Cooking as Fast as I Can (19 page)

Then, sometime in early 1997, the offer I'd been waiting for finally landed. Restaurants fail in record numbers every year. In the time it's taken you to read this chapter, I'm sure another one has shut its doors forever. The Sheepherding Co. was exceptional. All the national coverage had the culinary world buzzing, and somewhere in the buzz, my name had
come to the attention of Donna and Giovanni Scala, owners of Bistro Don Giovanni in California's Napa Valley.

Donna Scala called and offered me the position of
chef de cuisine
, or executive chef. I weighed their offer for a good ninety seconds before saying hell yes.

Melissa Kelly's fame and general bad-assery would continue. In 1999 she would win a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef in the Northeast, a huge honor, since her competition included the powerhouse chefs of every three-star restaurant in New York. A few months later, in August of that same year, both Melissa and her pastry chef, Price Kushner, would resign from the Sheepherding Co. in order to open Primo, in Rockland, Maine. Even though Melissa claimed she was replaceable, the Clarks, perhaps feeling stressed from the pressure, both financial and personal, of running a nationally renowned inn and restaurant, closed their doors.

thirteen

I
had never been west of east Texas, and when Hannah and I arrived in California that spring we were stupid with joy. It was green and balmy, with sunny days and crisp, starry nights. I was reminded of Mougins, that same soft air tinged with lavender, that lemony light. The vibe in Napa was vastly different from any place I'd ever known. Everything grew so easily there. For the first few months, whenever I'd see oranges or lemons hanging from a tree, my first thought was they must be fake. And however cool and happening Melissa's farm-to-table vision had been at Old Chatham, California in the mid-nineties was on the leading edge of American cuisine. The French Laundry, which Ruth Reichl had just called “the most exciting restaurant in America,” Thomas Keller's homage to the three-star country restaurants of France, with a California spin, was just down the road. A mere thirty-eight miles to the south, in Berkeley, Queen Alice held court at Chez Panisse, acknowledged by many as the birthplace of California cuisine.

I connected immediately with my new boss, Donna Scala. She was a southern girl, from Virginia, and had also
staged
in some famous kitchens in the south of France. In the early eighties she opened an Italian and French gourmet specialty shop in Sausalito, and then with her husband, Giovanni, opened Piatti Ristorante in Yountville.

Don Giovanni had been open for four years when I came on board. The restaurant was charming and funky, with French doors, terra-cotta tiles, and a lush forest of potted plants that grew without much care that I could see. You could sit outdoors beneath sturdy pergolas shaded by wisteria and strung with tiny white lights. Donna was a madwoman on the subject of decorating, and closed the place down for a month every other year to paint and replace the chairs. She was crazy on the subject of her chairs.

Donna was warm and maternal, and I was immediately attracted to her dark Mediterranean looks. She wasn't very tall, slim when we first met, and hardly looked forty. I was impressed with her pearls, which she wore with her chef's jacket.

I learned a lot from Donna, including how to make a first-class ciabatta and the proper way to caramelize Brussels sprouts. She impressed upon me more than anyone the power and necessity of tasting your food constantly. The concept wasn't new to me, obviously. All along the way, in classes at the Culinary, at my internships in France, and at Old Chatham, I watched while chefs tasted their food. But it had looked more like a habit than the best weapon in your arsenal; Donna taught me otherwise.

I was excited to the point of insomnia about the chance to make my mark. The first thing I noticed upon my arrival was the big laminated ten-page menu. For a second I thought I was back at The Continental in Jackson. That simply wouldn't do. We were closing in on the end of the century. After the Sheepherding Co., who knew better than me the power and appeal of the single-page menu? How easy it would be to draw up a new one each day in Napa, where the local farmers cruised by every morning and allowed me to choose produce straight off the back of their trucks. Heirloom peppers, beautiful
emerald-green kale, butter lettuce the size of your head. Valencia oranges and beautiful yellow-fleshed Sugar Time peaches. Anything I could imagine pretty much presented itself most mornings.

I convinced Donna and Giovanni to get rid of the tome, institute a one-page menu, and lose some of the heavier pastas. I suggested we feature more traditional Mediterranean fare, including whole fish (which, I'm proud to say and if memory serves, we were the first to do in the valley), food not unlike what I grew up on, minus the grits and tamales.

One morning on my way to work I noticed the driveway was littered with olives. When I walked back down that night at the end of dinner service, in the moonlight I looked down and saw beautiful plump olives that had been crushed to a pulp beneath the tires of the BMWs and Mercedes driven by our customers. I'd had one of a cook's hard golden rules—never waste a thing—seared into my brain that first day at Georges Blanc. Standing in the driveway, staring down at all those crushed olives, I saw precious olive oil going to waste. It wasn't as if I imagined Bistro Don Giovanni going into the olive oil production business (although, as it would turn out, they would end up bottling enough to sell at the restaurant). I just thought it would be a nice draw to use oil from our own olives in our dishes. We weren't going to get a huge amount of oil from these trees, but we could create an olive oil that was ours alone. Donna's first response was negative. She thought it would be too much work, but over time I convinced her, and that fall, during olive harvest season, with the help of a guy named Jean-Pierre, a friend of a friend who knew about such things, I harvested Don Giovanni's olives and drove them to Frantoio, an Italian restaurant in Mill Valley, at the time the only place in the country with a state-of-the-art olive oil pro
duction facility. They made their own olive oil, and also made their press available to other olive growers.

Jean-Pierre and I hit it off immediately. He was very tall for a Frenchman, maybe six four, and had that swashbuckling look—shaved head, goatee, and an earring. We were friends, but occasionally a man comes along about whom I think,
I don't like men, but if I did, I could certainly like you.
We bonded over my olive oil scheme, creating a delicious thick, nutty extra virgin that elevated all of our dishes and drew raves from our customers.

Word got around that Bistro Don Giovanni had a new executive chef who was shaking things up, introducing a new style of fresh, light Mediterranean cuisine, and we began to attract some luminaries. Lovely Barbara Tropp, of China Moon Cafe fame in San Francisco, came in one day and asked to see me after her meal. She said she loved the food, and put her hand on my shoulder. “You're taking care of yourself, right? Making sure your life is balanced?” I smiled and thanked her for her kind concern, even though we both knew “balance” and “executive chef” are two mutually exclusive terms.

Robert Mondavi and his wife were big customers. Napa Valley wines are world famous, and they have Robert to thank. He built the first winery in Napa back in the sixties and turned the entire industry on its ear, categorizing a wine by variety of grape rather than purpose (Pinot Noir rather than red table wine). He was warm and a big hugger. He would always come back into the kitchen and say, “Cat, Cat, what's the whole fish tonight?”

One afternoon as we were prepping for dinner service, Robert walked in the front door with one of my heroes, Jacques Pépin. He explained that Jacques was in town on a book tour and he wanted to try out the new chef in town, the girl cook
ing over at Bistro Don Giovanni. Donna had already gone home for the day and I was alone in the back of the house and my nerves started tingling, my mind started racing. What on earth does someone cook for Jacques Pépin?
Just do what you do best,
I told myself. You do the whole fish. You do some beautiful sides. You don't need to be anyone but yourself. I put my head down, felt the peace descend, and got to work.

Jacques loved it, squeezed my hand, and told me it was the best meal he'd had on the road. Part of me supposed he could have said that to all the chefs, but I believed he was genuine. His sincerity was confirmed when two weeks later I received a copy of a letter he'd sent to the James Beard Foundation, saying that while on tour he'd eaten at many top restaurants throughout the Bay Area, but the best meal he'd had was mine at Bistro Don Giovanni, and that they should invite me to do a dinner at the James Beard House.

There were downsides working for Donna. Up and down the Napa Valley, she was legendary for her fiery temper. She may have been the owner-chef of Giovanni's, but by hiring me she was giving up control of the kitchen so that she could focus on running the business. She found herself in a common restaurant world predicament: she hired an executive chef because she saw she couldn't do it all, but came to feel—once I'd relieved her of the responsibility of expediting every night and the eyeball-popping, migraine-inducing pressure of getting out the food had been relieved—that perhaps she actually
could
do it all, and what was I doing, taking up space, asserting myself, and collecting a paycheck for the privilege.

Every executive chef worth his salt learns early to handle orders. I was accustomed to chefs screaming in my face, so close I'd be blurry-eyed from their spittle. I could “Yes, Chef!” with the best of them. I did not complain. It was part of my
training, and the inner warrior I'd forged at the Culinary and in France allowed me not to take things personally and to pay attention to the work.

But Donna's orders came with a pinch of salt in the wound, meant to make me feel as if I was neither a good cook nor a good leader. When I didn't season the mashed potatoes to her liking and she roared that I didn't have the commitment to be a first-rate chef, I took it hard. I'd come to the job confident and full of spirit, and I was quickly losing both.

Once, on one of my rare days off, my phone rang at the crack of dawn, waking me from a deep sleep. I was barely awake, and I knew it could only be a death in the family or Donna. She was a little hysterical. “Why is this vinaigrette broken? Why didn't you fix it before you left? What am I supposed to do with it now?”

“Donna, it's always going to break overnight. In the morning you always have to reseason it and remix. It's always that way.” I was surprised, given how much she knew about more complicated aspects of cooking, that she didn't seem to remember that a vinaigrette is doomed to break, that after a few hours it will always revert to its original incompatible state, vinegar on the bottom, oil on top.

“This is unacceptable. It needs to be perfect and ready to go when I walk in,” she said.