After 25 Years, Chefs Call a Truce

It won’t go down with anything that has happened at Camp David, but Saturday night’s truce declaration between Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower is certainly worth a mention.

Waters, owner and guiding spirit at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant for 30 years, was being honored with the 2001 Robert Mondavi Wine & Food Award at a fund-raising dinner for the Collins School of Hospitality Management at Cal Poly Pomona. Several former and current Chez Panisse chefs showed up to contribute dishes--Campanile and Jar’s Mark Peel, chef-without-dossier Jean-Pierre Mouelle, new Chez Panisse co-chef Christopher Lee and pastry whiz Lindsey Shere.

But for foodies the real shocker was the presence of Tower. One of the restaurant’s founding chefs, he has been bitterly and outspokenly estranged from Waters for almost 25 years.

After leaving Chez Panisse, Tower cemented his reputation as one of the founders of California cuisine by opening his own restaurant, Stars, which became an anchor of both the San Francisco dining scene and of an international chain of similarly named restaurants. But Tower sold out of the San Francisco restaurant in 1999--as well as all of the other Stars restaurants, save the one in Manila, and it closed the next year. Today, he stays busy mostly as a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner.

History was set aside Saturday though, and the two cooed and kissed when the photographers asked, making it look as if nothing had ever happened.