L'Ermitage eulogized as spark of L.A.'s epicurean awakening

Nation's Restaurant News, August 26, 1991 by Richard Martin

You can't always measure a restaurant's intrinsic value or historical significance in terms of sales, profits or growth potential.

L'Ermitage -- which dazzled well-heeled gastronomes in Los Angeles for 16 years until the restaurant's unexpected closure last month -- will be remembered for the way in which it inspired a generation of young chefs to elevate their city to "world-class" dining status.

The restaurant's founder, chef Jean Bertranou, who died in 1980, awakened Los Angeles to French culinary traditions and showed chefs here and elsewhere how to tap the West's agricultural bounty.

If Bertranou found the locally available green beans to be gracelessly fat and tasteless, he would commission local farmers to cultivate pencil-thin haricots verts from seeds he smuggled into the country from France.

Because the Los Angeles restaurant market of the late '70s was still too immature to command regular, large-scale shipments of special food stuffs, Bertranou scoured the city to find crawfish in Watts and fresh squab in Chinatown. He battled airport customs officials until they allowed him to import directly such items as turbot and Channel sole, or 200 pounds of New Zealand black currants to make cassis sorbet.

When the chef couldn't find a local source of fresh foie gras or properly meaty duck breasts for his signature aiguillettes canard au St. Emilion, he and a would-be restaurateur, the young Michael McCarty, jointly convinced local poultry men to crossbred the Perkin and Muscovey species to hatch the accommodating Mularde variety.

L'Ermitage shared its culinary advantages, to the extent that its haricots verts and house-smoked salmon would show up on the menu of such places as McCarty's Michael's in Santa Monica and Jean Banchet's famed Le Francais near Chicago.

As a result of Bertranou's vision and demanding nature, L'Ermitage was the place to dine in L.A. in 1980 and would steadfastly remain among the city's foremost dining attractions -- until last month. The restaurant's passing came as something of a jolt to the local restaurant community.

"It's the end of an era, although Michel and Dora did a superb job of maintaining the L'Ermitage tradition until the very end," said McCarty, referring to Michael Blanchet, who was L'Ermitage's chef de cuisine for all of its 16 years, and Dora Fourcade, who bought the restaurant from Bertranou's family in 1986.

"Jean was an inspiration for all the finer qualities a restaurant should have," McCarty said. "He showed that you could be a chef and a restaurateur at the same time and he laid much of the groundwork for modern American cooking."

Bertranou also cultivated a sizeable crop of culinary talent. In addition to inspiring McCarty's launch of "California cuisine" at Michael's back in 1979, L'Ermitage was an enduring showcase for Blanchet's artistry and a springboard for several chef-prodigies who toiled in its kitchen: They included Roy Yamaguchi, now of Roy's of Hawaii, Honolulu; and the Los Angeles chefs John Sedlar, of St. Estephe and Bikini, and Kazuto Matsusaka, of Chinois on Main.

Those chefs subsequently pioneered such cooking genres as nouvelle Southwestern (Sedlar), Euro-Asian fusion (Matsusaka), and Pacific Rim (Yamaguchi). As Chinois' owner, Wolfgang Puck, put it in a Los Angeles Times obituary on L'Ermitage, Bertranou "is the one who showed us what could be done. It was the opening of L'Ermitage that showed that something more was possible in L.A."

Indeed, the possibilities for the city's restaurants seemed boundless during the last decade, until trend-conscious gourmets began seeking out less formal and lower-priced dining experiences.

"The times have changed, and they've changed for me, too," said Dora Fourcade, whose child-rearing priorities finally convinced her to put L'Ermitage up for sale and to abandon plans to remake it into a more casual concept. "Raising lonely kids is not a solution for a better world," explained the restaurateur, whose second child was born earlier this year.

Fourcade is negotiating with prospective buyers and mulling the fate of L'Ermitage's $250,000 wine inventory.

"There are so many memories," she said, voicing a sentiment widely shared by those who witnessed the L'Ermitage era.