“YO, WE’RE GOING TO EAT SOME CLAMS.”
Stars continued to draw young talent, even from across the country, like Bruce Hill, a young cook who had motorcycled cross-country to San Francisco, wanting in. He got a meeting with Franz but there was no opening, so he campaigned, returning with stalker regularity, until he happened by the day after Brendan Walsh left to return to New York City and was hired.
Hill was taken by the mix of high society and everyman at Stars: “One night that was incredibly memorable was the night that Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys came in for dinner,” says Hill. “They were playing a concert together, so they were at the same table. And I’ll never forget that Jeremiah was really cool; he was totally taking care of them. They didn’t really understand the food. So he was cooking things that would be more understandable to them. And one of the guys from Run-DMC saw some clams on the oyster bar display—there was this oyster bar that had about six counter seats and that was right where the salad guy was. And this guy was like, ‘Hey, man, can you make us some clams?’ And Jeremiah says, ‘Sure, I’ll steam you some clams.’ And so the guy’s in the kitchen watching Jeremiah cooking these clams. And Jeremiah goes, ‘Okay, they’re ready, go back to your table. I’m going to serve them.’ And this guy is walking out of the kitchen. He’s like, ‘Yo, we’re going to eat some clams!’ And right as he’s walking out, some socialite woman is coming out of the bathroom going back to her seat up in this little area called the club area, which was where all the socialites sat, and that’s where all the menus were as well. And I’ll never forget the look on her face. It was like the clash of two worlds: the socialite and some rapper from New York. And it was so beautiful. It was incredible. And that’s really what Stars was all about. It was a place that attracted all these different people.”
“It was the Second Coming of Christ,” says Mario Batali, who was installed as a sous chef at the Clift Hotel in the mid-1980s. “It was the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen. Jeremiah was a fascinating character and renowned. He was loved by society and cooks. He had created a place where—kind of like La Coupole, kind of like Balthazar later—a place where you could go in a tuxedo or you could go in golf shorts and feel comfortable. The food was serious. It was seriously priced but it was of the moment and remarkable for its variation. They changed the menu every day. The way they’d do it, they would come in and they’d have fifty pounds of scallops, they’d put it on the main course menu, and tomorrow if there were nine pounds of scallops left, they would make scallop ceviche. You just watched them, how they cycled the stuff through, and Mark Franz and David Robins and Steve Vranian and Loretta Keller, they would all have a little meeting at the end of the night to look over their stuff. ‘How much do we have left of this?’ In addition to being artistic, it was clearly a business that was being run smartly by the people. Not necessarily Jeremiah’s business smarts because he wasn’t that smart business-wise, but he was a genius in PR and the best possible front man. There wasn’t a person who didn’t love Jeremiah. I’ll never forget a lot of things but one of the things I saw that most impressed me: Paul Bocuse is in there and they served him prime rib and cauliflower gratin. And I just thought, Really? You didn’t serve him the black bean cake or something crazy? And at the end of the day what you realize then is when chefs really want to impress chefs it’s never so much with technique, it’s always with product. So he must have gotten the most amazing American beef and he knew that was going to blow Paul Bocuse away.”
Batali was also drawn to Franz: “That’s all that mattered to me was impressing particularly Mark,” says Batali. “Mark was the godfather of all of my gastronomic ambition. He was just the smartest, goodest guy. He got it. He was fair. He was even. He was passionate. He was a great cook. He was the first guy that was curing his own salami and making his own prosciutto before everyone else started to take credit for it. He was the taciturn but sage leader and it was great to watch him operate. He was the operator of that restaurant. Undervalued historically like you can’t possibly imagine, the single most important influence of my life.”
Batali would park at the oyster bar. “I would sit there for six hours. Drink a single-malt Scotch and watch the whole situation night after night after night or I’d sit at the bar. Maybe I was annoying. I thought I was their friend.
“They would do seven hundred fifty covers a night. I mean it was insane how much volume they were doing. And I mean they were packed at four and they were packed at eleven-thirty. Babbo [Batali’s New York City hit, opened in 1998] was modeled after Stars. I wanted it to feel comfortable and yet elegant enough that if you wanted to put on a tuxedo you’d feel comfortable. And a big menu, they had a big menu. They had a lot of stuff.”
Some of that “stuff”: Jeremiah’s snapper ceviche with avocado-mango salsa, marinated red onions, and cilantro; grilled braised sweetbreads with potato gratin, swiss chard, roast shallots, and pesto; grilled lamb shank with roast eggplant, roast garlic, and a red bell pepper sauce.
The restaurant, also—as Tower had done at Chez Panisse—created themed meals, sometimes based on historic menus or events. “We did the dinner that they served on the Titanic,” says Pforzheimer. “It was very over-the-top things.”
It all kept Tower front and center in American chefdom, but Tower always felt that his homosexuality kept him from being fully accepted, both among his peers and his clientele.
“It has always been a barrier,” says Tower. “Social San Francisco, which I had complete entree to because of [San Francisco socialite] Denise Hale, and they all came to Stars. I was so famous and they wanted to—they had to be at Stars. So they had to never comment on it. San Francisco society figures couldn’t comment on it. But I knew there was still a kind of barrier there that if I had been straight wouldn’t have existed.
“More generally, I think there was a lot of confusion how somebody could be so famous and successful and be gay. And that meant my fellow chefs. You know, I think there was—with some, with many, I don’t know—a lot of resentment that because I was gay I shouldn’t have been able to achieve. In their book, the rules were that I shouldn’t have been able to do what I did.”
None of this was ever explicitly stated to Tower. “This was all a vibe. I mean, I never made a point about it. I never said I was gay and I never denied it because it wasn’t for me. It had just gotten really not much to do with it. For me your sexuality is not a political thing as it became with many, many people. So that was just boring. I mean, I’d rather talk about the politics of foie gras than that. But it was definitely a confusing thing for a lot of people, and I knew that but I just didn’t feel—I mean, I didn’t—there was nothing to deal with, really. But I knew that there were a fair number of chefs who felt resentful. It just wasn’t fair somehow, you know?”
At various times, Tower has also claimed that he hated the demands of his fame and success but now says, “For the most part, I sort of enjoyed it. . . . I did all my public relations. I’d sit at Zuni’s with a glass of Champagne in the afternoon and make notes. And every letter or phone call, anything I ever received or Stars received got a handwritten letter, so there were fifteen or twenty a day that I signed and sent off. So Jeremiah Tower was a construct, a business construct. And the Jeremiah Tower who said hello to three hundred fifty people a day out of the thousand that came through Stars, I mean, you can’t do that. You can’t do that if you actually think that’s who you are. If you are, then you’re a little bit crazy. And also, I never read the good reviews. I read only the bad ones. Because I knew I couldn’t stand it. I knew I was in trouble if I believed my own press. Is there anyone who it wouldn’t go to their head? So, the times that I made big mistakes was when I was starting to believe my own press. That I was this superstar who could do anything he wanted.”
In 1989, a tuxedoed Tower appeared in a Dewar’s ad campaign on which the Scotch giant spent $100 million. Tower also opened a smaller restaurant, Speedo 690, in San Francisco.
&nbs
p; As was the case with other members of the Stanford Court Gang, Tower was in perpetual motion, not only around his various properties, but also at charity events, creating a circuit for the top echelon of chefs that found themselves thrust together around the country, serving morsels of signature dishes at tasting stations, then popping into each other’s restaurants for the star treatment.
“Anytime when we went to New York, to Jams or Bud’s or wherever, of course we’d be wined and dined there, and anytime Jonathan Waxman came to Stars, he’d be wined and dined,” says Vranian. “And we were talking Cristal or whatever. I remember an evening where Jeremiah was sitting there and said, ‘Jonathan, we’ve got to stop this. We’re going to go broke.’ There’d be no check, everything was free. It was just hilarious. But it wasn’t just chefs coming through, of course. Richard Olney was there, Elizabeth David came through.”
There’s a general belief among many of his peers, including Waxman, that Tower spread himself too thin, that being in other restaurants meant there was no Tower at Stars, and Stars without Tower’s immaculate presence, and omnipresent flute of Champagne, wasn’t Stars. Among the places that siphoned his attention were a Stars cafe, Stars offshoots in Oakville, Palo Alto, Manila, Seattle, and Singapore, and a dream project, Peak Café, on the other side of the world in Hong Kong.
Franz traces the beginning of the end to the San Francisco earthquake of 1989: “The kiss of death was the earthquake. Stopped. Overnight. Thirty thousand office workers from the federal and state [buildings] which were all around us who came for lunch on a daily basis were gone. Life was never the same.”
Franz was home when the quake hit: “I was pouring myself a beer, sitting down. As I was sitting down I heard this crash coming from behind me. It was a wave. It was just this wave. But of noise, you know? The world just going like this. And it was the beginning of the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants for the World Series. First game of the World Series. I remember standing out on my foyer looking out over San Francisco and seeing smoke, thinking, Oh my God. The world is done. That is what happened. The world just changed. San Francisco doesn’t like earthquakes. And nobody comes. Once that happens, they don’t come back for a couple years. It takes them a long time to forget. Really. And what happened was, you know, the Bay Bridge was closed. They all stopped coming. They realized that they had food in Berkeley. And it’s never been the same. Ever. San Francisco’s not ever been the same. Not that way.”
Stars held on another decade, then shuttered in 1999. Tower moved to New York City. He wrote a memoir, California Dish, published in 2003. It doesn’t hold back, especially about his feelings about Waters.
“A lot of people have complained about how he’s been,” says Franz. “That was a pretty wicked book. It got deep. He burnt many, many, many, many bridges. . . . A lot of people can’t believe he actually comes back to San Francisco. That’s how much they feel about it.”
Sitting with Alice Waters during our Chez Panisse interview, I ask her about the split with Tower.
It was, she says, “a sad, unfortunate parting because we certainly had great, great times but it really fell apart, like a marriage. Very painful ending . . . but you know, when I really do think about it, we went our separate ways and it seems much more of a logical parting because I was much more political. I mean, I was political. He’s apolitical. . . . I was an idealist and he was cynical. And the restaurant sort of had a life bigger than both of us at that point. It had a momentum.”
“I’ve interviewed him a couple of times,” I say. “It’s hard for me to picture him here. It really is. Stars I get, not having ever been there but knowing all about it.”
“But you could picture him if you [could] see him in his twenties,” she says. “And somebody that had never been a professional chef and getting into his whites and thinking about, you know, those blinis that his aunt made or whatever it was. ‘Oh, let’s do them so that there’s butter dripping down off your elbows. Let’s serve it with that.’ I mean, he was playful in that way and a little nervous that there was only one meal; you had to have it on or it didn’t work.”
“When Stars came along,” I suggest to Waters, “it seems to me like it brought what each of you was fundamentally about into high relief.”
“I would say that,” agrees Waters. “I think that that’s really accurate. . . . We both went on and made what we wanted.”
This was my only sit-down with Alice Waters but that portion of our conversation is the one I can still hear, the one that rang the most true, the least guarded.
“WHAT’S THAT DOING THERE?”
Sometime during the writing of this book, I recognized that while it’s of course desirable to relate history with the authority of one who was there, it can also be dishonest. These stories were told to me, and a thorny theme was the desire of many involved to shore up their respective legacies; one former River Café cook, a good friend of mine no less, even told me he dreamed up the chocolate Brooklyn Bridge. There were moments when I felt more like a beleaguered gumshoe than a guy who just wanted to relay the evolution of the American chef, and never more so than when trying to disentangle the Tower-Waters double helix.
The question is so front of mind that when I imagine Stars, there’s one image that floats to mind above all others—it’s not the groundbreaking low-high combination of a burger and glass of Lafite at the bar, or Tower mingling amongst the people, the chef-impresario, ruler of all that he surveyed. It’s not the famous photo of him astride a motorcycle purchased the same day he defeated Doyle Moon in a lawsuit, or laughing uproariously with his bar patrons. It’s not his Dewar’s ad.
I’ve seen all those things, and yet the image that comes to me is of a handwritten letter, hung on the restaurant’s wall, just below the VIP section. It was a letter written to Tower by Waters back in the mid-1970s, praising his talents, in very personal terms.
The letter lodges in the memory of many. The first interview I conducted for this book was with Jonathan Waxman. I wasn’t sure where I was going with it when I asked him if I could bend his ear. We met at the lounge of Batali’s Chelsea restaurant Del Posto, which—as Stars once did—had a piano player when it first opened. Jonathan, whose lack of vanity I find lovable, arrived in checkered chef’s pants, a purple Izod polo shirt, and sneakers. We began interviewing and this, literally, was the first unsolicited thing he said to me: “There is a famous incident from when Jeremiah Tower opened up Stars. There is a VIP section at Stars and he put letters from friends and fans up there and he put up a letter, a love letter, that Alice Waters had written to him. When he left Chez Panisse, Alice wrote how much she adored having him at Chez Panisse. It was a love poem. I am not going into the psychological analysis of what she means but it was a letter that was meant for his eyes only. It should never have been in the public. It should have been an intimate thing but Jeremiah put it on the wall. I kind of know why he did that. He wanted to flaunt his independence. It was kind of a crazy, wild thing to do. I would have never done it. But in a way it sort of showed what Jeremiah was all about. It also showed the emotion of what was going on those times. Because everybody knew that it was kind of like [Edward] Teller in Los Alamos. He was the genesis of making American food what it is about now. That is all because of Jeremiah and Alice.”
Why did Jonathan mention that letter, I wondered. It wasn’t a secret. It’s been written about in the San Francisco Chronicle, and in Thomas McNamee’s book Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. And those who saw it remember it. “There was a letter from her,” says Pforzheimer. “It was like a love letter up on the wall. And at some point over the course of a year and a half working there I’d read everything on the walls but I never asked about it. I knew it was weird that that was there because I knew that they didn’t get along, but I guess I was too chicken to ever pull someone aside and say, ‘What’s that doing there?’ He stuck it there as kind of a ‘fuck you’ as I recall. Everything else on the wall was the 1983 Schramsberg tasting and
menus of the Lusitania.”
“Well, first of all, my comment on that action is . . . if you’d like to be in the hospitality business, you have to maintain good manners, and if you don’t have good manners, you’re an asshole. The end,” says Clark Wolf. “Jeremiah Tower behaved badly in public. Shame on him. The end. . . . He stopped having a voice for me and a lot of other people when he went to the self-aggrandizing negative. He invited the press—mostly the New York Times—to Chez Panisse hoping for fame and glory. Turns out he is not what they found interesting and it’s bitten his ass forever. Honey, get over it. When you light your hair on fire, what you get is a burnt scalp. . . . I’m not saying Alice is Mother Teresa, but then as I understand, neither was Mother Teresa.”
During our Chez Panisse interview, I ask Waters about the letter.
“What letter?” she asks, stunning me.
“The letter from you that he put up on the wall at Stars.”
“You know, I can’t even remember the letter. What did I say?”
“I’ve never seen it. But it was after a dinner here and you were singing his praises and he put it up on the wall at Stars near the VIP area.”
“Oh, yes. I do remember it.”
I tell her that a former waiter from Stars told me that Waters had come in for dinner a few times, and that I couldn’t square that with their vituperative separation.
“I think the letter was describing a meal that maybe he made for Richard Olney, I think it might have been. And I think he was proud of the meal, and the fact that I really liked him sort of proved that I really liked his cooking. Yeah, it was a personal letter, but I can’t remember the details of it. But I do know that it was a personal letter to him. And I probably wouldn’t have put something like that on the wall . . . [but] it didn’t keep me from going.”
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