Customer Reviews

California Dish : What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I just finished reading Jeremiah Tower's outrageously stylish memoir, and I don't hesistate to say it's compusively readable and hugely entertaining. I grew up in San Francisco and know the culinary history of that fabled city inside and out. I only know Tower through his reputation. While I've dined at Stars, (wonderful food in a superb party atmosphere), his now-closed bistro in San Francisco, I never ate at Chez Panisse during his tenure there as the chef.

I appreciate anybody who isn't afraid to bite back at a nasty and disloyal media, or some of their powerful icons. And Tower takes no prisoners here, deservedly serving up Alice Waters, Michael Bauer (S.F. Chronicle food critic), and others. He's already been accused of being bitter--and so what! But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Tower grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth. His mother, aunt and uncle and his world travels, exposed him to a wide range of great cooking, the best in wines and spirts, even during the terrible 50s when the U.S. was pretty much a agricultural and culinary wasteland when it came to fresh ingredients. Tower further refined his pallette in Boston during his Harvard years. Well traveled, well-read, intensely and naturally curious about food and the great wines and spirits of the world, it's no wonder that he gravitated towards cooking professionally. Though he never attended culinary school, he didn't need to. He was a collector of menus, wrote his own, and came up with wonderful ideas based on his education, his experience and his organic connection to food.

Tower managed to talk his way into the chef's job at Chez Panisse, and the rest was history. He brazenly established his surpremacy calling upon everything he had learned, and his timing was impeccable. Just as Alice Waters and other pioneering souls in California were creating wha the press would dub California Cuisine, capturing the culinary world by storm, and Tower was in the middle of it all. He cannily exploited the press, and his natural talent and flamboyance made him a big star.

When he finally opened Stars, he had created a powerful coterie of the world's (and San Francisco's) moneyed and social supporters. From day one, the restaurant was a huge smash hit, and Tower it's majestic king.

And after a little more than ten years of massive success, it all fell apart. A victim of his own wandering attention span and spread-too-thin ambition, lawsuits (frivolous and otherwise), the San Francisco earthquake (1989), which hurt Stars's business, defecting personnel, and a formerly adoring press that had suddenly morphed into jackals, Tower's fall was mighty and humiliating.

He charts his history honestly. His trademark champagne glass ever hoisted, Tower isn't afraid to take the blame himself when necessary. He acknowledges his hair-trigger temper which hurt many. Only at the very end does his story get a tad whiney. But considering what he was up against, I'm not sure I blame him.

Tower also vividly and lovingly recalls his many friendships with some of the great food personalities of the last fifty years. There are portraits of James Beard, Richard Olney, Barbara Kafka, Wolfgang Puck, and Elizabeth David. He enjoyed his friendships with Rudolf Nureyev, S.F. socialite and big Stars customer, Denise Hale, Francis Ford Coppola, Luciano Pavarotti, Dany Kaye, and George Hamilton. He's incredibly generous with other chefs and famous cooks, and shares his deep admiration for the talents of his colleagues, such as Daniel Boulod, Mario Batali (a former employee), Charlie Trotter, Lidia Shire, Jacques Pepin, Julia Child (though I sensed some chiliness here), Michale Chiarellia, Robert del Grande, Dean Fearing, Lary Forgione, Ken Hom, Hubert Keller, Emeril Lagasse, Drew Nieporent, Jamie Oliver, Charlie Palmer, Lulu Peyraud, Debra Ponzek, Paul Prudhomme, Eric Ripert, Michael Roberts, Jimmy Schmidt, Lindsey Shere, Henri Soule, Martha Stewart, Jonathan Waxman, and others.

The book also includes three interludes where Tower sounds off about the freshness of ingredients, creating harmonious menus, etc. These interludes give Tower ample room to write about the things he feels passionate about as a restarauteur and chef, and his devotion to getting it right.

Tower sets the record straight about "California Cuisine," and has much to say about some young chefs who abused the term by pairing the wrong ingredients, and went overboard with strange culinary experimentation. This set the tone for a backlash, some of it which reached to the his own doorstep, not because of his own cooking, but because of his vast celebrity.

Some will probably think Tower is ungrateful to Alice Waters, who was in the position to give him a job that launched him to the heights of a great career. Tower thinks she took way too much credit. I never thought that he was being mean-spirited towards her. She is often given sole credit for creating a culinary revolution in this country by opening Chez Panisse. Tower is generous to her contributions, but he's also testy about her manipulation, and rewriting of their history (or rather ignoring it). I think he's balanced and fair towards her. And after all, Alice Waters (as he points out) still does not list the chef of Chez Panisse on her restaurant's menu--an oversight that would never occur in restaurants of similar stature. They had a complex relationship. Waters has been rather mum about some of the sniping she's taken from Tower. I'd like to hear her side of the story as well.

Tower is a great chef because he brings a wealth of experience, education, his knowledge as a world-traveler who has kept his eyes and nose open to the best things that life has to offer. CALIFORNIA DISH can be bitchy entertainment, but it is als a celebration of that experience. He vividly tells his side of a wonderful story.

Jeremiah Tower is without a doubt one of the culinary world's most dynamic, enigmatic souls. Having met him several times and tracked his career over the years, I can testify with certainty that he polarizes people immediately. People with big personalities and charisma tend to do that. Tower's "autobio" is at times painfully self-aggrandizing and his tone can be bitter, but the real point of this book is DOES IT ENTERTAIN? I say YES. There are so many sides to every story and I for one am pleased to read that Alice Waters is not the second coming of Mother Teresa. This book does a great job of capturing a period in time (The Celebrity Chef) that will not be repeated despite the best efforts of young turks like Rocco DiSpirito. It happened once, like the era of the supermodels in the late 1980s and early 1990s and that's what Tower attempts to share with his readers. This book isn't as mean-spirited as people think, and certainly no more so that the media is to celebrities on a daily basis. A decent read where you can open any chapter and enjoy a tidbit about Tower's life. Tower is a terribly self-absorbed agent provacateur but that's what makes him so interesting and a real catalyst for change in the food world--then and now.

Tower is obviously a genius. He also comes across as somewhat narcisistic, but in an interesting way. His understanding of food, wine, eating are obviously very deep. The accounts of the beginnings of California cuisine and the whole food revolution are dead on. In the tradition of Alice B Toklas, he enjoyed his drugs. I reccommend this book highly to anyone interested in food, particularly American food and definately California or Berkeley food. The fact that I can buy fresh mesclun mix on an island six thousand miles from california is at least in small part thanks to Towers, and for that alone he deserves fame and fortune.

As a food professional, I was eager to read about the whole California food revolution from Ms. Towers' perspective.
It took over two months for me to finish this book, not because I am educationally challenged in any way, but because the absolute pomposity of this man actually irritated me to the point where I had to stop reading it.
There are some fascinating stories and interesting facts but these are overshadowed by Towers' constant self-loving and enormous ego (at one point he states that during his training as an architect, he came up with plans to build an under-sea tunnel connecting Britain to France, long before anyone else! How sad).
The common thread running through this book is his constant sour grapes towards Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. Mr Towers felt he never really received the huge amount of praise he needed, and was sure he deserved, for his contribution at Panisse.
Most chefs dream of owning a restaurant-Jeremiah Towers owned several AND they were all successful. Despite this, and the fact that he was in the limelight as a celebrity chef for a few years, he still remains bitter. I guess some people are never satisfied. It's a shame, this could have been a good book. Check please!

I worked for Jeremiah off and on for 17 years or so. He is totally correct. His inspiration was Curnowsky and the classic French cuisine of the late 19th century.This is what made him famous as no one in the early 1970's was particularly focused on organic, fresh yes, but not organic. That was what attracted the likes of James Beard and other luminaries to his table. He cooked like this while in college, long before Chez Panisse was conceived. He wanted his own restaurant and he really paid rent on the space that STARS occupied, for 6 years before he opened it in 1985. It was his intellectual interpretation that brought Chez Panisse it's fame in making California the birthplace of Modern American Cooking.

While there were restaurants in the East that relied on fresh produce and meats from local farmers, they were all owned or under control of French chefs. Jeremiah was the first American who realised the importance of local and fresh. NOW, the standard of good restaurants.

...in California 'Dish', and I'm Californian! What a boring read. My copy I'd found (a neighbor had apparently had enough of it, as they left it in the entryway table, dogeared in the middle; with a note saying 'PLEASE TAKE' stuck on it.)
Houseguests chuckle at the fact that I left it where it belonged: In the bathroom.

If Oscar Wilde had written a book about food, this would be it. The same wit and zero tolerance for B.S. levelled at BOH, FOH, board room, colleagues, press corps. But magnanimity and menus, too. An amazing life even without the food, this is an important report about the food revolution, through Tower's innately discriminating and world-class trained eye and in his words. No ghosts here -- the pantry and walk-in doors are wide open.

Jeremiah Tower is a talented and innovative chef with brilliant instincts on food and its preparation. But in this memoir he comes across as a totally shallow, erratic, cocaine sniffing, champagne swilling, celebrity fawning, spendthrift and airhead.
One senses that Tower has never read anything more serious than a cookbook. If there is a single idea of consequence in this work I must have missed it. What there is no lack of is insipid gossip and name dropping. Worst of all is the editing, or rather lack of it: this must be one of the most poorly edited books in the history of publishing.
Tower's descriptions of his endlessly messy legal and financial entanglements might possibly have been interesting had they been written in something approaching comprehensible English. But like much of the rest of the book they are barely coherent with unexplained references and gaping holes in the narrative.
In sum, this work is very thin gruel, indeed. Tower should stick to cooking!

You don't have to be a 'foodie' to be captivated by the sheer dishiness of this book--from the story of Tower's growing up amid an eccentric and erratic family, to his fame and fortune at Chez Panisse and Stars. An elegant and witty writer, it's the perfect read whether or not you know the difference between a shiitake or button mushroom, it's a tantalizing tale!

The New York Times called California Dish an important book in how it chronicles the revolution in American cooking in the 1970s--foodies should eat it up. But it's also terrifically fun to read. Tower isn't just a great chef but an engaging and witty storyteller, who can be brutally honest about himself and others. This book made me hungry AND laugh out loud. To paraphrase the punch line to a great anecdote early in the book, California Dish is a delicious meal and Jeremiah Tower is dessert.