At any other time I would have turned down anything as patently self-serving as an organization like Chefs in America. But they had managed somehow to get Carnegie Hall, an Oscar look-alike statuette, and Lee Iacocca to present it. No one outside the community of chefs would know that it meant nothing, and it was good for at least temporary emperor’s clothes, hiding the fact that the year looked like it would be very naked indeed. Full dressing occurred, however, when a few months later I received my real Oscar, this time for the Outstanding Chef in America from the James Beard Foundation. It was a very much bigger deal, and invitations to donate money and services flowed in, as did customers.
We did the usual benefits and dinners to much acclaim (cystic fibrosis in Florida, International Association of Culinary Professionals for Julia Child, at Stars for Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Martha Stewart). But the Citymeals-on-Wheels at Rockefeller Center that summer was a grim wake-up call. I didn’t want to spend the usual ten thousand dollars on the trip, so decided to do a new brand of tomato stand and have the Florida growers pay for it. The tomatoes showed up an hour before the event, unripe and ordinary, and, for the first time ever, the event was rained out. If I had trouble grasping large-scale disasters, I certainly knew a small one when I was standing in the middle of it. When I suggested to the new team members that we cut our losses and split, they were confused. The old team would have had us packed up and out of there before even I realized we should go. Standing there in a location that was not our usual the center of the rink, and with bad supermarket tomatoes, I just wasn’t interested in summoning up the old bravado. It was a mess, so call it a mess, and get out. The new staff expected miracles from me, and I was running out of them.
Right after the tomatoes and Mark Franz’s dinner for Jacques Pépin, I answered the phone on one of the nights I was working as maître d’ at Stars. It was the Pacific Grove, California, police. My brother had been killed moments before. This several times wounded Green Beret, Special Forces, and 101st Airborne soldier with three tours in Vietnam at the height of the war was killed getting on his ten-speed bike on the grass verge of a park in the center of town. He was on his way to celebrate his birthday with his family when some kid ran him over.
I walked over to the bar, had a glass of champagne, and considered my options. I picked up the phone and found the people I wanted to talk to at their offices in Tokyo.
“Right,” I said to Sapporo and Sony in separate calls, “if you are still interested in Stars, let’s talk.”
The next morning, feeling the false resolve of unrealistic decisions, I made the list of potential buyers. Japan was at the top, then my friend in Thailand (even with rumors of a palace coup confirmed when I called and the queen, in hiding, was sitting next to him), followed by Golden Harvest Films in Hong Kong and the developers in Palo Alto.
I was ready to sell.
The first Stars franchise with its promise of big returns was in Palo Alto.
But things started to get strange right away in Palo Alto after the meeting, when I told the head of the investor group that he, with no experience in opening a restaurant, should not be project manager. Perhaps his having different sets of architectural working drawings and not being able to coordinate them was an indication that I was right. That’s when he told us about his perfect record in decision making. Having just finished with Doyle Moon, I felt I was perhaps yet again in the company of another sociopath and should have walked out of the room. But we needed the money to support the Civic Center Stars.
The project took on an unreal glow.
Stars Palo Alto finally opened in 1995, to a San Francisco Chronicle rating of three stars out of four. But when the inevitable cost overruns from Baer’s disorganization became known, Jim put all the blame on us. The investors, just as inevitably, took his word. Trying to get a grip on the difference between the project’s fact and its fiction, I took an afternoon off with perfect margaritas at Zuni restaurant and waited for a call from Jim to tell me not to come back. Or to make one myself. Over the third cocktail I wondered what it was about me and the kinds of people with whom I was involved.
First there were the Jesuits in Australia, then the sexual predators of English schools, though I’d more or less outrun them all. So far so good. My great friend and lover in freshman year at the apartment on Boston’s Beacon Hill turned out to be purely psychotic. Alice could be actually quite adorable, but hostile when threatened. My original Stars partner, Doyle Moon, was rough-diamond charming and a lot of fun for a few lines of coke and some wonderful drinks, but dangerous when someone threatened to come between him and what he wanted. I found his killer instinct a bit fascinating (as long as I was not on the list of his victims), and I envied his single-minded strength in destroying his friends, once his fondness, loyalty, and often endless tolerance for them were replaced with paranoia and greed.
I found nothing to admire in Jim Baer.
When the entire franchise fee from Palo Alto went to floating Stars, I answered with interest a potentially lucrative call for a consultation from the owners of the Hotel Vancouver. They wanted to redo its dining room. After my first visit, I was hooked. Not only did I like the regional general manager and his wife, the migrating whales, and the otters on Vancouver Island competing with bald eagles for salmon; I fell in love with the region and its ingredients. When I attended a festival of British Columbia foods and for the first time tasted cloudberries and the wines from the Okanagan Valley, I knew the region was in the same phase California had been when I started at Chez Panisse. I loved the enthusiasm of the chefs and the farmers who were supplying them, and the very unjaded way in which they appreciated what they were trying to do.
A new development opportunity became available in Seattle in 1997, in a building that was to finish off the revival of the new downtown. I jumped at the chance. Since 1981 I had been telling the press that Florida and the Northwest were the only two culinary regions of America that were left to develop and received only raised eyebrows in response. But by the mid-nineties it was obvious to all what we had known in California for years—that the best berries, mushrooms, pinot noir, and fish were now from Alaska and the Northwest, not California. And no psychos.
Following my culinary nose, I decided to open a Stars five blocks up from Seattle’s waterfront market—a Stars that would help make America’s newest regional food. I told the architects I wanted the same kind of huge bar overlooking the dining room as in Stars San Francisco, but that we’d hide most of the kitchen with a big oyster and seafood bar for casual and single diners. It would be a celebration of local seafood, a visual statement of where we were and what kind of food we would be emphasizing. I wanted a big fireplace separating the bar and the dining room to give the feel of a Northwest lodge. I knew that anyone coming up the escalators out of the Seattle rain and seeing a hearth with a roaring fire would not be able to resist coming in.
But that was two years before the opening, and before an old friend in Hong Kong’s film business called and said we should meet. He was developing a team to open entertainment restaurants in Asia and then in the United States. They wanted a Stars franchise and to pay for it. Always one to travel at the drop of a hat, I flew to Singapore to meet his group, where I would be dealing with three very civilized and ethical principals: the owner of Golden Harvest Films, the chairman of the board of the city’s biggest investment house, and the minister of tourism, who, very usefully, was also in charge of Singapore’s work visas. To the extent that I could feel secure with any human beings at this time, I warmed up to the appearance of successful, rich businessmen, well liked in their community, and a government that ran a state as well as any ever had. I accepted. My Hong Kong friend introduced me to the young California team who he thought could lead and operate the projects.
My slightly criminally minded publicist took one look at the team leader and warned me not to trust him in or out of my sight, saying that there was more snake in him than man.
I didn’t see it then.
I could see that he hadn’t much experience with money unless it was someone else’s, spending like a kid given the keys to a billionaire’s cash. He made me nervous when he talked about budgets, blithely skipping through a three-year projected budget awash in projected red ink. He signed a lease the restaurant could never afford, and talked about losses as inevitable, even part of the plan. I had never planned to lose money in my life, but nothing I said fell on open ears so I kept quiet. The owners of Stars Singapore were very big guys in finance. I figured they knew something I did not.
All doubts flew momentarily from my brain when I climbed up the ladder and put my head through the hole hacked in the floor of the hundred-year-old building across from Raffles in the heart of Singapore.
I gasped in joy.
It was a room I had waited a lifetime for: a hundred-foot-long Palladian rectangle with a row of Doric columns five feet away from each of the long walls, a big shuttered window centered between each column. Here was classical, grand colonial, tropical architecture at its best. When I learned it had been the dormitory for the boys of the Sacred Heart orphanage, I could almost see the same lineup as my school in England, with its long rows of bed-chair-bed-chair.
The other possible locations—an old Chinese spice shop, a government building on a hill—were beautiful, but this city-block convent with its little cathedral that would be our banquet hall was unique in the world. And after seeing the outdoor fast-food restaurants and the exotic food markets I knew all my fantasies from my upbringing—of tropical fruits and verandas filled with elegant white suits and cool gin and tonics—could come true here. Who could resist creating a new cuisine with California inspiration behind eight kinds of mangoes, huge baskets of rambutans and mangosteens, of headily fragrant pineapples, and sugary finger bananas stacked in small mountains next to bamboo baskets filled with thirty-pound red snappers, octopus, garoupas, and exotic striped moray eels? It was a world to which I was happy to escape. Over drinks at Raffles I signed the franchise contract, holding back a desperate eagerness to say, “Why not buy Stars instead of merely franchising it?”
The finished Stars—with its pizza oven and rotisserie oven at one end of the dining room and huge bar at the other, a spiral staircase in between joining the cafe below with the upper main Stars—was magnificent. Drew Nieporent, a man of many famous restaurants on both American coasts, said Stars Singapore was “the most beautiful restaurant in the world.”
I thought about buying an old chophouse and setting up shop in Singapore, letting a management company operate all the restaurants. But after a few months, when the young California team failed to get even to first base in how to operate a Stars, were seemingly more loyal to each other than to the owners, and were more interested in glamorous special events than in everyday operations, I knew we were marching to different drummers. Their music was more Pied Piper than victory march. After helping them open the restaurant I returned to San Francisco to find the Civic Center in a morass of demolition.
I was determined to get a grip on the operations and to build the restaurant back up, but as construction of the new courthouse across from Stars’ entrance began, huge barricades went up that isolated the area even further.
Since there is never a better time to strike successfully than when someone is down, the bottom feeders appeared, first with little bites, then in a wholesale frenzy.
First was the FBI. A telephone call. How well did I know Andrew Cunanan? Gianni Versace had been murdered in Miami Beach a few days before, and Cunanan was the suspect, along with anyone who “knew” him. But because the real contacts were customers of Stars, I told them my lips were sealed.
They didn’t like that.
The next day it was around town that I was mixed up in Versace’s murder.
I got on a plane to Singapore and returned a week later.
I saw it on the evening television news the night I got back. An attorney in a wheelchair had invited a news camera crew into the men’s bathroom at Stars and had filmed him bashing backward and forward, “trying” to get into the toilet stall, which, no surprise to anyone, he could not. Soon there was a lawsuit on my desk. The press howled in righteous outrage, and more inspectors, TV, and activists showed up across the street at Stars Cafe. They objected to the marble bathrooms, installed at vast expense a few years before, inspected, and passed as conforming to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
It turned out that the perfectly accessible stall openings were one-quarter of an inch short of what was required by the newer regulations.
We ripped them out.
I had to give interviews in the bathrooms when they were finished. So this is what it has come to, I thought to myself. I really am in the toilet. I thought of Singapore, the strictest city in the world, where this would have been done via a letter in a dignified way instead of with barbarians at my gates.
The only people embarrassed by all this other than me were the fifty representatives of the Japanese Hotel and Restaurant Association, who had been my hosts in Japan and were now visiting Stars. They had come to California to see Napa and buy wine for the five hundred hotels and restaurants they represented. But our visit to some of Napa’s most prestigious wineries ran aground on the new grandeur spreading through the valley. The Japanese were snubbed. I cajoled my pal, San Francisco’s mayor, Frank Jordan, who gave them the key to the city and declared that day theirs. His presenting the signed parchment in person to them at Stars helped smooth their feathers. But they suggested between very polite Japanese verbal lines that I move to Kyoto. It was my favorite Japanese city and I couldn’t have agreed more. Buy Stars, I told them above the lines.
My efforts to sell Stars to Sapporo and Sony came to a civilized nothing after the Japanese experience in Napa and their interested tour of the Civic Center area, now falling into the fetid laps of the homeless.
Moving on, I turned the old cafe space in Stars into JT’s and a cigar room to show what I thought was the next trend: comforting, sensible, unadorned, single-ingredient-driven food. That approach was a few years premature: the new hires for it had no idea what I was talking about when I said that a great chef knows when not to get in the way of perfect ingredients. They had heard of the new postmodernist trend in food just then starting, and which would end five years later in a glass bell jar filled with smoke over an eighteenth-century Marie-Antoine Carême presentation of a caviar blini at New York’s Eleven Madison Park. As if Chez Panisse, the Santa Fe Bar & Grill, and Stars had never existed. My telling them that a piece of impeccably fresh turbot needs no more than a made-to-order shellfish sauce, into which a sprig of tarragon has been infused for ten seconds, fell on puzzled ears.
There was no extra money to take the new managers and staff to the Crillon in Paris to see how breakfast was done, to Lameloise in Burgundy or the Four Seasons in New York to see how service was done, or to Maguy Le Coze’s perfect Le Bernardin to show how perfect unadorned fish was done. At a lecture at the Culinary Institute of America in the fall of 1995, I begged the first graduating class of the bachelor’s program to have a little humility. I said that spending all that money to become chefs was really only the beginning of the journey. The stunned silence that followed told me I should never have left Hong Kong, where the staff knew I knew more than they did, and would listen as long as I made them money, and as long as they could call me names in Chinese under their breath that would have stripped the paint off the culinary walls of fame in America.
Back in San Francisco, things became worse with the new mayor: the deal to buy out Stars and build one at their expense was revived, but it never seemed to be either in or out of favor. The cupboard was empty.
Denise Hale and I drank the last of the Cristal champagne in Stars’ cellar on New Year’s Eve 1996.
Her husband (with Al Wilsey one of the last great San Franciscan tycoons with any style) had just died. While he had been in the hospital we would sit every midnight in Stars, drinking and feeling nothing, not even the alcohol. We made a vow to be out of San Francisco for the next New Year’s Eve. I told her that it should be in Hong Kong, and that I would show her the wonderland of Singapore, where nothing bad ever seemed to happen. Or Manila, from where I was hoping something good in the way of money would arrive.
Benjamin Bitanga, that cheery Manila pirate who had helped wrest Stars from Doyle, had always thought of it as “our” restaurant. Now he had been back to the rescue, agreeing that I should sell part or all of Stars to keep it afloat until the opera and ballet came back in the fall of 1997. I had already been to Manila earlier in the year and met the group who adored Stars and continued negotiations. When rumors that Stars was broke started, they were scared off.
At the end of 1996 I was easily persuaded to spend New Year’s in Singapore, though it was a toss-up what needed my attention more that evening: Singapore Stars for its first December 31, or San Francisco Stars for its twelfth. When I decided on Singapore I knew I had cut most of my emotional ties with San Francisco. I took Denise Hale and my other two favorite San Franciscans, Brunno and Urannia Ristow, on a Christmas cruise on the Regent Hotel’s yacht (the general manager’s gift to me) around Hong Kong and gave them a champagne lunch. In Hong Kong I felt truly at home. I had sold my shares in the Peak Cafe for $500,000 to cover my earthquake-closed Speedo 690 and faltering Stars. And I had not been back to the Peak since 1993.
The staff cried when I walked in. The at-home feeling was intensified in Singapore, when at 3 A.M. on New Year’s Day, Denise and I walked a mile back to the Ritz-Carlton, she bedecked in a lot of Bulgari feeling completely safe. The streets smelled of jasmine not urine, and there was not a homeless person in sight, let alone a thief. Neither one of us wanted to return to San Francisco and face the music. Her lawsuits were piling up from her stepchildren (other than Liza Minnelli), and I was wondering what was going to happen if the cash from my pending Manila, Hong Kong, and Bangkok deals didn’t come through. Or cash from the franchises didn’t start to flow. The Thai connection was proving elusive, potential deals with Hong Kong–MCA and/or Disney seemed far off, Manila was in weekly contact but agonizingly evasive, and Stars Singapore, with its impossible rent, was hemorrhaging money and percentage fees for Stars San Francisco.
Then Andrew Yap, the new owner of Stars Singapore, was arriving in San Francisco supposedly in a buying mood. The word was he needed something to go with his newly acquired famous Italian “cigarette” boat brand.
Andrew Yap was due at the Stars management offices at three thirty one afternoon in early 1997 to sign the letter of intent to buy Stars. By four forty-five he had not shown up or called. At five he did show, explaining that the San Francisco airport weather had held him up and that he now had only a few minutes to talk before his plane to Singapore. I knew all the airlines’ schedules to Asia by heart and knew there were no planes to Asia until later that night. I knew what he was up to. I was used in Hong Kong to dealing with Chinese and he was only half. But just to check I excused myself and called the San Francisco airport. There had been no fog or delays in two days. I walked back and listened as Andrew explained that the original offer of several million dollars could now be no more than one. I rose, told him I was grateful for all the work he had done, and said I did not want to be responsible for him missing his plane. His mouth sagged slowly open, then quickly shut. He stood up, buttoned his coat, and instantly dropped the fatherly tone with which he had broken the news of our ruin. I escorted him politely to the door.
Back in San Francisco there was no end to the mounting bills. Only the Christmas holiday season private parties, each of which I was forced to guarantee to cook myself, saved our cash flow, if nearly destroying me.
Back in the Philippines after the season I met the investment group again, who were now excited (having seen the recent San Francisco cash flow) about opening a Stars in Manila. I phoned my comptroller with the great news of more franchise fees, but his news was less good. On my desk was another employee complaint about the new business manager of Stars. Because of the impending sale, we took to confidential mediation.
The mediation judge was a Stars customer, but since I had never talked to her, she didn’t have to disqualify herself from the case. She took me aside and said the whole thing was “pure extortion.” But did I want to settle or face another lawsuit?
I didn’t. I knew I hadn’t the money to fight a protracted battle, but was horrified when I realized I didn’t have the desire to either. Or lose pending deals. Twelve years before, a settlement would have been $3,500. The trial of the waiter dying from AIDS had cost hundreds of thousands. Now just a down payment on a discrimination case was $150,000. At a break in the hearing negotiations, the two employees had dragged me into the ladies’ room, their tear-filled eyes suddenly quite dry, to assure me that this was not personal, nothing to do with me.
I tried to remember that it was nothing personal when I left the judge’s chambers to write a check for the 150. The last of the Peak Cafe share sale cash was gone.
When I drove off, I laughed. I was in a new Mercedes 560 SEL, and now seemed as if I wouldn’t have a dime to my name.
Stars’ vendors had been held at bay by promised of Asian funds. So far at the end of 1997 and beginning of 1998 nothing had appeared. Then a check for $350,000 from the Stars Manila franchise came through from Bitanga’s group. The money dented the vendor bills but we couldn’t hold out for long. On my first morning in Manila in March, to see the Stars site, a call came through over breakfast in my room at Makati’s Shangri-La hotel. It was Andrew Yap. He said he was downstairs and would like to talk.
I could barely breathe.
We met in the enormous foyer lounge next to a garden of royal palms. I told him that I still had plans to refurbish Stars to bring it back to its former glory for the reopening of all the Civic Center in the fall, but that I would need financing. Andrew looked at me with barely concealed cunning and told me that if he were to refinance Stars he would have to own it. I paused delicately, for as long as I could.
“Fine.”
Hoping he would not hear the trap snapping shut, I named the price. He didn’t want me to stand up and leave again so we shook hands. After mine had stopped shaking.
As I wandered into the garden, I wondered if the shaking of my hands was from sadness or relief. But now, assuming the deal went through, everyone would get paid.
After a stop in Singapore to check on its Stars, and a promotional tour on Crystal Cruises, I returned to San Francisco to put on our best face. We cooked again for the Meals-on-Wheels, for the fifteenth anniversary of the American Institute of Wine & Food, held at Michael’s in Santa Monica, and with gritted teeth, for the AIDS Emergency Fund. But my mind was on the sale and what would happen if it fell through. Then Andrew and his team finally believed me when I advised them to hustle to be ready with Stars’ new appearance by the opening of the 1998 performing arts season in September. The due diligence ended on June 3, 1998; the money was due on the twelfth. On the fourth I cooked a big dinner for Shafer Vineyards; on the seventh I flew to New York for Citymeals-on-Wheels at Rockefeller Center. I made two appointments on the twelfth: one for an overhaul at my favorite salon, and the other, tempting the gods, for the movers to come and get my papers and personal goods from Stars.
The money was due by noon, so I made a spa appointment for eleven thirty. Whatever the outcome, I was going to need a massage. When my cell phone rang, I felt my heart miss several beats. It was the office at Stars saying they had given my cell phone number to the bank, but had no news. Of course I had already given the number to the banker, so the second time the phone rang I was calm, thinking the bank would not bother to call saying it wasn’t there. It was. All delicious several seven figures of it.
The next day we handed Stars to its new owners. Then I headed to the airport for the closest tropical beach that was at the height of its mango season.
At Rosewood’s Las Ventanas al Paraiso in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, I had an ice chest of ripe mangoes put next to the hammock on my roof garden, and stocked up it with champagne and fresh pineapple juice.
Paradise indeed this was.
At last it was over.
I put on the earphones and listened to Gregg Allman’s “I’ll Be Holding On.”
I did.
Sixteen months after I sold Stars (and I never set foot in it again), the new owners closed it “for remodeling.” Journalists and some of the old crew sniffed an ending and went for a last look. Its former chef de cuisine Mark Franz was quoted as saying it was like being at your ex-wife’s funeral. Both he and the wonderful Stars Cafe chef Loretta Keller, who had gone on to open her own cafe, Bizou, laughed with Gourmet magazine’s Ruth Reichl, and her evaluation that the prevailing Berkeley attitude, “‘Oh, it’s OK, it’s good enough,’ was never good enough for Jeremiah. He brought this amazing style into the community and everybody—men and women—were in love with him. He was like a character in a movie. We were all walking around in Birkenstocks,” said Ruth, “and here he comes this English gentleman.”
In Lucky Peach magazine, Mario Batali summed it all up. Up until the late ’70s/early 80s, he said, the general eating-out public took restaurants probably not “as seriously as going out to a game or opera or the movies.” But when California chefs started making noises it all changed.
Reichl described “the California cuisine revolution, where Californians realized they had the same bounty as France and Italy, and that if they paid attention and made goat cheese and grew baby lettuces, they could have something that was similar to going to a two- or three-stars restaurant in Europe without all the travel,” especially when “Wolfgang Puck made it very hip to go out to dinner in Los Angeles—not just to eat, but to be seen.”
Then there was Stars in San Francisco. “I still consider Stars to be one of the greatest restaurants of all time. This is a place where you could wear a tuxedo, or you could be dressed like me with dirty shorts and a golf shirt. It was luxury—but not overpriced—for the masses. It was very fresh every day. It was all very vibrant. It had piano players. It was this giant restaurant.” And one that made a “compelling” star of its chef and owner. “He’s like James Bond. . . . Jeremiah would walk in and people—boys and girls—swooned.”
Must have been the drinks.