Pros: funny, gossipy, always saucy. Tower is a real character
Cons: I'd take his version w/a grain of salt. Needed editing.
The Bottom Line: A fascinating look behind the scenes and under the covers with one of the country's most creative chefs and personalities. What goes on in the kitchen. Let them eat cake.
dwynne's Full Review: Jeremiah Tower - California Dish: What I Saw (and ...
I howled (and drooled) while reading Jeremiah Tower's memoir of how he single handedly revolutionized cuisine as we know it in America.
The book is a bit long and rambling, but it's a very entertaining tale and made me look at the restaurant business differently after many years of simply ordering and eating. It's also a tell-all of everyone Tower every cooked with, slept with, ate trout with; no wonder he had to leave California.
Highlights:
-Tower opens the book describing an event in which he and his chefs fly across the country to Rhode Island for a lunch sponsored by Ocean Spray, shipping mesquite, shopping in NYC for lamb, and eventually being kicked out of the tiny kitchen by a band of surly French chefs. Not deterred for a moment, they prepare the entire meal on the grills, including dessert, for a startled audience of food critics. The revolution begins...
-Tower as a child in hotels in London and later at boarding school in the 50s, begging to be allowed into the kitchen to eradicate meals of jello with marshamallows and bacon from school menus. His parents discover after he's spent an idyllic month cooking in England that they've forgotten to enroll him in school.
-Tower at Berkeley's Chez Panisse in its formative years. In what is probably the book's greatest controversy, Tower accuses former lover Alice Waters of stealing his thunder and not attributing his menus to him in the famous cookbook. And yet this is probably the most interesting section, especially for those of us who still eat at Chez Panisse (cafe) and see its influence on restaurants and community-supported agriculture all around us.
-Tower turning around two lesser San Francisco dining spots and then opening Stars, his own restaurant, with various scandals, lawsuits, and mismanagement. Tower paints himself as perpetually heroic and put upon, although he clearly ate up the limelight.
-Visits to his aunt and Russian uncle who introduce him to caviar and fine wines (while at Harvard), visits with Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, and a host of other famous diners.
Tiring for me: his interludes of favorite menus, many of the items in untranslated French with wines I'd never heard of.
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