands. Here in Napa Valley at Far Niente.

With the perfectly in season and just picked vegetables and fruit.

Some people are mad for corn. I am for ripe off the tree white peaches.

I cannot think of any subject that is more complex than vegetables, which is not to say that the best vegetable preparations are complicated to cook. It is just that the range of possibilities seems vast in comparison with any other category of raw materials- and there is the challenge to keep it simple. In fact, a good rule with vegetables is: The less is done to them in the cooking, the better.

In my early days at Chez Panisse, I used to make a carrot soup that unfailingly provoked the question: “What did you do to that soup?” And I would have to reply, “Nothing.” What I did do was to make sure that the carrots cooked in the shortest amount of time and were then cooled down in an ice bath as quickly as possible so that they would not continue cooking and lose their freshness.

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Guest Contributor ~ Charles G. Thompson/Substack: The Sharpest Tool

Jeremiah Tower’s comments are in italics.

Too many restaurants are posting menus online without prices. I like to see what I might have to pay before venturing out to a place I’ve not visited. The internet has now made it a requirement that restaurants have a website or some type of digital presence. Most consumers expect this to be the case. Now diners can peek at what’s in store before their actual dinner date. They can decide if the prices are within a comfortable affordability range. And most of us look at these sites. That wasn’t always the case.

Jeremiah: You have boarded a plane and are taxiing out onto the runway when there’s an announcement that your ticket costs $650. This is the first time you have heard of it. No chance to leave for another airline.

You are greeted in a famous restaurant and taken to your table. After a glass of champagne, you ask for a menu. “The chef insists that you have the tasting menu. It is $325 per person.” And that is the first you have heard of that. You’re in the same position as on the plane. You could leave, but where can you find another unoccupied, unreserved table at the last minute?

This happened to me in New York at Per Se several years ago. I had researched the menu and was looking forward to what I’d made as preliminary choices. A la Carte. My choices.

As I am writing this, I looked at the restaurant website to see what menu prices are like now. “New menu page coming soon,” it said. No prices either. On Google it told me that the tasting menu is now $425, but no mention of the food itself. So at least $500 per person, and who knows what wild tipping policies they have?

Going in mostly blind.

A Tradition Begins

At age nine my mother started a tradition for my birthday that lasted through my high school years. On my actual birthday, I was allowed to choose a restaurant to go to for a ‘fancy’ meal. At this point I don’t remember why I wanted this, but I really, really did. (Maybe from watching The Galloping Gourmet and Julia Child on T.V.?) Going to a restaurant in this fashion was a real splurge for my mother. We were lower middle class, and she was a single mother raising two children. Money was not falling off trees in our world. Of course, looking over the menu at all the yummy possibilities was one of the more exciting aspects of this experience.

That first fancy meal was also my first time spying the most expensive dishes on the menu. In those days, it would likely be steak or lobster. If she’d let me, I’d order whatever was priciest. From that first meal, I became known for ordering the most expensive item on the menu.

Jeremiah: For the first 20 years of my life while traveling, it was my father’s corporate expense account that paid for First Class, smoked salmon at every meal for me, and extra aged rum for my babas au rhum that had to be dessert. When it wasn’t a special-order Baked Alaska.

When we were off the account and my father was paying, it came with a reminder “No smoked salmon tonight.”

I countered that with a loud voice to the waiter for all to hear, “May I have a half portion of salmon.” That was enough to embarrass my father into a full portion and a big tip to the server.

To Splurge or Not?

To this day, the most expensive dishes on a menu are the ones I look for first. Then I argue with myself on whether to splurge or not. The point here is that we didn’t always have the luxury of looking at a website menu before we arrived at a restaurant.

I have noticed an uptick in the practice of posting menus online sans prices ever since COVID. I see it more and more, and it’s highly annoying. My husband and I are financially sound. We enjoy the occasional ‘fancy’ meal out a few times a month. I’m in charge of keeping a list of places to try. The procedure used to be that I would pick a place and look at their website. A.) to see what they offered, and B.) to look at the prices. We both know our financial boundaries; a splurge is one thing. A break-the-bank is another thing entirely (for example, the recent Noma L.A. pop up at $1500 each would fall under bank breaker). With the advent of the internet and online menus, my husband loves to decide before we go what he’s going to order. At times, he’ll have two choices in mind. It’s now become a family joke, as I much prefer the element of surprise. Or at least waiting to really study the menu when we are in situ.

It took me a minute to figure a work around to missing menu prices: Google/AI. the name of the restaurant but don’t go to the restaurant site. Look at the other results, maybe on Yelp, etc. Invariably someone who has already been to the restaurant has posted a photo of the actual menu (that includes those missing prices). Apparently, I’m not alone in this practice. There are endless Reddit threads on the subject. Eater also covered this topic: Dear Expensive Restaurants: Stop Posting Online Menus Without Prices. It’s not only high-end restaurants who have adopted this practice. I wanted to try a new burrito place the other day. Yep, when I went to the website, there were no prices listed.

Menus: Typed Up & Photocopied

A quick return to the before times. I remember the days at Stars, Jeremiah’s San Francisco brasserie, when we typed up menus and photocopied them.

Jeremiah: This one below was a pre-opening lunch for the newly formed American Institute of Wine and Food. And somehow the Beef Council who had been persuaded that veal sweetbreads were all the beef necessary.

This happened daily as Jeremiah and his chefs changed the menu depending on what was fresh and available.

It was often a mad rush to take the stack of menus up to the host stand before service commenced. He reminded me how on Sundays, they had a second menu printed and stuffed into covers within minutes in case one of the dishes was no longer available.

Jeremiah: I knew what we would run out of. I also knew I never wanted to hear a server at a table or the bar saying, “I’m sorry but that is no longer available.” So new complete menus, without any items missing, were prepared.

This one is from 11 months after we opened July 4^th, 1984.

Jeremiah: Nothing 86’d included. And for the wine list the same. It was made up of small pages. If two or more items were missing from a page, it could be redone and inserted so that no one ever knew. Don’t you hate it went the server has been back to your table two or three times with the same story--that the wine you want is not in the house?

For the special and additional wine list for that day only. It could be, like the food menu, typed, printed, and stuffed into covers in an hour.

Restaurant Guides: Zagat, Michelin (and Critics)

I had to think back too to remember how we used to decide to try a new place. And it came to me: restaurant guides like Zagat and Michelin. They listed price ranges and suggested dishes to order. When I lived in New York, I always had a Zagat guide. There were also restaurant reviews which I still love to read. Those were the heady days of critics like Mimi Sheraton, Gayle Greene (and her hats), Ruth Reichl, Bryan Miller, and in Los Angeles, S. Irene Virbila and Jonathan Gold (and Ruth Reichl too!). Yes, they usually listed price ranges and favorite dishes. When Bryan Miller was the New York Times restaurant critic, I was lucky enough to go with him as he reviewed a couple of new places. I was friends with his wife.

And let’s not forget those menus posted in restaurant windows. A common practice to this day in cities like Paris, Rome, Madrid, and London. You’re out and about and hunger pangs come on? Take a look at café and restaurant menus and choose one to dine at. Of course, it happens in the States as well, a bit less frequently. Jeremiah reminded me of the glass enclosed wooden box outside Chez Panisse where he was chef. Each night of the week the restaurant served a different menu; the menu posted outside the restaurant listed the menus for one week. It went up every Friday morning. Walking through the Gourmet Ghetto on your way to the Cheese Board? Stop and peek at what’s in store for the week at Chez Panisse. Jeremiah continued this practice at Stars by posting the daily menu at the restaurant’s entrance.

We do offer a caveat here at Out of the Oven: we understand how difficult it is to operate a restaurant right now. The instability of just about everything, the high prices for rent and for material goods, it’s a difficult moment to own a restaurant. Yet, if there’s one take away from this, it’s that we fully support restaurants and those hard-working people operating them. In that spirit, our suggestion is, one way to encourage diners to visit an establishment might be to post prices on websites. No surprises and no angry customers.

Is part of the problem a decline in customer service? Has the public been trained to accept less? Everything feels more difficult. Try to cancel memberships to anything, like Uber One, You Tube, or Amazon Prime. Or attempt to reach, say, the Social Security office, or other agencies involving our own money. It can be headache producing. Viewing restaurant menus should be a cinch.

Biography – Charles G. Thompson

In my early employment years, I worked in the restaurant business as a cook first before moving to the front of the house. As luck would have it, I was employed in three of Jeremiah’s restaurants--Santa Fe Bar & Grill, Stars and 690. A friendship with Jeremiah began then and has lasted to this day. I’ve not been part of the hospitality industry for many years. Now, I’m a writer. My writing has appeared in Wired, Advocate, Washington Post, Business Insider, Los Angeles Times, The Independent (U.K.), Chicago Tribune, among others.

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European Words Versus American

A while ago, I wrote this.

“It’s time again for our vocabulary to catch up with our cooking.”

Now that we are not seeing so much of crème instead of cream, I guess it has.

Though sometimes the cream of the cream is better in French.

English has long been a mongrel language, strongly marked by just about every other language in Europe. With America’s thriving immigrant communities, or what will be left of them, the English spoken here is even more of a mixed bag—and therein lies much of its vitality.

For American cooks, much of our vocabulary comes directly from the French or Italian—a logical enough development given our love and acceptance of their principles of cooking. And we have recognized that we have our own distinct cuisines and its and their own young language.

All about having one foot in the past and one in the present as we build a new American culinary tradition.

My delight in opening a bay scallop, standing knee-deep in crystal Maine or Montauk water and eating it right out of the shell, is as strong as my prejudice that our American culinary language must evolve at the same rate as our continuing culinary discoveries. And that common sense should eventually prevail over the momentary pleasure of fashion.

Garnishes

More words on this because I am annoyed that after vertical food that fell off the plates an into our laps, we now have garnishes on our food placed undressed/sauced with tweezers and often fairly nasty tasting.

I have been sometimes guilty of the appearance is everything even when it is not. Here is one for black bean puree soup. But the nasturtium flower added spice, and the salmon eggs a touch of smooth salty richness

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Errors

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Dorothy on Substack this week asked me “where was I in the midst of truffles, trifles and frivolity” that I had been going on about recently. And how ‘does one devise a watermelon soufflé dear chef?”

Sidetracked for a moment I want to Escoffier’s masterwork cookbook Le Guide Culinaire to see what he did with soufflés.

I saw recipes for Wild Sorrel, Foie Gras, Eggplant, Jerusalem Artichokes, and Fresh Almond. Like the ones I used to crack open with Richard Olney in his South of France garden and savor the pale cream nuts with a young Sauternes.

The only thing I can get here in Merida is eggplant, and a soufflé of them is the last thing I would do after I had grilled and dredged them in the juices of cochinita pibil and lots of the wild oregano that teems around here.

So for now, the soufflés, I answered, are all about meringue. And tropical or summer fruit. Especially when you need to serve 85 a night and have no more time to cook them than 10-12 minutes as we did at Stars.

They were thought of as forward thinking then. As I do now when I read on Island Creek’s Substack “Oysters with a Pineapple Habanero Mignonette. Like a teleportation device to a different headspace.”

When I read the list of ingredients it was also about mouthspace.

4 oz fresh pineapple

1.5 tbsp finely minced shallots

1 tbsp finely minced cilantro stems

Habanero, finely minced

zest + juice of 1 lime

2 tbsp rice vinegar

12 oysters on the half shell

Broil the pineapple on a small sheet pan until lightly charred and juicy, 4–6 minutes. Let cool, then finely dice.

Mix with the remaining ingredients. Taste and adjust— more habanero for heat, more vinegar if you want a looser texture. The pineapple will continue to release juice as it sits.

Chill before serving with freshly shucked oysters.

I removed the “to taste” phrases because what else would you be doing?

When looking back at the masters and their commentators, there is danger in getting so caught up in the interpretations of their work by subsequent followers that one assumes a slavish posture.

It is a position to be feared.

In Dialogues of Ancient and Modern Music, Galileo’s father challenged the kind of thinking of those who would later refuse to look through his son’s telescope knowing it couldn’t show anything new.

“It appears to me,” he said, that it was worth standing up against those “who in proof of any assertion rely simply on the weight of authority.”

Or repetitive history like “season to taste.”

His, and his subsequently his son’s desire, was to “wish to be allowed freely to question and freely to answer [conventional shibboleths without any sort of adulation.” It is with the same inspection and open mind that I suggest looking back to the future. At these books with a new eye and expectations, avoiding the conventional scholarship that in the past has sought out only what is strange. Mace, ginger, nutmeg and clove in “every” dish (untrue). Or how to roast a crane, stuff a sparrow, or skewer a snipe.

In the 1596 The Good Huswifes Jewell, there is not a mention of French cooking or the use of a French word. Perhaps that’s because Elizabeth the First would have thought Mary Queen of Scots and her French connections and affectations were out to poison her. A Book of Cookrye of 1591 is the same plane English fare. All about how to make white gingerbread, boil a leg of mutton with lemons, and make a sirop of violets.

But by 1615 Elizabeth’s throne has been taken over by Stuarts, all of whom had caste more than a casual eye across the channel at French niceties. In A New Booke of Cookerie (J. Murrell) of that year, the first recipe calls for larding a capon (before poaching it) with lemons “in the French fashion.” English food would never be the same. Until the early 20^th century when a Frenchman called Marcel Boulestin in London and on TV reminded English housewives that English food cooked simply should be a national pride, and towards the end of the century restaurants like St John created a temple (if an unpretentious one) to that food.

Grilled chicken hearts on toast a few weeks ago made our hearts sing. Let alone the devilled kidneys also sitting on toast.

I drooled over their famous marrow bones with parsley and onion salad.

It was their perfect fish that turned my mind to the sea

And why I was suddenly thinking of soused oysters. They could easily have been on the menu as well. Here is an almost four-hundred-year-old recipe for them. ‘Take out the meat of the greatest oysters. Save their liquor and put it into a saucepan with half a pint of white wine and the same quantity of white wine vinegar. Add some whole pepper and sliced ginger and simmer for a minute. Then add the oysters and let them boil one minute only. Take the oysters out and chill the poaching liquid. Then put the oysters back in the liquid and hold [refrigerated] until you need them.” Though perhaps not all year as the book allows.

Now I might add the fresh new crop ginger or even galingale and call them Oysters in White Wine Vinegar & Ginger.

Just another mignonette sauce I guess!

Mignonette Sauce

Image: NYTimes

2 finely minced peeled shallots

⅓cup red-wine or white-wine vinegar

1teaspoon coarsely ground black or white peppercorns

I would add minced Moroccan style salt preserved lemons, perhaps some fresh mint, and stay away from the Yucatecan love of Salsa Inglese (Worcestershire). Though perhaps not if with a of of butter for grilled or baked oysters too large to comfortably eat raw.

It was from one of these books that the inspiration for oyster hollandaise hit me enough to add it to almost everything, especially poached chicken. So it is not astonishing that my favorite recipe from the 1615 book is poached capon with the above soused oysters and pickled lemons. Of course, I was tempted to poach the capon (after it is boned and then stuffed with mushrooms) and pour the oyster hollandaise over it. The old recipe calls for putting some of the poaching broth in a pan with Rhenish wine, sweet herbs, mint, pickled lemons and oranges (use salt preserved ones), and then to cook some oysters in the mixture. If “you love the juice of an onion,” then add that to the oysters. I would forgo some “raisins of the sun” as offered as a variation.

Speaking of lemons.

A recent shipment of Meyer lemons from a garden in the Berkeley hills, unpacked to the music of the bittersweet good-to-be-alive feeling in Brahms’ violin Concerto in D Minor #1 played by Pinchas Zukerman that talked to me of woodcock, its liver on toast, and champagne (in no particular order), made me think.

And while thinking of toast (and toasts) it seems to me that one or two of the refrains are all about toast and butter, and a lover who spreads it for you.

Why all that made me think of picnics, I don’t know. Perhaps because there is a summer-loving photograph from “Residences –Decoration” stuck to the wall in front of me. This magazine’s cover story is called “Vivre au Bord de l’Eau,” and the cover itself shows a blindingly white terrace in August at the god-like Santorini hotel called Katikies, a 300 feet above the ocean, with its “promesse de bien-etre et de fraicheur” that defines the color “blue,” wine-dark or not.

Well, we could all do with a freshness in the air, and as for bien-etre or well-being, it speaks for itself.

And how to end a soon-to-be summer picnic.

The day before pick some small (each enough for one person) cantaloupe melons around four in the afternoon after the sun has beaten down on them all day. Then cut the tops off to make a lid, scoop out the seeds, strain them and the juices for putting back in the melon, fill the melons with at least 50 year old malmsey Madeira, put the lids on, and then put the melons down a deep well in a bucket just above the water. Leave them there overnight, and the next day, to finish off the picnic, get the melons out of the well, hand out spoons, and then all drink the melon-infused Madeira and spoon out the Madeira-infused melon flesh.

If no Madeira, then grab whatever dessert wines you have. And if not those, some green Chartreuse, white port, or Beaume de Venises.

And if alcohol is off the menu, macerate raspberries in Seville orange juice and load up the melons. And if no melons, slice some white peaches or nectarines and serve with passion fruit sabayon.

Sabayon

The secret to holding sabayon (zabaglione) to be served cold is to keep whisking it over an ice bath without stopping until it is quite cold.

Yield: 2 to 3 cups serving 4-6

6 egg yolks

½ cup sugar

Pinch salt

1 cup Champagne or white wine

1 cup Heavy Cream

Put two trays of ice in a container large enough to just hold a wide, rather shallow, stainless-steel mixing bowl. Half fill the container with water and keep this ice bath by the stove. Boil a pot of water that is large enough to hold the cooking bowl so that it sits half down into the pot.

Combine the yolks, sugar, and salt in a stainless-steel mixing bowl. Mix well and add champagne or wine.

Over barely simmering water, whisk the mixture vigorously until it is thick and pale yellow, about 10 minutes. Put the cooking bowl immediately into the ice bath and whisk vigorously again until the sabayon is cold. Keep chilled.

When you want to use the sauce, whip the cream and fold it into the sabayon.

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