MAKING MENUS
I just received this email from Steven Vranian, a former star of my San Francisco restaurant, Stars, concerning its unique brand of madness that led to its success.
“I don’t know of any restaurant, especially of Stars caliber, where menus were written daily, cooks just got a list of ingredients and were expected to be ready at 4:45 for service. Today, everything is tested, debated and judged, taking weeks to be approved. I don’t think tequila-orange-chili butter would make it today or the cinnamon-green peppercorn butter on grilled salmon (straight from Elizabeth David that was).”
San Francisco Stars
Here is a rough draft of the first very rough lunch. Rough because we were late with construction and the first important press lunch has already been scheduled. The restaurant was unfinished. As Steven said, “No hood, no gas, no license, no nothing.”
No point in advertising that we were incompetent, so we went ahead as if ready to cook.
Anything that needed to be cooked was done on the grill. The fact at the hood was not working meant that we took turns standing in front of the burning charcoal and the next chef would jump in before the previous one passed out from the intake of too much carbon monoxide.
We barely had a typist. As you can see. The lunch, tables decorated with construction tools (thank you Cocteau and Picasso) was a huge success because in the face of impossibility we had pulled off the possible.
And opened 2 months later, on July 4th.
“Cordon Bleu” was the plates. As well as an inspiration as a teenager my receiving the notes from that school of my aunt, a fabulous cook, who had attended that school.
What were my other inspirations from the past?
Thank you for reading Out of the Oven. If you upgrade for the whole experience, and pay $5 a month or $50 a year, you will receive at least weekly publications, recipes, news, videos and more.
As well as the original menus included here:
A masterpiece menu by Auguste Escoffier, in his own handwriting
An early American cuisine menu that includes possums
A menu for President Hoover with my father
1959 aboard the Southern Pacific train. With Nikita Khrushchev and his wife.
From Henri Soulé’s legendary Le Pavillon
The 1976 Chez Panisse menu changed everything.
Our Berkeley’s Santa Fe Bar & Grill Texas Dinner
For 100 American food journalists who that day invented the phrase “California Cuisine.”
1987 for the American Institute of Wine and Food
A 1986 Panisse lunch for Richard Olney
The dinner that made it no longer “California Cuisine,” but “American Cuisine.”
Stars restaurant in San Francisco, 1984-1989. Another change of everything.
My notes for those
My tropical cuisine Restaurant Speedo 690
JT’s private dining café at Stars
Mine and Sacramento’s dinner on a bridge for 850
The Anthony Bourdain quotation about my menus