383: The Father of California Cuisine with Michael McCarty

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. It was called California Cuisine because it was the first step in regional American food. Because what we focused on, the maxims of our neighborhood were what was growing here, what was the traditions, what were the history of these areas, and how do we modernize it? This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbart.

0:59Michael McCarty is the owner of two restaurants, Michael's in Santa Monica, which he opened in 1979, and Michael's on West 55th Street in Midtown Manhattan, which he followed up a decade later. McCarty is the father of California cuisine, truly, and the center of a culinary movement that produced some of the top Los Angeles chefs like Jonathan Waxman, Mark Peel, Nancy Silverton, and many others. I had so much to ask Michael, and he was really game to go over his deep history in the American restaurant scene. And you know what? I wanted to hear about how he moves between the two coasts. He spends two weeks here, two weeks there, and it's really remarkable how he does it with such ease and with such grace.

1:42Michael McCarty is honestly a living legend, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

1:57Michael McCarty, welcome to This is Taste. Great to see you. Great to see you, and thank you for having me here. I've been to your restaurant many times over the years, and from my mom and my son in L.A. in the 70s to your time in New York in the 1980s, so many eras to cover. I want to first get a sense, and I've talked to you in the restaurant a couple times, you split time between your restaurant in Midtown and your restaurant in Santa Monica. Yes. The Santa Monica restaurant started in 1979. The New York restaurant started in 1989. Michael, how do you split your time? Well, in 1989, my son was, our son was 90 days old.

2:34And our daughter was two and a half. And so we lived here the fall and the spring, and we lived in L.A. the summer and the winter, and they would go to prospective schools. So all the way up until 1993, so 89 to 93, and then we lost our house in the huge Malibu superfire of 1993. So then we moved back full time to L.A. because we had to rebuild the house. It was a complicated situation. And that's when I started coming every other week. So 10 days in LA, four days here, Monday through Thursday, like today, this afternoon, I'll go back to LA and I'll come back 10 days later on that Monday. And this is like a routine for, we're saying it's like 21 years.

3:17It is. Wow. Amazing. Yeah. How do you. More like 30 years. Sorry, I did the math wrong. I'm like 31 years because like that is the 93 is 30 years. Yeah. So 31 years you've been doing this. Yeah. Why is it important? Because clearly you don't have to do it this way. It seems like you're doing it the hard way. Well, it's not the hard way. For me, it's what I do. You know, I'm like a performance artist and I love to perform and I love my people. I love my restaurants. It's one of the reasons why I only own two restaurants instead of a million other ones, you know, or in airports or stuff like that.

3:49You know, I really just love focusing on both of my restaurants and my clientele. Yeah. I mean, it's like having a dinner party at your house every night. I mean, we have so many regulars in both restaurants. And they've evolved over the years. And they keep getting better and better and better and more diverse. The demographics keep exploding. It's great. You're making these flights. I mean, I love both of these cities. I mean, I think I like L.A. more, to be honest. Yeah. I mean, is that just like the beauty of this setup, that you get to experience these two super very different cities? Yes, exactly.

4:23I grew up in New York, so my first half of the life was here. And when I went away to France to cooking school in Paris in the 70s, the first half of the 70s, when I moved back in 1975, my parents had moved to Malibu, California. So I went out there in December of 75, and it was stunning weather and beautiful. And the calamities were a lot less than. You talked about traffic. That was about it. Yeah. But, you know, we live on a vineyard in Malibu. We've been there since 1975, my wife and I. and we've just, we live here in Midtown at 54th and 5th, and it's just such a great balance. People ask me all the time, if you had to choose living one and the other, I said, you know, it'd be very difficult to choose because they offer such a different thing.

5:10You know, LA is about the car culture. It's about, fortunately, my house is 10 minutes from the restaurant, and same thing here. It's like one minute by walking. So that's what I like to do, you know, and we have a lot of people coming and my wife's a painter. So we have both huge art collections in there. We do a lot of art shows, especially California, where we have our upstairs. Yeah, the salon. Where we're doing fantastic shows up there. My son got very involved in that when he came on board back in 2016. Yeah. And I can't complain. It's fabulous. No, and you live by it, honestly. You're not trying to, you don't have to.

5:47You don't have to make it be about Instagram or make it be about this. You don't like it's very much you. And but it's a lifestyle that's unique. Yeah. And hard to fathom that a restaurant group of two awards you this kind of lifestyle. But these are why your restaurants are special. They are. They are. I mean, that's really it. I mean, when you think about being open for 45 years in L.A. and 35 years in New York. And mind you, I found that site on in 1979. It took me 10 years to make a deal to get that site. from the Italian Pavilion, if you can imagine. Yeah. Which had been there for 50 years.

6:25I can imagine, Michael. 50 years. So it's on 50, what's it, 54th? 55th. Yeah. Between 5th and 6th. Iconic location. So it took you 10 years to get the - To make the deal with Guido. Yeah. Wait, do you own the building? It's long-term. Long-term. Yeah. Good. A lot more years. A lot more years. A lot more years. Good for Midtown to have that. Yeah. Do you have time to host at either of your homes? I mean, you mentioned the dinner party. Michael's is very much that. You walk in, you're there, you're greeting your staff as always. But do you get, do you actually have people over? Absolutely. Like in California, you know, I made a lifestyle decision to be open to the restaurant Tuesday through Saturday.

7:03So everybody has a five day work week. They have two days off in a row. We entertain all the time at our house in Malibu, almost every Sunday. And we entertain a lot at the restaurant. Yeah. Yeah. Again, when you're in the world of art, wine, food, it's it's there's always something going on. And same thing in California. I mean, in New York, we have a great terrace here at our apartment. Yeah. And I got a little barbecue going out there. And it's you know, we do a lot of good things. It's nice to bring your friends together in both your formal space in your restaurant or your home. Yeah. I want to ask you, what's a regular like in Michael's in New York?

7:40And what's a regular like in Michael's Santa Monica right now? Well, they're both defined by the single most important thing, which is they come a lot. Yeah. You know, the way people say, well, how do you become a regular? I said, you come a lot. That's so funny. You get to know my managers. You get to know my chefs. You get to know the maitre d's at the front. You know, L 'Oreal and Joanna here, they've been there 25 years each. And you just, you show up and you're not an idiot. You know, I mean, we we have a self-censoring situation where we don't get bad people. And we started out that way in the beginning.

8:17I mean, I remember when I opened in 1979, all the big shots in Hollywood, they wanted to slip a 20 to the maitre d' to get a table in a coveted table in the garden. And I said, absolutely not. You do not do that. That's amazing. Yeah. And you're you're you're telling this to to like executives in the entertainment world. And big shots. You know, the movie business is pretty wild today, but it was really wild. It was real the Wild West in those days. I mean, what's the one Jack story you're going to give in this podcast that we can say? Well, you know, I think that L.A., I think the thing in 79, which was something that I thought was a really intriguing situation was, is we were right at the turning point of old Hollywood and new Hollywood.

9:00Exactly. So, you know, the the the Lou Wasserman's that whole generation that ran Hollywood, the studios since right after World War Two was aging out. Let's call it that. And I was very fortunate that in Santa Monica that a lot of new Hollywood, young Hollywood was there. so you would walk into my restaurant and you'd have Lou and his crowd sitting in the main dining room and then in the garden you would have you know the Michael Eisner's to Spielberg's to Tom Hanks uh the David Geffen's uh the new Hollywood all in their early 30s you see what I'm saying so and the stories that went with that are insane and if I can remember most of them that's my next book.

9:49I mean, my guy, are you going to do a memoir? Right before COVID, we had begun talking about doing a book which would focus on the stories that people had in our restaurant. Because we have so many regular customers. And every time they'd come in, they'd say, well, you know, I was here, this is what happened. So we were going to gather all of these stories and publish that book. Then all hell broke loose with COVID, et cetera. And we're now beginning to get close to doing it, relaunching that. Oh my goodness. Well, you dodged the Nicholson questions. I know. You dodged it so well, Michael, and you seem like a discreet man.

10:26Yeah. He was a customer. Very big customer. Yeah. All of them. Yeah. All of them. I mean, remember something in 1979, there were like eight restaurants in the entire LA region that people went to. And now there's 20 per neighborhood. In 1979, you open the restaurant, you're 25 years old. Yeah. It's not even in the age of restaurants was a different thing. I mean, it's still very young, I'm sure. Now, I want to ask you, what was that first night of service like in Michael's Santa Monica? You're 25. It's 1979. You've just really well set. You've laid out the dynamic of Hollywood. What's happening in that first night?

11:04Well, you know what? The world was very small in those days. The restaurant world was small. The food world was small. The American had not accepted it as a rational career choice. So it was almost all Europeans that were in our business at the time. But there was a succinct group of people that were into food and into wine. And so before the Internet, before even fax machines, before anything other than word of mouth is what happened. So that's the way that I gathered my first team of chefs. They had heard about it. They all came down one by one. the Jonathan Waxman's, the Ken Franks, the Mark Peel's, the Billy Flug's, Nancy Silverton.

11:50Nancy Silverton, I was going to say her too. They all walked down the steps, because I had my office in the garden in those days, and just said, what's going on here? We want to be part of it. And so the first night, we had a gathering of a very interesting group of artists, because we had already begun to develop an art collection. the old famous you know column door where you you do a trade for an art piece it goes on the wall you get food and beverage yeah and it was a model that like really drove the restaurant industry in New York it drove it obviously in Europe yeah oh yeah I love that that was your model I had no idea oh yeah that was I love that very very and you could afford to do it in those days exactly because you know if I had to do that with a Basquiat for a hundred million dollars that wouldn't work that'd be a lot of hamburgers but at any rate so So that night we had, you know, Dan Helpern, by the way.

12:42Yeah, of course. So Dan was, he. Very famous editor. Very editor, big editor, Echo Press, big poet, but also a very big food guy. Yeah, he edited Bourdain later in life. Yeah. And so it was that group. There were a dozen of them that went to Claremont and there was Tony Bill, you know, who produced The Sting. There was David Ward who wrote it. there was Phil Reich who went who was my first sommelier and he's a guy I met in Colorado who was brilliant when when he ran a store called Liquor Mart there otherwise known as the Shrine and when he would get annually the the same exact quantity of California wines that entire Southern California got gotta remember this is in Aspen and no in Boulder Colorado Yeah, the professors, they all like good wine.

13:33Yeah. That allocation is remarkable. That's a whole other conversation. Oh, yeah. About how Southern California didn't respect Napa in that way. Just didn't have a thirst for... Well, it wasn't there yet. Yeah, right. You know, when you went into a liquor store or a wine store, it was French wine. There was no Italian wine of note. There was no Spanish wine, no Australian. None of what you have today. So we opened up with a list that was 50 % French and 50 % Californian. And, you know, we had Schramsberg by the glass for champagne. We had Dick Graff from Chalone for Chardonnay. We had Ridge for Zinfandel.

14:06I mean, you know, this is all names that are still here, fortunately. I mean, zooming out a bit, we're talking about you've got this modern art scene happening. You've got this really burgeoning wine scene. And it's all coming together in Santa Monica. Yeah. And you're creating something called California Cuisine. That's right. Which you are well, well established as founding. You're the founding father of California Cuisine. It was called California Cuisine because it was the first step in regional American food. Yes. You know, because what we focused on, the maxims of our neighborhood were what was growing here, what was the traditions, what were the, you know, the history of these areas, and how do we modernize it?

14:45And how do we, I won't say use the word Frenchify, but how do we use the coda of La Coulinale, you know, the famous book that codified it all for Escoffier? How do we do the same thing here? And, you know, San Francisco was growing at the, you know, working in the same lab, I say. I mean, Shea is there at 73, 72 Shea Pichis. So that's happening as well. But the California movement up there really started in the late 70s. Yeah, of course. That's where it was like, okay, we've done enough French food. Let's do our menus in English. Let's focus on that. And, of course, both Northern California and Southern California had stunning produce.

15:22But, you know, people refer to farm to table. I used to say back in the 70s when I was there, there were no farms. So we spent five years, two or three years before I built the restaurant, getting farmers to grow what we wanted. And that started this whole revolution. And I think what also started it, just to jump in, is that you clearly understood how the media worked. Oh, yeah. Because you obviously, to this day, know how the media works. Though I had to approach you, so that's okay. I was expecting you to approach me because you're so good at it. But honestly, Michael, you got a young food writer named Ruth Reichel to pay attention to you.

15:59Well, that was the most important thing because Joe Armstrong, who was also the publisher of The Rolling Stone and California Magazine, hired Coleman Andrews. Coleman, yeah. To hire a stringer named Ruth Reichel from Berkeley to come down and figure out what was going on down there. And Ruth came down, and that's where it all started. She spent two weeks with us before we opened, and then right through the opening, and then wrote that pivotal article that came out in New West Magazine. Which Coleman was editing. Yeah, they were really heady times. You know, it was simple. That's the beauty of it, and that's what we did.

16:40We simplified our product, our food, how to produce it, and we made massive changes in the way restaurants are run. They went from the old guard classical French restaurant, which you had in every city in the United States, major city. Here you had Lutece, you had La Granouille, Caravelle. You had all of them. And same thing in L.A. We had a handful of French restaurants. the best was Lermitage. He was a genius. He was the first French chef that embraced not Nouvelle Cuisine, but the various parts of Nouvelle Cuisine, which is what we did. Bucose, like Paul Bucose. Yeah, we brought over Paul Bucuse and Gaston Le Nôtre and Pierre Toigreau.

17:26We did a Dîner du Saint in the early 80s, like 80, which was the beginning of this sort of other revolution. I mean, so you're, Michael, just, I can't let it pass. You know, you say it's heady times and it is, but it's also just history. It's the founding of regional American cuisine in our country as we know it. Yes. Listener, take a break and take a pause and think about that. This is, we're talking to the individual who created regional American cuisine or at least brought energy around it. Yeah. Now, you were also, it was a nod to France because you brought the French guys in too because you knew how to market because you obviously couldn't only do so-called farm to table cooking.

18:09You had to, your customers demanded French cuisine. It's 1980. Yes. So it's like splitting the difference. How are you thinking about creating, and you've got Jonathan Waxman and Nancy cooking ambitiously but you've also have to get to a grata to come in and do guest dinners. Yeah. How are you marrying the two? Well, it was, again, what our food evolved to was, again, we learned the classics Escoffier. That was what was taught at the École Hôtelière in Paris. That was the school you'd go to if you were a French kid. And the Cordon Bleu and the Wine Academy with Stephen Spurrier, who put on the famous dinner in 76, where the California Chardonnay and Cab beat the pants off the French.

18:49but it was a time when you were sitting there trying you weren't necessarily just being creative but what you were doing is going okay this is what i've got what do we do here we've learned the classics we're not doing that but we're learning from it it's like latin i call that the lat yeah you can't you know can't learn to speak french if you don't really know great latin and then the idea of nouvelle cuisine the revolution happened fortunately when i was living in Paris in the first half of the 70s. So I got to experience what a revolution in food and something that was - So you went down to Lyon and had some meals down there.

19:25Oh, definitely down there. Our graduation present in 74 was myself and three other chefs. We went to Paul Beaucuse. We went to Rouen, La Pyramide, Trois Gros. And right before we left, because we were going down to Greece to have a big time, Madame Point, who is still alive, says to us, you got to go to one more restaurant. And I said, where is that? They said, well, it's in, it's next to Geneva. Freddy's Girardet. Oh, right. So we drove over the hill, because it's very close. Yeah. And we ended up staying there three days, eating lunch and dinner three days in a row. Absolutely a riot. Yeah. And I went back every year until he retired.

20:07Wait, Point's still alive? Point, no, he was gone. Okay. But Madame was. Ah, right on. In those days. Wow. So you are experiencing this idea that Roy Sokolov wrote famously in Time Magazine and brought French Nouvelle to America, media at least. This lightning of, you know, flour exits the program and it's purees. It's lighter and brighter. We call that bright cuisine or acidic balance. As I say, our food was defined as green, crispy, and acidic versus brown, mushy, and sweet. Because the old school was all about the brown, the mushy, and the sweet. And so we refined that attitude, still using sauces.

20:55We brought pasta onto a French menu. Which is remarkable when you think about it, because pasta in America is like Sicilian, southern stuff. No, and I'm doing angel hair pasta with a Chardonnay cream sauce with fantastic Sacramento caviar and spiny lobster from the coast of Santa Monica. You see, you're the guy who brought angel hair to America. You're the man responsible. Man, what are the most polarizing pasta shapes? Yes. Yeah. But easy to eat. Absolutely. And lighter, too, than other ones. Wow. And purees, right? Purees. Tons of purees. Yeah, because you would use, like Jean-Georges did a spectacular job of utilizing purees as an alternative to sauce.

21:39And again, it was all of this where you take fantastic olive oil, which nobody used really good olive oil here, you know, and you puree the tarragon, you puree the basil, you puree any kind of vegetables, et cetera. You build yourself for that. And it's that color on the plate. You know, do you want to look at that green, crispy and acidic plate or do you want to look at the brown, sweet, mushy plate? Pre-Instagram, mind you, but definitely salient now. Things need to have visual identity and be interesting visually. Well, this was our rule. When you brought the food to a table, let's say it's a six-top or an eight-top or even a four-top, all plates had to arrive at the same time.

22:14I mean, a lot of the service improvements that we made and enacted are an example of that. How many times in those days where this person gets its food, two minutes go by, another one comes out, another one comes out. This is before shared plates, where they've sort of gone back to that. I know. Ours was they hit the plates where everybody oohs and ahs and then goes on. It's also bringing in the giant plates, the Vila One Bush white plates, taking off the basket, which was the decal on it, just making it pure white. Yeah. And that's just an aesthetic choice that you made at all your restaurants and decided that white has to be a big part of it, right?

22:49Yes, it's the canvas. It's the canvas that you paint upon. We're going to talk at another time, and please come back. I hope we have a good time and we can talk about Nancy and Mark Peel and your team in L.A. But I want to move this conversation on to Michaels in New York, which you opened in 1989. Yes. And, you know, I got to get a sense. How did you find that space? How did you actually get onto that street? Well, ironically, when we opened in April of 79, we had such a huge success that we decided that the last week of August, sort of very French, we're going to close. for a week and the first week of September.

23:29So Kim and I went to Europe, went to Paris, and we're having a big time and everybody's having a big time and we're all ready to come back, et cetera. And I meet up with Steven Spurrier at the Academy Duvin. And I say, so what are you up to? He says, well, I'm thinking about opening an Academy Duvin in New York City. I said, that's so weird. I'm thinking about opening a Michael's in New York City. He said, well, I've got a great broker. So we got on the plane, went to New York, got a broker. He lived in that building. Oh, wow. Hey, I got a place for you. No, he didn't say that quite yet. I said to him, I said, because when I opened in LA, no matter how famous we were and packed it was, we couldn't do any lunch business.

24:10We're just not in that neighborhood. So I said, if I'm going to open in New York, it's like driving a Maserati during the day as well as at night, I want to make sure we have a lunch crowd. And in those days, Midtown Manhattan was it. And so I said, I want a space between 59th Street and 52nd and between Madison and 6th. And it's got to have a garden. Yes. And so we looked at so many spots and none of them were good. I finally said, all right, we're going home. He said, come by and have a drink. And there's a restaurant in the bottom of my building called the Italian Pavilion. So I go in there.

24:42It's pitch black. Yeah. You know, it's three o 'clock. Pitch black. Blacked out walls. Yeah. velvet, red velvet curtains, bunquets, you know, classic. Yeah. And we're sitting there and he says to Guido, who's 78 years old at the time, he said, my friend of California, he's looking to buy a restaurant and I just want you to know him, blah, blah, blah. And he says, why don't you give me a tour of your place? So you walk towards the back and that was a solid wall. Oh. And there was a hardcore door on it. He opens the door and shows me that garden and I go, this is it. That's amazing. This is it. Wait, was that back, was it like a private space?

25:17They were like smoking cigarettes back there. Oh, no, it was the parties that went down in there from the advertising world and the publishing world. It turned out that the restaurant at the Italian Pavilion was one of the places that the advertising world and the book and the magazine people went to all the time. Well, I want to segue to that topic exactly. So you opened in 1989 and, you know, Michael's to me as a young writer and a student of journalism in like the mid 90s. I'm reading New York Magazine. I'm reading Keith Kelly. Yep. And I'm seeing your restaurant mentioned. Yeah. Where Cy Newhouse.

25:55Yep. The titans of the industry are holding court. And, you know, Michael's, similar to the Four Seasons, which R.I.P. is not the same Four Seasons now. Right. You were home to Ty Minkhurst, Condé Nast, Random House. The biggies in publishing were there. Yes. And I'd love to get a sense of how that became. How did Michael's become the publishing center of the universe? Well, it's actually quite a simple story. When I opened up in 79, during the entire 10 years it took me to negotiate that lease. Guido, by the way, then was 88 when he finally sold it. So you saw that space in 79 for the first time.