Chefs and Restaurants
25 Trailblazing American Chefs You Should Know
September 19, 2021 9:25am
History’s bandwidth can be sadly narrow when it comes to chefs.
To make sense of the past, historians simplify and consolidate, focusing on people who fit neatly into game-changing movements and trends. This makes for compelling storytelling; it also, unfortunately, erases or minimizes people who contributed but don’t reinforce a larger narrative arc. And, because restaurants are chefs’ chief platform, those who no longer own and operate them tend to fade from memory more quickly.
American chefdom is rife with talents who delighted countless eaters, schooled future chefs, or moved the culinary football forward, but aren’t household names, and in many cases, not widely known even among their professional descendants—today’s cooks.
The 25 chefs listed here are sometimes mentioned in books, articles, or documentaries, but haven’t attained the renown of, say, Wolfgang Puck or Alice Waters. In a pre-Internet age, some lived in under-the-radar places. Others cooked food so distinct that they couldn’t be grouped with their contemporaries. Still others simply weren’t self-promoters, or were anti-social, which—let’s not kid ourselves—makes a difference in who receives accolades and who doesn’t. Some became better known for other accomplishments such as books and cookbooks. And some simply died too young or have been out of the restaurant game for decades. But all deserve their due.
Making this list required tough choices; we tried to include men and women of different backgrounds, geography, and generations, and debated who demanded greater attention and who was already properly appreciated or remembered. (We also confined ourselves to the savory realm rather than settling for a too-short sampling of pastry chefs.)
Here, then, are 25 chefs who helped shape our modern culinary and industry landscape, listed to the best of our ability, in chronological order according to when they first made their defining impact.
Was This Woman the First Modern American Chef?
Edna Lewis
The bedrock of Edna Lewis’ legacy is her books, especially her landmark The Taste of Country Cooking (1976). But in 1948—long before most Americans, let alone Black or female Americans, aspired to chefdom—the Virginia native assumed command of New York City’s Café Nicholson. There, she served herbed roasted chicken and chocolate soufflé to the likes of Truman Capote, Paul Robeson, and Eleanor Roosevelt. She would later, intermittently, lead other restaurant kitchens. Almost 75 years hence, when Black female chefs are still a relative rarity, Lewis remains an inspiration. Of her journey to opening The Grey, Mashama Bailey wrote, “Through Miss Lewis I realized that there was a history of black women, like me, in professional kitchens, and that I wasn’t alone.”
Showing Americans Traditional Chinese Food
Cecilia Chiang
Anyone who enjoys kung pao chicken, tea-smoked duck, and moo shu pork owes a debt of gratitude to Cecilia Chiang. With her San Francisco restaurant the Mandarin (1962), and the Beverly Hills outpost that followed, she taught diners weaned on chop suey, chow mein, and other Americanized dishes about mainland Chinese food. She emphasized Sichuan, Shanghai, and Cantonese classics, introducing her adopted nation to now-routine offerings like hot-and-sour soup and Peking duck. Chiang influenced many fellow Bay Area luminaries, including her friends Jeremiah Tower and Alice Waters.
Bringing Nouvelle Cuisine to America
Bruce LeFavour
An aspiring novelist seduced by still-nascent nouvelle cuisine during his Army tour of duty in France in the 1950s, Bruce LeFavour opened his first restaurant, The Paragon, in Aspen, Colo., in 1965. He later ran a short-lived follow-up in Idaho and then Rose et LeFavour, in the Napa Valley, from 1981 to 1987. Years before his colleagues (The Paragon predated even Chez Panisse by half a decade), LeFavour transcended time and place by mingling the emerging California allegiance to fresh, locally grown and raised ingredients with the Gallic trend toward what we now call “signature dishes.”
Hudson Valley Hippie
John Novi
In 1970, Craig Claiborne anointed John Novi’s 1797 DePuy Canal House (1969) in High Falls, N.Y., with a four-star rating—a designation previously reserved for French restaurants. Novi’s tasting menus mingled his Italian heritage with French influences and hippie tendencies exemplified by sauces made from puréed fruits and vegetables, carrot “pasta,” and his habit of famously sprinkling popcorn over salads. Much of it sounds quaint today, but at a time when New American Cuisine was in its infancy, these were among its baby steps.
Organic Pioneer
Jesse Cool
Her Menlo Park, Calif., restaurant Flea Street Cafe has been an institution since 1982, but Cool first made her mark on American dining in 1976 with one of the first organic restaurants, Late for the Train, long before “organic” was a buzzword. Her mantra was simple: No Artificial Anything. “I didn’t care if it wasn’t perfect, as long as I knew the farmer and there were no chemicals in it,” Cool says. “That was my question: ‘How are your grapes grown?'” Cool, an educator, author, and activist, continues to innovate, launching a program to end wage disparity in her restaurant through tip sharing.
New York City’s Nouvelle Trendsetter
Leslie Revsin
Leslie Revsin initially garnered media attention as the first woman to ascend to a chef position at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City (where she ran the fish station), but her legacy extends beyond that gender milestone. When she was bluntly turned away from the great French restaurants of Manhattan for being a woman, she responded by opening Restaurant Leslie (1977), a nouvelle cuisine jewel box in Greenwich Village, where she was among the first young Americans to forge a repertoire of personal dishes in contrast to the resolutely Escoffier-bound French menus of the day. The restaurant closed after four years; Revsin shifted to writing cookbooks, appearing on television, and consulting before her death, at age 59, in 2004.
Did This Man Invent California Cuisine?
Bruce Marder
Years before Jonathan Waxman served his first roast chicken, Bruce Marder was forging a prototype of what came to be known as California Cuisine—French- and Italian-inflected dishes, a nod to Mexico (duck tacos!), and the best fries in town—at L.A.-area restaurants including Cafe California and West Beach Café. Ruth Reichl said of him, “Nobody was serving [California Cuisine] before him. Nobody.” Today, his Capo in Venice is one of the most exclusive and high-priced restaurants in town, but Marder, who’s never courted publicity, remains happily outside of the limelight.
The Man Who Brought the Chef-Farmer Connection to America
Larry Forgione
It would be enough if Larry Forgione had “just” celebrated and elevated regional American classics. His food at The River Café and An American Place (1983), some of it conceived in gab sessions with James Beard, was seminal for its mingling of homegrown traditions with the French techniques Forgione honed at the CIA, London’s Connaught Hotel, and while working for Michel Guérard. But Forgione was also among the first American chefs to establish a sourcing network for quality ingredients, in a pre-FedEx world, when it required endless phone calls and special deliveries.
Louisiana’s Culinary Champion
Paul Prudhomme
The youngest of 13 children born into a sharecropping family in Opelousas, La., Paul Prudhomme made his name creating signature takes on Cajun dishes such as his blackened redfish, whose popularity literally threatened the Gulf of Mexico’s redfish population. After becoming chef of Commander’s Palace and then of his own K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen (1979), he took his show on the road, producing some of the first prototypes of what we’d now call “pop-ups” in San Francisco and New York City. His Magic Seasoning Blends line of spices was among the first chef-inspired supermarket products.
Vegetarian Visionary
Deborah Madison
Deborah Madison may be remembered more for her books than her restaurants. But her cooking style originated at Greens, the restaurant of the San Francisco Zen Center; she ran the kitchen when it opened in 1979. Madison sidestepped drab, no-frills vegetarian cooking in favor of more stylized compositions. She introduced her guests to fingerling potatoes, arugula, and several varieties of cucumbers and beets, many of which were grown for her from seeds she brought back from her travels. Her ethos is reflected in her landmark book, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.
Eclectic Before It Was Cool
Michael Roberts
In 1980, Michael Roberts became known for his cooking at Trumps, a sleek restaurant in a former gas station in West Hollywood. There, he produced dishes that were radical for the time: guacamole of frozen peas, fried plantains topped with American caviar and sour cream, a quesadilla filled with Brie and grapes. There was also high tea (a magnet for stars like Eddie Murphy) and a late-night menu. Wolfgang Puck called Spago and Trumps “the quintessential L.A. restaurants.” Roberts died in 2005 at age 55, from complications from Kugelberg-Welander syndrome, the progressive neuromuscular disorder that forced him out of the kitchen.
Architect of the American Brasserie
Patrick Clark
As the chef at New York City’s The Odeon, Patrick Clark’s menu set the tone for American brasseries, mingling French staples with burgers and other American stalwarts. He also mentored and made a point of hiring Black cooks. Culinary educator Scott Alves Barton, who cooked under Clark, notes that his food incorporated nods to the African diaspora, such as the curry and ginger seasoning on Clark’s signature lamb loin. “He could be French and show that he came from a place that had [a different] spice profile, another cultural orientation…he always had something that [pointed] you there,” says Barton. (Take a look at our Digestif page to read what Patrick's son Preston learned from his dad.)
Japan by Way of France
Susumu Fukui
Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois on Main is the best-known of the restaurants that combined Japanese or Chinese flavors with French techniques in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. But the most ambitious of this movement was La Petite Chaya (“The Little Teahouse”), where Japanese-born Susumu Fukui served nine or 10 courses of then-arresting juxtapositions such as raw fish, puff pastry, and mustard vinaigrette and a lamb salad with pine nuts, sesame oil, and sautéed asparagus. Fukui’s business card read “La Nouvelle Cuisine Franco-Japanaise,” which makes the word “fusion” seem not so bad after all.
Embracing His Personal Roots
John Sedlar
As a Hail Mary to save his failing Manhattan Beach, Calif., restaurant Saint Estèphe (1981), John Sedlar switched up the menu, working influences from his childhood in Santa Fe into his nouvelle cuisine-inspired menu. It worked, and Saint Estèphe became both a success and an early prototype for restaurants as explorations of a chef’s personal heritage. Sedlar went on to open other restaurants, including, years later, the wildly ambitious and well-received (though sadly short-lived) Rivera.
Imbuing Chinese Food with California Spirit
Barbara Tropp
Usually, cookbooks follow restaurant success, but Barbara Tropp’s restaurant was made possible by her writing. While working toward a graduate degree in Chinese studies at Princeton, Tropp lived in Taiwan and became obsessed with the food. She authored The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking (1982), which in turn formed the basis of China Moon, her “Chinese bistro” (her term) in San Francisco. There, she cooked food she characterized as California in substance but Chinese in spirit. Like Joyce Goldstein, she was a founding member of Women Chefs and Restaurateurs.
Queen of Napa Valley
Cindy Pawlcyn
A native of Minneapolis, Cindy Pawlcyn studied at Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne and worked in Chicago’s Pump Room before moving to Northern California and eventually opening her iconic Mustards Grill in 1983. The restaurant brought sophistication to elemental dishes in a come-as-you-are setting that Pawlcyn described as “a cross between a roadside rib joint and a French country restaurant.” Early classics included their burger, smoked duck, ribs, and a pork chop. Pawlcyn went on to work on Fog City Diner and open more Napa Valley classics including Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen.
Messenger of the Mediterranean
Joyce Goldstein
A former chef of the Café at Chez Panisse, Joyce Goldstein struck out on her own in 1984 with the influential San Francisco restaurant Square One, where she served a changing menu of Mediterranean cuisine that raised the bar with homemade breads, simple yet exquisite pastas, and grilled fish and meats adorned with traditional condiments, among other faithfully rendered staples. In addition to her restaurants, Goldstein has written about 30 cookbooks, as well as Inside the California Food Revolution. She founded the California Street Cooking School and was a cofounder of Women Chefs and Restaurateurs.
Rustic Revolutionary
Judy Rodgers
Judy Rodgers didn’t open Zuni Café, but she defined it when she took over the kitchen in 1987, and her legacy haunts it—in the best way—since her death in 2013 at age 57. Rodgers lived with France’s legendary Troisgros family as an exchange student and later worked at Chez Panisse. She snuck perfectionism and thoughtful technique into simple-appearing food, evidenced by her iconic roast chicken with bread salad and the recipes in her brilliant cookbook. Alums of Rodgers’ kitchen have made their mark on San Francisco dining, from Foreign Cinema’s Gayle Pirie and John Clark to Mister Jiu’s Brandon Jew.
Southwestern Savant
Mark Miller
A one-time Chez Panisse chef who became fascinated by the culture and cuisine of the American Southwest, Mark Miller helped drive the Southwestern food craze years before Bobby Flay took up the cause. After successfully launching Fourth Street Grill and Santa Fe Bar and Grill in Berkeley, Calif., Miller relocated to Santa Fe and opened his landmark Coyote Café (1987), following it with the similarly successful Red Sage (1991) in Washington, D.C. A prolific author, he also created those classic chile posters displayed by a generation of home cooks in their kitchens.
The Chef Who Let His Cooking Do the Talking
Mark Peel
Mark Peel’s accomplishments equal those of any chef of his generation, even if others are more famous. He was on Wolfgang Puck’s line at Ma Maison (1975) and the opening team at Michael’s Santa Monica (1979). After a stint in pastry at Chez Panisse, he became Puck’s opening kitchen lieutenant at Spago (1982). In 1989, he (and then-wife Nancy Silverton) opened the groundbreaking La Brea Bakery, and then Campanile, a restaurant that epitomized what the late critic Jonathan Gold dubbed an “urban rustic aesthetic,” with a grill at its heart and a connection to Chino Farms in Rancho Santa Fe.
Americanizing the White House Kitchen
Walter Scheib
In the early 1990s—well into the era of New American Cuisine—the White House lagged behind the times, continuing its tradition of serving French food to guests at receptions and dinners. That changed when First Lady Hillary Clinton lured Walter Scheib from The Greenbrier to become White House chef and asked him to update the food program. Under Scheib’s stewardship, the White House kitchen embraced the ethos of American restaurants—seasonal and local sourcing, healthier preparations, and bold, homegrown flavors—imbuing plates with an unabashedly American spirit.
The Wizard Within
Rocco DiSpirito
People who know Rocco DiSpirito from cookbooks and reality television might not realize that he dazzled critics and diners as chef of New York City’s Union Pacific (1997). His how-did-he-think-of-that? combinations were epitomized by a signature dish of just four ingredients: bay scallops, tomato water, mustard oil, and uni. Ruth Reichl, while editing Gourmet, was so impressed she made him the first chef to grace the magazine’s cover. DiSpirito attempted a return to his ambitious restaurant roots at The Standard Grill in New York City in 2018; it was short-lived but showed that DiSpirito can still be brilliant.
Nuevo Latino Leader
Douglas Rodriguez
In 1999, Newsweek selected Douglas Rodriguez, hailed as the driving force behind Nuevo Latino cooking, as one of the people who would influence the coming millennium. The son of Cuban immigrants, Rodriguez garnered attention at his Miami restaurant Yuca (1989), then leapt into the stratosphere with Patria (1994) in New York City. He went on to open more restaurants and partnered with Stephen Starr at Philadelphia's Alma de Cuba (2001). Rodriguez’s food blended influences from Latin America and whetted appetites for menus proffering both classic and interpretive versions of Peruvian, Mexican, and other cuisines.
Training Future Generations
Joe Randall
A former Air Force flight line cook known to many as “The Dean of Southern Cuisine,” Joe Randall has been executive chef of a dozen restaurants, including Cloister in Buffalo, N.Y. All truly great chefs are to some extent also great teachers, but Randall has made educating and advising an explicit part of his career—he has served on the faculty of four schools and taught for 16 years at the Savannah-based Joe Randall’s Cooking School. Working with Toni Tipton-Martin, he coauthored A Taste of Heritage: The New African-American Cuisine, which shared his recipes and stories, as well as those of other Black chefs.
Giving Indian Cuisine in America its Due
Floyd Cardoz
Trained in the fine-dining crucible of Gray Kunz’s Lespinasse, Indian-born Floyd Cardoz (whom we lost to COVID in March 2020) came to prominence at Tabla (1998), a Danny Meyer-owned restaurant where he put forth a French-Indian menu that demonstrated that Indian food was worthy of more than its curry house reputation in America. Cooks who worked for him, like The Hill’s Ben Pollinger and Loring Place’s Dan Kluger, called Tabla’s “spice room,” where cumin, coriander, cardamom, and other aromatics were lovingly kept and ground, revelatory.
These chefs shared similar sensibilities and were integral to regional culinary trends that influenced chefs across the country.
The French Invasion
Three French toques did much to stimulate the appetite for fine dining here, and to inspire (and sometimes hire and train) a growing population of young American cooks in the 1970s and 1980s: Jean Banchet in Wheeling, Ill.; Jean Bertranou in Los Angeles; and Jean-Louis Palladin in Washington, D.C.
Trumpeting Texas
Dean Fearing (Mansion on Turtle Creek), Stephen Pyles (Routh Street Cafe), and Robert Del Grande (Cafe Annie) all came of culinary age in the 1980s in Texas, forging individual styles rooted in their state's culinary traditions. Anne Lindsay Greer, herself a chef, saw opportunity in the burgeoning movement and organized group-cooking events and guest-chef series to foster camaraderie and garner media attention.
The NYC Couples
These five couples—Francophiles and career-switchers all—opened nouvelle-inspired restaurants in New York City in 1979, cooking some of the most game-changing food of the time: Len Allison and Karen Hubert (Huberts), David and Susan Liederman (Manhattan Market), Karen and Robert Pritsker (Dodin-Bouffant), David and Karen Waltuck (Chanterelle), Barry and Susan Wine (The Quilted Giraffe).
Who would you have included? Leave a comment or email us at hungry@plateonline.com to let us know.
Want to hear more from our trailblazing chefs? Watch a recording of Chandra Ram's discussion with author Andrew Friedman, chef Cindy Pawlcyn and chef Larry Forgione here.
Andrew Friedman is the author of Chefs, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits, and Wanderers Created a New American Profession (Ecco, 2018), and the producer and host of the independent podcast Andrew Talks to Chefs.
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