“Eat American!” was the opening line of a 1985 Time cover story called “The Fun of American Food.” The cover image was the Renaissance-style head of a chef with an asparagus neck, romaine lettuce shoulders, a sea bream forehead, tangerine cheeks, and shrimp lips. On his head was a star-spangled chef’s hat.
Two years earlier, just after the American Institute of Wine & Food’s “American Celebration Dinner,” the San Francisco Chronicle asked some of the personalities involved for their idea of “an elegant meal.” Sautéed foie gras and fresh truffles with asparagus and Madeira sauce, said Julia Child. “Fresh rabbit cooked étouffé style,” said Paul Prudhomme. Michael McCarty, always the up-to-date showman, said first caviar, followed by pasta, then “quail grilled over mesquite coals, served with a salsa of fresh cilantro, jalapeños, and triple virgin olive oil.” Alice Waters wanted Chinese food from Cecilia Chiang’s Mandarin restaurant. Larry Forgione cited the menu he was cooking for the Brooklyn Bridge’s centennial: “Sixteen courses based on American recipes from 1880,” among them soft-shell crab glazed with beach plum jelly and “oysters and sea urchins sharing a shell.” I wanted American woodcock, black walnuts, southern white peaches, and wild strawberries, although not together.
We were all over the map. So what was American food?
That same issue of Time said it started on the West Coast and was more or less interchangeable with “Californian,” with its “dedication to lightness and freshness and its celebration of vegetables, herbs, and fruits.” A Life article of the same period agreed that California had a profound effect on the new cuisine, and named Chez Panisse as the formative influence, crediting me as “the innovator” who still dreamed of a farm-restaurant that would produce its own “butter, honey, jams, vegetables, chickens, trout and hams. Tower is already trying out tastes newer than radicchio, miniature vegetables, and fruit vinegars, and pushing the next trend: Southeast Asian flavorings like lemongrass and fermented Chinese black beans.”
The writer wondered if that mix was un-American. “Nope,” I was quoted as replying. “The cuisine of the United States, like its population, is an amalgam, taking ideas from abroad and, in pure American style, mixing them all together.”
Jonathan Waxman added, “You can fool around”—only this time he didn’t mean sex and drugs.
Whereas the necessary culinary pilgrimage in recent years had been to France for the latest three-star food of Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and the Troisgros brothers, now it was a summer trip “with equal zeal” through the United States. The Life article reads, “Sample the highly publicized creations that make up the new American cuisine.” As the restaurant becomes “the new American theater,” said Life, even the reigning Francophile Julia Child is courting young Americans. Travelers sought out Paul Prudhomme, Larry Forgione (An American Place), the Ivy in Los Angeles, Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and me at Stars in San Francisco. In Boston, America’s best woman chef, Lydia Shire, believed that “the average diner was very much aware of ‘new American cuisine.’” For her that was the creative cooking of good simple food, using American products while infusing some kinds of classical preparations, an example being her smoked Massachusetts partridge under a cloche.
Almost as important as ingredients, said Life, was the new esprit de corps. Waxman credited Forgione with giving him so much help with suppliers that his restaurant Jams should have been called “Another American Place.” A full-page Life photo shows Jonathan looking embarrassed in a pond full of ducks, Top-Siders hanging over the edge of his dinghy. How I agreed to get into jodhpurs and Hermès riding boots for my photo I don’t remember, but I do recall hauling myself and a goat to the top of a hill above Paso Robles, California, for a reluctant kiss with the goat.
Waxman’s Jams was a shock to New York, if a delightful one. The prices were electric, and the decor an eye-opener for New Yorkers who hadn’t seen Michael’s Trumps or the West Beach Cafe. How could a “serious restaurant” with a “famous chef” be so plain? None of the “frog-pond” great French restaurants had white walls. And the elegance of the Four Seasons (the only other American restaurant mentioned) was indeed very formal. The co-owner of Jams, Melvyn Master, explained: “I hate the theatrics of pseudo haute cuisine—the kind where you need a torch to see the menu.” He opted instead for bright walls with works by modern artists and a kitchen open to public view—where diners could watch Jonathan prepare his trademark dish of “free-ranging” chicken cooked over mesquite charcoal and served with french fries.
Time claimed that the new cooking was in “an intellectualized, even esoteric style, characterized by the use of fresh native ingredients.” Now I would add that, since one cook’s esotericism is another’s poison, the term California cuisine was brought to its knees by overenthusiastic combinations of ingredients known only for their newness. Kiwis were piled on top of blueberry vinegar-infused reductions that were loaded into squirt bottles lined up in front of restaurant cooks just waiting for some poor squab to come along, probably paired with foie gras, scallops, and balsamic vinegar– drowned baby lettuces.
But that was later. For now California was the media darling: it had the freshest ingredients in the land.
FROM CHEF TO RESTAURATEUR
With that Californian cornucopia, conceptualizing the food for my new restaurant was the least of my worries. Panisse was all about food, as was the Santa Fe Bar & Grill. But now I wanted to make a restaurant statement, about the greater challenge of being a restaurateur rather than just a chef. On my mind was whether Americans were ready for a new take on the brash elegance of old New York and San Francisco. I loved the callused-hand-with-a-manicure elegant roughness of Tadich and Sam’s. I loved Clark Gable in a gold-paved San Francisco with Jeanette MacDonald. I worshipped the photograph of Gable, Gary Cooper, Van Heflin, and Jimmy Stewart in white tie at Romanoff’s in Los Angeles and hung it wherever I went. As in someday it will be regained. I wanted a place where the young princes of Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers could rub elbows with bankers and dancers and musicians from the arts center a block away, where fur coats could be flung aside with the seeming carelessness of Dietrich onstage. In short, a place that was chic, with cheeky panache.
In early 1981 I had sent my Green Beret brother a letter that included the proposal for the restaurant, telling him it would be a brasserie like Flo, Lipp, or Pharamond in Paris, but modernized and adapted to San Francisco. My sister had found the location in late 1978, and I wrote that in mid-June we’d finally close with the bank and start construction. My two partners, I said, had experience and assets, and seemed “normal and honest.”
Stars would not open until July 4, 1984.
It had been a maddening six years. The promised group of ten investors had come and gone like dance partners at a dateless prom. The owner of the ghostly old Italian restaurant had panicked several times, forgotten to renew his lease twice, and died once. After our lease was signed and various lawsuits settled, my partners decided to savage each other. One of them, an accountant, had distinguished himself by delivering Balboa’s annual report on a cocktail napkin. He was soon history. I should have known to leave for New York then, to take glamorous offers from Windows on the World or Le Plaisir, or with the head of Air India to buy the Royal Palms in Scottsdale. But my sister, who had seen firsthand my experience with equal partners, advised me not to worry, that unlike Berkeley, I’d be working with grown-ups in San Francisco. Since I had never trusted grown-ups, that should have been my clue to run.
In March 1981 I led James Beard, Barbara Kafka, James Villas, Jim Nassikas of Stanford Court, Danny Kaye (fresh from an affair with Laurence Olivier), and several awestruck investors on a tour of the deserted site. I warned them to pause just inside the front door to let their eyes adjust to the interior’s deep gloom. The fixtures had been removed and the place was gutted. Only two remaining forty-watt bulbs responded to my flipping on the circuit breakers to illuminate the five thousand square feet. The hushed group tried not to notice that Jim Beard had taken a swing with his cane at a large rat. A little bit of light was worse than the darkness. Now they could see the remains of the gold-flecked black mirrors on the walls and the grimy plastic flocked-red plush wallpaper. Dominating the view was a geyser of water spewing eight feet above the kitchen floor. My friends tiptoed gingerly through the mirror shards, damp-eating fungus, and rat droppings.
“Jeremiah, it’s a disaster,” cracked Barbara Kafka.
“Really, my dear . . . ,” began Jim. Words uncharacteristically failed him. His huge gold-bedangled hand waved limply in a gesture of hopeless dismissal.
Danny Kaye gave his usual glass-shattering whistle to test the echoes.
It was all so awful that I had to fight off a fit of giggles.
Jim Nassikas saw only expense and privately withdrew any thought of investing. All I could see were pale lemon walls, mahogany wainscoting, shiny brass, huge Chinese tubs holding oversize flowers and entire wild rosebushes, and a deep, star-covered Wilton carpet, from which the restaurant would take its name.
Everyone emerged from the site quite shaken. Perhaps worse interiors had been successfully remodeled, though doubt hung heavily in the fetid air. My choice of site was thought downright suicidal. Although the restaurant was in the heart of the Civic Center, itself the political and cultural heart of San Francisco, the area was a mess. Drug dealers, criminals, and the homeless moved amid the blowing garbage. The only visitors by day came to beg or bribe for building permits. At night the visitors getting out of cars held their noses against the smell of urine as they hurried out of the Civic Center garage to the opera or symphony. But no one was as shaken as my partner Doyle Moon, because the answering machine for days recorded messages he didn’t want to hear: the site is hopeless, the facility a mess, and “that man [Doyle] downright dangerous.”
THE KIND OF STARS
I saw a different future, but with doubts. Breaking the rules at Chez Panisse and the Santa Fe had been lauded, but would the public understand our choice of site? I saw a restaurant to which you would drive up, give your car to a valet, come in for a drink or oysters, walk a block (escorted by my staff) to the performance, walk the block back two hours later with the crowds, have dinner or a snack or dessert, then pick up your car at the valet and leave. I knew people would come to see beautiful dancers or famous opera or ballet stars, so I would subsidize the young dancers and court the stars. I wanted people to feel as if they owned my restaurant, as if it had everything for them rather than something for everyone. San Francisco didn’t need another “special occasion” restaurant, it needed a great “regular.” A home away from home, a place one could casually drop into for a glass of champagne, a business lunch or dinner or meeting in the bar, or a four-hour gourmandizing meal. I had visions of a place full of lawyers and city politicians selling us all down the river at lunch, afternoons at the bar full of glad victories or unhappy defeats from the law courts next door, the cocktail hour with all the office workers in the area, the pre-theater crowd, a full house for dinner, and then after 10 P.M. the restaurant full again with the stars of the performing arts eating oysters and drinking champagne, the fans coming by to ogle the lithe young bodies of the corps de ballet. Filling the place four to five times a day was the dream. Reality was the pro forma at the bank that said three, and a “best possible” gross at $3 million a year.
Meanwhile, there was a restaurant to build.
Pushing aside the lawsuits against my partner as thick on my desk as the rats had been on the floor of the abandoned restaurant, I got to work. The sheer weight of our press (from the Newport Astor mansion, the American Institute of Wine & Food festival, and many other Santa Fe national and international events) was enough to convince the Crocker Bank to set a meeting to sign loan papers. Then our banker left Crocker, sending us into a scramble to find another who would hand over $350,000. Our ace in hand was the very favorable and valuable lease I had negotiated before I met Doyle. Then a lawsuit from one of Doyle’s partners forced a public auction of the lease, our only asset. Few showed up to bid, and those who did were scared off by the Apache Doyle in his Eddie Bauer sunglasses, which he wore throughout the session. His expression in victory was not one of joy but one of bloodlust. “If we ever have a problem,” he assured me, “I am more than willing to step aside or buy you out.” His long list of victims, he promised, would stop at me.
The problems began at once. Doyle evidently had no use for my master’s in architecture from Harvard or my successful remodeling of Chez Panisse, Santa Fe Bar & Grill, and even his own Balboa. He insisted on managing the project himself, which would have been all right if he didn’t habitually show up on the site an hour before the workmen left for the day, which made the pace of reconstruction painfully slow. My taking over some of the decisions caused one scorching battle after another.
Looking at the mess of construction every day, I would have to remind myself of the wonderful dignity of trains like the 20th Century from New York to Chicago, of what it was like to dine in those mahogany-and-nickel cars as they flashed through the countryside of the United States. I’d think of the great ocean liners; of the grand old restaurants of New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco; and of Lucius Beebe, my hero since college days, who had dropped dead in his Turkish bath a few miles south of San Francisco only a few years before I arrived. His column in Gourmet, called “Along the Boulevards,” described a life I wanted to re-create, and the terms on which I wanted to re-create it. “If anything is worth doing,” he once said, “it is worth doing in style and on your own terms—and nobody goddamned else’s.” I wanted to be as James Villas described him in a Gourmet article called “Lucius Beebe: The Last Magnifico”: the randy and dandy boulevardier, the “eminently polite, generous, witty, and kind gentleman, who was not out to impress anybody and simply relished a civilized evening on the town over ‘a hot bird and a cold bottle.’”
Eventually the spirit of this millionaire bon vivant prevailed. But the opening of the restaurant was a nightmare. The stakes were vastly higher than they had been at the Santa Fe Bar & Grill, and I was about to be hoisted on my own press petard. The staff and public actually thought I knew what I was doing, so I had to act like it.
The sound of Birkenstocks slapping across the bare boards of the old Victorian in Berkeley, or up the tarmac drive to the Santa Fe, was to be replaced by the sound of Manolo Blahniks swishing across a soft and star-filled Wilton carpet, but there was no carpet. A week before we were to open the restaurant, it wasn’t finished, not by the stretch of anyone’s imagination. So I turned the previously scheduled press lunch into a tongue-in-cheek “construction” one. We couldn’t let the workmen stop, so we made them part of the scene. Remembering Jean Cocteau’s playful tables for one of Picasso’s lunches using toys from the boulevard hawkers outside, we set a long, plywood-and-sawhorses table with nails, colorful electrical wire, hammers, and drills in the carpetless dining room. The only other decor was a massive bouquet of flowers in the one completed corner so Vogue could photograph the “finished” restaurant, in the tradition of the great Dorothy Todd, who changed fashion magazines into lifestyle when in 1924 for English Vogue she photographed my other hero’s revolutionary new London restaurant, Boulestin’s. Barbara Kafka reminded me how thin a limb she was perched on by writing that the restaurant was already a great success. She said she’d kill me if that wasn’t the case by the time her Vogue lifestyle article was published.
The press was poised to be enchanted, but their Caesar-like thumbs hovered between up and down. When I told the champagne-swilling crowd that the menu might veer from their printed ones because the gas had not been turned on, they looked around to see if I had been smart enough to invite the president of the utility company. While the cooks fired up the grill and I prayed there were no bullets in the charcoal, I told the story of the grilled dessert at the Astor mansion lunch a year before. I downed a glass of champagne and relished the adrenaline of the moment.
“Right,” I said to the cooks who had been with me at Newport. “Line me up eight sauté pans.” Hearing the cheers of the press as I juggled four pans for each hand over the fire, I wondered why I hadn’t thought to stage the whole thing. I relished the thought that events beyond my control always seemed to produce the most powerful results.
NEW-OLD FOOD IN A NEW-NEW SETTING
On opening night the public was less forgiving. And who could blame them? Bare bulbs were still hanging from the ceiling because Doyle’s chandeliers were still in Napa. He had been promising to deliver them the next day for the last six months. We had promised glamour, and here was only gloom and confusion. What customer in those first two months could be expected to know, walking in the doors for the first time, what the place was going to be?
On opening day, the hostess ran up to me just minutes before the doors opened and urgently inquired: “When the customers ask what kind of restaurant it is, what kind of food, what shall 1 tell them?”
I tried to think. “Tell them . . . American brasserie. Whatever that means.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s fine,” as if I had said “Italian bistro.”
After lunch I asked her what people had made of the “American brasserie” tag.
“Oh, no problem, they got it.”
Which was certainly more than we did at first.
But soon we did get it, and as we all pulled together as a team, we felt that Stars could be what the new American restaurant was all about, more than just a California style.
Not that I thought Stars would ever win the best food in America contest. It was too big, and I couldn’t supervise it all, all the time. What Stars did best and uniquely was measured in the breadth of the food, offering everything from lobster with veal marrow or scrambled eggs with black truffles in a buttered and baked brioche “box,” to what the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called a “superb $3.50 hot dog with sauerkraut or the $7.50 hamburger which is probably the best in town.”
Robert Finigan had wondered what we could do that we hadn’t done at the Balboa Cafe and Santa Fe. He wrote that the food “resting on its raw materials is at once harmonious with Tower’s latter-day style, familiar from Santa Fe and Balboa, and yet more exploratory and adventurous. Once you glance at the Stars menu, you will see how far the offerings range beyond ‘California cuisine’ clichés (sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese), even those which seemed so new when Tower and his colleagues developed them.” His favorite dishes: the Iced Oysters with Spicy Lamb Sausages ($6.75), which “are truly sensational in the truest sense of that overused word”; the hollowed-out Brioche with Marrow, Lobster Sauce, Poached Garlic, and Chervil ($7.50); the Blanquette of Veal with Summer Vegetables and Crayfish Sauce ($15.00); and an “exquisite” fattened Duck Liver on Grilled Bread ($12.50). He loved the huge champagne list, the long list of innovative cocktails, all the flavored frozen vodkas, and urged his readers not to miss “being present at the creation of something very special indeed.”
The kitchen was but one element in the overall experience, but its aesthetic and work ethic pervaded the overall experience. We were maniacal about the quality of green salads and how its ingredients were treated.
THROWAWAY ELEGANCE
As San Francisco’s version of Walter Winchell meets the New York Post’s “Page Six,” Herb Caen wrote in his column the morning after I introduced him to my pal Rudolf Nureyev and his “date” Natalia Makarova: “Thank God for Stars, which honors the city’s legendary reputation for kick-up-your-heels liveliness.” He found Stars “the perfect place” to wind down after a show: “Stars looks terrific,” Caen wrote, going on to describe the fifty-two-foot bar, the illustrations and posters crammed on the walls, the various eating locations, the cafe effect in the center of the room, the chandeliers and paneled walls, the wide-open kitchen, and the grand piano presided over by San Francisco’s favorite, Mike Greensill. “And then,” he continued, “there’s the energy and electricity. You feel it the minute you walk through the doors. It’s enough to light the city of Bakersfield.” A couple of years later, Herb gave me an even more sparkling quote about Stars’”unique mixture of fun, vitality, throwaway elegance, and wide, beautifully done choices.” Then he said Stars blessed San Francisco as a world-famous hangout. “That puts Jeremiah Tower right up there with Coit Tower as a beloved landmark.”
Whether you came in for Herb’s beloved hot dog or a sixty-five-dollar truffled three-pound lobster cooked in the wood oven, you arrived in Clark Gable– in– San Francisco style, up the steps from the alley into the pulsing main room filled with three hundred guests, sixty of them at the fifty-two-foot bar in the center of the space along a wall facing the oyster bar and the open kitchen with its ten cooks.
Finigan said the kitchen, bar, and patrons were the principal decor, while dishing the namesake carpet, which looked to him as if it belonged in the office of the president of Paraguay. He was right about the powerful punches that created Stars’ ambience. It was not just that we didn’t have money to spend on expensive fixtures. It was also that I didn’t believe (and I still don’t) that a restaurant should outdress its customers.
On Jim Beard’s return visit he immediately got that Stars had “caught the spirit of its time.” He loved its welcoming informality, comparing its look to a “quality that one sometimes finds in a nineteenth-century restaurant that has lived on” and its hustle-bustle to Paris brasseries like Le Vaudeville and La Coupole. Those favorites of mine had been my part of my inspiration.
Caroline Bates in Gourmet got it, too. She remembered my telling her that Joe Baum’s motto “new-old food in a new-new setting” would be Stars’ and reported that the food was provocative and satisfying. The feeling of the restaurant captured “the times so surely that someday it may be looked back on as the restaurant that best defined the tastes of the eighties.”
“THE ONLY TRULY DEMOCRATIC FAMOUS RESTAURANT”
I told the staff on opening day that the Stars motto was “Everything from black tie to blue jeans,” that it would be dining for people of all incomes, all in one place. Everything for someone, as well as something for everyone.
In Stars you could see the mayor, Dianne Feinstein, looking better now that she had let her hair turn from basic black to gray, squeezing in next to diners in jeans like the Nicaraguan left-winger Daniel Ortega. Everybody getting along just fine, the way San Francisco was meant to be. One magazine caught the crowd in amber: “Tuxedoed men and ball-gowned women from performances, students and stockbrokers and Sacramento car dealers, old money and borrowed money.” R. W. “Johnny” Apple Jr. of the New York Times called Stars the “only truly democratic famous restaurant” he had ever seen. Stars was Paul Bocuse’s favorite, “the kind of restaurant that every Frenchman envisions an American restaurant to be.” It was not surprising then, that for Jacques Pépin, Stars was “the most exciting place in San Francisco.”
Within four months Travel & Leisure recognized that “le tout San Francisco” had adopted Stars, and we were soon filling it my envisioned five times a day, doing three times the bank’s best-case scenario. Metropolitan Home used the word Superchef for the first time and gave six full pages to photographs of the food. The articles were great for morale and business, but my favorite response to Stars was written on a cocktail napkin: “Dear Jeremiah, Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!! We’ve been to Paris, England, Berkeley, Germany, Yugoslavia and Livermore etc. and this is #1. Thank You.”
Needless to say, there were dissenters, not all of them lipstick limousine liberals like the ones who told the Boston Globe that California cooking had started when Alice Waters built her pizza oven. Some distrusted the story of where the restaurant got its name, some felt uneasy with all the signed photos of stars on the walls, and some Berkeley critics just decided to build a wedge between Alice and me.
Trouble was in the air.
In the Chronicle, the Birkenstock-clad old hippie Stan Sesser, with whom I had much-publicized rows, hated everything about Stars and, of course, me—a stance later inherited by a restaurant reviewer for the same newspaper, Michael Bauer. Sesser repeated his peeve: “Tower’s weakness has always been a lack of consistency, an inability to control the kitchen so that everything comes out just right.” How unable, or not, the years would show.
At the time, however, I listened more to the averages than to Sesser. I knew that in feeding six to seven hundred people a day there might be casualties. But most of the complaints turned out to be of the “high” prices– ”small” portions variety. And then there were those who felt that a superstar chef should “always be in the kitchen.”
My “patrician” accent and stories of storms with a soon-to-be iconic Alice turned up in a few East Bay reviews. One important national review opened with me hearing an airline promo in my car on the way back from Napa and capriciously jetting off. “Seizing the moment Tower thought ‘why not’ and twenty-one hours later was lunching at Alain Senderens’ Lucas Carton in Paris and then, after shopping for supplies for the restaurant, in less than forty eight hours was back cooking in his own restaurant.” On the flight back I had read all these reviews. What I read made me want to head right back to Paris—and to decide never to read anything but constructively negative reviews again, and then only the ones about Stars itself. Wide open to the press, who were either fawning, lapdogging, or on the attack, I felt that Stars and I were getting too vulnerable for comfort.
But nothing made me feel as vulnerable as assassins at my door.