Eat American!

• Share

(5 of 9)

Barry Wine of New York City's Quilted Giraffe suggests that any restaurant designated new American should be entirely staffed by Americans in the kitchen and dining room. But Wine admits this poses a problem in defining the California cuisine turned out by Wolfgang Puck of Spago in West Hollywood. Born in Austria and trained in France, Puck specializes in upscale pizza and pasta. To complicate matters further, Puck is a consultant to the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, a hotel restaurant where Israeli-born Chef Avner Samuel reinterpreted and enhanced some of Puck's creations for fashionable Texans before moving to the soon-to-be-opened Hotel Crescent Court in the same city. Tom Trieschmann, the chef at Sinclair's in Lake Forest, Ill., describes this cooking as having "elements of classical French, a little common sense and definitely American ingredients."

The entire movement has its share of cynics who define it by disparaging it. Says Bill Neal, of Crook's Corner, a Southern-style restaurant in Chapel Hill, N.C.: "The new American cuisine is nothing more than a commercial flash in the pan made up by restaurateurs and trendsetters." French Food Critic Christian Millau, writing in his monthly magazine Le Nouveau Guide, agrees: "The new religion, 'American Food,' is a boon for the industry."

The origins of the new American cuisine go back further than most of its current critics and champions may suspect, and Californians will have to cede some of the credit to Easterners. Although there were always expensive, formal restaurants with names like the Little Old Mansion and the White Turkey serving American food in large cities, they began to disappear in the late '50s and early '60s. Intimations of the future style came in 1959, when the Four Seasons opened in the handsome new Seagram Building on Manhattan's Park Avenue, designed by Miesvan der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Jerome Brody and Joseph Baum, then president and vice president of Restaurant Associates, which operated the restaurant, balked at the notion that only French or Continental cuisine could command serious respect and high prices. "We didn't think of what we were doing as new American," Baum recalls. "We just thought of it as the right contemporary expression for New York as the crossroads of the world."

Many dishes on the earliest Four Seasons menus would seem up to date in Berkeley now: sweet potato vichyssoise, julep of crabmeat in sweet pepperoni, fried chicken Maryland with nasturtium fritters, and Amish ham steak with apricot knödel.