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

by Jeremiah Tower

Widely recognized as the godfather of modern American cooking and a mentor to such rising celebrity chefs as Mario Batali, Jeremiah Tower is one of the most influential cooks of the last thirty years. Now, the former chef and partner at Chez Panisse and the genius behind Stars San Francisco tells the story of his lifelong love affair with food -- an affair that helped to spark an international culinary revolution.
Tower shares with wit and honesty the real dish on cooking, chefs, celebrities, and what really goes on in the kitchen. Above all, Tower rhapsodizes about food -- the meals choreographed like great ballets, the menus scored like concertos. No other book reveals more about the seeds sown in the seventies, the excesses of the eighties, and the self-congratulations of the nineties. No other chef/restaurateur who was there at the very beginning is better positioned than Jeremiah Tower to tell the story of the American culinary revolution.

Genres: Food, Food Writing, Nonfiction, Memoir, Cookbooks, Culinary, Food and Wine

356 pages, Paperback

First published August 4, 2003

Reviews

[Ryan Naples · Rating 3 out of 5]

This author's life is fascinating. Unforatunately, his book has a few too many chapters that are completely unrelated to the story of his life and how he evolved as a chef and lover of great food and wine.

He also isn't very self-critical of how cheesey a name his restaurants "Stars" truly is.

I loved the inside scoop on the real Alic Waters who seems like a fascinating person. Friendly, fierce, focused. The author seems quite similar but he clearly got distracted once he finally had a successful restaurant in the mid to late 80s. Which is why he no longer has a restaurant at all. Sadly, his book is similarly distracted.

I would say I absolutely 1oved about 65% of the storytelling here and the other 35% I had to just read as fast as I could. The unrelated chapters were even noted as being, the first of many breaks to just talk about how he planned menus, private parties he cooked for, etc. It was a painful laundry list of food and people without much detail.

While the first 3 chapters of the book are very strong, detailing a trimuphant cooking event in Newport for food journalists that put him on the east coast culinary map; followed by his luxuriously foodie upbringing in Australia and London, the last chapter is quite terrible. After the book describes him as finally desperately selling his flagship restaurant in San Fransico to a Singapore investor, it doesn't say what happens to the rest of his Stars restaurants, 5 in all, that were opened in Asia and other parts of California. Instead it details all the chefs he thinks are great at the time he was writing the book (the early 2000s) and he doesn't talk about why he comes into contact with any of them. Did he just travel around the country eating? If so, with who? Anything special about of any of his trips or the meals? Did he sleep with anyone during he trips? The last chapter read like a quick laundry list. It was just bad. Then he describes a trip to the Union Square farmers market. It was a very unnecessary way of saying how great it is that all the food he used to kill himself trying to find in the mid-70s in order to cook at Chez Panisse is now readily available. He then describes all the great food that's grown all over the United States. It was a very impersonal way to end a book that is very intimate. He details his various affairs with both men and women, his social highs in San Francico and his litigious lows at the hands of former employees. And he ends his book with a detached walk down 15th Street? Not good. The last 12 pages were just unnecessary and bad.

I do really wish this book was better. It did really have some awesome chapters and I'm glad I read it. It's certainly interesting to see how we got from shitty food to great food. I really enjoy learning about the journey, and how without people like Jeremiah Tower, we wouldn't have locally grown food in restaurants, or hormone free beef in Brooklyn.

I did enjoy the book, and recommend people read it if they like food because the author clearly does as well. Maybe just skip the chapters about how crazy he is for the onion stand in Union Square in 2001.

[Dvora Treisman · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Christie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a moderately entertaining, gossipy read. He certainly thinks highly of himself.

[Nicholas Aune · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is sort of the O.J Simpson's "If I Did It, How I Would Do It" of cooking.

Jeremiah Tower is an American Chef who redefined American cuisine, demanding fresh, local ingredients that showcased regional specialties rather than the bland Continental fare. He was at the forefront of the California food revolution. He was America's godfather to the nouveau cuisine revolution. He was intimately close with James Beard.

He also destroyed any meaningful relationships he had and lost his small restaurant empire almost overnight. He is an unknown figure now. Considering how his contemporaries view him (poorly), Tower wrote this book as a Jeremiah Tower apologist. This is his side of the story. How he came from nothing. How he was right all along damn it.

The author is pretty arrogant and is willing to sling gossip about his lose friends and acquaintances freely. Still an enjoyable book, and the only cookbook in my collection that has recipes for haute marijuana cuisine.

[Ty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeremiah Tower is one of the towering figures of American cuisine, and he is also a fairly good writer. This memoir describes his life from growing up in a very privileged and globe trotting household after WWII, through life at Harvard to becoming a self taught chef at the beginning of the United States' awakening to fine cooking and highly varied foods. Tower lived a remarkably interesting life, traveling the world, rubbing elbows and often other body parts with the rich, famous and beautiful across many continents, and driving a new interest in simpler cooking, fresh ingredients and less heavy sauces. His restaurant, Stars in SF, was a superstar of the 90s, and his earlier work at Chez Panisse helped establish that restaurant as one of the most influential in American history. This was fun read!

[Mskarla · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I was obsessed with food, but this book has convinced me that I know nothing. This man is OBSESSED, and has a deep historical knowledge of food coupled with opportunities few of us have had to eat amazing meals. Although the menus and some of the details were a bit much, this was a great history of the contemporary American food scene and the author’s significant contribution to it. The name dropping was fun, too.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeremiah Tower, illustrious chef at Chez Panisse, Starz, and Tavern on the Green (among others) and a pioneer of the California Cuisine/local food movement tells his story.

[Stephanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can’t even with this book anymore. The ego is too much for me to tolerate.

[Kim Scharf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeremiah Tower is a great storyteller and shares some really great insight into the food scene in 80s-90s.

[Danny]

I gained a lot of respect for Jeremiah reading
this. His menus are superb, wine choices very
fortunate, and I loved the backstory on Chez Panisse.

[Tucker Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This guy has been around the block more than once cooking krazy stuff around the revolution of cooking when cali was taking over the menus with variety coming from their own backyards.

[Hillary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Especially interesting in comparison to Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, but Tower's ego is tough to swallow.

[ChromaticRat · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories are very entertaining though the writing could be improved.

[Genie · Rating 1 out of 5]

don't bother...