Andrew Friedman - Chefs, drugs and rock & roll : how food lovers, free spirits, misfits and wanderers created a new American profession

O kay, gather round, everybody. Just a few things before we open the doors.

This first note is for the kitchen: What follows is intended as a narrative, impressionistic summary of the transformation of professional cooking in the United States during the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s. While many prominent chefs from the era are profiled, this book by no means constitutes a comprehensive survey of everybody who contributed to the industry over the twenty-plus years it covers.

In our interview, Patrick OConnell, chef-proprietor since 1978 of the landmark hotel and restaurant The Inn at Little Washington in Washington, Virginia, made a helpful point: We all have so many parallels. We had a party at Per Se for [the great French chef] Paul Bocuse; it was about thirty American chefs that Thomas Keller had invited and everybody was asked to stand for a moment and tell their story, and it usually involved some inspirational intersection with Bocuse and the great Michelin-starred restaurants of that era when we had nothing comparable yet in America. You would listen to their stories, and except for your own idiosyncrasy and personality, it was Oh my God. You had no idea we were all on the same trip and didnt even know each other.

With those parallels in mind, I have focused primarily on the broad historical strokes and on the central hubs where the most chefs were concentratedthe Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York Cityand on game changers rather than those generally acknowledged to have been cooking the best or most influential food, although they are often the same. The example of La Cte Basque says a lot: Readers who were around in the 1970s and 80s will be surprised, if not scandalized, that Jean-Jacques Rachou casts a longer shadow here than Andr Soltner, but New York City cooks who were there will understand, and that decision should make sense to one and all by the time the dust clears.

With all of this in mind, many godlike talents, including some who took precious time to treat me to deeply revealing interviews, are scarcely mentioned, if at all, and related developments, such as the contemporaneous expansion of the American wine industry, have been necessarily relegated to the sidelines and footnotes.

Logic aside, please know that making these decisions caused me great personal anguish and was responsible for at least one lapsed deadline. And please accept my sincere apology if I failed to find the right spot to pay respect to you or your mentor.

For the dining room: In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I have collaborated on books with many of the chefs in this storythough I have avoided it while working on this projectand count many more as friends and acquaintances. And so while I was fortunate to gain access to the breadth of people interviewed, Im also inclined toward discretion. All of which is to say that this book, despite its title, isnt by any means a tell-all, and that certain people known industry-wide for a range of illicit behaviors and weaknesses dont show any powder on their noses here, either because they wouldnt cop to it themselves or denied it on the record.

My wish was to write a strictly oral history, with the story told exclusively in the voices of the participants. But too many memories proved incomplete or flawed. So I consulted a mountain of books and periodicals and did more writing than originally planned, although the story is still largely carried by the words captured in a few hundred interviews. Quotations from those interviews (listed at the back of the book) are cast in the present tense (he says), whether the subject is living or deceased, while those from third-party sources are in the past tense (she said). Additional sources are listed by chapter at the back of the book as well. With everybodys best interest at heart, and with the consent of the participants, I have performed some minor editing on some quotations from my interviews to eliminate false starts, confusing colloquialisms, and the like; for elegance, I have avoided the use of ellipses to indicate omitted portions of quotations except where considerable text has been deleted. In no cases have my adjustments altered the speakers meaning.

Okay, thank you. Lets have a good service...

Andrew Friedman