The New York Times, in an eighties “Living” section cover story by Marian Burros, called us all “Disciples of Chez Panisse,” saying that if Henri Soulé at Le Pavillon “can be credited with igniting the explosion of fine French food in America in the 1950s and ’60s, then Chez Panisse deserves similar recognition for revolutionizing American cooking in the 1970s.” The chef photo was a face behind the veil of Alice’s antique hats.
When Adam Nagourney interviewed me for the New York Times in 2002, he quoted me saying Alice didn’t know a little vegetable from a rotten one. I did for once regret not having handled the interview in sound bites even if that comment was supposed to be “off the record.” What I had told him was that the true story of her enormous contribution has not been told, and that he should interview her to get it. I said that her real contribution didn’t have a lot to do with the early revolution, that in the beginning she didn’t know commercial vegetables from truly great ones, but that she had learned. Much of her story came later, especially after Sibella Kraus came onto the scene in the early eighties and planted those little lettuces in Alice’s garden. That was the beginning of her actually great contributions, things like her advocacy for farmers’ markets, for sound and sustainable agriculture, for supporting Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement, and for the Chez Panisse Foundation, which underwrites the Edible Schoolyard as well as the Garden Project at the San Francisco county jail. Ask her about all that, I said. Not about a perfect peach.
Mark Peel, chef of Campanile, in Los Angeles, had another view of Panisse. “I wanted to work at Chez Panisse in 1980 because it was a major force behind the return to our culinary roots. But it was not highly organized. There was never-ending confusion.” Jonathan Waxman, at Panisse in 1978, was quoted while still chef at Michael’s in Santa Monica as saying he applied at Panisse because of Alice’s reputation, but “quite frankly I didn’t understand what it was all about. But I learned that you don’t serve a dish unless it’s perfect.” He lauded the use of fresh herbs and of “going through sixteen cases of fresh lettuces to find the finest.” Mark Miller was inspired by Panisse to use “native ingredients,” and Judy Rodgers of San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe credited Panisse with the “obsessive pursuit of perfection” in raw ingredients. Judy said that Alice was “the kind of cook who is visceral instead of one who quantifies” but that she “used to get three cases of green beans in order to find enough tender small ones for a single meal.”
At least I taught Alice and the restaurant something.
The New York Times went on to say in the early eighties that Alice acts simply “as a consultant to the restaurant and spends only two days a week there, one cooking and one working in the dining room.” Alice mused to Burros in 1984 that she might go back into the kitchen—“I’m curious to cook up coq au vin right now”—and mused further about the difference between her and my kitchen styles: “Jeremiah was not hesitant. His cooking is more elaborate than mine, more flamboyant, and I was fascinated by his combinations, things I wouldn’t have thought of.” And my comment? “‘Mainly,’ Mr. Tower says, ‘we had fun together. Alice has a wonderful sense of how to eat,’” as I well knew from our travels alone together.
I told the Detroit News I remembered an evening in September 1980 on the terrace of the Gritti Palace in Venice, under the moonlight, drinking Krug with Alice, when she admitted “that without you, there would be no Chez Panisse or me.” I didn’t mention that Alice and I, enjoying our on-and-off-again affair, on our way to lunch the next morning at Harry’s Bar had sent a telegram. It was to her new beautiful boyfriend back in Berkeley for his twenty-first birthday:
funghi, uccellini, gritti;
seppe, fritti, harry’s—
a hardonna! madonna (pardonna)!
krug ’59
After I left Chez Panisse, it was undeniably still an unquestioned influence, and would be even in 2001, when the restaurant garnered first place in Gourmet magazine’s “Best Restaurants in America” issue. After reading that piece, I wondered what made a chef of America’s best restaurants. At 1990’s so-called disciple dinner of former Panisse chefs, held in Los Angeles honoring Alice with the Robert Mondavi Food and Wine Award, the chefs made it quite clear that no such across-the-board real “teaching” had gone on during their tenure with Alice since I left. Even Alice, now as “co-chef” of Panisse, admitted she hadn’t cooked in eighteen years. When she told me she was now “emeritus,” I asked what it meant and she laughed. That night I asked the on-and-off Panisse chef Jean-Pierre Moullé what the term co-chef meant. He was not sure it was even true. We laughed about the night in 1978, while he had taken over from me as chef, when Alice had called asking me to fire Jean-Pierre because he had been mentioned in the press as “chef of Chez Panisse.”
If it was true that Alice had not been cooking since I left in 1978, what was the lesson or lessons here about the nature of a chef, great, famous, or otherwise? How was it done? As Alice said in a 1986 interview with Restaurant Business, “It’s hard to balance your own feelings as an owner with the necessity of putting someone else in charge” of the kitchen. Looking back on our equal-owner status, she in the dining room with me in the kitchen, I wondered if that was how she had always felt with me.
By 1998 there was a backlash. Was it the twenty-eight-dollar price of chicken at New York City’s California restaurant temple, Jams? Did the public agree with Rolling Stone that what we were doing was really “ambitious gardening followed by crude mixology”? One classically trained French chef called California pretentious. “Its cuisine consists of things you don’t normally hear of going together, like alligator fritters with a parsnip sauce. The alligator tastes like chicken, and the parsnip tastes like turnips. It’s frightening.”
The revolution starting in air transportation and quick delivery of national and international fresh ingredients meant that in 1985 the list of local was becoming worldwide, increasing the quantity of choices we could cook with. For New Year’s dessert was Satsuma mandarin orange, Meyer lemon, and Australian fresh young ginger and pineapple sorbets with ripe passion fruit sauce. We could celebrate three fresh American caviars for a dinner at the Imperial Bank in San Diego. At the California Wine Perspective dinner, after we had survived the evil treatment at the Hotel Pierre’s front desk, we could serve braised sweetbreads with fresh Côte d’Azur violets, nasturtiums, and sage butter.
In the hands of a hack, the results were indeed very often frightening. But in the hands of a classical-principles-inspired new chef, the mixology was not jinxology, but “new” without being solely for newness’s sake. Some visionaries looked forward, saying that the new tradition would be remembered not for certain dishes like the ones made famous by the previously established cooking—tournedos Rossini or chicken cordon bleu—but for our “attitude.”
Rolling Stone had Alice Waters put the background of this new cooking into a nutshell: “At first we wanted things to be like in France, and we called everything by French names, then all of a sudden straining to, like ‘Huîtres de Bolinas’ instead of ‘Bolinas Bay oysters.’” She was talking about the reason for my “road to Damascus” moment in 1976 when I saw the turn from France to regions of America, specifically California. Both Alice and the reporter pointed out that my 1976 California Regional Dinner at Panisse began Berkeley’s second revolution, the first having been the political one of the late sixties. Rolling Stone thought Alice was still stuck in the first one, even if the Volvos parked outside Panisse were new and the bumper stickers no longer rooted for the Black Panthers but for the lifestyle of “Living well is the best revenge,” a suggestion from the reporter that left Alice on the defensive.
The same magazine could not help but be fascinated by the difference between the clienteles at Panisse and at Stars. “Jeremiah is equally comfortable with the rowdy Beastie Boys and Run DMC who Tower shooed successfully out the door just as the baroness de Rothschild from Chateau Mouton-Rothschild showed up with a reservation for the same table.” The article made the point that, whereas I had kept evolving my style, the one at Panisse had stayed the same, and that this “split” in styles had created two camps and an atmosphere on which the new young chefs were “neatly skewered.”
Nowhere was the conflict between choosing whether to be a private or a public chef more evident than in the institution of the chef-driven benefit banquet, the proliferation of which the reporter blamed on me. The motives for participating were under suspicion. Were they self-promotion or charitable concern? “There is something that sticks in the craw about the average gourmet benefit,” said Rolling Stone.
Only if the food is bad, I replied.
I added that for me, they were publicity opportunities waiting to happen. At a Rockefeller Center Citymeals-on-Wheels, Robin Leach was looking around for material more interesting than Wolfgang’s spit-roasted ducks in flames, or Bradley’s lamb chops on the grill in the interior kitchen threatening to burn down the tallest building. He spotted Malcolm Forbes and me spotting each other. As Forbes walked over and put out his hand, I introduced myself. “I know perfectly well who you are” was the reply caught on tape by Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous as Forbes quite snugly took my arm. All this intrigued the gay Robin so much that he later filmed Stars for a show that aired for years afterward all over the world, one in which the public remembers Leach saying that “Stars is the best restaurant in the world,” even when he said no such thing. After that event any chef who did not have a publicist or handler got one. The relationship of the superstar chefs and the press was a symbiotic marriage made and consummated on the battlefields of charitable work, and definitely not in church.
The nineties was the decade when I sat on a cow for the Milk Board, Wolfgang Puck put his coffee in cheap hotels and did a bad raisin commercial, and there was lineup of naked chefs (even Jean-Louis Palladin) showing hairy bodies somewhat the worse for gravity and booze, hiding their genitalia behind food blenders, a reminder to prefer the real “Naked Chef,” Jamie Oliver. All this made a clothed Jonathan Waxman ten years earlier, lying in a pond with ducks for Life magazine, look tame. Rolling Stone tried to define what kinds of chefs we all were: Alice was “Chef as Doyenne,” and I the “Entertainer.” André Soltner, the doyen of French chefs in America, in disgust called us all “soup merchants.”
The eighties press had done its job, and the public was primed to eat new American, to see chefs as stars, to think that cooking was a new form of theater and part of the entertainment industry. So caught up was the nation in this new food fantasy pastime that there was hardly any dissent. The pendulum swing of disillusionment with this culinary flash dance wasn’t to hit until 2015. A handful of writers used to identifying trends still in their fetal stage had already spoken out. Town & Country’s James Villas in 1983 had said, “I am up to my neck with all the phoniness and abuse and elitism and celebrity. All this business is really getting out of hand.” Perhaps he was still sore still at Alice having threatened to call the police over his smoking in “that military state called Berkeley.” Or was it because Alice, now a celebrity, had once spent the end of an evening in his lap at Georges Blanc’s restaurant outside Lyons before sliding to the floor? In his mind, she did not know how to behave.
But no one else in the now-fascinated public was fed up or thought anything had gone far enough. John Mariani took several pages to extol the “Regional Favorites” in his Playboy list of the nation’s best restaurants, even if only eight of them served “regional” American food—interesting that regional America was now the measure. Those restaurants included Larry Forgione’s An American Place in New York, Stephan Pyles’s Routh Street Cafe in Dallas, Jasper White’s Jasper’s in Boston, and Frank Stitt’s Highlands Bar & Grill in Birmingham, Alabama. Some reporters talked of the new “stars” of the culinary world, and some, like the “Question Man” in the San Francisco Chronicle, featured chefs instead of taxi drivers as “the regular Joe on the street.” One can’t blame the chefs for being a bit confused.
Gone were the days (momentarily) when a chef would be featured in German Penthouse, as I was in 1988, next to the naked centerfold, as a “Jet-set-Guru.” Now it was much more an article in the New York Times about “how a celebrity chef of the ’80s got his stove back,” as Jonathan Waxman opened the Washington Park in April 2002 and had the confidence to put on the menu a dish that is seen as his signature from Michael’s and Jams: the roast chicken with french fries and watercress from 1979. After years of being a media darling, Jonathan was no longer flying off to Paris’s Taillevent for lunch, but was back in the restaurant.
The San Francisco Chronicle pointed out the irony in new American cooking in 1988. Hardly any chef in the country claimed to be cooking American food. Even if discovering America was what it was all about, each chef taking clues from California, how many cuisines were there in the United States? And was this new emphasis on regional cooking “a profound reawakening or another exhausting trend”? The always intelligent writer Jay Jacobs said it was a game of culinary star wars, with every chef grabbing his or her Warholian fifteen minutes of fame. The chefs who had been there at the beginning disagreed.
Jimmy Schmidt defended the superior flavors of any vegetables picked closest to you that went straight into the pot, adding that the celebration of regional food is merely recognizing food for “its true worth, rather than a marketing-created worth,” and that some regional foods were so highly charged from childhood they would never be trendy and disappear. I thought of my Cape Cod family’s clambakes with cantaloupe melons straight from the kitchen garden, filled with hundred-year-old Madeira and stuck down a cool well for the next day’s lunch. It was an optimistic view of American childhood, but regardless, every chef agreed that when a vegetable or fruit is ripe, ready, in season, and in your own backyard, it’s the best.
Larry Forgione of An American Place agreed, but cautioned not to forget new techniques and combinations. Most of the chefs voiced a vision that the pull of working with locally superior ingredients was so strong that regionalism was here to stay, that great cooking would always be ingredient driven. John W. Makin said from his restaurant in Napa Valley that the next great leap in regional cuisine “will be chefs moving out of urban areas and setting up restaurants in the countryside where farmers knock on their back doors with ripe products at the height of freshness.” As the chef who had opened his kitchen back door to wandering amateur foragers sixteen years earlier, I loved the historically innocent freshness of that comment when it was wryly told to me.
Stephan Pyles and I were the lone voices of dissent in this vision, seeing an end to regionalism but not to the force of perfect ingredients, wherever they came from. We saw a sort of “culinary harmonic convergence,” and I predicted that regional cuisines would exist for some time, but would result in a codification of a new American cuisine. Building on the tradition started at the Four Seasons in New York in 1959, fueled by its own foragers, and creating what Jeffrey Steingarten at Vogue forty years later called “a completely contemporary American haute cuisine,” that’s what happened. In 1979 Michael McCarty had to rely on his contacts in France to get the ingredients he wanted, but by the late eighties and early nineties he and every chef around America were encouraged by the spiritual, public relational, and financial rewards of encouraging local producers. The revolution became evolution in full flower.
The circle has been completed: restaurant guru Joe Baum’s “new-old food in a new-new setting” all over again, driven, as always, by ingredients.
Trying to figure it all out, the Australian food and art critic Leo Schofield talked to the “megastars” of the West Coast chefs to find out what was happening, what “new directions” the revolution was taking in 1986. Leo predicted that chefs would be faced with a choice between two wells of inspiration—new ingredients or money. Was a chef to believe, as Bradley Ogden said he did of the Four Seasons in New York, that “style and decor are more important than food”? Which road was a chef to take? Another Australian, Jill Dupleix, knew why the nineties were not going to be the eighties, and wrote New Food: From the New Basics to the New Classics.
The food/decor question highlighted awareness of the tension between the now de rigeur philosophy of authentic simplicity and our steadily increasing bank accounts. This crise de coeur was nowhere more evident than in the 1986 cover story for Restaurant Business magazine titled “Chef Celebrities.” The five cartooned chefs included Prudhomme holding his pan for blackening fish, Larry Forgione running after a chicken, and Alice Waters in overalls holding a rake. “Flashbulbs are popping and the videotape is rolling. Movie stars? No, chefs. Suddenly, working in the kitchen is a glamour occupation, and a new generation of aspiring chefs is entering the ranks, making American cuisine truly world class, as Americans have become food-crazy.” In this same article I was held up as a prime example of the new dilemma facing chefs because of my maintaining a heavy schedule of public appearances, charity events, travel, and interviews with the press, my life reading, it said, like a script from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Five years earlier, “Jeremiah Tower’s appearances would have been limited to two choices: the front of his restaurant (dining room) or the back (kitchen).”
This picture was now not all about food. The chefs made their lives public like any major star in Hollywood. Rolling Stone warned of this emerging crisis in new America’s cooking, incredulous that the Los Angeles Times devoted the entire front page of the food section to photos of the wedding vows not of a movie star but of the chef Michel Richard. The magazine notes that the epicenter of all this weirdness was Northern California (with its “edible flowers and homegrown snails”), where eating had taken over from sex as the preferred form of sensual gratification. “We can’t have sex anymore because of AIDS, and we can’t do drugs because of Ed Meese’s [President Reagan’s then–attorney general] storm troopers,” said one of the chefs, “so what’s left?”
But drugs were still around, and cocaine was still fueling the overtaxed schedules of famous road-running chefs. One night in Miami with the March of Dimes the guest chefs had been to a bizarre and huge estate patrolled by armed guards mingling with the guests. All that day had been TV and radio appearances for me, so by eight o’clock, when the curtain was ready to go up on our performance in black tie for five hundred of the Boca, the Beach, and Coral Gables classic swells, I was beat. After the reception I simply could not go on. In my hotel room for a minute to splash cold water on my face, I wondered whether all this was worth it and whether I would just rather be at home in the arms of a great white Burgundy. The telephone shrilled.
“Come on down to my room,” a familiar voice drawled. “I have something for you.”
A champagne thirst surged through my body as I hung up, but since the voice was that of a chef who had a reputation for cramming the divine white powder up his nose, my body waved with a certain peristaltic rush instead.
Sure enough, when I walked into his room’s short corridor with its built-in dresser, the top ten inches below nose level, I saw four white powdery lines, each the size of a small python.
“Two are yours,” he said.
And two I took. Within seconds I was myself again, or some newly energetic version of it, mentally fit for the press and all the smiling fans. The second round four hours later was laid out on the thick marble counter of the men’s room, setting off a panic in me for a second as, my eyes only two inches from the counter, the white lines in the thick black Italian marble momentarily camouflaged the drug. We needed this round before going into the bar to face the event’s sponsor’s new vodkas being passed around in long-stem martini glasses the size of goldfish bowls. Glamorous “New Society” was embracing “New American Cuisine,” or was it the other way around? Lucius Beebe, who had invented “Cafe Society” fifty years earlier, would have looked around the room for Cole Porter and the Murphys and seen only chefs courted by gun runners, drug dealers, and slinky trophy wives in Armani beaded couture.
The benefit that Rolling Stone really choked on was for a whole new cause, held in San Francisco in 1987 and called “Aid and Comfort.” AIDS had hit the California restaurant industry as early as 1984, just as Stars opened. Two of our best dining room staff fell fatally ill within the year, both events that ten years later would turn me from local hero to San Francisco pariah. At this time, however, the charity-going community was fresh and the party a huge hit, if a bit staggering, and foreboding. I was quoted at the after-event party for the volunteers as saying I thought perhaps we were flying too close to the flames, but no one else seemed worried or even noticed. After all, we had raised a lot of money for AIDS research and hospice support in a town where a thousand waiters had died of AIDS since the early eighties. The evening’s very success bred a proportional amount of hype, and what some saw as enthusiasm was already being seen by some press as opportunism. By the end of the food service, Alice Waters said she had no control, “as she was relegated at that point to picking up cigarette butts off the floor of the wharf, and no less than fourteen HYC [Hot Young Chefs] had muscled their way into the kitchen, as the whole thing had come to look like the biggest photo opportunity of the season.”
These chefs weren’t stupid.