"Most people would not know who Jeremiah Tower is -- and sadly," Martha Stewart says in the CNN Film "Jeremiah Tower." "He certainly is considered, -- and in my book, anyway -- a father of the American cuisine." Here's a brief history of Tower's life and career, and why it was so revolutionary.
In 1971, Alice Waters -- herself a legendarily influential American chef -- opened Chez Panisse, a homey French bistro in northern California. As former Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl puts it in CNN's film, "You can not begin to understand the impact (this had) on the food landscape." By 1973, a gastronomic polyglot by the name of Jeremiah Tower had walked into the restaurant to respond to a help wanted ad. He had two degrees from Harvard, an interest in architecture, no culinary training but a bone-deep love of food -- and he so impressed Waters and her staff that he was hired as Chez Panisse's chef.
"Everyone, reluctantly or not, (has) to agree that he put the place on the map," Anthony Bourdain, an executive producer of CNN's film, says of Tower's five-year stint at Chez Panisse. "Jeremiah Tower's menus made Chez Panisse the place that everybody wanted to go. A complete re-evaluation of not just American food and ingredients, but food." That would include Chez Panisse's 1976 Northern California Regional Dinner menu, which has been called the menu that "changed everything."
Not everyone shares Bourdain's point of view; the question of whether Alice Waters or Jeremiah Tower deserves the most credit for bringing a revolutionary style of eating and thinking about food to Americans is still hotly debated. What is indisputable is that the Waters-Tower partnership created something incredible and enduring -- as seen here in a 2016 photo from the kitchen of Chez Panisse -- and it also set Tower up for the star-making moves that followed.
Tower went on to open the game-changing San Francisco restaurant, Stars, pictured here in the late 1980s. "Jeremiah, in many ways, at Stars, defined what a modern American restaurant could be," Reichl explains in CNN's film. Chef Mario Batali agrees, adding, "That was when the restauranteur became sexy; that's when the chef came out of the dining room, (and) that's when the energy became as important as the food."
Having created a restaurant that, through its approach to American regional cuisine and its entertaining atmosphere, redefined what American fine dining could be, Tower became a culinary powerhouse. "During the '80s and early '90s, Jeremiah Tower was one of the major names in this country," food editor James Villas told CNN. "He was on the front of magazines. He was known all over Europe."
But then, Jeremiah Tower seemed to simply vanish. He sold his restaurant group in the '90s, and in 1999 the flagship restaurant Stars closed up shop. "It was just odd that he burned so bright and then just disappeared," says former New York Times food writer Regina Schrambling in CNN's film. "You couldn't pick up a book at one point that wasn't a collection of the great chefs of America and he was right there, and then he's gone."
After Stars closed, you were more likely to find Jeremiah Tower on the shores of Mexico than those of the San Francisco Bay. Then, in November 2014, Tower decided it was time to make a comeback: this time on the East coast as chef of the New York City landmark Tavern on the Green. "That quote from Proust: 'Work while you still have the light,'" Tower explains of his decision to re-emerge into the culinary world. "I wanted to see if my light was still on."
After a rocky tenure, Tower left Tavern on the Green as executive chef in 2015. "It takes a certain kind of person to keep coming back. It takes a romantic, honestly," Bourdain says in the documentary. "Jeremiah was very much maybe the last, certainly the most important, bridge between the old world and the new. ... In my view, we should know who changed the world. We should know their names."
