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| Jeremiah outside Stars on his BMW circa1988 |
Jeremiah Tower, now in his early Seventies, is currently in the midst of a well-earned revival. He was the chef most commonly associated with the birth of Californian Cuisine, which started with his time at the stove of Chez Panisse in Berkeley 40 years ago and then grew in the Eighties with his all singing and dancing Stars in San Francisco. There have been the occasional ups and downs since then, but he has found contentment living in his villa in Merida in the Yucatan, where he has also restored the odd house (don't forget, he trained as an architect at Harvard) when he is not snorkelling or travelling to food festival events around the globe.
I did a profile on him a few years back when he was on one of his regular visits to London
and found a lot to like about him. We had met briefly in the Eighties at Stars, when I was able to compare a bottle of Grange against a Rostaing Côte-Rôtie (the latter was the winner). He has an extraordinary knowledge of fine wine and more recently, we drank bottles of Pétrus 82 and Latour 82 – both ridiculously unready. He is now half way through filming a documentary with Anthony Bourdain for CNN.
I can’t do better than quote from AB about JT:
“He was the original. He was the first chef in America that you wanted to see in the dining room. He was the guy who transformed American menus from what they were to what they are now. He’s a hugely compelling personality, a dangerous man. He’s the history of everything. I mean, cautionary tale, inspiration. It’s all there. It’s a great story as well as an historical correction that needs to be made.”
Backstory on MAD Food Camp – Three years ago, René Redzepi of Noma decided to hold an annual food symposium with innovative chefs and historical food figures in a circus tent on an island near Copenhagen.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303740704577524981538924826
After a miserable downpour nearly succeeded in flooding out the first event, it has since become the most interesting and stimulating gathering of food people on the planet….(BP)
Jeremiah Tower’s speech at MAD4 in Copenhagen, 24/25 August 2014
First of all, it is an honor to be invited to MAD, and thank you René, Alex, and Mark for what has turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life. And thanks also to the teams for the three wonderful lunches. Now, not to screw it up.
I wanted to talk about JUNGLE TO TABLE cooking, and the Chinese chef who recently was killed by the severed head of the cobra he had planned to eat for lunch. But I was asked to talk about something frivolous instead, so have chosen my career, how and why it was successful, and what, if anything, it means now and for the future.
The first time I gave a speech to chefs and cooks was at a graduation ceremony at the CIA [Culinary Institute of America, not the other one bp] in Hyde Park NY. The dean had asked me to give the graduating class some advice on what the students could expect in their first job. “If you come to work for me at Stars,” I told them, “you will spend the first week learning how to prep lettuce.
Then you will learn how to peel 20 cases of ripe tomatoes. And all this time you will work in the basement room where the ingredients are received, inspected, and stored. You will learn that no matter how perfect the ingredient, if you can’t get it into the hands of the line cook in perfect condition, it means nothing (except disaster). So don’t expect to be a sous chef within the first 6 months and make the first payment on a BMW.” Half the room hissed, and the other half booed.
I haven’t given a speech in front of cooks and chefs since then and until now. So it is with some trepidation that I stand here. But looking around and seeing the company I am in makes it quite clear that this is no time to be timid, so here goes.
My advice is still somewhat the same. Focus on ingredients and only dream about the car. It has always been about ingredients, was when I started, and more than ever, is now.
And I don’t mean the paedophile love (thank you Fulvio) [Italian chef Fulvio Pierangelini had said "food blogs were for gastronomy as were paedophiles for love" in his MAD4 speech earlier –no, I don’t know what it means either bp] for baby vegetables and the infantile language of menus that goes with them, like “sweetie, crunchy, dearie.”
I am not obsessed with what WAS. But just because the past is past does not mean it’s over. No more than because the future is the future, it has not happened yet. And, after all, the future was made yesterday.
And if that isn’t true, we wouldn’t all be here holding MAD in our hands.
But I do agree with David Chang after his visit to San Francisco restaurants: “Fuckin’ every restaurant in San Francisco is just serving figs on a plate. Do something with your food.”
From my first day as chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1973 – I was faced with what to do not with figs, but green beans. By the way, I had never cooked in a restaurant before, and this was actually my first real job. But I had always been entranced with design, and I was a failed architect, or rather the world had failed to recognize my genius as an underwater architect and I was down to my last 25 dollars. You can’t blame those Harvard professors after I had summoned plankton like foraminifera to be the structure or my ocean floor housing. Or when I designed an underwater vehicle that was fueled with sea water, the MIT professors told me, ‘Jeremiah you have re-designed a whale.’ Too many drugs I guess.
No wonder I was broke and answered the first ad for a job that I saw in San Francisco.
I showed up and they gave me the job – just to show you how desperate they were.
My first morning at work the produce arrived at the kitchen door. The first crate I checked revealed some enormous Kentucky Wonder green beans. I took one look and told the delivery guy to take them back. “Can’t do that,” he said, “they have never sent anything back.” “Well, we have now,” I told him. 15 minutes later two owners showed up, one of them a lawyer. They repeated the bit about never returning anything already delivered. After all, the produce guy was their friend.
I slowly took off the apron I had worn for about 30 minutes, laid it on the kitchen table and said, ‘well then, why don’t you cook them. I’m outahere.’ Hoping desperately they wouldn’t since I had about 7 dollars to my name at that point, barely enough to get the bus back to San Francisco. They backed down, or out into the dining room, and left me to cook lunch all by myself for 50 people, and then to cook dinner for 70 with only my Beatnik, cocaine snorting, Menthol cigarette smoking, ex rock and roll drummer assistant, Willy, to help.
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| Jeremiah at Chez Panisse |
The rest of just about everything that arrived that week was not much better. And looking back on that past makes me say now that it is almost impossible for anyone in this room to understand that in the USA in 1973 that there were almost nothing of the variety and quality of fresh ingredients that we take for granted now. I know that you don’t believe me, any more than you do when I tell you that we are now in a spaceship. You all think it’s a tent!
So what to do cooking with no decent ingredients? I stole nasturtium flowers on my way to work, dreamed of re-creating my mother’s one-acre English fruit and vegetable garden. But at first only a dream. Then one day a young charter fishing boat guy showed up at the back door of the Panisse kitchen. He was shyly holding a huge salmon and shyly asking me if I wanted to buy it. BUY IT! I ran and grabbed it out of his hands. Anything, I told him, anything that comes out of that Bay, I will buy.
When I started buying huge and ugly conger eels for a perfect bouillabaisse, or mushrooms from the local hills, the word got out. Since we cooked a different menu every day depending on what I could get my hands on, I had no problem going out into the dining room during the service and telling everyone that the chicken did not come up to snuff that day, and that they would have to eat the salmon four hours out of the water. Or telling them that the baby geese I had bought months before were now grown, now confit, and now in the cassoulet in the ovens that night.
And so on it went until some people at the back door got the idea to start up some small business to sell us ingredients to our specifications. So I started the ‘boots-on-the-forest-floor’ or the ‘back-of-a-beaten-up-old-VW-bus’ to table movement.
My bean lesson was when I was a teenager and my Russian aunt parked me by the bin of green beans at the local market, where I proudly picked out two pounds of the biggest ones I could find. When my aunt came by to check she took my bag and dumped back on the pile. “No, darling, only the smallest and barely-formed pubescent ones.” So that was another 20 minutes and a fine lesson. Years later I was ready for the arrival of the jumbo Kentucky Wonders. And to send them back for some other vegetable. That was my benchmark with beans.
MY BENCHMARK SCALE
10 The little pubescent velvety green beans
9
0 The jumbo Kentucky Wonder green beans
At the California Culinary Academy in the late 70’s after I had sold my part of Chez Panisse, I gave classes in ingredient benchmarks to teach that it is not about any one individual’s taste - that quality is only barely subjective. To prove I gave a blind tasting class in chocolate. The group had all voiced their preference for Hershey bars. After 15 different chocolates, Hershey was at the bottom of everyone’s scores, and Lindt at the top. It became the benchmark, until a better one was found.
As I have said, at my first day on the job quality ingredients were no mystery to me, but when after a year I met the founder of Connoisseur wine imports, George Linton, I was introduced to a new world of defining quality. He gave me many lessons about Burgundy and taught me about Premier Cru (which is French for “growth”) vs. Grand Cru (the best). Just to confuse things, in Bordeaux it is the other way around and everything is Grand Cru but “first” is best. Was it always true, and were they always worth the price? The most dramatic lesson involved four different vintages each of what are considered two of the greatest red Burgundies - La Tâche and Romanée-Conti. These days, the price of the 2010 RC is $12,000 to $15,000 a bottle, and the La Tâche $3000 to $4,000.
Is the RC really 4 to 5 times better than the La Tâche? We tasted them together. A close race, but what was that feeling that drinking the RC put one in a sensory realm that was previously unchartered --- unless, of course, one had had eaten some Petrossian beluga out of the kilo tin with a spoon with hot, buttered English muffins, or drunk an old and slightly chilled d’ Yquem with cold roast goose on a hot August afternoon.
OK we agreed, the RC is out there in a stratosphere of its own.
Let me show you why, George said, drawing on a couple of napkins.
First: The first one is what everyone thinks is the 0 – 10 scale. In this realm is the belief that everything can be measured and proven. It is also the realm of relativism (any opinion or taste is as good as another) and where the homogenizing of humanity occurs. And this, in the world of ingredients, is where Tyson Foods and Monsanto are, circling their wagons, but with us on the outside. We are the Indians out there getting shot at, out there where they would like to exterminate us. This is where we’re facing the extinction of the environment and its ingredients. But I agree with chef Alain Senderens [previous speaker] and Voltaire about discernment – so here we are dealing with another scale altogether – this time only from 9 – 10.
Second: In this scale, nothing can be proven (at least to lab scientists). It is just a matter of common recognition and agreement. In this 9 -10 realm, I have found that for any shared experience, there is always agreement that it was an ultimate. A benchmark. When you serve an old d’Yquem with aged and very rich roast rib of beef, everyone at the table knows that marriage is pushing us to a very instructive limit.
Serve white wine, a big chardonnay, with cheeses, and the initially apprehensive looks around the table turn to a new wonder. By the way -- the pinnacle of this realm is Le Montrachet from the DRC – have a glass of that and all the chardonnays of the world will line up behind it. It is here where we can make sure there is a future. That we will find out what we will be cooking next, here from what we cook will trickle down to the public so that they will say ‘NO’ to more Tyson-industrial ingredients, say ‘NO’ to Monsanto, say ‘YES’ to eating only healthful and joyful ingredients. MAD is addressing both realms, but the 9-10 benchmarks are also our guide through trends and what we create today of the future.
TRENDS
We love trends, especially when we start them, but is our future really about one trend after another, the Holy Grail being the list of what’s next and what comes after that?
The future is not about trends, even though it will be full of them. René thinks there is a big future in Mexican cuisine, as do I, particularly when mixed with Indian cuisine – think of the various so-called “curry” pastes and powders and the moles of Oaxca, or the three recados or pastes of the Yucatan: the green pumpkin seed, the red achiote or annatto, and blackened chili or chilmole.
Remembering that and looking back to the future, I think again of Escoffier and his keep it simple. Faites Simple. Or of Oscar Wilde’s “The simple is the last refuge of the complex.”
--- and whether I followed that maxim in my career?
STARS
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| Yquem by the bottle |
At my flagship restaurant Stars in San Francisco I did with the food, cocktails, and wine program (Chateau d’Yquem by the glass, for example), but the packaging of the message, the restaurant itself, was over the top.
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| Jeremiah in the kitchen at Stars |
The main reason for Stars success is that we were a team and usually stayed a step or two ahead of disastrous mistakes, despite my best efforts. Here are some of the other reasons.
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| Julia Child at Stars |
The opening motto was everything from blue jeans (less) to black tie (more). Johnny Apple from the New York Times called it “the most democratic restaurant in the United States,”
There is Denise Hale, then San Francisco’s top socialite at HER table, the photo of us behind her. But next to that photo is the one of the gay bull riders from the San Francisco rodeo that Stars had sponsored. Somehow everyone, including Denise, got it!
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| Denise Hale at her Stars table |
As for the democracy of Stars Food - sit in the main dining room and have a cocotte of whole sweetbreads studded with black truffles and perfumed with 100-year old Madeira or sit at the bar and have a Stars hamburger with a glass of Lafite. Really it was everything for someone, more than something for everyone – though that too! The democracy also included Star power.
Like Rudolf Nureyev with his entrance bringing all the customers to their feet in an ovation.
And Streisand, Armani, whatever President in office, or Pavarotti
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| Pav and Jeremiah |
It was the first time that the rich and famous and superstars were sitting in a public restaurant, out in the open, mixing with the government clerk from the courts across the street, the owner of the hot dog stand next door, and groupies from all over town.
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| Julia Child's birthday party at Stars |
Heady stuff. And quite clearly more was definitely more.
But it wasn’t all about star power – design had a lot to do with Stars success. Specifically the tension created by putting the huge bar right across from the then radically open kitchen, with an oyster bar for single diners in between.
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| Stars kitchen |
As for my CAREER
How did I get to all that from nearly being fired for turning back shitty beans?
As the story goes, if it had not been for a bunch of French cooks, California would never have been born. And I tell this story about marketing oneself and therefore one’s restaurant because it has two messages:
1.
1. Always be alert for the moment that will propel you into success,
getting what you want
getting what you want
2. And be ever wary of getting it.
My moment was a lunch in 1983 for 100 American food journalists at the Astor Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, where Guy Savoy was cooking dinner – the main event.
I had brought a team of California cooks, just kids, and when we showed up early at the kitchen door of the mansion, the French team told us to get lost. Grabbing the moment I turned to my crew and said ‘right, let’s set up on the lawn.’
All we had to cook with were some 6-foot grills fired by a few hundred pounds of mesquite charcoal we had brought on the plane (no mesquite in the East in those days).
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| The BBQ that changed the face of California Cuisine |
What ended up happening is that we had to cook everything on the charcoal grills, astonishingly enough for us and the journalists. But what really stormed their imagination was when we grilled the dessert.
Picture four cooks in white, each with a sauté pan in hand, tossing a ragout of mixed berries and syrup as high in the air as we could without making fools or ourselves and wasting the dessert. Also, as it turned out, the reporters were too full from lunch to really enjoy dinner. Some of them slept through it.
A week later a 100 food sections appeared across the USA, some full page for the first time, many in color for the first time. The huge headlines screamed MESQUITE IS IT and GRILLING IS NOW IT. For the first time the words “CALIFORNIA CUISINE were spread all over the United States.” Overnight we were famous, and a new cuisine was born.
In the plane back to California, my cooks were ecstatic at our victory. One of them looked back at me in the seat behind them and saw tears on my face. He was at first horrified, and then puzzled. “No worries,” I told him, “it’s just that we got what we wanted. And God help us all, from now on.” And why did I concentrate on Stardom (sorry Fulvio) in the early 1980’s as well as the food service, wine and bar?
To get the message across that we were not servants relegated to the kitchen basement and servant’s hall, to show loudly and clearly the really important message that a successful restaurant did not have to be only for the rich elite. It could be great and popular as well.
But once on the road to fame and success it was hard to get off. After the Dewars national billboard campaign...
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| Dewars ad... |
All hell broke loose.
Soon Time magazine, in an article about the emergence of the chef as a superstar, said that I had had more publicity than Meryl Streep – as ludicrous as that sounds. But a week later I did have my BMW.
And finally, to answer Rene’s question to Alain Senderens about what keeps one going?
Again, for me its ingredients. When I wander out for coffee in Italy or the south of France and find a few people selling what flowered or ripened that morning, huge squash flowers, ripe white peaches, fresh white beans just crying out for spring garlic and olive oil, perhaps a little lobster coral butter as well. Or wandering down the Santa Monica farmer’s market, even in January Or walking in a winter storm in Galica, through pounding rain, to find percebes in a deserted ocean front restaurant - and so on. Then I can’t wait to get back to a kitchen. God, I hate the restaurant bureaucracy. But I have never lost my love for perfect ingredients.
Thank the team – Aly, Gabe, blond Mark, and dark James - and all of you on both sides of the kitchen wall, since at Noma, there isn’t one. Finally, I leave you with the advice of what Elizabeth Taylor said to me:
“When the going gets rough, put on your lipstick, pour a cocktail, and get on with it!”
