Like Cinderella's pumpkin, the “roach coach” poufs into a high end cafe on wheels.

The current fad in LA for high grade or at least serious mobile kitchens is a good thing. It is an innovation and a fusion whose time has come. These rolling kitchens have been around for more than a generation and usually known as “roach coaches.” Most of them serve a mix of Mexican and American cooking depending on their clients, and their daily route from office to factory to this or that other site. Few people realize that this form of mobile kitchen had a highly improbable birth. Forty or more years ago an Armenian immigrant from the USSR was eating lunch with his coworkers and they lamented that all you could get from a truck was cold sandwiches and prepackaged salads and and candy.

The immigrant mentioned that when he was drafted into the Red Army, he had spent his years as a cook in a mobile field kitchen. Somehow he was able to convince a friend or relative that there was a big market for these mobile kitchens and they built one and then another and soon they were everywhere and the old cold food catering trucks all but disappeared.

What is happening now that is good is that trained chef’s and cooks have taken these mobile kitchens and begun to use them to offer high quality food in their ethnic tradition or in a hybrid fusion of American and other cooking traditions. By parking them near clubs and other venues popular with young adults that empty late at night, they provide high quality food to people who need it at a time and place where it is hard to get. Some of the fusion's are highly personal, like the Korean Taco truck that more or less kicked off the trend. Over time I am sure many other forms of fusion menus will develop and compete for acceptance. Like any fad, this can be carried too far, but I suspect high quality mobile kitchens are here to stay and will become the up scale part of the mobile kitchen industry. They will serve the affluent in the evening as the earlier trucks served the working class morning and noon and the middle class on the weekends at parks and beaches.

What to expect? Barbecue trucks serving meats from one or more traditions, ultra high end coaches offering Segruva Caviar and the rarest and most precious Jamon Iberico, a mobile calzone kitchen, a fine intense ramen truck, a mobile kitchen from Campanile offering the variety of special sandwiches that are the Thursday night special at the restaurant. Other things that might appear could be a deli truck with pastrami, brisket and corn beef on rye and Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda, a Polish truck with a soup kitchen with flaki (tripe), beef barley, sauerkraut, sorrel, kapusta (cabbage) or any of the other dozens of great soups from the Polish kitchen. Who knows we might see a Portuguese American truck offering linguiça sandwiches and steaming bowls of Azores style bean soup and kale & potato soup or a Spanish one offering chorizo sandwiches, hot or cold tortillas (potato & onion omelets) and plates of jamon y machego cheese, or a French one selling onion soup, ham and cheese on a baguette, croque’s and cones of pomme frites & remoulade.

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California & Salad Days

California is and has been the salad bowl of the nation since the railroads perfected the refrigerator car a hundred years ago. The Southern Pacific and Union Pacific built thousands of bright yellow orange insulated "refer" cars as they were called, established ice houses along the routes to keep them cold and developed high speed steam locomotives to pull the trains. Today the Union Pacific keeps the last steam locomotive that is still in continuous service, a large fast Challenger class engine that was specifically designed to haul the Pacific Fruit Express as this service was called.

My wife’s mother Fran grew up in Chicago. Seeing it on a menu, she told us how in pre-World War II Chicago, the “Wedge Salad” was a famous local specialty even in winter time at the best restaurants and steak houses. Because the railroads could deliver Salinas Valley lettuce to Chicago in three days, the restaurants could offer this delicacy. Still a steakhouse favorite, the Wedge Salad is as its name indicates is a large wedge of iceberg lettuce served whole on a plate with a heavy garnish of bacon shards, crumbled blue cheese, chopped fresh tomato and hard boiled egg then dressed with a white wine vinaigrette dressing. The diner’s carving up the dense crisp wedge was part of its appeal, which indicates its steakhouse origin, since diners already had a sharp steak knife along side their plate.

A Union Pacific Challenger locomotive built to haul high speed Pacific Fruit Express trains from California to the Midwest. Still on the active roster, it is the largest steam locomotice still in service in the world. Photo copyright by Allen Robertson used with permission.

In California at this time in the better restaurants, salads were either made at table side like the Caesar or dressed and tossed table side as they still do at Lawry’s Prime Rib. In San Francisco in the simple family run Italian restaurants like the New Pisa salads were served in a bowl that came out of the kitchen and stopped at the counter of the older woman who supervised the the dinning room. She would carefully pour on just the right amount of olive oil and then the waitress would deliver to the customer’s table where a cruet of red wine vinegar waited. Then either the waitress or the head of the table would pour on the vinegar and toss the salad then pass it around.

There is a unique salad that has long been the specialty at Clearman’s in San Marino and its branches. This salad, actually a pair of simple salads that are eaten together are memorable and addictive. They call the pair “Red & White” salads. The White salad is lettuce tossed in a not too rich creamy blue cheese dressing. It is paired with tart snappy red cabbage salad in a red wine vinegar dressing. This is the “Red” half of the partnership. The “White Salad” must be dressed immediately before serving to make sure the lettuce stays crisp. The “Red Salad” on the other hand has to be made a day or at least half a day before to set up. The red cabbage has to loose some of its moisture and soften just a bit while it absorbs the tangy vinegar sharpness that makes the combination of the two salads fascinating and refreshing.

Recipes for the pair salads are available at the LA Time food blog. They are not the actual recipes that Clearman’s keep to themselves, but savvy culinary “reverse engineering” that results in a near perfect duplicate of the original. On LA Times food blog do a search for “Clearman’s Salad.”

Like many trademark restaurant dishes including Joe’s Special, Philippe’s French Dip sandwich and Taylor’s Steakhouse “Molly Salad,” I suspect this pairing was a happy accident that the customers loved and asked for again and again. My theory is that the “red” salad came about when someone in the kitchen prepared a batch of red cabbage to be cooked down into the traditional German Rotkohl but never got around to cooking it. Someone in the kitchen tasted it after it sat over night and realized this was a cabbage salad with zest and crunchiness and served it. At the table the customers themselves most likely mixed the “Red” salad with the “White” one and the fit was a natural.

The whole phenomenon of the “happy accident” will be the topic of a future blog. A surprising number of well known dishes originated by lucky chance not the more common rational intention. One reason why they are memorable is the pure mischance or unusual circumstances of their creation, they broke some rule or tradition in an unexpected way, yet they worked. Another coming post will be a rant at the wide spread debasement of two California classics, the Caesar and Cobb salads. While not accidents these two icon dishes were both the result of someone daring to innovate when unusual circumstances demanded it. As the old US Navy wisdom has it, Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

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At meal at Jack's in San Francisco in 1965.

If there is one restaurant that I wish could visit again it is Jack’s in San Francisco. It had a long run, almost a century and a half. Some people miss other fine places, my parent’s loved the Blue Fox. In Los Angeles Scandia would head the roster of fondly remembered places. In New York there are many restaurants people recall with nostalgia. These special and favorite places keep passing on, this month the famous Cafe Des Artistes closed after almost a century. It is cherished as much or more for its pastel murals of delightful carefree arte deco nudes as for its food, a unique blend of French, American and Hungarian dishes. It was if nothing else, a deeply romantic place.

The first time I went to Jack’s in San Francisco was in August 1965 when a few of us got together to treat a friend who was about to report for duty in the Army. Even then Jack’s was a very very old place. The building was a weathered shabby three story brick building put up right after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. It was just up Sacramento Street from Montgomery Street, at the point where hill began its climb. Sacramento was a narrow side street that marched straight up and over Nob Hill. It was August in San Francisco, the weather lived up to Mark Twain's famous comment, “The coldest winter I spent in California was my summer in San Francisco.” This night was cool & foggy. When you turned off Montgomery Street, you caught a blast of misty air right off the Pacific. You entered through double beveled glass doors into a brightly lit room with a hand laid black and white hexagonal mosaic tile floor, dark wood paneling with beveled glass mirrors on the walls and a very high ceiling covered in sheets of patterned pressed tin. The dinning room was long with a bar across the front window. There were large round tables on the far wall and smaller square ones in the center and near side, all draped in stiff white table clothes. The staff was as elderly as the surroundings. After standing at the bar, without bar stools just a dinged and tarnished brass rail to rest your feet on, we were led to a stout table against the near wall and hung our rain coats on dark metal hooks screwed into the paneling. We were two or three decades younger than anyone else in the dinning room, although like them we all wore dark suits and white shirts and ties. The waiter handed each of us a menu, another relic from the nineteenth century, it was printed daily on stiff white legal size stock. It was all small black type, no art work and not even simple prose describing anything, just the names of items in French or English, a long long list of what was available printed on when inked metal type pressed directly on the paper on an antique letter press. In the 19th century Jack’s had begun as a French restaurant and still had some very old french dishes on the menu, although it was very much an American restaurant that didn’t go in for fads or much else that had not been listed since the place was reopened after the 1906 earthquake.

An oddity of Jack’s was the way drinks were served. Due to the very advanced age of most of its waiters, simple drinks and cocktails like Old Fashions, Gin & Tonics, Martini’s and Manhattans were made at the bar then poured into tall water glasses, put on the waiter’s tray with an empty cocktail or old fashioned glass for each drink. When he got to the table the elderly waiter set down stemmed cocktail glasses and then poured the cocktail into it, leaving the depleted water glass beside it. The same for whiskey, whiskey & soda and gin & tonics which arrive in the bottom of the glass with a few pieces of jagged ice chipped off a ice block at the bar. The waiter then topped off the glass with a small bottle of club soda, quinine water or with water from the pitcher of ice water on each table. This added an extra layer of ritual and intensified the antique aura and slow tempo of the restaurant.

In the evening Jack’s served a set dinner that hadn’t changed in decades. Indeed this Edwardian meal continued to served into the 1980’s. An appetizer course was followed by bowl of soup, then a salad, followed by a fish course, the entree and finally a dessert. In progressed in the long accepted sequence of a proper meal at a very traditional restaurant. You began with a cocktail while your read the menu, then ordered a bottle of white wine with the appetizer and perhaps another with the fish, then a bottle of red wine with the meat entree, and finally cognac with the coffee at the end of the meal. Since you were in San Francisco you knew when you left the restaurant sometime between nine and ten you would step out the door onto Sacramento Street and a sharp blast of foggy cold air right off the Pacific Ocean would hit your face like punch.

You chose one item from each course on the list. The appetizers included shrimp or crab cocktail, home made pates, pickled pigs feet, marinated tongue, and other items rarely if ever seen on menu’s today. Then there was a choice of soups, beef or chicken consumes, vegetable soup of some kind, scotch broth (lamb and barley -- my favorite) and a cream soup. The salad was a straight forward mixed greens and sliced tomatoes in a white wine vinaigrette with or without Roquefort crumbled on it as you prefered. That was the only salad dressing offered. The Fish Course presented a choice of local fish like petrale, rex sole, hatchery trout, and sand dabs served “dore” or “mineure.” Finally you reached the entree, the red meat course. It was a choice of that evening's roast meat & fowl or their house special marinated rump steak. The rump steak was long marinated and cooked medium rare. Dense solid meat , no fat, bone or gristle. This steak was chewy with a zippy tang from the spices and vinegar and a deep base baritone beefiness. It was served in a rich bordalaise sauce. The potatoes and vegetable were served from small platters. Desserts were simple enough: ice cream, sherbet and apple pie. A cheese platter was also available.

It took at least two hours to march through this menu. A century ago, before radio or television, it was considered civilized to spend two hours at the table for an evening meal. Each course was like a round at prize fight with a ten minute intre’act between to savor it and clear the palate for the next. The sequence of courses was that of a proper 19th century French meal with the appetizers acting like the overture of an opera: tasty tangy salty items to wake up your taste buds. A large basket of sliced crusty sourdough bread and a bowl of salty butter stayed on the table. The size of the courses was appropriate to the meal, with portions smaller than we expect today in a two or three course dinner. The appetizer was served on a leaf of lettuce and only four or five savory bites. Next the soup was served in a small bowl, but it was more than the little cup you often get today. This warmed you up. A California restaurant, at Jack’s salad came next following the Iberian custom, not the French. All the salads except Crab Louis (a favorite local lunch dish) were served with a classic white wine vinaigrette. At Jack’s it had a good sprinkling of Roquefort cheese crumbles. Next came the fish course. Here again this was one whole fish or two or three fillets of a larger one. The fish was not accompanied by a starch or vegetables. Finally came the entree or main course. While most people had the marinated rump steak in bourdelais sauce, others had roast beef or lamb or half a roast chicken. Pork was sometimes offered, also roast mutton -- a rich manly dish rarely served at all today since the flavor is a bit like game and it is chewy and earthy. Finally came the desert course, but most of the time I ate there we would get the cheese platter. One of the cheeses was a strong soft cheese and a sharp hard cheese plus a large slab of fresh creamy Monterey Jack where the middle of the slab was so fresh it was spreadable and sweet and salty. I seem to recall a few apples or pears on the platter, but that be an error. At this time the old time family Italian places offered one dessert, a slab of fresh Monterey Jack cut from a large wheels, not rubbery square blocks from a supermarket. At Jack’s sliced sour dough bread was available through out the meal.

The wine list was large, ranging across the dozen or so important California wineries of the day and a selection of mainly French imports. This was years before the wine boom and establishment of dozens and then hundreds of small ”boutique” wineries. If my memory is accurate, we usually drank a Livermore Valley Sauvignon Blank from Wente or Concannon with the fish and a Cabernet Sauvignon from Beaulieu, Chas. Krug, Louis Martini or Inglenook or perhaps a reserve Pinot Noir with a bold red stripe diagonally across the label indicating its rare status from the long gone Almaden Winery in the Santa Clara Valley whose vineyards have disappeared under today’s Silicon Valley. If we drank French wines it was usually a white Burgundy followed by a velvety Chateauneuf de Pape from the Rhone Valley. Even if we could pronounce their names we were too young to appreciate and too poor to afford the great reds from Bordeaux and Burgundy.

All this food, drink and wine for four people might cost $60 including a tip, all laid out in cash on a small white plate with green stripes around the rim. Credit cards were a new thing then and the older San Francisco restaurants were slow to adopt them. At good San Francisco restaurants full dinners were five dollars at this time and the huge set piece dinner at Jack’s was around eight dollars, the same for bottles of good local wine. At this time three dollars would buy a hearty meal and house wine at the family places like the New Pisa, La Pantera and the San Remo. At fine Italian restaurants like Paoli’s, dinner began with a vast antipasti spread that cover the entire table with small plates and platters, then soup, a light salad, a small pasta course and finally the main dish. Cocktails were less than a dollar in San Francisco back then and our larger coins were still minted in real silver and a new VW beetle sold for about a thousand dollars and a brand new Ford Mustang for $2,000.

Jack’s dated back to the Gold Rush, I believe it was officially founded in the 1850’s. It was a French Restaurant which at that time meant it not only offered food in the French style, on it’s second and third floor it also provided “les chambres separees.” That is private rooms where meals were served to discreet couples. In addition to the main entrance through the bar and dinning room on the ground floor, a separate side entrance allowed ladies and gentlemen to enter and leave the second floor unobserved by the dinners in the ground floor restaurant. When my mother was a student nurse in San Francisco in the late 1930’s she and her classmates were given stern warnings about French restaurants and their private rooms, specifically Jack’s. When I first went there in the 1960’s the upper rooms had long since been converted into private dinning rooms for business meetings. Seduction and adultery had been replaced by tax avoidance and sales meetings while “the pill” had loosened up sexual mores for my generation.

The principal reason for Jack’s unchanging menu and a dinning room that looked as it had in 1910 was that it was owned by a real estate tycoon who ate lunch there almost every day into his nineties. His heirs continued on for a couple decades after his death. Today it has been modernized into a more or less authentic French bistro and the main dinning room only has hints of it’s former Edwardian look. A perfectly respectable place, it retained the name, but it is not in any way the old Jack’s of fond memory. It was a miracle that it survived as long as it did.

As I wrote at the beginning of this chapter it was widely acknowledged to be a historic anomaly when I first went there in the early 1960’s. It was like eating and drinking in a museum where the menu was authentically as archaic as the decor and aged waiters, all of whom were at least seventy even then. Time passed very slowly at Jack’s and it had a large following who liked it that way. It had great gravitas and an almost preternatural longevity.

On the a la carte menu it offered a wide array of fish, steaks and chops and it’s signature dish, Chicken Jack’s: a sauté of half a chicken in pieces with mushrooms, onions, garlic, artichoke hearts and flavored with fresh herbs,spices and finished with sherry. Before the 1960's and large poultry companies like Foster Farms and the others, chicken and turkey were relatively much more expensive than today and most menu's reflected this. At that time fish was much cheaper than today and since Catholics and many other denominations had to eat it every Friday or on designated Lenten and fast days, fish was a far less exalted main course than today. Jack's was also famous for asparagus with hollandaise sauce, celery victor and leaks vinaigrette. It served entrees accompanied by their traditional classic french sauces, mushrooms in a Madeira sauté, Lobster Thermador, and California’s unique and now all but unobtainable beloved specialty, the essence of simplicity and the sublime, a ten inch wide Abalone steak d’orée. Today when culinary innovations and unexpected if not eccentric transpositions of Asian and European cooking are almost required at better restaurants, Jack’s seems to be a time warp. It was in many ways. It carried on far longer that anyone could have expected but not as long as it’s loyal diners might have hoped.

There was an almost antiquarian liquor store not far from Jacks on Montgomery Street that was my university for learning about wine. It is still there, John Walker & Sons. They carried a solid collection of the leading California wines and a wide selection of European wines. There I discovered French and German wines, especially the great reds from Burgundy and Rhine wines, in particular the great Rhinegau wines like Steinberger, Schloss Volrads, Schloss Johanisberger. I also found the Gewertztraminers of Alsace from the French side of the Rhine. These wines at their best were and still are like bottled sunlight. The legendary 1959 vintage were still available when turned 21 and could buy and drink them. That was the year of the century, annis mirabilis, as far as the Rhine and most French wines were concerned. The French reds of that year were big round and had wonderful rainbow of tastes. Both 1964 and 1966 were fine years also. I also discovered fine Ports and Madeira's from Portugal and the Gran Reserva Rioja reds, then aged at least until they were 10 to 15 years old, and Sherries, real Sherries including the bracing dry clear slightly salty Manzanillas from Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Because of the high post WW II dollar, the Rhine wines were not much more than their pale California counterparts while first rate, not grand cru but very good, French reds were not much more than very good California wines. The dollar fell from it’s pedestal at the end of the decade and fine European wines became a stretch for those of modest means.

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