It is hard to overstate Campanile’s contributions to American cooking. It wasn’t the first fine restaurant in the country to operate with a grill at its heart, but it codified the style, as well as the practice of reinterpreting simple dishes — steak and beans, Greek salad, fish soup — with first-rate ingredients and chefly virtuosity.The whiff of wood smoke, the drizzle of slightly over-reduced stock and the smack of strong herbs are instantly identifiable as Peel’s signature. The very first menu included things like mozzarella made to order and lamb carpaccio with artichokes that still seem new 23 years later. Some of the restaurant’s dishes, including Niçoise salad with grilled tuna, lamb briefly smoked over smoldering rosemary branches, crisped penne, and sautéed fish laid over saucy puréed potatoes, caught on all over the world.
In Campanile’s first years, every table was served an exquisitely seasonal plate of grilled vegetables that Peel himself drove up from Chino Farm in Rancho Santa Fe several times a week, which was the most direct farm-to-table connection in any American restaurant to that point and has still never quite been surpassed. Peel helped set up chicken and lamb operations in Sonoma County.
Campanile is where the grilled-cheese phenomenon started, weekly family dinners on off-nights and arguably the idea of pop-up restaurants-within-restaurants that has been so dominant in the last several years.
Silverton famously baked the bread herself, so well that the bakery, which grew from a few hundred square feet below the pastry kitchen to massive operations in Los Angeles and on the East Coast, eventually dwarfed the restaurant. Her rustically complex, generously salted pastries set the benchmark in America for decades — rustic pies, luxurious panna cotta, and huckleberry shortcake barely existed in fancy kitchens before she put them there.
The two chefs broke up several years ago, and when Silverton moved over to Mozza, the national spotlight followed her. Campanile for the first time in its existence became an old reliable, the kind of place where you knew you could probably pop in on a Saturday night without much notice; a restaurant where you could take an East Coast colleague for dinner when Cut seemed too over-the-top.
The urban rustic aesthetic had succeeded to the point that it essentially had become the lingua franca of California restaurants — not old-fashioned, exactly, but not different either.
But Peel is still the most exacting grill chef in the country, a master who plays his smoldering logs the way that Pinchas Zukerman does a Stradivarius. And every time I returned to the restaurant, usually following some downhill report or another, I was blown away once again by the details of execution — the exact temperature of every ingredient in the fish soup; the careful grilling of the rib-eye; the chewy-crisp texture of the sautéed pasta. Campanile, to its last day, remains one of the city’s best, and I can hardly wait to see what Peel is planning to do next.
Jonathan Gold, 2012
