The United States of Arugula (26 page)

BY 1975, TOWER’S THEME
dinners and ever-more outlandish flights of culinary fancy—like his Gertrude Stein–Alice B. Toklas dinner, composed of recipes from
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
, and his week of Salvador Dalí–inspired fare, such as
l’entre-plat drogue et sodomise
, a leg of lamb “drugged and sodomized” by a mixture of Madeira, brandy, and tangerine juice injected through a syringe—started attracting the press attention he craved. Herb Caen, the
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist and beloved local institution, wrote up the Stein-Toklas dinner, and James Beard, during one of his regular trips west to
teach cooking classes, paid a visit to Chez Panisse and mentioned it in his syndicated column as a “fascinating” new place to watch. “I don’t know where it came from, but I have a very good instinct for PR,” Tower says. “Basically, getting somebody to write about you is the same as getting them to sleep with you. And I’d had a lot of practice in that. I adored Richard Olney, but he wasn’t any use. Jim Beard, I realized, was gonna be very useful to us, because he had a hundred newspapers or something syndicating him.”

Tagging along with Beard’s friend Cecilia Chiang, proprietor of the Mandarin restaurant in Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, Tower met the master in his suite at the Stanford Court Hotel. “Cecilia took me up to the hotel,” Tower says, “and it didn’t hurt that he was receptive to my paying attention to him.” Everything went as planned: Beard took a shine to Tower, and soon was inviting him up to the Stanford Court whenever he was in San Francisco, addressing the young chef as “darling” and “my dear” in the swishy manner he reserved for boys he fancied.

In October of 1975,
Gourmet
ran a rave review of Chez Panisse by Caroline Bates, the magazine’s West Coast correspondent, hailing Tower for “joyously exploring
la vraie cuisine française
in all its vigor, freshness, and variety and ignoring those French dishes that turn up elsewhere with such monotonous regularity.” The
Gourmet
review was crucial, its appearance the juncture at which Chez Panisse gained a national reputation, and at which people with unfamiliar area codes started calling for reservations. It was also a crossroads for Bishop, who, a few months after the review appeared, threw down his apron for good, unable to abide the onslaught of what he called “food weenies,” some of whom dined with that issue of
Gourmet
open in their laps, hoping to find the dishes they’d read about re-created—a futile hope at Chez Panisse, where, at least in those days, no menu was ever served twice.

The question arises: Precisely what was Alice Waters, the person most readily identified with Chez Panisse, doing as all this dazzling culinary wizardry was transpiring? “Overbooking, mainly,” says Bishop. “And then hiding in the kitchen when she overbooked, because we only had enough food
for a certain number of people.” In fairness, it should be noted that the front of the house, Waters’s domain, also came in for copious praise in the
Gourmet
review, with Bates devoting her entire first paragraph to the atmosphere that Waters had so carefully cultivated: “It is warm with the honesty of natural wood … Just inside the main dining room a still-life table arrangement of flowers, unblemished fresh fruit, and glistening fruit tarts suggest that this is a restaurant more interested in art than in artifice.” But the kitchen was very much Tower’s show in those days, and as the restaurant grew more successful and Tower and Waters more famous, their relationship, always volatile, suffered more blowups.

There was a notorious episode in which Waters seated a party of four after 10 p.m. that included her then boyfriend Robert Finigan, the restaurant critic and wine writer, even though the group had no reservation. Tower was furious—the night’s entrée,
gigot d’agneau
, leg of lamb, was almost sold out, and he didn’t have enough for everyone. He offered to cook someone a steak instead, but was told by a waiter that Waters, who had sat down with the group, demanded that everyone be served the lamb. “So the other three people at the table had perfect lamb,” says Finigan, “and my plate was so gristly that I couldn’t eat it. And I—politely, I think—asked the waiter to take it back to the kitchen and say to the chef that he couldn’t have intended that to be the case.” The waiter complied, but Tower, growing angrier by the minute, replied, “Tough shit!” The waiter, inexperienced and terrified of further incurring Tower’s wrath, returned to the table and announced, “The chef says to tell you, ‘Tough shit.’” Moments later, Waters stormed into the kitchen, sobbing and screaming, “Jeremiah, how could you?”
*

Asked for her own assessment of the Tower era, Waters says, “That was a period of time when I was very much on the foraging side and Jeremiah was very much on the cooking side, so we fit that together. I had always intended
Chez Panisse to be a simple little place. Never wanted anything more, and I still don’t want anything more. When Jeremiah came, he had a whole other vision of the food. It was just the kind of food that I …
[contemplative pause]
wasn’t cooking. And I was fascinated by it at the time.”

If there’s a whiff of diplomatic evasiveness about these comments, it’s because Tower’s contribution to Chez Panisse remains a touchy subject, and the relationship between Tower and Waters remains rather tortured and complex. Tower, though he physically still looks like someone who should be “standing at the prow of a yacht,” as the Chez Panisse busboy-turned-baker Steve Sullivan puts it, has withdrawn from the restaurant game and acquired the gossipy mien of the late-period Truman Capote; he’s funny and unafraid to say whatever is on his mind, yet his wit and entertaining braggadocio can’t mask an abiding bitterness—in his case, over Waters’s “editing,” as he puts it, of his role at the restaurant. Waters, on the other hand, has matured into a great doer of good, America’s foremost champion of organic farming, sustainable agriculture, and healthily fed schoolchildren, beatified in a PBS
American Masters
special as the architect of a “delicious revolution.” As such, she comports herself with the dignity and guard-up caution of a UN goodwill ambassador. Yet even she can’t suppress a smirk and a roll of the eyes when a portion of Bates’s
Gourmet
review is read aloud to her, a paragraph that praises a course of “quenelles of fresh fish, beef suet, and marrow with a lobster sauce.”

“That was a baroque period,” she says, smiling. “But that was
his …
his taste, his desire.”

The paradox of the Tower period is that it put Chez Panisse on the map, but in many respects wasn’t representative of what the restaurant, or Waters, stood for, before or after. Some Waters loyalists, like Tom Luddy and Greil Marcus, go so far as to label the Tower era a ghastly aberration. “If you read Jeremiah’s menus from that time, they’re incredibly pretentious,” says Luddy. “They were going toward that Paris haute-cuisine thing that Chez Panisse later turned against. I’d go to Alice and say, ‘I can’t eat this—it’s too rich. And then there’s all this cheese coming.’” Marcus remembers going to
Chez Panisse for a New Year’s Eve dinner in 1975 with his wife, Jenny, a fellow Pagnol et Cie board member, as they’d done every New Year’s Eve since the restaurant opened. They arrived, Marcus says, to find the place bereft of their old Berkeley crowd and “packed with Jeremiah’s cocaine-dealer friends. We took one look at the crowd, and the menu, which was full of all these haute, heavy courses we didn’t want to eat, and left.”

The price for that night’s dinner, whose main course was “prime sirloin of beef with truffles, roasted and served with a truffled Madeira sauce,” was an astounding $25 a person, not including wine—a long way from the convivial Francophile bistro that had arisen out of the Free Speech Movement. Yet those who actually were on the staff at the time say that Tower’s transformative effect on the restaurant is indisputable. “Anybody who says that Jeremiah made it too fancy is whistling in the wind to me,” says Jerry Budrick, the headwaiter. “All I know is we sold out every dinner. The more elegant Jeremiah made those dinners, the more the public responded. And it wasn’t just the snobby elite.”

“There are two camps,” says Tower. “There’s someone like Darrell Corti [the Sacramento wine expert and gourmet-foods-shop owner], who sent a Sicilian Mafia funeral wreath when I did the week of Escoffier menus, saying ‘This is the end, Chez Panisse can never be greater than this.’ And the other camp is, I destroyed the little Pagnol-movie neighborhood thing. And the truth is, you know, both.”

BY 1976, BURNED OUT
by the long hours and the tensions at Chez Panisse, Tower was trying to conjure an exit strategy. Beard suggested that Tower take over the kitchen of Maxwell’s Plum, Warner LeRoy’s upscale pub in New York. Tower rejected that idea, having grown too fond of the ingredients and open spaces that northern California afforded, but was intrigued by Beard’s advice to “just stick with America.” Beard had been proselytizing on behalf of American food for years, and had published his would-be masterwork,
American Cookery
, in 1972, but it wasn’t until Tower was feeling stirrings
of discontent that Beard’s message reached him, that it occurred to him that a serious chef could, as he puts it, “use American ingredients for themselves rather than as substitutes for unobtainable French ones.”

The epiphany occurred when Tower, as was his wont, was paging through an ancient cookbook for inspiration—in this case,
The Epicurean
, by Charles Ranhofer, the chef at Delmonico’s, the great restaurant of New York’s Gilded Age. One of Ranhofer’s recipes was for
crème de mais à la Mendocino
, a cream of corn soup. The town and county of Mendocino were just up the coast from Berkeley, due north of Sonoma. Tower remembers thinking, “What in the world was the chef of New York’s most famous restaurant doing thinking about dishes local to small regions of California?” More to the point, he wondered, “Why fret any longer about the authenticity of ‘French’ ingredients for French regional food? Why not just go shopping in northern California and call that the region?”

On October 7, 1976, having exhausted nearly all the regions in France and nearly all the French cookbook authors whose recipes interested him, Tower unveiled his Northern California regional dinner at Chez Panisse, its menu entirely in English. The second course was “cream of fresh corn soup, Mendocino style, with crayfish butter.” In another nod to Ranhofer’s era, when restaurants often listed the provenance of the ingredients on the menu, Chez Panisse that night served, among other courses, “Spenger’s Tomales Bay bluepoint oysters on ice,” “Big Sur Garrapata Creek smoked trout steamed over California bay leaves,” “Monterey Bay prawns sautéed with garlic, parsley, and butter,” and “Preserved California geese from Sebastopol.” The descriptions didn’t yet have the intimacy of later years—apart from the mention of Spenger’s, a Berkeley fish market, there was no nod by name to a supplier, à la “Bob’s turnips” and “DeeAnn’s garden greens”—but there would be no turning back. The notion of a “California cuisine” was afoot.

Within a couple of years, California cuisine would be seen as a bona fide culinary movement, though its base of operations would not be Berkeley but Los Angeles, the home of the young chefs Wolfgang Puck and Jonathan Waxman, the latter a Chez Panisse alum. In the meantime, Berkeley had its own
mini-movement in the form of the “Gourmet Ghetto,” as the area around Shattuck and Vine was coming to be known. The Cheese Board had moved directly across the street from Chez Panisse in 1975, in a space next door to the Pig-by-the-Tail Charcuterie, which had been opened two years earlier by Chez Panisse’s first chef, Victoria Kroyer Wise. The opening in 1977 of yet another culinary shrine on the block, Alice Medrich’s Cocolat, the dessert shop that kicked off the chocolate-truffle craze in America, “is what kind of cinched the whole Gourmet Ghetto thing,” says Wise. Just as sleepy little Freeport, Maine, by virtue of being the home of L.L. Bean’s outlet store, became Outlet Town, U.S.A., so was Berkeley, California, by virtue of Chez Panisse and its neighbors, becoming Gourmet Town, U.S.A.

AS 1977 APPROACHED
,
Tower was presented with an enticing short-term opportunity: Richard Olney had been asked by Time-Life to compile and edit another of its multivolume cookbook series, this one to be called
The Good Cook
, and he wanted Tower to join him in France and work on the project. Tower and Olney had finally met in person in 1973, when the latter came to San Francisco for a book signing at Williams-Sonoma, and they had subsequently become fast friends. On one of his vacations from Chez Panisse, Tower journeyed to Olney’s home in Provence to learn the master’s secrets, and, inevitably, go to bed with him.
*
He decided to take Olney up on the offer, telling Waters he would be gone by the end of the year. Tower toggled between the French and American idioms for the last three months of his tenure, signing off after one last New Year’s Eve dinner, at which he served, in a final flourish of Toweresque decadence, a truffle soup.

Chez Panisse’s kitchen was taken over by a committee led by Tower’s sous-chef, Jean-Pierre Moullé, an actual Frenchman and the first employee of the restaurant to have authentic culinary training. Moullé’s deputies were
Mark Miller and Michel Troisgros, the nephew of the great French chef Jean Troisgros, who was so taken with Chez Panisse that he wanted one of his kin to experience its inner workings firsthand.

But as of 1977, the restaurant was indisputably Waters’s. With Tower around, she had achieved recognition as a restaurateur, but had never been the go-to person when it came to food itself. Now she was planning the menus and calling herself the “chef,” even though she was more of a kitchen overseer and Moullé the actual guy cooking. And, with Budrick’s help, she was starting up a Chez Panisse garden on an expanse of property that Budrick, owned in Amador County, northeast of Berkeley, with the hope that the restaurant would be able to grow its own unusual produce, planted and harvested to Waters’s specifications.
*
With Tower’s outsize presence no longer a factor, she was now the focus of articles about Chez Panisse, and would gradually emerge as the Waters that America would come to know: the farm-to-table lady in the beret, importuning us to think globally and eat locally.