The United States of Arugula (49 page)

Likewise, Barry Wine was so overcome by his first trip to Japan in 1985, that as the eighties progressed into the nineties, the Quilted Giraffe evolved from a defiantly American place into New York’s fanciest Japanese American fusion restaurant, serving yellowtail sashimi, Kobe beef, a Wolfgang Puckish ricotta cheese and wasabi pizza, and a $135 version of the ritualized Kaiseki tea ceremony. “I realized that what we called nouvelle cuisine was, in fact, very Japanese,” he told Gael Greene. “The small portions on big plates, the emphasis on what’s fresh in the market, the taste of food unmasked.”

Appropriately enough, it was in Los Angeles, always at the vanguard of American sushi culture, that sushi made its greatest strides forward. Matsuhisa made his way to the city in 1979, licking his wounds after an awful experience in Anchorage, Alaska, where he’d finally opened a restaurant of his own, called Kioi, only for it to burn to the ground fifty days into its existence. After nearly nine years of working at a traditional sushi bar in West Hollywood as a mere employee, Matsuhisa finally had the money to open his place on La Cienega in 1987—conveniently located just north of Wilshire Boulevard, where the Hollywood agents worked.

As Ma Maison had proved, the movie-industry people loved nothing more than to be in the know about some grubby little place where the food was fantastic, and Matsuhisa, with its plain storefront disguising wondrously transcendent sushi and innovative Peruvian Japanese fusion within, was just
the ticket. One of the restaurant’s earliest regulars was Michael Ovitz, the founder of Creative Artists Agency, who was then regarded as the most powerful man in Hollywood. “Mike Ovitz used to bring in a lot of clients, because he say, ‘Power lunch at Matsuhisa,’” says Matsuhisa. “He bring in producers, directors, Bob De Niro, Tom Cruise. And
then
people start talking about my restaurant.”

For his high-profile clientele, Matsuhisa unleashed all his creative powers, offering not only some of the best raw fish in town but
tiraditos;
ceviches; broiled black cod marinated in sake and miso; “new-style sashimi” seared for a micro-moment in hot oil; squid sliced and scored to look like rigatoni, and served in a garlic sauce; and a plate of rock shrimp in a creamy sauce of mayonnaise, chili peppers, garlic, and onions that packed a wallop but visually resembled nothing so much as Kraft’s Deluxe Macaroni & Cheese Dinner.

As the Nippophile Ovitz rose to the peak of his power, secretly negotiating the sales of Columbia Pictures and MCA-Universal to Japanese companies—Sony and Matsushita, respectively, in 1989 and 1990—so rose the popularity of Matsuhisa. It was only a matter of time before a group of investors, led by “Bob” De Niro, would encourage the modest Nobu Matsuhisa, who insisted he was really happy just to break even in his one little restaurant, to open a branch in New York.

IN 1997, FOUR YEARS AFTER DAVID PAGE AND BARBARA SHINN HAD OPENED HOME, A
much-beloved, postage-stamp-sized restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village, they were presiding over the grand opening of their second restaurant in the Village, Drover’s Tap Room, a bigger, fuller realization of the farmhouse-cuisine vision they shared. “We were celebrating with family, drinking champagne, eating hors d’oeuvres, hanging out, just enjoying the night,” Page says. “And then, a few people, one after another, came up and asked me what I was going to do next.
On opening night”
*

The nineties were when the entrepreneurial spirit took hold of the food world, even before the words “dot-com” and “Internet” were on anyone’s lips. They were the years when an interloper named Martha Stewart swooped in and showed the veterans a thing or two about building a brand. A Connecticut caterer and former stockbroker of middle-class, Polish American origins (birth name: Martha Kostyra), Stewart made her first foray into public life in 1982, with her debut book,
Entertaining
, a gracious-living primer that
combined James Beard’s and Larry Forgione’s love of culinary Americana with Ralph Lauren’s jodhpur-fantasy approach to dress, table arrangements, and home decor. In the nineties, the unrelenting Stewart broadened her portfolio to include a magazine, many more books, TV programs, and various product lines, all collected, as of 1997, under the aptly omnivorous-sounding corporate title Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Stewart wasn’t strictly a food person, but the chefs and cookbook people paid close attention to her—figures from Emeril Lagasse to Julia Child to Mario Batali appeared on her television programs—and took note of how eagerly middle-class Americans latched on to Stewart, trusting her as an all-around arbiter of taste, personal shopper, gardening adviser, and kitchen sage. (Noting the resentment and contempt that the chilly, blond Stewart aroused in some people, Child said, “It’s the haute bourgeoisie who have a problem with her—they’re jealous of her. For what? That she manages everything so perfectly, I suppose. But the masses love her.”) If this
caterer
could construct a multimedia empire, why not an accredited chef like Emeril?

Lagasse makes no bones about it: he wanted to become a big deal, and he primed himself for the decade by reading motivational books like
The Magic of Thinking Big
, by David Schwartz, and
In Search of Excellence
, by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman. “In essence, the books say that everybody has a certain amount of smarts and drive and motivation inside of ’em, but you really gotta drive it up,” he says. In 1990, Lagasse left Commander’s Palace to start his own place, Emeril’s, and, two years later, opened a second restaurant in New Orleans, NOLA. It would be on the strength of having nine restaurants, six of them outside of New Orleans, that he was able to find work for most of his employees in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Even more aggressive was Howard Schultz, a Brooklyn native who, in the early eighties, had made his living as the U.S. point man for a Swedish housewares manufacturer. In 1982, Schultz moved to Seattle to take a job as the director of retail operations for Starbucks—“and neither of us has been the same since,” as he immodestly put it in his memoir,
Pour Your Heart into It.
In a complex series of transactions, Starbucks acquired Peet’s Coffee, from
whence it had sprung, and later split into two separate, unaffiliated companies. Jerry Baldwin, whose interests tilted more toward coffee roasting than running cafés, moved back to San Francisco, where he had attended college and pilgrimaged over the Bay Bridge to learn at the feet of Alfred Peet himself, to run Peet’s as a regional chain. Schultz, in 1987, bought out the interests of Baldwin and Starbucks’ other remaining co-founder, Gordon Bowker. As the CEO of what was now called Starbucks Corp., Schultz pushed into other cities, venturing beyond Seattle to open cafés in Chicago, Vancouver, and Portland, Oregon, in the late eighties. But it was in the nineties that he truly went on an expansionist tear, taking the whole shebang national; whereas there were only eighty-four Starbucks locations in America in 1990, by the year 2000, there were more than three thousand.

While some members of the food world had always envisioned running an empire—Drew Nieporent, modeling himself on Joe Baum and Restaurant Associates, named his company Myriad Restaurant Group because “myriad” implied “endless, countless, as many places as I could handle,” he says—others found themselves blindsided by the development. Says Danny Meyer, “When I got into the business at Union Square Cafe, if you wanted to be taken seriously, you wanted to emulate André Soltner. Which is, ‘I’ve got one restaurant. I live upstairs, and it’s only open when I’m there, and if I need a vacation, I’m gonna close the restaurant.’”

Meyer sounds sheepish in acknowledging that he now runs a company called Union Square Hospitality Group, which, as of this writing, has seven restaurants in its portfolio. Whereas nine years passed between the opening of Union Square Cafe and Meyer’s second place, Gramercy Tavern—“and I was kind of dragged, kicking and screaming, into opening that one,” he says—he has since launched a further five restaurants; and compared to Nobu Matsuhisa (twelve restaurants as this book was going to press) and Jean-Georges Vongerichten (fifteen restaurants), he’s a laggard.

Americans have come to follow restaurants, chefs, and their activities “like a spectator sport,” Meyer says, citing the flurry of activity that’s going on around him as he sits down to be interviewed in his office. His staff is
scrambling to furnish
The New York Times
with information about his latest restaurant, the Modern, because it is to be reviewed the following week by the paper’s current critic, Frank Bruni. At the same time, Meyer’s public relations person is trying to help Bruni with an article he is preparing about the state of restrooms in restaurants, “right down to what the timing is of the automatic flushing system!” Meyer exclaims. “That’s why I start talking about it being a spectator sport. Since when do people have time to be
thinking
about these kinds of things?”