Have Blade Will Travel: The adventures of a traveling chef (26 page)

The Stinking Rose
, a restaurant built upon a theme of garlic, soon occupied the space vacated by Café Americain.  They started small, with one-retail-space, soon expanding into the next five commercial slots up the block.  With a combination of sassy attitude, marketing and a clever concept – mountains of garlic! – people flocked to
The Stinking Rose
and they were literally packed seven days-and-nights per week.  In fact, the owners have become so successful that they have opened five other restaurant operations in San Francisco, and one in Beverly Hills. 

Some of the establishments that disappeared during my years in San Francisco – much to my profound disappointment – include
Amelio’s
,
Bentley’s
,
The Blue Boar
,
Le Club
,
Doro’s
,
Ernie’s
,
Jovanello’s
,
Lascaux
,
Orsi’s
,
The Ritz Old Poodle Dog
,
The Squire
(in the Fairmont Hotel), and of course
Vanessi’s
(R.I.P.).

Some of my restaurant experiences were also derived from my hands-on experience in the kitchens of more than a dozen different restaurants over the years.  One of these was the kitchen at
The Washington Square Bar & Grill
, one of the most popular dining-and-drinking destinations in the city, with a reputation that spanned the globe.  The creators were Ed Moose – a former dispatcher and reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Sam Dietsch – an oddball whose acerbic personality earned him numerous death threats over the years – though unfortunately, none of which were acted upon.  (Ed Moose passed away in August 2010 at the age of 81; Dietsch died in the late 1990s, with no known fanfare.)

Opened in 1973, popular columnist Herb Caen (1916-1997) gave the
Washington Square Bar & Grill
the venerable nickname
The WashBag
.  Caen was well-known for his many “bon-mots” over the years, including the popular nickname for San Francisco – “Baghdad-by-the-Bay” – taken from a collection of his essays published in 1949; followed by "Don't Call It Frisco," published in 1953.  I was honored to have had my own fifteen-seconds of Herb Caen fame when the following blurb was published in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday, February 25, 1991:… “David Paul Larousse spotted this sign at the entrance to Saffron Sushi on Lombard: ‘Restroom for free use by Saffron patrons.  Public use $40.’  Well sometimes it’s worth it.”  (Sadly, Caen died of lung cancer in 1997, though his funeral was one of the best-attended events in the city’s history.) 

Very soon after opening, The WashBag became the favored gathering place for a generation of writers, politicians, musicians, social elite and wanna-be’s.  It was a late 20th-century incarnation of Rector's, the celebrated New York City gathering place on Times Square, opened by Charles Rector in 1900, and lasting until 1947 when Rector’s son George passed away.  Rector’s was celebrated by the journalists of its time as “the favored hangout of playboys, prize fighters, actors, journalists, statesmen, and the like.”  The WashBag was often compared to
Elaine’s
, a widely celebrated, though much more hip and chic bar and restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side – that catered to a similar clientele.

Moose was an enigma.  He had no food service experience, nor was he particularly sophisticated.  But he had a combination of personality and business sense – the old
je ne sais quoi
charisma that attracted the hoy-paloy of the town and beyond. In addition, Moose was a near genius at publicizing his restaurant, and his softball team,
Les Lapins Sauvage
– the Wild Rabbits – staffed by notable locals who were regular restaurant patrons, remains an extraordinary Public Relations coup. 
Herb Caen often wrote of the team's exploits in his newspaper columns, describing their travels playing in major stadiums around the world. 
In 1989 Ron Fimrite, a member of the softball team and author of
Square: the Story of a Saloon
– penned a nine-page story for Sports Illustrated magazine about a Lapins Sauvage game in the Bois de Bologne in Paris. 
The game was played on August 8, 1979, against a team sponsored by Le Moulin du Village, a neighborhood Paris restaurant, and was touted as the “Softball Championship of Western Europe.” 
Les Lapins Sauvage won, with a score of 40-to-22.

I worked occasionally at the WashBag over the years, and though the owner and I never got along particularly well, it was one of the most interesting places I have ever plied my craft.  I happened to be on duty on Sunday, January 10, 1982, when the Forty-Niners football team battled the Dallas Cowboys in a playoff game for a berth in their first Super Bowl.  At 3:00 PM the kitchen closed, and I came out to the dining room for a beer.  Two customers seated nearby, invited me to join them, and I found myself right in the middle of the wildest afternoon party I had ever witnessed.

The game was down to the last two minutes of the final quarter, and Dallas was leading by a score of 27-to-21.  Both the bar and the restaurant were packed solid, and the tension in the air was palpable.  There were two photographers – one from The New York Times and another from The S.F. Chronicle – who were literally climbing along the back shelf of the bar to photograph the frenzy of the moment. 

The 49ers moved the ball down to the Dallas 6-yard line, where they faced third down-and-three with 58 seconds remaining on the clock. As Cowboy’s defensive ends Ed “Too Tall” Jones and Larry Bethea chased quarterback Joe Montana, he appeared to be headed out-of-bounds.  But he made a pump-fake – to get 6-foot-9-inch "Too Tall" Jones to jump up prematurely – then threw a high pass to the back of the end zone.  Dwight Clark then made what is still referred to today as “The Catch” – an absolutely stunning, leaping grab with his fingertips for the winning touchdown. The photo of Clark making that catch, was posted on the next issue of Sports Illustrated.

At that moment the WashBag exploded in a way I had never witnessed in all my years before or since.  The release of pent-up fan energy was astounding, probably the equivalent of several million gallons of water cascading over the Niagara Falls.

The day-shift dishwasher at the WashBag was Romaldo, who had started working there on day one back in 1973, and had literally never missed a day of work.  He was a quiet, unassuming and polite man, married with five children, and frankly, I always marveled at how he managed to raise a family on the meager salary of a restaurant dishwasher.  But such loyalty and dedication did not go unnoticed by the owner.  To celebrate Romaldo’s twenty-fifth anniversary there, Ed Moose hired a Mariachi Band and hosted a full-on, midday party to celebrate Romaldo’s accomplishment.  I found it intriguing that Moose was able to affirm the importance of what one might consider the lowliest member of the kitchen staff.  But as a chef, I know full well just how important the plongeur is. 

On another evening, when I was working a dinner shift, waitress Judy Berkeley came in at 10:00 PM and asked if I could make a Baked Alaska.  With only an hour remaining before the kitchen closed, the business had slowed down to a trickle, so I said “Of course.  What’s the occasion?”

Apparently a friend of hers was celebrating his wife’s birthday, and her favorite dish was Baked Alaska.  I told Judy I would need forty-five minutes for the task.

The original dish, invented in 1804 by American-born physicist Banjamin Thompson Rumford (1753-1814), was named
Omelette Norvegienne
.  Sixty-three years later, it became one of the great gastronomic achievements of American cuisine, when Charles Ranhofer, the legendary chef at New York City's restaurant dynasty, Delmonicos, put it onto his menu to
honor Secretary of State William Henry Seward’s purchase of the Alaska territory on March 30, 1867, for $7.2-million (the equivalent of $95-million in 2005 dollars). 
Baked Alaska
 received considerable press then, due to
public's outrage over "Seward’s Folly,” “Seward’s Icebox,” and Vice-President Andrew Johnson’s “Polar Bear Garden” - in reference to the 586,412 square miles of land, purchased from Russia for 2¢ per acre. The dessert was thus popularized, and the Alaska territory became known as the greatest purchase of the century.

Ranhofer’s original dessert was in the form of a tall cone, though modern versions take several different shapes.  I have had it in France, shaped like a flattened football, though on this particular evening I sliced up some rum-soaked butter cake – the only cake I had at the time – and arranged it in a 6-inch (15 cm) circle on an oval stainless-steel platter.  I topped that with a half-dome of vanilla ice cream, then returned it to the freezer.  After beating a stiff meringue, I piped it out in a simple motif with a pastry bag holding a star tube.  I set an empty half eggshell in the center, then browned the meringue with a small blow-torch.  When the waitress arrived, I filled the egg shell with three-ounces of warmed brandy, lit it, brought it out to the dining room.  At the table, I jiggled the platter lightly, with just enough movement to cause the brandy to spill out of the eggshell, over the lightly browned meringue and down around the sides of the dish.  Pleased with my success, I went back to the kitchen and finished closing up.

Back in my street clothes, I ordered a beer and sat down at the employee dining table to unwind and savor my accomplishment – providing the birthday girl with a memorable desert.  Judy Berkeley didn’t bother thanking me, but I knew that I had exceeded all expectations, by creating a
Baked Alaska
without advance notice.  So the least I could do was pat myself on the back for a job well done.  “Baked Alaska?  Oh yeah.  That was a piece of cake.”

Having grown up in and around New York City, and having spent some time in Western Europe, I eventually came to realize that Rudyard Kipling’s observation that San Francisco was “…a mad city – inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people” – was well earned.  One of the most outlandish characters from the early days of San Francisco was Emperor Norton – born Joshua Abraham Norton in London in 1819, raised in South Africa, and who emigrated to San Francisco in 1849.  With a bankroll of $40,000 from his father's estate, Norton invested in real estate, successfully expanding his initial investment more than six-fold by 1852 – to roughly $250,000. 

That same year, China banned rice exports, due to a famine, causing the price of rice in San Francisco to skyrocket from four-cents per pound to thirty-six cents per pound.  When Norton heard that 200,000 pounds of rice were en route from Peru, he bought all of it for $25,000, hoping to corner the rice market.  On December 22, 1852, he put down two-thousand-dollars and signed a contract to pay the remainder of the $25,000 within thirty days.

The next day several shiploads of rice from Peru came into San Francisco harbor, causing the price of rice to plummet to three-cents per pound.  Norton tried to void the contract, and for the next five years he and the rice dealers engaged in protracted litigation.  Norton prevailed in the lower courts, but the California Supreme Court ruled against him, after which his bank foreclosed on his real estate holdings to pay his debt. 

Norton declared bankruptcy in 1858, and left the city for a while.  When he returned, he had become visibly disgruntled with the legal and political structures of the United States, and his mental state appeared to have been affected by the earlier financial setbacks.  As a result, on September 17, 1859 he proclaimed himself "Emperor of these United States," later adding the title "Protector of Mexico."

Over the years Norton issued numerous decrees on matters of the state, including formerly “dissolving” the United States Congress on October 12, 1859 – and in November summoning the army to depose the elected officials of the Congress (an official act that is sorely needed in the early years of the 21st-century).

Undeterred that his attempts to overthrow the government by force were completely ignored, on August 12, 1869 he abolished both the Democratic and Republican parties (another excellent idea – then and now!).  Three years later he issued an edict against the use of the name “Frisco” for his adopted home, deeming it a “High Misdemeanor,” and instituting a penalty of twenty-five dollars – payable to the ”Imperial Treasury.”  (In 1953 San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen published a collection of essays under the title “Don’t Call It Frisco,” and to this day, it remains a local affirmation held on to by local residents.)

Norton spent his days as Emperor inspecting the streets of San Francisco in an elaborate blue uniform, decorated with gold-plated epaulets given to him by officers from the Presido Army post, and a beaver hat decorated with a peacock feather.  During his inspections he examined the condition of the sidewalks and cable cars, the state of repair of public property, and the appearance of police officers.  Norton frequently gave lengthy philosophical lecture to anyone within earshot.

It was during one of his inspections that Norton performed one of his most famous acts of "diplomacy."  During the 1860s and 1870s there were a number of anti-Chinese demonstrations in the poorer districts of San Francisco that occasionally grew into riots and resulted in fatalities.  During one such incident, Norton positioned himself between the rioters and their Chinese targets, and with a bowed head started reciting the Lord’s Prayer repeatedly until the rioters dispersed without incident.

Norton was much loved and revered by the citizens of San Francisco, and though he was penniless, he regularly ate at the finest restaurants in San Francisco.  The restaurateurs who fed him, would later post a brass plaque at their entrances declaring "by Appointment to his Imperial Majesty, Emperor Norton I of the United States," a gesture that was much prized and a substantial boost to their trade.  In addition, no play or musical performance in San Francisco ever opened without reserving balcony seats for Norton.