Mean cuisine

At bottom, Jeremiah Tower’s memoir is all about who gets the credit: Who gets our thanks for the revolution in American cuisine that took place in the ‘70s and ‘80s?

One line of thinking holds that the movement began at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and radiated out so that California cooking soon became synonymous with a new type of American food experience. From the beginning, Chez Panisse was ripe for legend, a restaurant that grew out of the iconoclastic political turmoil of the ‘60s and had the good fortune to be run by untrained, intelligent people who knew so little about formal cooking that they could more or less do what they wanted.

But who should be anointed as the champion of this revolution? Is it Alice Waters, the public face of the restaurant, or is it Jeremiah Tower, the cook who worked there during several of the critical early years in the ‘70s?

The feud between the two has been going on for years and, every now and then -- with a friendly word, a public hug -- shows signs of abating. But it isn’t. Tower, always the more vituperative of the two, is still proclaiming his bitter belief that Waters got more adulation than she deserved and that he got less.

In his fascinating, elucidating and often mean-spirited book, “California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution,” he does everything he can to hammer home his position. It’s as if he said to himself, “They still don’t get it. They still don’t understand that Alice was doing PR, and I was the creator,” and so goes about documenting his role, even including his job description at Chez Panisse.

As he tells it, Waters was an almost marginal character in those years while he was creating in the kitchen. And lest there be any doubt, he peppers “California Dish” with testimonials. At Chez Panisse and later at his hugely successful restaurant Stars in San Francisco, journalists and diners are nothing less than thrilled. Repeatedly he describes how the food press was blown away by his brilliance, as it was in 1983 when he traveled to Newport, R.I., to show off his wares. It was there for the first time -- at least in his mind -- that the national press recognized California cuisine. The writers in attendance, by his account, swooned over his genius, and “[t]he love affair between the food press and California had begun. Another affair began, too -- with me.”

But give him this: Tower did have his charms. Ask anybody who remembers him during his heyday. Their eyes go wide as they tell you what a beautiful, riveting man he was, immaculately dressed, able to carry off clothing combinations that shouldn’t work but did, always with a glass of champagne in his hand as he strolled through the dining room, his head adorned with a crown of stunning curly hair.

In “California Dish,” we learn about the little boy who liked to prepare nasturtium sandwiches; the brilliant young cook; the self-destructive San Francisco celebrity, always being sued or suing over one thing or another; and the still-handsome man, who in late middle age remains resentful, striving to establish a preeminent place in culinary history through sheer force of will and spite.

Tower was educated at Harvard as an architect and never trained as a cook, but he had read and reread the greatest food writers of the modern era, from Escoffier and Curnonsky to Elizabeth David and James Beard, and was influenced by them all. Tower understood centuries of cooking and could take it all into the kitchen.

As much as Tower tends to put himself in the spotlight in the developing restaurant movement in America -- one that ultimately would bring not only restaurants but also home cooks some of the finest, most interesting food in the world -- he seems fully aware that the “revolution” was not just about Chez Panisse and Stars or even about California. It was much more.

The new American cuisine, as defined by Tower, reveres fresh, home-grown ingredients and encourages creativity based on tradition at the same time that it boldly departs from it. As Tower concedes, and others frequently point out, this philosophy had a number of influential early advocates.

David and Beard worshiped freshness, and Beard, as early as the 1950s, urged Americans to value what they grew on their own land and caught in their own waters. Nouvelle cuisine in France showed Americans the value of innovation, of stepping away from tradition. About the same time that Chez Panisse and Stars were gaining recognition, American regional cooking, often prepared with great finesse and popularized by the likes of Paul Prudhomme, was hitting its stride.

Nor is Tower’s claim as the eminence grise of the new American cuisine beyond debate. Larry Forgione, a young cook who had just finished a stint in Europe, arrived in New York in the late ‘70s determined to bring to that city what was so apparent abroad: a reliance on home-grown, fresh ingredients. He soon opened An American Place, and there are those who have credited him with creating this new cuisine. When Forgione arrived in New York, he’d never heard of Tower. In fact, it can safely be said that, even at the very height of Tower’s fame in San Francisco and among food cognoscenti elsewhere, he was almost unknown on the East Coast, while Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck were quickly becoming household names. The Four Seasons flourished in New York during that period too. It extolled seasonal freshness and didn’t fear experimentation. Beard, a friend and confidant of Towers, was also a consultant to that remarkable restaurant.

In Los Angeles, the often neglected city in this formulation, Michael McCarty of Michael’s was creating the ambience and many dishes that would also come to be characterized as Californian. McCarty presented a decor that played with light and a cuisine resplendent with bright flavors. One of his early chefs, Jonathan Waxman, would move on to New York, open the restaurant Jams and introduce the city to the California accent.

It was a revolution all right. With or without Tower, American chefs, across the nation, were turning the dining experience upside down. They were all demanding better ingredients and incorporating them with considerable success. Restaurants, more than ever, became places of entertainment, and their chefs, superstars.

Although Waters carries the banner for California’s cooking and certainly represents its spirit as no one else has, the influences that shaped the new American cuisine over decades were so broad that it’s silly to start pinning too much on any one person or restaurant.

Tower describes a lot of this in his book, often with feeling -- and sometimes just as a litany of names. In any event, it’s unlikely that the book will be read for its educational qualities. “California Dish” comes alive most when Tower is taking shots, fair or not, at some of his friends.

There are all those references belittling Waters. Tower writes about how one of the cooks at Chez Panisse “consistently saw through Alice’s wiles. He called her Tiny, in part because of her stature and in part because when she’d be caught in some brazen act of manipulation she’d try to become small; she’d raise one hand to her mouth to hide the lower part of her face and emit little squeaks of contrition .... Alice was good.”

He recalls the time he saw the early galley of the “Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook” (1982), which would have a powerful effect on America’s awareness of the cooking in California, and he complained that Waters did not acknowledge him for his contributions to the work. By his account, she was so petty and reluctant to share the spotlight that she removed the most obvious of his contributions and never did credit him.

Marion Cunningham, adored by so many for her Fannie Farmer cookbooks, is reduced to Beard’s nursemaid, washing his ailing feet. We learn more about Beard himself than we need to (especially when Tower feels compelled to describe his genitalia). The same is true of Rudolf Nureyev who, in this account, insisted that Tower purchase pornography for him not long before the dancer died. And, of course, we learn about Tower’s many affairs, particularly with the enormously admired American authority on French cooking, Richard Olney.

Tower’s testimonial to himself begins to degenerate during a long section on Stars. We get so much name-dropping -- all the mighty and famous who showed up at the restaurant -- that the book soon loses its momentum, much the way Tower himself did.

There have been many great artists whose nasty personalities were far beneath the grandeur of their art, and so they were forgiven. Tower doesn’t rise to that level. Even if he was once a part of the vanguard of cooking in America -- and there’s little dispute about that -- it’s hard to care enough about him as a person to bother with the question of whether he’s been slighted and, if so, to what degree.

Let Alice keep the credit.