The party that’s lasted a quarter century

It’s been 35 years, but Michael McCarty can still recall the precise moment he decided to become a restaurateur.

He was 16, and he and his parents had just finished dinner at a fancy French restaurant in New York, celebrating his departure the next day to spend his junior year of high school in France.

“My parents always entertained a lot,” he says, “and now here we were in this restaurant, and when the owner ... started working the room, you could see the service get crisper and the buzz get louder and then they brought the check and I thought, ‘Wow. You can have a party with all this fun and all this great food and wine and at the end, you give the guests a bill.’

“That’s my kind of business.”

Ten years later -- fresh from a return trip to France, where he went to cooking and hotel schools -- McCarty opened Michael’s restaurant in Santa Monica and fired one in a volley of shots heard ‘round the gastronomic world. Almost overnight, Michael’s became both a breeding ground for a new generation of chefs and a laboratory for what soon came to be called the New California (or New American) cuisine.

McCarty was neither the first nor the most influential pioneer in this revolution. Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower and Wolfgang Puck, among others, played crucial roles. But six years before Time magazine deemed “Eat American” worthy of a cover story, McCarty helped popularize it and give it a name and a face, and after his restaurant celebrated its 25th anniversary last month, I sat down to talk with him about his vision and his voyage.

“My whole idea was to make a restaurant that was not a restaurant,” he said. “I didn’t want one of those stuffy, classic French restaurants with everything codified by Escoffier and everyone uptight. I wanted to repeat the casual experience of entertaining in my parents’ home.”

A restaurant begins with food, though, and McCarty wanted to break with formal French tradition here too. For him, as for his colleagues, California cuisine came to mean certain ingredients and techniques, a sensibility that blended Provence, the Mediterranean and Southern California in a formula that now sounds almost cliche -- fresh, local produce, simple grilled foods, pizzas with exotic toppings, salads of field greens topped with goat cheese and grilled meats.

An all-star roster

When Michael’s opened in 1979, the chefs in the kitchen included Mark Peel (who later opened Campanile); Ken Frank (who went on to run La Toque here and, now, in Napa Valley) and Jonathan Waxman (who later introduced New York to California cuisine with his Jams restaurant). The all-star roster grew quickly.

Nancy Silverton, who began as a cashier, became the dessert chef before going on to Spago and Campanile. Kazuto Matsusaka went from Michael’s to Chinois. Roy Yamaguchi went from Michael’s to, ultimately, a global empire. Gordon Naccarato became the top chef in Aspen. Eric Tanaka, now at Dahlia Lounge in Seattle, is one of the top chefs in the Pacific Northwest.

I first went to Michael’s, shortly after it opened, because I’d been dazzled by Frank’s food at two other L.A. restaurants. That night, when I asked McCarty if Frank were in the kitchen, he stood ramrod straight and demanded to know why I’d asked. I told him I thought Frank was the best young chef in town.

“I’m the chef here,” McCarty said imperiously. “All the recipes we use here are my recipes. Ken is just one of my cooks.”

But that was just a bruised ego speaking. I’ve come to know McCarty fairly well over the years, and he’s told me often how talented Frank and his other young chefs were.

From the start, ambience has been as important as cuisine at Michael’s, though, so he put thousands of dollars of fresh flowers everywhere, put half the tables outdoors in a lush garden and dressed the wait staff in Ralph Lauren pastels, not tuxedoes. He piped in jazz, not classical music, and he filled the walls with great original art, not what he dismisses as “red velvet and cobweb mirrors.”

“I wanted openness and fun and spontaneity,” he says.

McCarty may be the most gregarious person I know, and his ebullient personality -- loud across-the-room greetings for everyone -- made guests feel welcome, special, early on and sustained the restaurant when tough times came later.

On the day we last had lunch -- at Michael’s -- he seemed to know every guest. Either they came to the table to say hello or he jumped up to greet them. For each, he had a bone-crushing handshake, and after each handshake, he had a story.

“What can I say?” he asked. “I love people and I love to party.”

That he does. For Michael’s 16th anniversary, he invited all his previous chefs back and threw a benefit bash for local museums. (His wife, Kim, is an artist, and they’re both art lovers.) For Michael’s 25th anniversary, last month, he threw a party for 600, featuring more than 30 old wines from his cellar and many of his favorite foods (shad roe, soft-shell crabs, oysters, foie gras, rotisserie-roasted sucking pig, Dutch white asparagus, among others).

McCarty’s best-known party came four years after Michael’s opened, when he organized a 350-seat dinner to celebrate the beginning of the American Institute of Food and Wine. It was the first time many of the rising-star chefs had met one another, and McCarty was credited with helping to put New American cuisine officially on the map.

“You know what my idea of a good time is, what the restaurant experience should capture?” he asks. He’s got this big self-satisfied grin on his face, and suddenly I know what’s coming.

Seven years ago, my wife and son and I had rented a house for a week in Tuscany with Piero Selvaggio, the owner of Valentino, and his family. McCarty and Selvaggio are close friends, and one morning, McCarty called to say that he and his family were also in Italy and wanted to have lunch with us.

“You buy,” he said. “I’ll cook.”

Selvaggio and I raced to the local farmers markets. We bought tomatoes and eggplant and zucchini and cuttlefish and giant shrimp and porchetta and chicken and bread and cheese and wine. The McCartys had arrived by the time we returned. Michael immediately flung the cuttlefish on the grill, and the wine began to flow.

“We spent all afternoon eating and drinking and talking with people we cared about, right?” he asks me now. “We had all this food and all this wine and the kids were jumping in and out of the pool and everyone was laughing and playing. That’s what life should be. That’s what a restaurant should feel like.”

McCarty always seems to speak in these booming declarative sentences that brook no challenge and that have led many to brand him as brash and arrogant. He can be both. But his relentlessly sunny disposition and indefatigable joie de vivre have enabled him to survive a series of disasters that would have devastated, if not destroyed, most men.

Expansion

After the success of Michael’s, McCarty opened four more restaurants in the 1980s, one each in New York, Washington, Denver and Detroit. He also decided to build a 150-room hotel on the beach in Santa Monica. That’s when his luck ran out.

A municipal referendum defeated his hotel plans in 1990, “and it cost me $6 million,” he says. “I lost everything. I filed Chapter 11 in ’92 and tried to hang on.”

Meanwhile, a severe recession hit Southern California, and at Michael’s, as elsewhere, business plummeted. Then, in the brush fires of 1993, the McCartys’ Malibu house burned down. A year later, the Northridge earthquake caused $250,000 damage and destroyed 3,000 bottles of old California wine at Michael’s.

Amid these disasters, the McCartys were coping with a medical condition that required frequent surgery for their youngest child, Chas.

But McCarty never stopped bounding through life with a smile on his lips and resounding words of confidence in himself and encouragement for others, especially for Chas. I can recall seeing McCarty periodically in those years, and every time I asked how he was, he said, “Great. Great. Business is up 11%” (or 12% or whatever number popped into his head).

Finally, in 1994, he emerged from Chapter 11 proceedings, sold his Denver, Washington and Detroit restaurants and used those proceeds and insurance money from his house fire to buy his Santa Monica and New York restaurants back from the bank.

How’s he doing now, 10 years later?

“Last year was the best year ever for both restaurants,” he insists with characteristic vigor.

But Michael’s is no longer a cutting-edge restaurant.

“Not interested,” he says. “My job now is to preserve the dining experience as we’ve created it here. We didn’t do Cajun and we didn’t do fusion and we don’t do cutting edge. I do believe in change, change to survive, and right now I’m interviewing candidates to be our next chef. Olivier [Rousselle] is leaving to get married and move back to France, and I’m having great fun talking to all these young chefs who apply.

“I tell them right off, ‘If you’re looking for a French Laundry experience, you’ve come to the wrong place.’ We could do tasting menus here that would knock your socks off, but that’s not who we are. We’re more casual. We’re here for a good time.”

McCarty’s been giving diners a good time for 25 years, and he’s not about to stop now.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.