A Food Documentary That Would Kill on Delta
Michael McCarty’s story is The Kid Stays in the Picture for chefs.
I want to make a documentary. Did I attend film school? Make actual films? Watch a lot of documentaries? No, no, and YES. I never really took journalism classes in college in the late ’90s, but I read a lot of Talk and Caroline Miller’s New York magazine while working long hours at my college newspaper, a daily where we literally pasted up our QuarkXPress pages using a machine that burped out hot wax. We’d place the boards holding those pasted pages into large portfolio cases, and somebody on staff would drive the boards over to the printing plant. I believe the PDF was invented sometime during my four years at the Badger Herald, because one day the van had been sold and the pages could be emailed. Crazy.
The point is this: I was an English major, I liked magazines a lot, and I eventually worked at a couple of them. So, yes, I can make a documentary, and I have a really good one outlined that would absolutely slay on Delta Air Lines. (This is always my mental test for an idea.) I have so many food documentary ideas. I have a Notes file on my phone dedicated to them. Will it work on Delta? Delta is where documentaries go to live. People aren’t watching Mickey 17; they are watching The September Issue for the fifth time. It’s Navalny, The King of Kong, and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, not Ray or Richard Jewell. But this one would especially kill, and I’ve been percolating on the idea for a minute.
Michael McCarty is the father of California cuisine. That’s a fact. And while Alice Waters is unquestionably its godhead, what Michael did in Los Angeles when he opened Michael’s in Santa Monica in 1979 at age 25 was revolutionary in its own way. He bridged the farm-to-table ethos of France (where he studied, worked, and trained beginning in high school) and the farms of California. Like Alice at Chez Panisse, he began acknowledging farmers on his menus, offering arugula from the San Fernando Valley and goat cheese from Sonoma.
On the wine side, he didn’t just champion French imports from little-known (in America) regions like the Rhône Valley while everybody was hooked on Burgundy and Champagne; he cultivated an appreciation for little-known Napa, just up the coast from his restaurant. Along the way, as the chef of Michael’s, he mentored bold-faced talents like Jonathan Waxman, Mark Peel, and Nancy Silverton, who all started their careers at Michael’s.
This is all rich and textured and important food history, but this is only the beginning of the story of Michael McCarty. While revolutionizing California foodways, Michael’s in Santa Monica became the canteen for Young Hollywood, a group of stars who eschewed living in Beverly Hills in favor of Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, and Santa Monica. They needed a place to break bread, and Michael’s was the spot (and the bread used locally milled flour). Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, David Geffen, Barry Diller, and Michael Eisner were all in their early 30s or younger and dining at Michael’s on a weekly basis. “They claimed it as ‘our place,’” McCarty told me earlier this year on the most recent of two memorable This Is TASTE episodes. All this with old-guard Hollywood checking it out too. “Jennifer Jones would dine every Friday night, often with Audrey Hepburn,” he said. Throw in Joan Didion (“She’d lunch there three times a week”), the entire Dunne clan, Francis Ford Coppola with a standing reservation, and you have some great stories from the garden.
The story moves to New York City in 1989, where, after a decade of searching for the perfect location, McCarty finds the exact right place. There’s a great backstory of him negotiating with the mob to take over a dusty Italian joint, which would open as Michael’s on West 55th Street. While the Hollywood clientele remained loyal while he traveled east, Michael’s—located just steps from book publishing, magazine, and broadcast offices, and the talent and ad agencies that made them all hum along—became the place for the 1990s media power lunch. Tina Brown, Graydon Carter, Anna Wintour, and Dan Rather all had Michael’s in their rotation—along with the Four Seasons and Elaine’s. That garden on West 55th also has some great stories to tell.
A film about the life of Michael McCarty can be The Kid Stays in the Picture for food. Like Robert Evans, McCarty is a gifted storyteller with a gravelly, patrician voice that sucks you in and sells the narrative. But unlike The Kid Stays, this film would bring in the voices of his celebrity clientele and the journalists who covered the era—with Ruth Reichl’s foundational 1979 article for New West playing a role, along with other prominent chefs of the time. Participation from some of the celebrities mentioned would build this universe and give it all weight.
I know Michael a bit, and I think he would be down to collaborate on something—he has told me so and started filming here and there on his own. I know he has all the receipts. (Literally, the guy has paper receipts from the late ’80s.) And art. His art collection—that’s its own story altogether.
Writers and editors actually do end up making documentaries sometimes. There’s Graydon, of course, who was involved in dozens, including The Kid Stays in the Picture. I look at the work of Nick Bilton, whose hard pivot to the documentary medium has gotten him into the scripted game, and he’s now working with Martin Scorsese. But not too many in food media come to mind, except for Kevin Pang’s excellent (and frankly kind of disturbing) For Grace.
I’m putting this out there because I simply know Michael would kill on Delta—especially with his many, many friends watching in Delta One.
New Gary Shteyngart Is a Holiday
Vera, or Faith, out this week, is Gary Shteyngart seventh book, and it’s on my nightstand (downloaded in my glorious Penguin Random House employee app). I’ve been hooked on the Shteyngart sensibility since 2002’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, and I enjoyed his upstate, pandemic-era play within a book, Our Country Friends, a great deal. I’ve intentionally read nothing in advance about his new one, but I know there is a kid somewhere in there. He writes children and younger people so well. The comma in the title makes me uncomfortable. That’s probably a good thing.
I caught up with Gary in January 2022 for an episode of This Is TASTE. It’s a banger, and we talked about some of his truly memorable food writing, as well as his fiction writing diet (the food he eats when in the lab).
Make that doc Matt! I’d love to see it.
What a cool venture., Matt.