Spicy Blend of East and West

By Martha Duffy

Lunchtime in Beverly Hills. A bold, bright, high-ceilinged room with sun streaming through the skylights and a mighty bamboo tree thrusting toward the roof. The regulars, mostly show-biz honchos, pour into Chaya Brasserie to talk their way through low-cal power meals. The plates, sprouting salad greens, look conventional at first, but in fact, the fare is novel: a combination of the vaunted California cuisine (roughage) and subtler accents from Asia -- tuna and salmon tartare, lemongrass, ginger. Called Cal-Asian cuisine or Pacific Rim cookery, it is the latest gourmet buzz.

The idea of Pacific Rim cuisine began taking shape about 10 years ago. It can be several things, but it is never merely a transplanted ethnic cuisine. Instead it is an unpredictable culinary reflection of California's ethnic mix. Typically a chef or sous-chef may be Chinese or Japanese and may have trained in France or Italy. He or she may mix several Pacific traditions into what could be called a pan-Asian cuisine, or perhaps add just a few Far Eastern touches to American or French dishes.

The best-known pioneer of Pacific Rim cooking is Wolfgang Puck, California's reigning celebrity chef. When it comes to dining, he maintains, Californians love novelty. "There are so many cultures with exciting cuisines here," observes the Austrian-born Puck. "After all, the culinary heritage of Thailand is more interesting than Poland's. Californians are very open. They're less likely than back East to go for pot roast or baked scrod!" When he started up Spago in Beverly Hills, he employed young Asians in his kitchen. In 1983 Puck decided to look East himself -- Far East -- with Chinois on Main in Santa Monica, now a Cal-Asian temple. His 2 1/2-year-old Postrio in San Francisco is also a Pacific Rim hot spot.

Other visionaries were stirring. San Francisco restaurateur Jeremiah Tower was teaching Cal-Asian cooking with Ken Frank, who opened La Toque in Los Angeles to show off his ideas. At the same time, ethnic communities were growing rapidly, especially around Los Angeles. The town of Westminster in Orange County was becoming a vast Little Saigon, eerily reminiscent of Vietnam two decades ago. Monterey Park is now the modern Chinatown, where purist chefs from Hong Kong disdain any mixed methods -- and draw their own faithful crowds.

It was only a matter of time before the impulse to marry East to West became irresistible. Says Barry Wine, whose Quilted Giraffe in Manhattan is a rare East Coast Cal-Asian spot: "You can do this only in America, where there is less cultural baggage to lift." Nobu Matsuhisa, whose eponymous Beverly Hills restaurant serves masterly food, observes, "Here I use French truffles and Caspian caviar. Why not?"

The new menus would not be nearly as popular if the food did not appeal to Californians' health consciousness. Thai food, in particular, is healthful. The flavors tend to be clean and clear, the colors bright, the presentation light and graceful.

Cal-Asian cuisine -- as distinct from wok and stir-fry cooking -- is still ^ largely a dining-out rather than a domestic phenomenon. Some culinary sophistication is called for. "You can't just plop Asian ingredients into French food or vice versa," says Tower. "And some Western things shouldn't be touched; I wouldn't give up sauce bearnaise for the world."

Still, it probably won't be long before cookbooks crop up and more people start experimenting. Asian markets are attracting not only their own ethnic shoppers but the whole community as well. Tower recalls that five years ago he found a supplier of exotic Thai and Indian commodities who every week produced something he had never seen before. Now much of it is at the local Safeway: fresh turmeric, several kinds of Thai basil, gingers like galingale, and strange fruits, including the dread durian, which tastes sublime but smells foul.

There are entertainers and purists. Noa Noa, in Beverly Hills, is a sort of post-Polynesian circus of a place that features oddities like "mashed potatoes with chicken in Asian whole-grain mustard sauce." In San Francisco, Bruce Cost runs a superserious Chinese-style spot called Monsoon. He prods his clientele to try the pigs' feet and the innards, and zealously guards the freshness of his food. And when Cost says fresh fish, he means alive almost until the fork hits it, "not a dead fish that's been sitting around for eight hours."

What no amount of ingenuity or international esprit can do is create a dessert menu. The concept is alien to Asia. But in California that is a mere detail. Tiramisu, Venice's current contribution to international menus, is popular. Creme brulee, the chic dessert of the '80s, gets a mild Asian make- over -- with ginger, mint, chocolate or mandarin orange added.

Opinions vary on just how far the cuisine will spread in the U.S. -- but it is definitely traveling westward, back along the Rim. In fact, Jeremiah Tower is already singing the praises of the best, most balanced French-Asian fare he has ever sampled -- in, of all places, Adelaide, Australia. California may have to start looking over its shoulder.