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10 Questions with Chef ... Jeremiah Tower

Written by Susan Dyer Reynolds, Northside Editor

Sunday, 30 April 2006

Jeremiah Tower’s 2003 autobiography, California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution, so incensed San Francisco Chronicle columnist Kim Severson that, in her review of the book, she wrote: “To make it through former superstar chef Jeremiah Tower's memoir, the reader has to suspend disbelief and accept three basic premises: 1. Everything was his idea. 2. Any culinary and financial reversals weren't his fault. 3. Everyone wanted to sleep with him.” Severson was mostly angry that Tower dished on his love-affair-gone-sour with Alice Waters, stating that it was simply a grudge he couldn’t let go of and accusing him of painting Waters as a coquettish control freak who was a bigger publicity hound than Donald Trump. While you have to take Severson’s wrath with a grain of Malden salt because of her friendship with Waters, California Dish inspired similar barbs from others and distracted from the most important thing about the book: Tower’s importance in the history of California cuisine. Without any formal culinary training, Towers took over the kitchen at Waters’ landmark Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, in the early 1970s. His daily-changing menu emphasized locally grown, seasonal ingredients and let the food speak for itself. At his own landmark San Francisco restaurant, Stars, he continued his crusade for local/seasonal cookery and is considered my many to be the father of California regional cuisine (though he jokes that today he is more “the grandfather”). Tower left the restaurant business and his superstar chef toque behind for a quieter life in M&eacuterida, a city in southeastern Mexico on the Yucat&aacuten Peninsula. I caught up with him recently while he was on a diving excursion in Cozumel and found him to be every bit as pithy and candid as ever. What is your first memory of cooking? When I was five years old: I had just caught a barracuda on Australia's Great Barrier Reef and I grilled it over a wood fire on the beach with my aborigine pal. Who or what inspired you to become a chef? I had always cooked for relaxation and entertaining, cooking though Escoffier's ma cuisine when I was in college and graduate school [Harvard University]. I then became professional in California out of dire financial need and not being good at anything else. What is your proudest cooking, food or restaurant moment? My proudest moment was surviving the opening of my Peak Café in Hong Kong, and then seeing it become the most successful 100-seat restaurant in the world. What is the biggest misconception about chef Jeremiah Tower? That I am a chef. What is your favorite ingredient? Fresh black truffles with Chateau d'Yquem. What is your least favorite ingredient? Any corporate American fast-food-chain slop. What do you think is your most important contribution to California cuisine as we know it today? Educated sound bites that encouraged the U.S. Press to write about me and the new California philosophy of cooking, and then to continue to write about it until all the world was aware and inspired. Your memoir, California California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution, still has tongues wagging. Are you surprised at the controversy it caused, especially regarding Alice waters and Chez Panisse? There is always controversy when impassioned lies collide with passionate truth. How did you wind up in Mexico and what are you doing there? I was compelled to look further into the obvious, if often repudiated, connections between all of my favorite places: Egypt, Puglia, Havana, New Orleans, and the Yucatan peninsula. Also because the National Geographic Society will find Atlantis off Cabo de San Antonio [between the Yucatan and Cuba] this year, once and for all proving that the ancient Egyptians 'discovered' the Americas and not that slave-trader Columbus. Are there any plans for another restaurant from Jeremiah Tower in the near future, stateside or otherwise? Never say 'never,' but I can see in my restaurant future only an American bar in Havana. Once both dictators are gone.

Last Updated ( Saturday, 12 January 2008 )