Dining

Southern California cooking is an easy cuisine in its most basic form: Dad on the patio grilling steaks, Mom making a big salad, a pot of beans on the stove, a cold, sweaty beer. Los Angeles is a young city, but it has always had its own cuisine, based on the quality of its produce, the ease of its style, the pleasantness of being able to barbecue outside in your shirtsleeves almost every day of the year. The vaqueros ate like that in California’s early days, and so did the Midwesterners when they settled here at the beginning of the last century. The Sunset magazine, men-grilling paradigm of the 1950s was a continuation of the aesthetic. When it is 72 degrees outside and the surf is up and Vin Scully is on the radio, who has the patience for casseroles or stews? People may be flexible about Chinese noodle shops, but they will defend their favorite barbecue pit to the death.

Still, traditional high-end restaurant cooking has always shied away from live-fire cooking. Exalted Italian chefs leave the grilling to their country cousins. French chefs, I suspect, think that the flavors developed by the grill are too strong, too alarming, too likely to overpower the delicate bouquet of an old La Lagune.

“When I worked at the old Ma Maison,” says Mark Peel, feeding an oak log into a firebox at his restaurant Campanile, “we didn’t even have a grill in the restaurant. When somebody ordered a steak, we’d heat a metal rod until it was red hot, and then — sssss, sssss, sssss — we’d brand grill marks into the meat before we sautéed it. It looked great, and I don’t think anybody ever knew the difference.”

In 1982, the chef at Ma Maison, Wolfgang Puck, opened the original Spago on the Sunset Strip, the restaurant that took wood-fire cooking out of the patio in Los Angeles and placed it squarely in the context of fine dining, possibly the first kitchen in the United States to put the grill man (who happened to be Peel) at the number-one position on the hot line. At Spago, not just the steaks but the squab, the chicken, the John Dory, the tuna, the calves’ liver and the salmon came off the big grill. The duck and the lamb and the sea bass passed through the wood-burning oven, which also cooked the pizzas. There was a new kind of cooking in Los Angeles, with a flavor as old as time.

Nearly 25 years later, live fires still burn everywhere in every neighborhood, baking bread in Indian tandoors and Iranian tanours, charring Japanese yakitori and Indonesian satay, blackening Mexican carne asada and Peruvian chickens and African-American ribs. When Mario Batali, the most notorious Italian chef in the country, came to Los Angeles to open an upcoming restaurant with Nancy Silverton, the first thing they looked for was a space that would let them fire their ovens with wood.

But ironically, in the recent resurgence of fire in Los Angeles, Spago has reverted to its haute-cuisine roots, and less than a third of the food at the Beverly Hills restaurant ever sees live flames at all.

“The grill man is still the number-one guy,” says executive chef Lee Hefter. “But now he has to do the pan roasts too.”