Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.
Updated May 1
When Berkeley writer L. John Harris’ “The Book of Garlic” became a success some 50 years ago, his mother’s response was so textbook Jewish that it could have been a punchline: “Honey, I’m so proud of you. But what about that novel you said you were going to write?”
Harris relayed this story at an April 10 talk at the Berkeley City Club’s “Food for Thought” program to celebrate the book’s 50th anniversary. The accompanying meal featured dishes heavy on the garlic.
The evening was full of reminiscences as Harris, 78, described what it was like to be part of the food revolution that started in Berkeley in the early 1970s.
“The Book of Garlic” kick-started what became not only a lifelong obsession for Harris, but also a garlic movement with Harris as its head. It earned him the moniker “Mr. Garlic,” with alternative nicknames “The Garlic Guru” or simply “Garlic Guy.”
Harris said that before his seminal book, most Americans used only dried garlic. His book coincided with the dawn of an era of growing American sophistication about food, when French and Italian uses of fresh garlic were making their way to U.S. shores.
The book, which came out in 1974, was translated into multiple languages and spawned a Harris-produced newsletter called “The Garlic Times,” which was geared toward an international fan club called Lovers of the Stinking Rose. Harris convinced his friend Alice Waters that her newly opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley should celebrate Bastille Day as the Bastille Day Garlic Festival. The event still happens today.
He helped launch the Gilroy Garlic Festival, where he wore a ceremonial head-of-garlic turban, complete with large fabric “cloves” that unsnapped, as well as a brim that held actual cloves. And in the most fantastical story of the Mr. Garlic era, he once debated the chemist behind Signal mouthwash on television, discussing company claims that the mouthwash would fight “even onion and garlic breath … the worst bad breath in America.”
Harris’ colorful, multifaceted life isn’t easy to sum up. He lived for a time in an art commune in Berkeley, where the founder and several residents were also Jewish. He’s an artist and student of the classical guitar. Over the years, he amassed a collection of classic and flamenco guitars that he donated to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He had his own cookbook company, Aris Books, and wrote and illustrated a string of memoirs. In addition to his micro-tenure at Chez Panisse, where he was a waiter for all of a week, he was employee No. 3 at the Cheeseboard Collective. He is now at work on a book on the history of Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto.
In a phone interview, Harris told me that although he first came to the Bay Area from his native Los Angeles to attend Cal, he had family roots in San Francisco when his grandfather Sol Harris (previously Hrekowitch) arrived from Poland via France in 1900. He established the S. Harris Co. textile business, which became a success. In the 1930s, the family and the company moved to Los Angeles.
L. John Harris recalled his father’s love for food of all kinds.
“He would come back from Europe with stories about food he had eaten there,” he said. “He was always trying to be on diets to be thinner, and the same thing with my older brother. It was a love/hate battle to curb our enthusiasm for food, and that’s because my grandmother and mother were wonderful cooks.”
In the 1990s, Harris was at a crossroads, when the idea of writing a book on Jewish delis piqued his interest.
“I decided I would reconnect with that part of my life,” he told me, describing how he grew up eating at L.A.’s famous Jewish delis and how he and his friends in the Berkeley commune went out in search of “Jewish soul food” in the Bay Area. From memory, he easily recounted all the precursors of Berkeley’s Saul’s Deli — the Pantry Shelf Delicatessen, Rosenthal’s, etc.
The deli book was started but never published. Harris pivoted, partnering up with filmmaker Bill Chayes to co-produce the documentary “Divine Food: 100 Years in the Kosher Delicatessen Trade” about a Cincinnati family.
He never did write that novel his mother was hoping for, but last year his “Portrait in Red: A Paris Obsession” was published. In his talk, Harris said the book “is as close as I’m gonna get to a novel.”
In 2015, he was in Paris — a city he loves — to research and write a magazine piece about the history of the Croque Monsieur, a fancified ham-and-cheese sandwich.
While there, he found a mysterious painting of a girl with a red head-covering on the street, dated 1935. He became obsessed with the girl and the provenance of the painting. He had recently seen the movie “Woman in Gold” about the Gustav Klimt painting and wondered about this girl’s existence in Nazi-occupied France.
“This is the most personal book I’ve written,” Harris said. “The territory I have traversed in my life led to this most personal and Jewish work.”