A Conversation with L. John Harris, the Balzac of Berkeley 

Raised on chicken shmaltz and pastrami in the sunny Jewish ghetto of Los Angeles he was an active participant in the “gourmet ghetto” uprising in Berkeley in the late seventies that changed American dining habits. He is the author of The Book of Garlic and most recently FOODOODLES, cartoons and commentary From The Museum of Culinary History.

We caught up at the Café Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain to share culinary memories, discuss recent bistro discoveries, shmooze with my regulars, and, of course, swap smiles with pretty women.

TG: Since you divide your time between two socialist countries–Berkeley and France–may I assume that you are a true Democrat when it comes to food?

LJH: You could assume that, but you’d be wrong. When it comes to food, and politics I might add, I’m a stranger in a strange land, both here and back in California. My bent in both domains, food and politics, is either towards an aesthetic anarchy or a kind of “centrist aristocracy”.  You see, as an artist and a writer with deeply rooted trickster proclivities, the People’s Republic of Berkeley and Paris become fair game. I’m a culinary contrarian. Does that make any sense?

TG: No, not at all. But it does raise the question of your roots in Los Angeles, your education at Cal-Berkeley, and your obviously growing passion for Paris. What’s behind this progression?

LJH: Well, as I sat Sunday, Bastille Day, at my local café, Le Saint-Germain, on the corner of Rue de Bac and Blvd St. Germain, happily watching heavy military vehicles rumble up the street after the parade, I realized the powerful influence of my paternal grandfather’s service in the French Foreign Legion in the late 1890s. His escape from Poland through Germany to France brought him to Marseille where he enlisted in the Legion. This was a job even a Jew could get. He served in Algeria and the Gulf of Tonkin and survived the Arabs, the Vietnamese and the locusts responsible for the plague that wiped out 10’s of thousands in North Africa during that period. After recovering from the plague in a Marseille hospital, he got on a boat bound for San Francisco, where he raised a family and started a business that flourished after the earthquake of 1906.

You see, Papa Sol was my only relative to have served in the military—any military. The fact that it was the French military, not American, has created an odd sense of loyalty to France. I’d never be able to sit in the U.S. and tolerate a military parade, but here in Paris I get goose bumps.

TG: When did you first come to Paris?

LJH: Well, that sense of a French connection passed first to my older brother, who attended the Sorbonne during his junior year in college. I went to visit him that summer, 1963 I believe, and stayed with the family he had been living with, the Pelletiers. Madame Pelletier made a quiche Lorraine for me that was the single most delicious thing I had ever tasted in my life. Even better than my mom’s spaghetti and meatballs or our housekeeper/cook’s tamale pie. That meal was a French culinary epiphany that led to this life I’m living today.

TG: Why did you continue to come back?

LJH: The pleasure principle. One tries to hold on to and repeat epiphanies. I’m sure you understand this as much as anyone. Then, in the late 1970s my book, The Book of Garlic, was published in French and I brought my future wife with me to pick up the first copies of the book from my Parisian publisher, Guy Authier, who went broke a few months after my book came out. I never got a dime.

TG: Speaking of garlic, you were responsible for helping to launch the Gilroy Garlic Festival. How did you make that happen in a country where men and women avoid each other if they are “garlic-eaters?”

LJH: Well, that’s what The Book of Garlic accomplished in the 1970s and 80s. Gilroy was sitting on a gold mine and didn’t know it. They thought you were suppose to hide the effects of fresh garlic consumption in a dehydrated form for products like catsup and pet food (studies show that dogs and cats prefer their canned food with garlic in it). The success of my book opened the garlic industry’s pores and reversed, or at least challenged, the negative garlic bias in America that had been fueling the mouthwash industry for decades. My position in the book, and in my club, Lovers of the Stinking Rose and its newsletter, Garlic Times, was that garlic breath was “good breath,” a sign of culinary sophistication. I could go on and on, but in a nutshell, Gilroy invited me to be on a committee that would launch and promote their festival which would celebrate FRESH garlic, which I did in 1979. The falling out between the garlic lefties from Berkeley and the right-wing garlic industry in Gilroy came a little after that.

TG: You write and draw cartoons about food, and you ran a cookbook publishing company for many years, but didn’t you ever want to be a cook? I assume you know how to cook.

The Napoleonic Cod 

LJH: Sure, I love to cook, and I’m not bad. Back in the 70s I did a little cooking in one of the cafés I worked in called The Swallow Café, which was started by workers at the Cheese Board. It’s still going strong after 45+ years. But I had come out of the art department at Cal and then worked as a freelance journalist, so I just always preferred approaching food either with words or images, which made cookbook publishing at Aris Books in the 1980s the perfect gig for me. After selling Aris in 1990, I went back to my drawing and writing, made a few documentary films, and ended up as you see me now–the Foodoodler.  Cooking is very hard work physically, and it’s really a young person’s art form. And its ephemeral—the meal is over and that’s it. The drawing and the book last forever.

TG: What’s your favorite Paris café?

LJH: To be honest, I still don’t have a favorite. I love Café de Flore, of course, as do you. I like my local Le Saint-Germain, but not for food, and definitely not for their, sometimes, burnt croissants. Sitting at Le Select, you feel the literary and art history and I like the cat sitting on the counter. My morning coffee is at a little place on Rue de Bac called Le Gevaudan, near my apartment. Their crème is the best and cheapest (under 4E) in the area.

TG: What’s your favorite starred restaurant?

LJH: Gee, I tend not to go to starred restaurants, though when I arrive in Paris each summer I go to l’Atelier Joel Robuchon around the corner from my apartment. I order their frightfully expensive entrecote because its frightfully good. I prefer bistro food and just had a knock-out meal at the non-starred L’Ami Louis, against all advice, which I will be writing about for my on-line food journal, Zester Daily. I had a memorable meal at the 2- star Le Cinq a few years ago, the restaurant in the George V hotel. That meal happened because I had met the general manager socially in Aix en Provence and he invited me to eat with him. What a gorgeous and delicious meal—very modern, upscale, pretty French food. The dinner was on Bastille Day and I felt particularly patriotic afterwards. L’Epi du Pain is, I believe, a one star, and I’ve gone there several times since it became a Chez Panisse-endorsed hangout back in the 1990s.

TG: What’s your favorite bistro du coin?

LJH: I’ve adopted the tiny Au Pied de Fouet on Rue de St. Benoit, down the street from Café de Flore. Whenever I’m hungry and don’t have plans to go out or food at home, I go. It’s my canteen. The menu is simple, the prices very low, and the food delicious. I had a braised pork dish the other day, made with curry,that was just terrific. And their mashed potatoes have almost as much butter in them as L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon.

TG: What’s your favorite market?

LJH: When in Rome….I go to my nearest Sunday market just up Blvd Raspail from my apartment. I walk up with my shopping bag and get my Sunday lunch and dinner, plus produce, bread and cheese for the coming week. Good roast chickens. Went on Sunday with a friend who teaches seasonal vegetarian cooking with an Italian spin here in Paris and in the Loire Valley. Her name is Teresa Murphy and her website is www.lacucinadiTerresa.com. She made a first course for lunch of roasted fennel, goat cheese and toasted hazelnuts in a honey/lemon vinaigrette that just had us all gasping for breath. It was really so good.

TG: As the director of MOCH, The Museum of Culinary History, talk about the changes you have seen in American cuisine in your lifetime and the influence of French cooking on the American culinary scene?

LJH: Well, my answer to this is probably no different than the answers from food professionals far more prominent than I am. The Julia Child effect is too well known to repeat here. Then California cuisine emerged in the 70s, quite without intension– that began to see California as a culinary region, like in France, with products of its own that would be featured as the stars of the local cooking. This ingredient-based cooking, first associated with Chez Panisse in Berkeley, but actually a more ubiquitous response to the horrible processed American food we grew up with after WWII, is now working its way around the world. Although New York foodies stick up their noses at Berkeley’s ingrediocentricity, I don’t think you can have “new” British cooking” and “new Nordic cooking” without a nod to Berkeley and the Chez Panisse  phenomenon.  Actually, the cartoon on the cover of Foodoodles says it all. It’s called “From the Museum of Culinary History,” and it shows four museum pedestals with four characters or objects on top: Jame’s beard, Julia’s child, Alice’s water and Jeremiah’s tower. That’s the Franco-American food story in a cartoon-shell.

TG: How has Paris affected your work?

LJH: I think every writer or artist (or dancer or musician) who comes to Paris wants to bask in the glow of beautiful Paris and its cultural history. It still means something to be a writer and artist in Paris, unlike in the US. So when I am here, and away from my life in Bezerkeley, I am not thinking as much about my house, my kids, my tax return, my bills, my social circle, my partner (or, alas, lack thereof) etc. I’m thinking about Paris and about my work. People who know me here do not know my history, so I am, for them, this guy who comes to Paris to draw and write about food. I like that version of me.

TG: How has Paris affected your life?

LJH: Take my previous response and add that I think I was suppose to be doing this—spending a lot of time in Paris– long ago, but got distracted. The germ was there, always, but it took time for the infection to progress. Now that I’ve started to live my own personal Midnight in Paris, and at the risk of sounding pretentious or boringly romantic, I think I can die a happy man now. I’m not sure I could live here full time, but I could easily move up to 50/50. Would love to try it.

TG: You would be most welcome, Foodoodler.

LJH: My pleasure, Mr. Paris.