LaDou had learned pizza-making in the 1970s as a teenager at Frankie, Johnnie & Luigi Too, a traditional New York–style pizzeria in Mountain View, California.[5] He made pizzas briefly at Ecco, an upscale restaurant at the Hyatt Hotel in Palo Alto, California,[6] before starting at Prego.
Although Prego specialized in classic, Italian-style thin-crust pizzas, its chefs encouraged LaDou to experiment with prosciutto, goat cheese, and truffles in their wood-burning oven, and send his results to guests.[5][6] At one table, the guest to whom he served an off-menu invention involving mustard, ricotta, pâté, and red pepper turned out to be chef Wolfgang Puck.
Pizza topped with an egg from the Chez Panisse cafe
By 1980, Alice Waters' Chez Panisse and its head chef, Jeremiah Tower, had already invented California cuisine, a combination of French and Italian techniques and presentation with fresh local ingredient-focused flavors. Waters was a long-time fan of Tommaso's Italian restaurant in San Francisco's North Beach, which had installed the West Coast's first wood-fired pizza oven when it opened in 1935.[7]
After traveling to Italy, Waters decided to make an open kitchen featuring a Tommaso's-style pizza oven the focus of the new cafe she was opening above her main dining room. Although prepared classically, her chefs added exotic fine ingredients to their single-serving pizzas and calzones, such as goat cheese and duck sausage.[4] Her cafe, and its pizzas, in particular, were an instant success, attracting wide attention among food critics.[8][9]
Wolfgang Puck, in 1980 and 1981, was preparing to open the restaurant that would make him famous, Spago, in West Hollywood, California. Initially conceived as a pizzeria, Spago's was modeled after the upstairs cafe at Chez Panisse.[4][10] He was so impressed with the pizza LaDou had made for him at Prego, he hired LaDou as head pizza chef. Under Puck's guidance, LaDou developed more than 250 pizza concepts using ingredients such as scallops, roe, and baby zucchini flowers.[6]
Among their most famous invention was "Jewish pizza", a pizza dough first cooked then topped with smoked salmon, crème fraîche, capers, and dill.[11] Another innovation was using infused olive oil, baby vegetables, chili oil, and flavored dough.[5]
California-style pizza with greens, egg, bacon, and garden vegetables
In 1985, LaDou helped two inexperienced lawyer-restaurateurs, Richard L. Rosenfeld and Larry S. Flax, start a new restaurant concept, California Pizza Kitchen (also known as "CPK"). He brought them many of Spago's recipes, which he had carefully saved.[6]
The new restaurant borrowed the concept of open kitchens centered around wood-burning pizza ovens from Spago, but instead of exotic gourmet ingredients, it used innovative but simpler comfort food toppings.[6][12] When the new restaurant's chef quit less than a month before opening, LaDou quickly designed and cooked an entire menu, inventing barbecue chicken pizza on the spot.[5] LaDou also helped develop pizza menus for Sammy's Woodfired Pizza and the Hard Rock Cafe.[5]
Prominence
Both Wolfgang Puck and California Pizza Kitchen were instrumental in turning California-style pizza from a gourmet food trend to a mass consumer food product. Based on the success of his pizzas and his status as a celebrity chef, Puck opened a series of restaurants, ranging from high-end clones of Spago to convenience chains for airports and mall food courts. California Pizza Kitchen grew to 200 outlets.
Both introduced frozen pizzas, but after an early success Puck's supermarket lines were overtaken by CPK's, which are backed by Kraft foods.[13]
The cuisine of California reflects the diverse culture of California and is influenced largely by Hispanic American roots, alongside East Asian and Oceanian influences, and Western European influences, as well as the food trends and traditions of larger American cuisine.
Alice Louise Waters is an American chef, restaurateur, and author. In 1971, she opened Chez Panisse, a restaurant in Berkeley, California, famous for its role in creating the farm-to-table movement and for pioneering California cuisine.
California cuisine is a food movement that originated in Northern California. The cuisine focuses on dishes that are driven by local and sustainable ingredients with an attention to seasonality and an emphasis on the bounty of the region.
Chez Panisse is a Berkeley, California restaurant, known as one of the originators of California cuisine, and the farm-to-table movement. The restaurant emphasizes ingredients rather than technique and has developed a supply network of direct relationships with local farmers, ranchers and dairies.
Wolfgang Johannes Puck is an Austrian-American chef and restaurateur.
California Pizza Kitchen (CPK) is an American casual dining restaurant chain that specializes in California-style pizza. The restaurant was started in 1985 by attorneys Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax in Beverly Hills, California, United States. California Pizza Kitchen introduced and popularized BBQ Chicken Pizza.
Jeremiah Tower is an American celebrity chef who, along with Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck, has been credited with pioneering the culinary style known as California cuisine. A food lover from childhood, he had no formal culinary education before beginning his career as a chef.
Zuni Café is a restaurant in San Francisco, California, named after the Zuni tribe of indigenous Pueblo peoples of Arizona and New Mexico. It occupies a triangular building on Market Street at the corner of Rose Street.
Stars was a landmark restaurant in San Francisco, California, from 1984 through 1999. Along with Spago, Michael's and Chez Panisse, it is considered one of the birthplaces of California cuisine, New American cuisine and the institution of the celebrity chef.
The Gourmet Ghetto is a colloquial name for the business district of the North Berkeley neighborhood in the city of Berkeley, California, known as the birthplace of California cuisine. Other developments that can be traced to this neighborhood include specialty coffee, the farm-to-table and local food movements, the rise to popularity in the U.S. of chocolate truffles and baguettes, the popularization of the premium restaurant designed around an open kitchen, and the California pizza made with local produce. After coalescing in the mid-1970s as a culinary destination, the neighborhood received its "Gourmet Ghetto" nickname in the late 1970s from comedian Darryl Henriques. Early, founding influences were Peet's Coffee, Chez Panisse and the Cheese Board Collective. Alice Medrich began her chain of Cocolat chocolate stores there.
The Culinary Revolution was a movement during the late 1960s and 1970s, growing out of the Free Speech Movement, when sociopolitical issues began to profoundly affect the way Americans eat. The Culinary Revolution is often credited to Alice Waters, the owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California.
Edward M. LaDou, III was an American pizza chef, who is credited with popularizing gourmet California-style pizzas. Ed LaDou was the first pizza chef at Wolfgang Puck's Spago restaurant in Los Angeles. He also developed the first menu for the American chain restaurant California Pizza Kitchen.
Mark Peel was an American chef and restaurateur in California. Campanile, a restaurant owned by Peel and his former wife Nancy Silverton, won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2001. Peel specialized in California cuisine and was a pioneer of the farm-to-table concept.
Daniel Patterson is an American chef, restaurateur, and food writer, considered a leading proponent of California cuisine.
Frank Stitt III is the owner and executive chef of Highlands Bar and Grill, Bottega Restaurant, Bottega Cafe, and Chez Fon Fon in Birmingham, Alabama. He was inducted into the James Beard Foundation's "Who's Who of Food and Beverage" in 2011. The foundation also named him the "Best Chef in the Southeast" in 2001 and he was a 2008 finalist for its national "Outstanding Chef" award. Highlands Bar and Grill was selected the winner of its "Outstanding Restaurant" award in 2018. The restaurant's pastry chef, Dolester Miles, was the winner of its "Outstanding Pastry Chef" award in 2018.
Theo Randall is an English chef who specialises in Italian cuisine. He is the proprietor of Theo Randall at the InterContinental Hotel London Park Lane, although he is perhaps best known for being awarded a Michelin star at The River Café in London.
Harvest Moon Cafe was a New American restaurant in Sonoma, California in the United States. The restaurant closed in September 2019 after thirteen years of service.
Judy Rodgers was an American chef, restaurateur, and cookery book writer. She became famous at Zuni Café, in San Francisco, California, of which she became chef in 1987. Rodgers' food was influenced both by Chez Panisse, where she had worked, and by the food of France, where she had spent time as an exchange student living with the family of Jean Troisgros. The Zuni Café Cookbook, published in 2002, spread the influence of her painstaking, attentive approach to food further outside the United States.
Barbara Ellen Lazaroff is an American interior designer and restaurateur, and the co-founder of the Wolfgang Puck brand. She has been involved with several women's business and leadership organizations.
The James Beard Foundation Awards are annual awards presented by the James Beard Foundation to recognize culinary professionals in the United States. The awards recognize chefs, restaurateurs, authors and journalists each year, and are generally scheduled around James Beard's May birthday.
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