The United States of Arugula (25 page)

But by New Year’s Day of 1973, the jig was up. Tower was getting a bit old for the role of pretty boy at large, was unable to convince anyone of his architectural genius (he specialized in designing untenable underwater habitats), and, to his humiliation, was scratching out a subsistence living as a gardener for wealthy Bay Area homeowners. Fortunately, Palmer, his temporary host, saw Chez Panisse’s want ad in the
Chronicle
and, mindful of his friend’s cooking prowess at Harvard, suggested that Tower pay a call to the restaurant. Which Tower, in an uncharacteristic state of nervousness and supplication, did.

THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF
Tower’s hiring are a matter of debate. As he tells it, he went to Chez Panisse for a 6 p.m. interview, walked in, found the kitchen in a state of preparatory frenzy, and was received by a harried Waters, who pointed to a giant pot and said, “Do something to that soup”; Tower doctored the soup with salt, white wine, and cream; Waters tasted it, smiled, and shouted, “You’re hired!” through the din of the kitchen; and thus began one of the most notorious stints by a chef in American culinary history.

“That is
so much
a fiction. That isn’t how it happened at all,” says Opton. In her recollection, Tower was one of several candidates who were asked to provide a week’s worth of sample menus and cook an “audition” meal for the core staff: she, Waters, Budrick, and Tom Guernsey, who alternated with Budrick as headwaiter and cooked Sunday brunch. All the surviving principals save Tower support Opton’s version (Guernsey died of AIDS-related illness in 1990), but agree that Tower was far and away the standout candidate. “We almost hired someone else before him,” says Budrick, “but Jeremiah came and plopped down a
month’s
worth of menus and cooked this incredible meal for us. We all just looked at one another and said, ‘Well, if he really can do what he says he can do, then this is our guy.’”

It was a fortuitous case of mutual desperation—Chez Panisse needed a chef, and Tower needed a steady job, even one that paid all of $400 a month. He also signed on to join the new partnership that the restaurant’s main players were forming in order keep Chez Panisse from unraveling financially. “We explained the dangers of being a general partner, that if the restaurant went under he’d be liable like the rest of us,” says Budrick, “but he was instantly willing to sign anything. He was penniless and didn’t care.” Tower, Waters, Budrick, Guernsey, and Lindsey Shere (along with her husband, Charles, the music critic for the
Oakland Tribune)
were the general partners, investing their “sweat equity” in the place, since none of them had any money to speak of. In addition, four limited partners were brought in to kick in actual capital—among them Greil Marcus, who had already made a name for himself as an editor at
Rolling Stone
and as a rock critic for
Creem
—and to buy out Opton, who’d had enough of the craziness. The restaurant’s new management company was cutely named Pagnol et Cie, French for Pagnol and Company.

Despite his inexperience, Tower brought an instant professionalism to the kitchen, his comfortably worn East Coast authoritarianism a welcome antidote to the antihierarchical guilt and collectivism of the Berkeley gang. Whereas Victoria Wise played Led Zeppelin and David Bowie on the kitchen’s record player, Tower, in his pomp, took to blasting Marlene Dietrich and
Italian opera—Puccini, Bellini, Rossini, Verdi. Culinarily, though, he kept his flamboyance under wraps at first, sticking to Waters and Opton’s prescribed bistro menus of quiche, French onion soup,
boeuf bourguignon
, and the like, so he could acclimate himself to the task of cooking for dozens of people rather than six or eight stoned dinner-party guests.

After a few months, however, when he realized that his encyclopedic knowledge of food far exceeded everyone else’s there, Waters’s included, Tower began dipping into his vast cookbook collection, drawing upon such golden oldies as Escoffier and Curnonsky, as well as the somewhat more recent works of the mid-century master Fernand Point. “The newspaper ad had asked for someone who was passionate about Elizabeth David and Fernand Point,” Tower says. “So I was looking at Alice’s historical record of two years of menus at Panisse. I just laughed to myself. Fernand Point? I mean, hardly. But since his
Ma gastronomie
was one of my favorite books and always had been, I started trying to do a couple of simple things, like
crème gratin
, or
quenelles Lyonnaise
, things like that.” Before long, Berkeleyites were being served entrées like
truite jurascienne
, trout cooked in rosé wine with hollandaise sauce and buttered croutons, and
la brioche de ris de veau au champagne
, sweetbreads in brioche pastry with champagne sauce.

This wasn’t quite what Waters had envisioned for her
haimish
little community bistro, but, initially, she and Tower co-existed happily. Both adored not only Elizabeth David but Richard Olney, a native Iowan who had emigrated to France in 1951, and whose cultishly popular
French Menu Cookbook
, published in 1970, was predicated on the very David-like dictum that “one can only eat marvelously by respecting the seasons”—though his recipes were much more challenging and Escoffier-steeped than David’s. (Tellingly, whereas Waters had been too intimidated to introduce herself to David in London, Tower had no qualms about dashing off a fan letter to Olney. Even before he’d been hired at Chez Panisse, the cocky Harvard graduate had struck up an ongoing, friendly correspondence with the cookbook author.)

Both Waters and Tower obsessed over procuring the finest, freshest ingredients
available, no matter what the cost or inconvenience, in an era when even the white-tablecloth French restaurants across the bay in San Francisco were using frozen steaks and pre-butchered poultry. Using Waters’s geriatric Dodge Dart, Tower drove to San Francisco’s Chinatown for whole ducks and fresh fish, and crossed back over the Bay Bridge into Oakland to visit a meatpacking warehouse whose Sicilian proprietor let him plunge his arms into the bloody organ buckets and pluck out the best calf livers and sweetbreads for himself. Tower found a wild-boar supplier in Carmel, a spot-prawn supplier in Monterey Bay, and, recalling a childhood trip with his father to the Garrapata Trout Farm near Big Sur, special-ordered fish from the farm, which were delivered, still swimming, in a tank on a flatbed truck.

Chez Panisse didn’t have a full-time forager at this time—that wouldn’t happen until 1983, when a former Chez Panisse cook named Sibella Kraus was given the position—but Waters complemented Tower’s ingredient searches by seeking out and cultivating produce that the grocery stores didn’t carry. Sometimes this meant literally foraging for wild fennel and mustard greens along railroad tracks and in vacant lots; Tower would use the fennel to perfume the pork loins and game birds he grilled, throwing the stalks and greens directly onto the mesquite coals that he imported from Mexico (when few people had heard of mesquite) and burned outdoors (in violation of Berkeley city code) in a makeshift grill fashioned from a wheelbarrow.

Though Tower was unquestionably the chef, Waters was the salad evangelist. She’d return from her periodic sorties to France with seeds for then exotic greens like sorrel, mâche, and radicchio, which she convinced friends to plant in their backyards and garden plots. It was possible to have a salad at Chez Panisse whose lettuces had been picked just hours earlier from some neighborhood hippie’s little half-acre or quarter-acre lot—and, for that matter, to have a Meyer lemon tart whose lemons came from some university professor’s tree. “You couldn’t buy fresh herbs,” says Tower, “so you had to grow them. And it didn’t take long to exhaust everybody’s little flowerpot full of thyme or something. It was like, ‘Come to dinner and bring your tarragon!’”

As word got out that Waters and Tower preferred their provisioners to be as local as possible, some locals simply started showing up with their offerings to see if Chez Panisse was interested. “There was a lunatic who believed in what he called ‘companion plants,’ where he raised carrots with, let’s say, ragweed, because if you grow this plant and this plant together, both turn out better, even though one is not an edible plant,” says Goines, who was a constant presence at the restaurant and occasionally helped out in the kitchen. “But the carrots were fabulously good! And I remember that people would come with a basket of vegetables—you know, literally,
one basket
of vegetables: ‘These are from my backyard, and I have more tomatoes than I can eat.’ It’s more organized now, because you can’t really run a huge operation with people stumbling in saying ‘Here’s a squirrel I shot this morning.’ You don’t have, you know, gingham-clad six-year-olds showing up with baskets of eggs. That doesn’t happen any longer. But it certainly did.”

“People seemed to find their way there, with these little products that were sweet and cute,” says Bishop. “Mainly it was little things that Alice liked—baby things. That’s how she used to talk.
[Little-girl voice]
‘Little baby radish! Little baby lettuce!’ You know, she never had a kid until years later. I think, at the time, her children were these little baby food things.” (“It’s not a compulsion!” Waters retorts. “I don’t want anything that’s small for small’s sake. I like small because that’s where the best taste is. And I like big old radishes for certain uses.”)

Though Waters’s baby-greens fetish would prove to be hugely influential in the long run, it was Tower’s sophisticated cookery that had people talking in the Bay Area in 1973 and 1974. Emboldened by the positive response, he decided to up the ante. “We had Berkeley already,” he says, “and I was after the national press.” So he started planning entire dinners around specific classical chefs; or around contemporary masters like Elizabeth David and Richard Olney; or around specific French regions such as Brittany, Franche-Comté, and Provence; or around wines not normally drunk with each and every course, like champagne and Sauternes. Sometimes Tower even journeyed beyond France, doing a Moroccan regional dinner one night
(with marijuana stems burning in the kitchen braziers for “atmosphere”) and a Corsican dinner on another occasion. “It all came pouring out of him,” says Budrick. “He never had a real job in his life before, so he had all this energy, years of pent-up desire to do something that was really fulfilling. Willy was his right-hand man, and you could feel the energy between them. It was contagious and infectious, and we all just went along with it.”

“Generally, it worked,” says Bishop. “And it worked because this guy, Jeremiah, was so manic and insane. If he was gonna make bouillabaisse, he’d go to Chinatown and come back with, like, a six-foot conger eel: ‘Look what I got in Chinatown!’ I was like, ‘What the fuck is it?’” For the beatnik dishwasher turned sous-chef, nearing forty and accustomed to scraping by on society’s edges as an artist and sometime drummer in jazz combos, cooking with Tower brought him the greatest rush of artistic fulfillment he’d ever felt in his life. What was most extraordinary about their partnership, Bishop says, is that Tower wrote out these elaborate, themed menus, a different one for each night of the week, and sent them off to Goines to be rendered in calligraphy, printed up, and posted for public viewing a few days before they’d be served …
without ever having cooked any of the dishes described.

Which meant that every night, Tower and Bishop were essentially winging it, relying on Tower’s instinctual gift for getting things to taste perfect and Bishop’s telegraphic ability to instantly absorb and execute Tower’s visions. “We’d be doing ninety or a hundred soufflés,” Bishop says, “and we only had one oven behind us and two down below, and you gotta keep that door closed. For some reason, we were always able to pull that shit off. None of us, myself included, had the slightest idea of the chemistry, what food does when it does those things. It was kind of like World War I: give the guy a gun, send him out there—and fuck him!”

Tower is equally complimentary about Bishop’s skills. “He couldn’t taste anything,” the chef says, “because he sucked on English mints and menthol cigarettes, so he had zero palate—but he knew the workings of the kitchen. I mean, my God, if you had ever seen Willy make a duxelle out of twenty pounds of mushrooms, that’s my favorite image of him. Today, with
young kids out of cooking schools, you can hear them chopping from a mile away. But Willy was a drummer, a musician. He would take two Chinese cleavers, dump the mushrooms out onto the six-foot butcher-block table, and he’d go around the table, wielding the two cleavers. Within ten minutes, you had perfect duxelle. And the cleaver would just barely touch the table.”

If there was an air of naughtiness and decadence behind the scenes at Chez Panisse even before Tower’s arrival, by the time he was firmly in charge of the kitchen, the atmosphere was positively Caligulan. “It was so outrageous when Jeremiah was there, almost like another plane,” says Staggs, who was waiting tables at the time. “There were magnums of Sauternes, and champagne all the time, and he used to keep these nitrous-oxide canisters around for whipping the cream. The waiters would take a hit of nitrous oxide before delivering the entrées to the dining room.” Tower tamped down his hangover every morning by raiding Shere’s section of the fridge for crème anglaise, the thick, yolky dessert sauce, which he poured into a giant snifter and drank as his breakfast. He dates the start of his cocaine habit to the restaurant’s third birthday, on August 28, 1974. With the turnout much greater than he’d anticipated, Tower found that his energy was flagging. As word of his bedraggled state got out, he recalls, a friend of one of the waiters came back into the kitchen with a “black-leather-coated accomplice” who whipped out a big bag of blow and started cutting lines on top of the chest freezer. Reenergized, Tower returned to his ovens, in which were baking individual-sized pizzas—California’s first, so he claims.

Thereafter, Tower and Bishop were hooked. For the debauched but hyperambitious chef, cocaine actually enhanced his performance—“It was a party in the kitchen, but he controlled it, and was serious about the food,” says Staggs—but Bishop was not so fortunate or self-disciplined. As dealers started showing up at the back door with regularity, he and some of his acquaintances got into increasingly harder stuff. “We were doing opium-stuffing,” he says. “You stick it up your ass. Just a quarter of a gram, a little ball, and you bypass the alimentary canal—you don’t get nauseous, you just absorb it.” Bishop’s drug problems intensified to the point where, some years
later, after he’d left Chez Panisse, he was a suicidal, freebasing wreck. In an especially cruel twist of fate, given that he was revered in the kitchen for his nonpareil knife work, he wound up doing time for stabbing a man in an Oakland dive bar with his paring knife.
*
Thanks to the magnanimous intervention of Waters, who secured him the best legal representation possible, Bishop got off lightly, with eight months in jail plus three years of probation. Waters frowned upon the drug scene, but she imbibed as freely as anyone and was fully involved in the Fleetwood Mac–like carnival of sexual entanglings and disentanglings. “It was absolutely predictable,” says Staggs. “It’s after work, the customers are gone, the drugs come out, everybody starts drinking, the tango music comes on. Alice would get drunk, her incisors would show, and she would attack some poor innocent person and bed him.” Bishop claims he slept with both Waters
and
Tower, “though not at the same time.” And, despite his general orientation, Tower had a few romantic episodes with Waters, even while she was ostensibly going with Budrick. As Tower wrote in his memoir, “Drugs were easier to organize than sex, unless it was casual, which usually meant with one another. Who else would put up with us?”