High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [107]
On the other side of the culinary divide, the country’s elite celebrated with lavish meals in over-the-top restaurants, which proliferated. Wealthy diners around the country savored a new American cuisine inspired by regional dishes. America became one of the world’s dining destinations, with San Francisco and New York City developing into much-visited dining meccas. New American cuisine became the watchword, and American chefs like Larry Forgione in New York, Jasper White in Boston, Mark Miller in Santa Fe, and Alice Waters in Berkeley, California, championed the flavors of the country’s regional cuisines. They served them up to the top tier of the public in a nation that spent almost one third of its food dollars on restaurant meals, whether upscale or down. Those who only watched the lifestyles of the rich and famous on their television sets attempted to duplicate the same meals in increasingly elaborate home kitchens using one of the thousand cookbooks that were published every year. Others simply sat down in front of their television sets, tuned into one of the rapidly multiplying cooking shows, and munched away on their hamburgers or Kentucky Fried while dreaming of other fare.
Americans on all ends of the social spectrum became enthralled by a cadre of celebrity chefs: cooks who made fortunes from food. However, African Americans who had toiled in homes and restaurants since the origins of the country were once again on the fringes of the new bonanza. One who almost made it was an earnest twenty-five-year-old black chef who created nouvelle cuisine dishes at a downtown Manhattan bistro known as Odeon. Patrick Clark came to popular attention in the 1980s. He was fiercely dedicated to his profession and wildly enthusiastic; with the zeal and wonder of the youngster he was, he could and did talk about his culinary ideas for hours.
Clark was a second-generation chef whose father had cooked for the Restaurant Associates group in an era when blacks worked hard but garnered little fame. At home, he’d grown up on traditional Southern specialties like smothered pork chops and fried chicken, but he also had been introduced to more-omnivorous fare through his father’s profession. He trained at New York City Technical College and apprenticed at Eugénie-les-Bains, France, under Michel Guérard, one of the originators of cuisine minceur (the diet branch of nouvelle cuisine). As a classically trained black chef with an exceptional culinary pedigree, he was poised to enjoy the benefits of fame and fortune.
Clark arrived on the New York restaurant scene when fine dining was the social pastime of the well-to do and the city abounded with pricey restaurants purveying all manner of food. In Odeon’s first review he was awarded two stars by the New York Times. He soon became one of the city’s most revered chefs and expanded his culinary repertoire subtly, adding some of the Southern tastes of his African American world to the regional cuisines of America that were being rediscovered by chefs around the country. Clark’s culinary realm grew, and by the mid-1980s he was appointed chef at Café Luxembourg, a second restaurant opened by Odeon owner Keith McNally.
Although lauded by his peers and praised in the media, Clark wanted the single sign of success that other chefs enjoyed: his own establishment. By 1988, he had found backers and was able to open his own restaurant, Metro, a lavish endeavor. Unfortunately, it opened right after the stock market crash of 1987. Metro was created for the high-flying 1980s,