I’ve not yet dined at Chez Panisse (it’s on my bucket list), nor Michael’s in Santa Monica. Abby and I missed the final days of Jeremiah Tower’s Stars when we visited San Francisco in the late 90s (we wouldn’t have had a clue at the time). We were lucky enough to have dinner at both the original Spago on Sunset Blvd. and the subsequent flagship restaurant in Beverly Hills.  I met Wolfgang Puck personally at the latter. Abby and I also took our lunch regularly at the Border Grill in Santa Monica, established by co-chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken. The abiding connection between all these restaurants is their respective roles in defining the New American Cuisine, a.k.a. California Cuisine, one of America’s two great original food traditions, the other being Southern food, of course.

Abby and I moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles (Sherman Oaks to be exact) in the summer of 1998. Neither of us had spent any time in LA prior to our arrival, and we showed up with an image of the city, including its food scene, based solely on watching movies and television. No kidding, we were expecting to be overwhelmed by vegetarian restaurants serving bean sprouts and healthy salads, all located next door to yoga studios.

What we found instead was a rich and diverse culinary landscape that offered the kind of healthy fare we envisioned along with a universe of ethnic cuisine, trendsetting fast food (can you say In-n-Out, Fatburger, Baja Fresh, Koo Koo Roo, Zankou Chicken, etc.) and increasingly commercialized versions of the aforementioned California Cuisine, which had already evolved from cutting edge to mainstream.

During our years in Southern California we ate many meals at the various outposts of the Wolfgang Puck Cafe and California Pizza Kitchen and, the inspiration for this post, Encino-based Chin Chin, with its signature Chinese Chicken Salad (a similar Chinois Salad was also on the Puck menu). We loved the Chin Chin Chinese Chicken Salad so much that I recently set out to recreate it in our home kitchen. Our contemporary version with fresh greens and a pungent, pickled ginger laced dressing was reminiscently delicious!

What I did not know about the salad, at least until I went looking for the recipe – see here – is that its origin story connects this dish to the source of the California Cuisine movement at the renowned Ma Maison, where Puck and others got their start working for Patrick Terrail. For more background on the development of California Cuisine, I highly recommend Andrew Friedman’s “Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession.”

Los Angeles provided a bounty of culinary discoveries. How I would love to go back and re-explore the LA of the late 90s, knowing what I do today. Last year, pre-pandemic, Abby, Zoe and I were back there for a college visit. We hit a number of our favorites, or least those still remaining, including the Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Irvine and the Il Fornaio Italian eatery in Pasadena. I will save my love for this latter spot and my increasing passion for Italian food during those years for another post. 

All of this represented another level of sophistication that I had been seeking my whole life, stemming all the way back to my younger years in Mississippi poring over New Yorker magazines at my grandmother’s home, fascinated with the advertisements and cartoons representing a studied and worldly posture that could only be possible in places like New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco or Miami. By the late 90s, gourmet food had become as much a part of this worldview for me as wearing the right clothes, reading interesting books or demonstrating a nuanced view of global politics.

Living in Southern California also exposed me to a much wider range of ethnic cuisine, particularly food from the countries of Asia. Prior to moving there, I had sampled American Chinese food and Vietnamese fare (the latter because of significant Vietnamese immigration to my native Gulf Coast region). Thai food, Koean barbecue and Indian curries were all new to me, despite being almost 30 by the time we arrived in Lotus Land.

These discoveries prompted me to try my own hand at making Asian food. While browsing a used bookstore in North Hollywood, I stumbled upon a copy of Jennifer Brennan’s “The Cuisines of Asia: Nine Great Oriental Cuisines by Technique” originally published by St. Martin’s Press in 1984.

As I set out to cook my way through this fascinating book, I acquired a Joyce Chen wok at the Bristol Farms grocery store in South Pasadena (one of my favorite places to shop for supplies). I also began amassing a spice cabinet filled with newly discovered concoctions – cloves, five spice, garam masala, mace, turmeric, etc. – and a pantry filled with bags of Japanese and Thai rice and packages of wonton wrappers.  We spent hours in our apartment’s galley kitchen in Sherman Oaks attempting to stir fry, steam, bake and fry our way into Asian cuisine proficiency, with a respectable amount of success. We were also on a quest during this period to master the perfect lemon drop martini so sometimes the quality of our food took a back seat to our cocktail mixing practice sessions, if you know what I mean.

Recently, around the same time I went searching the Internet for the Chin Chin salad recipe, already deep in the throes of 90s California nostalgia, I ran across another Joyce Chen wok, on a sale table at Crate & Barrel. My old one died a few years back so this seemed like fate. I purchased the wok, dusted off my Jennifer Brennan book and whipped up a delicious Balinese pork curry, which duly impressed my 17-year-old daughter Zoe, who loves Asian food of all varieties. I also cracked open another Asian cookbook, a more recent acquisition, “The Chinese Cookbook” by Craig Claiborn and Virginia Lee, and tried a new recipe, one that became an instant classic in our household, Lion’s Head.

Lion’s Head is a dish of spicy pork meatballs served over cabbage (we used savoy). It was love at first bite. It’s simple and satisfying, yet also sophisticated, reminiscent of those years of culinary discovery when Abby and I were still relatively young, cooking new dishes and eating out often, prior to the responsibilities and joys of parenting.

Thinking about those years and connecting the dots to my present day kitchen adventures – reviving old classics and discovering new ones – encapsulates the modest goal of this present project. This week’s donation of $25 went to the Lee Initiative. Thank you for spending a little time with me.