Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  The lunch opens Tower’s California Dish along with the claim that the term California cuisine might never have become known had it not gone down. It’s as signature a Tower gesture as the glass of Champagne and red-rimmed sunglasses that would become his sartorial trademark. Just as vintage was the emotional roller coaster that ensued when he and his crew boarded their flight back to California: “When I got on the plane,” he says, “I was sitting and my chefs and cooks were sitting in front of me, and Steven [Vranian] looked around to toast with Champagne and he saw me sitting with tears streaming down my face. And he leapt across the back of the chair: ‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’ I said, ‘We won. It’s a success.’ And he said, ‘What’s the problem?’ I said, ‘We’re over. This is the beginning of the end. This is a very, very dangerous moment. Our lives will never be the same again.’”

  Spend enough time considering Tower’s life and it’s clear that he probably meant what he said on the plane—because his saga is defined by a series of points high and low, which any capable screenwriter will tell you is the secret of good drama, plunging the hero into the depths of desperation, then hoisting him back to an optimistic place, before lowering the boom once again. The man’s a human sine curve. And so . . . Jeremiah comes to California nearly penniless and becomes the chef of Chez Panisse; Jeremiah leaves Chez Panisse and wanders the land as a gun for hire, then opens Stars. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

  On that airplane, things couldn’t have been further from over: They were just beginning, again. Balboa Café and Santa Fe Bar and Grill had been auditions for Tower’s dream restaurant, which Moon had finally agreed to finance. Tower envisioned an audaciously gargantuan brasserie after the fashion of Paris’s La Coupole, with influences drawn from a variety of personal heroes and touchstones, such as the life and writings of Lucius Beebe, the columnist credited with coining the term cafe society, and a Slim Aarons photograph of Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart, in topcoats and tails, at the Hollywood restaurant Romanoff’s on New Year’s Eve in 1957.

  Only a former architect or born restaurateur could love the space that Tower found, a rat-infested warhorse in a run-down section of town that horrified James Beard, Barbara Kafka, writer James Villas, Stanford Court’s Jim Nassikas, and actor Danny Kaye (a plugged-in foodie during these years) when he brought them by for a look-see. But where they saw a ruin, he saw the glittering, magnificent brasserie of his dreams—a space he would not just resuscitate, but reanimate. And the location said it all about the democratic restaurant he envisioned: near both the Civic Center, so convenient for office workers, and the War Memorial Opera House, one of the gathering spots for San Francisco society.

  He had first found the space in 1981, but there were delays and funding gaps and ongoing horn locking with Moon. But by 1983, construction was moving apace, and word spread of the project. Emily Luchetti, who had cooked in New York City, moved to San Francisco in the spring of 1984, had heard about the impending opening, went to the space. “We moved out around March of ’84. And I remember it was completely under construction but you could see that it was going to be this big, big restaurant. Just physically a large space. Because you walk up the stairs and there was a bar that was about forty feet long and there’s just this huge dining room and the kitchen on the right. And it was going to be an open kitchen, which, not to say it was the first open kitchen of its kind, but it was one of the first where you could see all the action going on.

  “Jeremiah had a clear vision of what he wanted it to be,” says Luchetti. “And that was the thing that was so amazing about him: He is extremely creative. You could see his vision of taking all that French traditional, classic, really good stuff, giving it a real twist, both culturally and with California ingredients, and creating something for everybody, but it’s such a high level of quality that people will just be blown away by it.

  “I remember being offered a line position there and I was offered a position at Vivande, Carlo Middione’s place, and I didn’t really have any idea how big Stars was going to be because you just had this vision of this guy and it was like, ‘Oh, I guess I’ll just take the Stars thing.’”

  For the remainder of Stars’s buildout, Luchetti was assigned to Santa Fe. “It was much simpler. It was real kind of bar-and-grill food but they were doing grilled raclette with french fries and steamed mussels and that kind of thing. And Jeremiah had obviously come from Chez Panisse so he was really focusing on American ingredients, and really taking advantage of what California had to offer in terms of seafood and produce. I started out at the oyster station opening oysters and making pizzas.”

  Stars opened on July 4, 1984. (In the small-world department, like Jams before it, Stars had committed to a preopening party before they were fully ready to go, and Franz ended up cooking on a charcoal grill indoors, throwing open the windows for cross-ventilation.)

  There was no opening-night supernova for Stars. The restaurant, built for volume, was slow for its scale, and only open for dinner.

  Late that summer, Andy Pforzheimer, a Harvard-educated cook, arrived in San Francisco, eager to work for Tower. He presented his résumé to Franz, who ran it back to the boss, who in turn emerged to confirm Pforzheimer had gone to Harvard and cooked in France. Five minutes later, Franz hired him, asked him to start two days later.

  “Mark looked like what I expected chefs to look like,” says Pforzheimer. “Jeremiah didn’t. To this day, Jeremiah doesn’t look like what you expect a chef to look like. He’s what you expected the owner of the restaurant to look like. Except that he was in whites. But even when he’s in whites, he’s not really in whites. His pants are light colored and his shoes are spotless. It’s not a kitchen look. Soltner had shit on his aprons. Puck was a mess. Jeremiah never looked like that.”

  Initially, Pforzheimer found himself working the oyster bar alongside Clark Frasier, who with partner Mark Gaier went on to open Arrows restaurant in Ogunquit, Maine. It was a transitional time for the restaurant, which was gathering steam, growing busier. “Nobody was sure what to expect,” says Pforzheimer. “And it was so radically different. The dining room was so different than the Santa Fe dining room. It was bigger and fancier and next to the opera house. It was just a different thing. And I was very much an outsider in that group because they mostly knew each other.”

  Business picked up, says Franz, after Caroline Bates’s review in Gourmet magazine. Customers began showing up with the article in hand.

  “Jeremiah and Mark quickly weeded through the level of talent that started showing up at the door,” says Pforzheimer. “And the volume they did meant that they started getting rid of the weaker Santa Fe Bar and Grill people very quickly. There was a lot of turnover when I got there. And within two months I was surrounded by people who were all rock stars. And I was very intimidated. They were one of the most talented kitchens—still the most talented kitchen I’ve ever worked in by far.”

  The dining room quickly attained Tower’s vision, offering whatever one was in the mood for, from a casual bite to a multicourse meal. “We had a huge bar area there,” says Luchetti, “and one of the amazing things about Stars is people would come in for oysters and a glass of Champagne, or they might come in for a hot dog because we had a hot dog on the bar menu as well as a pizza. So you could come in and spend thirty bucks or you could come in and spend three hundred bucks. It was really kind of all depending on what you wanted to spend. And you had people that would be going to the opera and you’d have people going to the ballpark or coming from the 49ers game or something like that. Before that, the dressed-up people, the fine-dining people, stayed away from the lower classes.”

  Says Michael Bauer, who moved to San Francisco in the mid-1980s to become restaurant critic of the San Francisco Chronicle: “I think it was Wolfgang who kind of started it, then you have people like Jeremiah, which I think was the other, to me, transformative restaurant, because you could have a hot dog in the bar. It catered to the opera set as
well as the very casual, artisan set. And it was, to me, if you look at it, kind of the first American brasserie. He actually took Vanessi’s, which had an open kitchen, and that was his inspiration. If you look at the open kitchen in that style restaurant, it started at Spago and Stars. Spago was a little different. Stars kind of upped it a little bit. And it was very much of a brasserie with the open kitchen. That really kind of fueled the open kitchen trend that you see. I mean, even ten years ago you went to the East Coast and you didn’t see open kitchens. And now it’s like everyone has it. . . . He is very handsome. And again, he was a brilliant cook. You can’t leave that out of the equation. . . . His combinations. The way he used food . . . there were so many dishes that to me were a revelation. It was the first time I had watermelon and tomatoes and red onions together at that restaurant, which I still remember. It was just a party.”

  Even nonnatives viewed the Bay Area sensibilities as inherent to the restaurant. Says Luchetti, “I think the fact that it was in San Francisco made it so it could be successful. Because San Francisco is probably more democratic, at that time, than New York was, for instance. You look at the history of San Francisco in general, the whole Gold Rush thing; the people that made the money and discovered gold, they were a pauper one day and they had tons of money the next day. So I think there was always that more egalitarian tradition in San Francisco. The common denominator was just going to be the good food and it didn’t matter who you were, everybody had access to this food.”

  “That was one of the greatest spots in San Francisco history,” says Unterman. “Because it was just a crossroads. Everyone from every part of society was there—the upper ones, the lower ones, the artists, the poets, the socialites. It was just one of the greatest mixes. You could sit at the bar and have a hot dog. You could be in the little special place and have Champagne. Jeremiah was such a flamboyant character. He was completely democratic and completely outrageous and gay and it just epitomized the society, the freedom of San Francisco.”

  And everybody came: “We counted covers,” says Pforzheimer. “We were doing one hundred eighty a night, then we were doing two hundred thirty, then—whoa—we did three hundred fifty, then it was back to two hundred thirty, then—whoa—four hundred ten. Then every weekend seemed to just pick up steam. And after a while we were hitting five hundred on the weekends and doing three hundred during the week.”

  Just as diners flocked to the dining room, aspiring cooks rushed the kitchen: “There were so few places to go in the United States if you were like me,” says Pforzheimer. “If you were educated, hungry, dying to not only cook but cook something amazing, you could count on one hand the places that would just take you in partly because of the French training, partly because of the French identity, partly because of how much volume there was and the ability to hire. Stars was a magnet for that kind of thing, for I-just-want-to-cook, the way Dan Barber’s place is now for—you know: You’ve got a farm-to-table bug up your ass? You go to Blue Hill: ‘Can I have a job?’ And so we had that going on. We had rock stars. It was all celebrities and there was press in and out. Every dish that went on the menu, you read about it. So people came from everywhere. They wanted to work there. He had the ability to hire.”

  Tower could also, says Pforzheimer, be “scary. I remember it was salads. It was true of everything. He would comb through your salads.* I mean, these salads were big. You’d make fifteen of them at a time. He would come through. And he had an eye and he would go like that. His whole head would turn and he’d go right for one of them and he would reach into the middle. He had very long, elegant fingers. He’d reach in and out would come this—you’ve seen what a bad leaf of lettuce in a bag of lettuce looks like? It would be rotten and kind of droopy. And he would walk up to you and he would take his fingers and he’d put it right in your mouth, pushing up against your lip, and say, ‘This one’s for you.’ And the first time he did it I was—‘Huh?’ He goes, ‘This one’s for you.’ And I was staring at him. He goes, ‘Eat it.’ And he goes, ‘Well, you wanted someone else to eat it, right? Eat it.’ He shoved it in my mouth. And it doesn’t taste good. He was just dead quiet. I saw him do that to many people. And it wasn’t just salads. Sometimes it was something else. You put a bad anything out and he would just pick it up. And after a while he didn’t have to say anything. He’d just hold it up and you’d eat it. I’m not sure I could legally do it anymore, but I’m telling you, it sure made you pick through your salads carefully. You lived in fear of him coming over. And he would just stare. And if he didn’t say anything, walked away, that was a good day.

  “He would turn bright red and he would get very clipped,” says Pforzheimer. “And it would be, you know, ‘What is this? What are you thinking? What are you thinking?’ That kind of thing. Just sort of a cross between ‘I’m disappointed in you’ and ‘I’m controlling myself so I don’t hit you.’”

  On the flip side there was Tower’s intimacy with the gods of food—Julia Child, Richard Olney, Elizabeth David—that heightened his aura among the crew.

  “We busted our asses for a week just for the moment at nine-thirty when service was winding down and Tower would come in the kitchen and just kind of hang out,” says Pforzheimer. “Kind of lean over by the grill and start talking about something that he did with Julia Child in France ten years ago. We’d all kind of slide over, kind of keep an eye on your pans. But he would just talk ten, fifteen minutes about it. That’s why we were all there. Just to hear that story. Because he tells a great story. He tells an amazing story. And he lived bigger than any of us ever could.”

  Remembers another former cook: “One night there is a world heavyweight championship boxing thing going on, pay per view, somewhere in town. And Tower comes in with the mayor and the chief of police. They come into the restaurant, and they invite him out for dinner to go see the boxing. So he goes out with them to go see the show. And he comes back at like eleven-thirty at night, dinner is over, supper has started. I’m in the pizza station that night and I’m working late so I’m in there. And I see him walk in. And he walks into the restaurant and he has got—and he’s an impeccable dresser—he’s got the chief of police badge, the six-pointed badge, the San Francisco Police badge, on his jacket. And he walks into the kitchen and he’s wasted. He walks into the kitchen and he just screams out, ‘Who’s the new sheriff in town?’ And all the cooks turn around, and—I remember this guy now because he went far in the San Francisco restaurant scene. He became a general manager. At the time he was a busboy. Really handsome gay kid. ‘Who’s the new sheriff in town?’ And he’s standing there like this. And [the guy] is coming out of the kitchen—just happened to be coming out of the kitchen, toward the dining room. Jeremiah is right there and walks up and goes, ‘You! You’re under arrest!’ And he starts walking up to him. And he is like what the fuck? And he starts backing up, backing up. Jeremiah goes, ‘Freeze, you’re under arrest!’ He kept saying, ‘Freeze, you’re under arrest.” And the busboy keeps backing up and he backs up to the hot line. And now meanwhile, the whole dining room is right here and they’re all like looking at J.T. and he goes, ‘You’re under arrest!’ And he backs him up against the hot line. And he goes, ‘Now I’m going to frisk you!’ It was fabulous.”

  “I remember once, it was a late night and I think people were going to do something,” says Pforzheimer, and he said, ‘Are you going?’ And I said, ‘No, I think I’m going home.’ And he looked at me like, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘I’m tired. I want to go to sleep.’ And he said, ‘I’m going to sleep when I’m dead.’ Just very matter of fact. I remember that stuff. I’m fifty-three. It sticks in my head. There’s so much that I teach people now. I teach classes. I have a bazillion employees.* And a lot of it came right out of Tower. Not that it was an original statement, it was just the way he said it. He was actually living it.”

  “JEREMIAH’S JEREMIAH”

  In 1986, Harper & Row published Tower’s first cookbook, Jeremiah Tower’s New American Class
ics, a rectangular tome—modest in heft next to some of today’s doorstops—that was dedicated to Elizabeth David, Richard Olney, and the staff of his restaurants (Balboa Café and Santa Fe Bar and Grill were fresh enough that they are referenced alongside Stars). The book doesn’t promote the restaurants so much as it does Tower himself through stories of grand meals and an aristocratic lifestyle. Photographs depict Tower and friends on a hunt in the countryside, or lunching in a vineyard.

  The headnotes and chapter introductions shimmer with a depth of knowledge and detail only possible from an author who has spent a lifetime in adoration of food. Compared to McCarty’s first cookbook, published three years after Tower’s, New American Classics truly is American—with recipes for stuffed chiles with black bean sauce, grilled vegetable salad with Texas ham and aioli, and a black-and-white ice cream soda. It also neatly encapsulates the dichotomy of Stars with dishes as high-minded and Eurocentric as sea urchin soufflé and as everyday as a chicken club sandwich, both treated with equal seriousness.

  Through it all Tower continued to live big. He made frequent trips to Europe, sometimes with Franz at his side. Before and after Stars opened, the two would often connect with Richard Olney in London, take in a four-hour wine-soaked lunch, then refresh and get back out to dinner, talk nothing but food the entire time. “Richard Olney was Jeremiah’s Jeremiah,” says Franz. Tower also often brought his crew to New York City, booked a limo for the night, toured restaurants with them. Sous chefs and above at Stars were required to have passports, in case he had a sudden urge to expose them to standard-setting experiences, such as breakfast at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris. He called these reference points “benchmarks.”