Champagne helps mend old wounds between food icons, L.A.’s own Willy Wonka, Andrea Crawford’s Fillmore bakery, the essential restaurant workers you rarely notice, a redo of the legendary Judgment of Paris wine tasting, and can a new bar save Chili John’s? I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

Culinary détente

Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters, right, greets chef Jeremiah Tower at the Ojai Food + Wine Festival.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Depending on who you ask — and in this case I mean the two people at the heart of the question — it’s been anywhere from 13 years to 30 years since Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower have spoken to each other. The two food icons had a famous falling out, in part because the rightly earned fame of Waters as the mother of California cuisine overshadowed Tower’s significant contributions to food as we know it during his early years with Waters at Chez Panisse and later when he opened Stars in San Francisco.

But last week at the Ojai Food + Wine Festival — a gathering of culinary superstars from around the world — all was forgiven.

“Last night, Alice walked into a room and encountered Jeremiah Tower, who she was not expecting to see, and Jeremiah was not expecting to see her,” said critic and author Ruth Reichl, who was hosting an onstage talk at the festival’s Ojai Valley Inn with Waters. “It was really, for me, one of the most satisfying moments in food in [a] long time. I mean, to see these two icons, happy to see each other.”

“I think I need a glass of Champagne to talk about it,” Waters said after Reichl asked her to describe the previous night’s rapprochement.

“I walked into that space, which was so huge, and there were ice buckets all around the room filled with my favorite Champagne, just asking to be opened,” Waters said. “And it happened to be a Champagne that Jeremiah and I shared a love for. I mean, really, we had been to that Champagne place, and I don’t know what it was about it, but we just felt a huge connection …”

”… again … “ came a voice from the audience. It was Tower, who was beaming as he finished her sentence.

“Again,” Tower repeated as he confirmed that they had renewed their connection.

“How many years has it been?” Waters, looking thrilled, said to Tower from the stage. “Thirty?”

“Thirteen,” he said.

“Yeah. We really hadn’t communicated, and all of a sudden [it was as if we] were back in the kitchen [at Chez Panisse] having the best time, working together talking together. But that Champagne helped.”

“Always does,” Tower responded with a huge grin.

For those of you wondering, like me, which Champagne is loved so much by Waters and Tower, I found out later from Reichl that it’s Krug Champagne. In fact, Tower — who was at the festival to curate and cook a lunch at the festival with chefs Mary Sue Milliken, Susan Feniger, and Elizabeth Falkner — was hosting a caviar and Krug Champagne reception when he had his meeting with Waters.

“I was sitting next to Alice at dinner,” Reichl later told author Bill Buford during a live video conversation that two of them did for her Substack newsletter La Briffe, “and she was just weeping all night and talking about forgiveness and how important this was to her.”

Tower has previously said that he and Waters did see each other at least one other time since he left Chez Panisse in 1978. When he was promoting the 2017 documentary “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent,” directed Lydia Tenaglia, he told this paper’s Margy Rochlin that was at Waters’ table during the 40th anniversary celebration for the Chez Panisse. But at the time many were still trying to pit the two of them against each other, arguing over who did more to ignite what became known as California cuisine.

Reichl, who witnessed the birth of the movement first hand, credits them both: “I always felt like the combination of the two of them at Chez Panisse was like lightning in a bottle,” she told Buford. “It was two people with completely different food aesthetics coming together and doing something magical.”

Ojai to Fillmore and back

Andrea Crawford at her Roan Mills Bakery in Fillmore.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Two other culinary legends had a surprise encounter last week. Mozza founder and Ojai Valley Inn culinary ambassador Nancy Silverton was at the Ojai Food + Wine Festival in part to host a dinner with chefs Jonathan Waxman, Evan Funke and Sarah Cicolini of the great Rome restaurant Santo Palato. On Saturday, she decided to take a short break from the festival to visit Andrea Crawford at Roan Mills Bakery in Fillmore. As former Times food editor Amy Scattergood wrote in 2007, Crawford first became a part of the California cuisine movement in the early 1980s when she started growing lettuce for Chez Panisse in Waters’ Berkeley backyard. Then Wolfgang Puck talked Crawford into moving to Southern California so she could grow herbs and lettuces for Spago restaurant — which she did in the Encino backyard of Silverton’s parents (at the time, Silverton was Spago’s pastry chef). Crawford outgrew the space and eventually established the Kenter Canyon Farms brand that so many of us know from Southern California farmers markets.

In 2012, she began growing wheat and the next year started baking bread in Fillmore under the Roan Mills label. In 2017, she opened the front of the bakery to the public as a retail operation. But Silverton had never visited.

“What a beautiful space! And it’s big!” Silverton told Crawford as they discussed the price of eggs (which is why Crawford is baking less brioche these days), how she worked out more civilized baker’s hours (instead of working through the night, her workers start at 4 a.m. and 5 a.m), and whether a lemon cake recipe from Silverton’s cookbook “The Cookie That Changed My Life” could work in the cool rooster-embossed cake pan sitting on top of Crawford’s desk.

I bought some of Crawford’s gorgeous English muffins, a fantastic cherry pie, some Kenter Canyon arugula and my favorite Camino red wine vinegar made by Oakland’s Russell Moore and Allison Hopelain. (I usually mail order the vinegar, a last remnant of the couple’s great hearth-based restaurant, but I thought I’d save the postage since I was driving.)

Three shakes from Ojai’s Summit Drive-In: chocolate, left, cookies and cream, and peanut butter.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

On the way back, the scent of chicken grilling outside Fillmore’s La Plaza meat market, a favorite of Silverton’s and her partner Michael Krikorian, was too tempting not to stop. And just before we made it back to downtown Ojai, Silverton made us stop at the Summit Drive-In to try their shakes, which the menu board promised are “hand-scoop and hand-spun.” Silverton is partnering with “Somebody Feed Phil” host Phil Rosenthal on a diner in L.A.’s Larchmont Village named Max and Helen’s for Rosenthal’s parents. And even though the diner should be ready to open in early summer and the two have been tasting shakes all over the place, Silverton the perfectionist doesn’t think they quite have their shakes down. I didn’t mind the stop — I especially loved the extra chocolate sauce that swirled around the chocolate shake. If you see a similar swirl at Max and Helen’s later this summer, you’ll know where it came from.

The 1976 redo

At a tasting to determine finalists for the “1976 Redo,” judges chose finalists from nearly 400 wines. The venue was the winemaking facility shared by Pax Mahle and Patrick Cappiello in downtown Sebastopol.

(J James Joiner)

Sonoma winemaker Pax Mahle, sommelier legend Patrick Cappiello (who founded Monte Rio Cellars), and Vinohead media company founder Josh Entman had the wild idea to recreate the Judgment of Paris, the 1976 taste-off that changed the course of winemaking in California when two of the state’s wines, a 1973 Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon and a 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, beat every other French wine in the competition.

They’re calling the new competition the 1976 Redo, and in January the trio hosted the first round of the competition in which any U.S. winemaker was allowed to enter. Times contributor David Rosoff, founder of the late Bar Moruno and curator of wine programs in many L.A. restaurants, joined 10 other wine pros to choose five finalists from 144 Chardonnays, 125 Cabernet Sauvignons, 80 Syrahs and 45 Chenin Blancs in one marathon tasting. (The final tasting will happen in May.) “That’s 394 wines, to be exact,” Rosoff writes in his account of the tasting.

“The most surprising category was unquestionably Chenin Blanc,” Rosoff writes. And “the most consistently triumphant category”? Syrah.

The story reveals more about what he “learned about the state of American wine” and what the wine tasters did after they finished tasting nearly 400 bottles of wine. Hint: It involved more wine.

L.A.’s own Willy Wonka?

Seamus Blackley, a tech executive known best for inventing the Xbox game console, inspects a cacao tree grown inside the San Gabriel offices of his company Pacific Light & Hologram.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Seamus Blackley, inventor of the Xbox game console, goes deep when he is obsessed. During the pandemic, as features columnist Todd Martens writes, he didn’t just get into sourdough; he acquired centuries-old Egyptian yeast to bake bread. Now the physicist and tech entrepreneur is focused on chocolate — not from cacao harvested in tropical climates more suited to the plant, but from cacao grown right here in Southern California.

“Oh yes, we’re going to have an L.A. chocolate company,” he told Martens. “We’re going to be aiming at a different peak flavor than other people are because we have different organisms,” Blackley added, alluding to microbes in Los Angeles versus the equator-adjacent regions in which cacao is typically grown. “That’s exciting.”

Rarely noticed but essential workers

Alfonso Lira, 61, has worked for more than a decade at the Santa Ana gastropub Chapter One. As the restaurant’s utility worker he does it all, from making empanadas to busing tables.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

How often do you pay attention to the person bringing you water in a restaurant or clearing your empty plate? Many customers make a point of thanking their server when the food arrives, especially in the days since the COVID pandemic, but the person busing your table can be easily overlooked. There are many restaurant jobs that customers rarely notice but that are essential to making the business work. Food’s Cindy Carcamo profiled three restaurant workers for our Back of House series: utility worker Alfonso Lira, who clears tables, makes pizza dough and fixes the sound system, among many other duties at Santa Ana gastropub Chapter One; dishwasher Sophia Velador, who considers her work at Long Beach’s Alder & Sage therapeutic; and line cook Tomas Saldaña, who makes the difficult-to-master radish pastries at Paradise Dynasty.

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