Jeremiah Tower

I lived two blocks from Chez Panisse for over twenty years beginning in 1971. In all those years I ate at the restaurant only a few times and in the upstairs cafe, once that opened, many times, but never did I meet either Alice Waters or Jeremiah Tower. In fact, I never heard of Tower until many years later when he was associated with Stars. But we all knew who Alice Waters was, that she lived somewhere up in the hills, and that several people in those little bungalows in West Berkeley were growing fruit and veggies and herbs for her.

Chez Panisse is housed in a typical Berkeley brown shingle craftsman house. Going there is like going to someone's home -- someone who cooks really really well. You only have to read a little of Tower's book to know that he didn't relate to that aesthetic -- not the Berkeley brown shingle part or the going to someone's home part.

For that matter, Tower isn't one to invest his soul in any one place. Chez Panisse opened around the time I moved to Berkeley. Alice Waters created it and she's still there. Towers has worked his way in and out of, bought and sold, countless restaurants (I found it confusing to know which restaurants he actually did buy, which he franchised, which he had any part in running, etc.) Because for Tower, the restaurant business is just that: a business. He set out to run with the rich and famous, and to become rich and famous too. No little brown shingle for him. That's for people who wear Birkenstocks, a putdown he makes repeatedly through the book. Because it seems that he is interested only in people who wear Prada and Dior.

Tower is clearly deeply passionate and knowledgeable about food, cooking, and the restaurant business. What becomes clear is that he is just as passionate about making big money and living the good life. Once he left Chez Panisse, all his business ventures and the people he associated with didn't interest me. Neither did all the menus. Neither did his not so subtle mentions of the Italian loafers he wore or the BMWs he drove. It all became confusing and hard to follow.

And for all his acrobatics at becoming rich and putting down those who wear Birkenstocks (I have never worn them in my life and as I recall, most of the people at Chez Panisse were well shod yuppies), in the end, Alice Waters with her little brown shingle in Berkeley is just as famous as he is.

Two other comments. First, he mentions not being able to get good cheese for the first few years at Chez Panisse. But when I moved to Berkeley in 1971 the Cheeseboard was already there, on Walnut, around the corner from Chez Panisse. A couple of years later they expanded to across the street from the restaurant on Shattuck. They had hundreds of cheeses from everywhere, including some that were unpasteurized.

Seond, at the end of the book Tower provides an extensive bibliography, which he says includes every book in his library except one. It's an interesting list of books, almost all about food and cooking. He includes Roy Andries de Groot's The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, which is one of my favorites. But what surprised me by their absence is any book by M.F.K. Fisher, one of the great American writers about food, who viewed and appreciated food much as he says he does. He says any omissions tell a story, though not always. I wonder what this omission might say.… (más)