Post-Puck Generation

Photo by Raul Vega

The first time I went to Manhattan with some money in my pocket, I made a reservation at a restaurant reputed to be the best in New York at the time, a place with four stars from The New York Times, a celebrity clientele, and an avant-garde cooking style that had been proclaimed by the national food press to be absolutely the latest thing. An entire neighborhood had grown up around the notoriety of this chef: million-dollar lofts carved out of butter-and-egg warehouses, champagne bars popping up in old loading docks, limos lining up on streets that had previously never seen a cab. Good food has the ability to pull people toward distant parts of town.

But when I got to the restaurant, the entry hall was lined with cardboard crates of fruits and vegetables, many of them trucked in from California, that wouldn’t have passed muster at my local Vons, let alone at a place like Chez Panisse: skins wrinkled, bloom dulled with age. The menu, aside from a few nods to current Parisian fashion, seemed almost antique, somewhat within the context of “nouvelle cuisine,” yes, but prepared from ingredients that had nothing to do with the mid-Atlantic region that the restaurant happened to be in, and acknowledging nothing of the world beyond France. It happened to be early spring, yet half of the dishes on the menu included fresh tomatoes, which weren’t remotely in season. The lettuces in the salad may as well have been made from plastic. The food, even the chef’s famous specialties, was dull, featureless, like the San Gabriel Mountains barely seen through the smog.

Location Info

Map

Sona

401 N. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90048

Category: Restaurant > French

Region: West Hollywood

5 user reviews	Write A Review
Save to foursquare

Related Stories

• Near-Nude Man Goes on Rampage at Beverly Hills Restaurant (VIDEO)
  July 29, 2013
• 100 Favorite Dishes: The Whole Menu
  December 13, 2012
• Q & A With Soul of a Banquet's Wayne Wang: Cecilia Chiang Why the Best Chinese Food in the World is in the SGV
  April 6, 2013
• Diamond Bar: Beef Rolls, Lots of Boba Bistro Indian Food
  July 26, 2013
• How Bob Marley's Legend Has United My Family
  September 30, 2013

More About

• Andre Guerrero
• Wolfgang Puck
• Kazuto Matsusaka
• Meat
• Main Dish Recipes

Also in this issue:

A few good eggs: L.A.’s freshest faces in the kitchen. BY DEBORAH VANKIN

And subsequent meals in many of the other four-star restaurants in New York accentuated something that I had not been prepared to believe: In the late ’80s, Los Angeles, as the Pacific Rim’s hub of culinary cross-pollination and the center of a great agricultural zone, supported restaurants that were not merely as good but actually better than their New York peers.

Wolfgang Puck may not have invented the idea of cross-cultural cooking, but he came pretty close, and what he came up with eclipsed all the old-fashioned Dover sole, sieved pike and overblown pastry of the great New York restaurants. Ken Frank, when his La Toque was on the Sunset Strip instead of in the Napa Valley, composed exquisite salads of the toasted salmon skin, radish sprouts and mountain yam he’d tasted at his favorite sushi bars. Nobu Matsuhisa, re-examining Western cooking through the prism of Japanese technique, pushed from the other direction and created a paradigm of his own.

Still, Puck, who in just a couple of years at Spago had already created the Mediterranaen casual-dining template that changed American cooking for the better, created the East-West formula at Chinois followed by chefs around the world: heightened flavor; amplified crunch, smoke, heat and earthy depth; a shotgun marriage of Asian ingredients, European technique and plenty of butter. Los Angeles is where the culinary movement known as fusion cuisine started in the late ’70s; where four of the top five food scores in the Zagat survey are earned by Asian restaurants; where in some circles shredded green papaya is more common than potatoes; where mu shu pizza was born. Talk about the anxiety of influence: Being a chef in Wolfgang Puck’s Los Angeles must be like being the second-best playwright at the Globe.

At the height of the 1980s boom, the restaurants here were astonishing — L’Ermitage and Trumps and Citrus, 385 North and City, St. Estephe and Valentino and Rex and Michael’s. In 1989, Campanile and Patina opened in the same week. But then the ’90s happened, and the focus of the food world shifted back toward New York. Chefs spread out from Los Angeles to open some of the best restaurants in the country, including Jonathan Waxman, Thomas Keller, Hiro Sone, Tadachi Ono and Tracy Desjardins. (Sometimes a follower of the food scene in Los Angeles can sound like a bitter Dodgers fan wondering what the team would be like if they hadn’t traded away Pedro Martinez and Mike Piazza.) Half of the openings in town seemed to be of restaurants controlled by either Puck or Joachim Splichal, and many of the others were of exclusive velvet-rope restaurants with indifferent cooking and interiors influenced by traditional Japanese design and high-class S&M dungeons.

These last few years, Los Angeles more or less has had a reputation as a culinary backwater, and I suspect that its restaurants get less national attention than those of Chicago or even Las Vegas. Bay Area chefs have (unjustly) won the James Beard award for best California chef 12 years in a row, and in a few of those years all five of the chefs even nominated came from Northern California. In glossy-magazine polls, Los Angeles doesn’t rank in the top 10 American restaurant cities. (This isn’t to say there were no good new restaurants between Campanile, say, and Bastide. The restaurants of Suzanne Goin and Suzanne Tract, who both amplified and expanded on the California-Mediterranean principles laid down by Puck and Alice Waters, come to mind.)