Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  “THERE ARE THREE SIDES TO EVERY STORY . . .”

  Jeremiah Tower had long fascinated me, enough so that I sought him out for an interview for my blog before I’d sold this book. Jeremiah had flitted in and out of the public eye since shuttering the Stars mothership in 1999, and his absence, as absences can, had inflated his character. He had skipped the work-for-hire stage to which so many chefs submit themselves. It was well known that he was in Mexico, falling back on his architecture degree, flipping houses.

  Tower and I met at Michael White’s Midtown restaurant Ai Fiori for drinks and to conduct an interview. He was everything the legend had led me to expect: handsome, dapper, with a pocket square tucked into his checkered sport coat, and commanding.

  Tower was also in the early stages of a mission. He had recently launched a Twitter account, of which I was one of a handful of followers. He had also launched a website. He was puttering around with Facebook, establishing connections with old friends and colleagues.

  The interview was a pleasure, because Tower is willing to play ball, answer just about anything. And we hit it off, making dinner plans at the Chinese restaurant RedFarm two days later, though I remember being surprised at his availability. We stayed in touch, but it wasn’t until the following year that I learned the extent of his PR mission. In November 2013, Gayle Pirie and John Clark re-created Stars for one evening at their Mission Street restaurant Foreign Cinema in San Francisco. It was a happening: San Francisco restaurant critic Michael Bauer was there. In the kitchen were Stars alums: Bruce Hill, Dominique Crenn, Emily Luchetti, and Loretta Keller. Tower was in a chef’s coat, toasted the diners with a flute of Champagne. (Franz, who says he wasn’t consulted before the event was scheduled, was on holiday in Europe.)

  The next day, Tower gathered a group of his old crew and some new friends, including a couple from Cozumel, for lunch upstairs at Zuni Café. Luchetti was there, as were Steve Vranian and his wife, Jules, who also cooked at Stars. Everybody was mic’d up and a small camera crew circled the table on tiptoe, filming the conversation; Zero Point Zero, the production company responsible for the television series No Reservations and Mind of a Chef, were considering making a documentary about Tower and gathering exploratory footage. (Zuni still holds a place in the hearts of many who once cooked in San Francisco: Word spread to the balcony that Jonathan Waxman was simultaneously dining downstairs.)

  During the lunch, somebody referenced a dispute they’d had. “There are three sides to every story,” Tower yelled to Luchetti. “Your side, the other side . . .”

  “And the truth!” Luchetti yelled back, and everybody burst into laughter. I’ve since learned that the line is a favorite of Tower’s, a go-to chestnut which, it seems to me, is meant to inoculate him against any claims that his side of any story isn’t 100 percent accurate.

  Since then, Tower’s been making up for lost time, showing up at food festivals, including one devoted to honoring him—the second annual Roots of American Food conference, a small gathering in Chicago in 2014. (Full disclosure: I performed an onstage interview with Tower at the event.) And that documentary became a reality: Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent made its theatrical debut in 2017.

  A curious through line to all of this is that Tower seems almost as preoccupied with demanding his credit for Chez Panisse as he is with celebrating and memorializing Stars. At the Roots of American Food conference, Tower gives a talk. The first third to half are devoted to his telling of the Chez Panisse story. He runs down all the greatest hits: a story in which he nearly quit over the substandard quality of green beans delivered to the restaurant by a friend-of-the-house purveyor, his odd-couple relationship with Willy Bishop, the regional American dinner.

  One name is left conspicuously unspoken, as it was from a virtually identical speech he gave at MAD, René Redzepi’s Copenhagen think-conference earlier that year: Alice Waters.

  It reminds me of the time I broached “the letter” with Jeremiah. “I think it was okay to do it,” he tells me. “It’s the only public evidence that she thought . . . up until that point . . . it was the only time she admitted to anybody that she thought I had done something valuable. . . . To this day, it doesn’t horrify me that I did it. Not at all.”

  Tower traces the depth of his resentment to the moment in 1982 when Waters scarcely credited his contribution to her first cookbook, which featured many of his recipes and menus. “This is the woman who took my name out . . . when she did the first book.” But it’s swelled over the years, to monster proportions.

  When I meet with Ruth Reichl for an interview on a rainy midweek afternoon at BackBar restaurant in Hudson, New York, she tells me the genesis of the documentary: Years prior, the Zero Point Zero people had asked Reichl whom they should profile in the second season of Mind of a Chef.

  “And I said, ‘Jeremiah,’” says Reichl. “And Lydia [Tenaglia, cofounder of Zero Point Zero productions] said, ‘Who’s he?’ They’d never heard of him. . . . That is the Alice-Jeremiah problem right there. I mean, this is just, maybe, five years ago.”

  “Well, he’s made a lot of headway,” I say.

  “Yup.”

  I share with Reichl that I’ve had a rough time sorting out the credit issue and ask if Tower is wrong to feel as he does.

  “You know, no, he’s not wrong,” says Reichl. “I mean, yes, he is wrong. I mean, actually: He was an important piece of Chez Panisse at that time but Chez Panisse is Alice’s creature. And you know, I mean, I think the thing that is so interesting about that dynamic is just you’re looking at two sides. You’re sort of looking at Berkeley and San Francisco, you know? And Alice is a revolutionary. And her goal has always been to change the world through food. And Jeremiah is all about glamour and power and position. . . . Alice, she drives a Prius. She lives in the same house she’s [always] lived in.”

  (A similar sentiment was offered by Boulevard restaurant’s Nancy Oakes: “Alice changed what we eat. Jeremiah changed in reality how we eat.”)

  In November 2014, Tower stunned the food world by taking the executive chef job at the embattled Tavern on the Green in New York City’s Central Park, which had been taken over by two Philadelphia restaurateurs and had earned zero stars from both the New York Times and New York magazine. He actively pursued the job, even going through a fire drill at one point when the owners asked him to cook five dishes in seven minutes. “And I did it and it was fine,” he says. “I ran around the stations. You know, I already knew what they were serving but, you know, I sort of went to one of the sous chefs and said, ‘Okay. What’s great? What’s in-house that I don’t know about?’ And he said, ‘We have some filet for one of the banquets. You can have one of those.’ And I saw some chanterelles, and I quickly made some Robuchon mashed potatoes and put a dish together with that. And then there were some heirloom tomatoes so I chopped those up and made a wonderful sort of French-Mexican salsa out of that, put some tilefish in the pizza oven. There was some corn in there so I cooked that with basil and olive oil, did a bed of that with the fish and the salsa on top. And a few other dishes like that.”

  The familiar Tower pattern had been activated: He’d landed a shocking, attention-generating gig, but by April 2015, he was out of Tavern. Once again, he’d gone from low to high and back to low again.

  It only took a year for the next recalibration: Before I knew it, it was April 2016, and I was sitting on a picture-perfect Saturday afternoon at the premiere of The Last Magnificent. In the audience are David Burke, Drew Nieporent, former cooks and front-of-house staff from Stars. (My world had also become bizarrely small; my publisher Dan Halpern, seated mere feet from me, was set to publish a revised edition of California Dish, newly titled Start the Fire.) On the screen, Tower’s life plays out in reenactments, archival footage, and interviews. Mario Batali pronounces Stars more influential than Chez Panisse. We watch as seventy-two-year-old Tower goes through the Tavern folly. Notably absent from the film is Alice Waters, who didn’t consent to an i
nterview.

  The afternoon is a triumph for Tower, who’s brought up on stage after the screening for a conversation with Tenaglia and Bourdain, moderated by Charlie Rose, who wears sneakers with his dress pants. Tower is greeted by a standing ovation, peppered with people from throughout his life—it feels something like a Hollywood ending. In the ensuing months, the film shows at festivals around the United States, he travels to the events, teases them on Facebook. Oh, and in his spare time, he’s written and released an etiquette book, Table Manners.

  The day before the premiere, my friend chef Jimmy Bradley and I interview Tower, Bourdain, and Tenaglia for The Front Burner, a podcast we host on the web-based Heritage Radio Network. Afterwards, Jimmy and I rounded the corner to the elevators to find Tower standing there, trench coat draped over his arm.

  “Can we buy you a drink?” we asked.

  “Can’t do it,” he said. “Meeting people at Marea.”

  Tower was, once again, in demand.

  And yet . . . just as Waters was missing from that speech in Chicago and the movie, she’s also missing from the battle for Chez Panisse. As Tower travels around the world chasing his legacy, she relaxes in Berkeley, travels at her leisure, with—whether right or wrong—nothing to prove. Another moment that haunts me from our interview: Did she really not remember that letter from her former collaborator and lover, framed on the wall in San Francisco’s hottest restaurant for all to see, or was she sending a sly signal that it doesn’t matter? The letter may survive somewhere—for all I know it hangs in Tower’s kitchen in Cozumel—but there’s no public wall on which to flaunt it.

  “Whether this was all Jeremiah or all Alice or some of each or neither or whatever is kind of beside the point,” says Colman Andrews, when I interview him, before launching into a description of Chez Panisse’s relevance. What’s funny is that I never asked him who deserved the credit. He was clearly anticipating—perhaps dreading—the question, weary of it.

  Professional cooking can be cruel. Not only does it demand that a chef prove his or her mettle every day, from scratch, but maintaining a place in the public consciousness demands a restaurant in which to do it. “I don’t really see myself as a chef because I don’t put on my whites,” Tower said to me in our first interview. “I get to go out to dinner instead of cooking it. So, no, I don’t see myself as a chef so much anymore. I would be again the moment there was a restaurant and I put my whites on. But that’s not my identity now for myself.”

  This, it seems to me, is one of the key lessons of Tower’s saga and explains his fixation, after all these years, on Chez Panisse, as well as his attempted comeback at Tavern on the Green. A chef without a restaurant is, almost by definition, incomplete, if not impossible.

  Those who were there will tell you that even by the early 1980s, Waters had attained the messianic glimmer that she exudes to this day. Even then, Chez Panisse was hailed in many circles as the first link in the new American restaurant’s evolutionary chain. Maybe Tower sensed all along that his ocean liner was fated to go the way of most restaurants, while Chez Panisse—with a prominence poised to sustain its modest scale in perpetuity—was built for longevity. Stars menus are tucked away in the drawers of former cooks, its laughter faded, the dishes surviving only in the pages of Tower’s cookbooks. And so I imagine Tower, looking out over generations who know nothing of Stars but make pilgrimages to Chez Panisse, and can understand why he still wants to claim it after all these years, because while his masterpiece’s legacy endures, the place where he—in every sense of the word—left his mark literally survives, as much a museum, or a shrine, as a restaurant. You could have dinner there tonight, if you planned far enough ahead to have secured a reservation. That way lies immortality.

  8

  A Room of Their Own

  Bobby wasn’t Bobby, Mario wasn’t Mario. . . . We were all just cooks.

  —Bruce Bromberg

  HOW BLUE RIBBON CREATED THE LATE-NIGHT CHEF CULTURE OF THE 1990S, AND THE FOOD NETWORK CAME OUT OF NOWHERE TO IRREVERSIBLY ALTER THE INDUSTRY

  Of all the unknowable aspects of professional kitchen life, perhaps none is more misunderstood by the general population than the late-night post-service rituals of cooks and chefs. Outside observers are as fascinated by the drinking and mating habits of the culinary set as they are by what happens in the pan or winds up on the plate. Cooks party. Hard. But for all the literal and virtual ink that’s been devoted to their nocturnal exploits—to what happens after the whites are in the bin and street clothes have been donned—what most outsiders fail to grasp is that cooking doesn’t just happen to attract people who like to drink to excess and go to sleep when vampires do, that it’s not a coincidence that cooks party but rather it’s the work itself that necessitates it.

  Consider: For the average cook working a dinner shift, the day begins in the late morning and continues almost unbroken until well past midnight. The early hours may be calm, a time for prep work and banter. But as sunset approaches, the screws begin to turn and pressure builds toward the dinner hour. Once the orders start flying, heads turn downward and don’t turn back up for five hours or longer. During that time, each cook will ready, fire, and plate a handful of dishes probably dozens of times. They will lose themselves in the tumult of service, acting on intuition. There will be periods of soulful, Zen-like synchronicity. There will also be accidents, miscues, and recoveries. Tempers may flare along with the gas jets. Burns and bruises may accrue. Massive amounts of water and caffeine will be guzzled; trips to the bathroom will be rare.

  After performing, cog-like, for hours, subordinating personality to the kitchen organism, the need for release is immense, and the easiest way to achieve it is, and always has been, through the consumption of alcohol. And so it’s a phenomenon of the industry that those who cook develop a metabolic callus to massive alcohol intake, and to functioning on levels of sleep that would test a med student’s stamina.

  “We needed to decompress quickly because we had to come back the next day, so we would drink,” says Paul Zweben, a veteran of David Burke’s River Café kitchen in the 1980s. “The normal intake for a cook was anywhere from six to twelve beers a night. Twelve beers, you were wasted, but ten beers, you were fine, you were like, ‘All right, guys. Good night. I’m going home.’

  “Even now, I drink more than the normal person,” says Zweben, who co-owns a few Manhattan restaurants and has transitioned to a successful career in Manhattan real estate. “If I went to the doctor and he asked me how many drinks I had a week, he’d say, ‘You have a drinking problem.’ I remember there was one day I was bringing back recyclable bottles from my apartment and I had, like, fifteen cases of recyclable bottles and my neighbor said, ‘Oh my God. Did you have a party?’ I just looked at him and said, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m just recycling my bottles.’ It was like we were on two different planets.”

  “There was always the drinking culture,” says Tom Colicchio, who followed up his gigs at The Quilted Giraffe and Gotham Bar and Grill by helming the kitchen at Mondrian in the late 1980s, where he became one of the few Americans of that decade to earn an elusive New York Times three-star rating. “But it’s not surprising. It’s a tough life in a way. It’s always glorified but it’s fucking hard work. You’re working holidays, you’re working weekends, so your friends are the people you work with. It’s very, very difficult to maintain relationships even with your buddies because your friends are the friends who you’re working with in the restaurant. And then the problem you have when you chef in that restaurant, is that you can’t be friends with these people anymore. It’s much more of a screwed-up culture than people understand it to be. You start drinking when service ends. Last ticket goes out, you start drinking; you’re cleaning up the kitchen, you’re drinking; and you’d go out and you’d drink some more; and you start doing drugs. It’s nowhere near as glamorous as people think it is, the lifestyle.”

  Daniel Boulud recalls that when he was run
ning the kitchen at The Polo restaurant at the Westbury Hotel in the early 1980s, a trio of young American cooks would often work so late for him, helping prepare banquets and such, that he would put them up in a guest room. “The problem was that I needed to deliver a case of beer to them. They were true American kids in this way. I never experienced that in France, the fact that they needed a case of beer before they could go to sleep.”

  Says Stephen Kalt, who cooked under Boulud at Le Cirque in the mid-1980s, “Daniel runs a pressure cooker. He ramps it up and cranks it up and gets it as tight as it possibly can be. And so what are you going to do afterwards, go home and read a book? You’re not going to go to sleep, because you have adrenaline going and it doesn’t stop. It winds down a little, but it’s eleven p.m. and you just served two hundred forty very high-end meals to everyone from Woody Allen to Richard Nixon to Jack and Jane from Connecticut. And he’s already working on specials for the next day and you’re already thinking about when you’ve got to come in and what you have to do in the morning because you just used up all your stuff. It’s not like today where people can’t work more than eight hours.”

  This is a common lament among those who made their bones in the 1970s and ’80s, that employment regulations and the specter of legal action create a climate where excessive working hours and the tough love of a chef, verbal or otherwise, can have devastating consequences. The exertions and pressures of life in a less evolved time created an even greater need for release than today’s cooks feel. And in addition to the desire to decompress (read: drink) came a craving for human interaction, to commiserate with comrades after suppressing the stresses and frustrations of a shift.

  In the early days of the movement, the nocturnal scene was scattershot, lacking a focal point. Chefs and cooks tended to hang with their own crews at whatever bar was most convenient. In New York City, Charlie Palmer and his Aureole gang hit strip clubs or the Old Town, a nineteenth-century tavern on East 18th Street. Others closed down the Subway Inn, a dive bar around the corner from Bloomingdale’s in Midtown, or whatever Irish bar was convenient. Boulud says that sometimes, by coincidence, cooks from different restaurants might end up at the same watering hole: “Next to the subway station would be a bar and all the cooks from every restaurant within a ten-block radius would meet there after work.” Zweben remembers that there was a bar on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights that he and his fellow River Café cooks frequented, but he doesn’t remember the name. “Honestly, it didn’t matter,” he says.