The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Jeremiah Tower

Grilling was my first cooking lesson. My teacher was an old Aborigine named Nick, whom I met peeling potatoes out behind the kitchen of an island resort in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. From Nick’s dugout canoe I caught a barracuda, which he showed me how to roast over a coconut-shell fire on the beach. It tasted awful, like a meat loaf with fish in it, but I put on a good face. 

This was the definition of decadence according to Count Cheremetev, childhood friend of Prince Yusupov, Rasputin’s assassin. The Russians considered the point of it to be the richness of the fat (it had to be prime and aged beef) and the age of the wine, which could not be too young or too old. Too young, the wine would lack the complexity to match the richness of the meat, and too old, it would pale under that same richness. A twenty- to thirty-year-old d’Yquem was thought to be just about right. At a dinner party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as Harvard students in 1964, we served the beef with a 1955 d’Yquem because that was all we could find and afford. But the ten-year-old wine did its job: I remember the moment of silence that fell around the hot, early summer kitchen as I cut salty fat off the roast ribs and everyone (as instructed) sucked on a chunk while washing it down with the cool wine. One felt a stagger in the knees, the body sending a silent but eloquent message to the brain to stop! We had reached the benchmark. Or so we thought. 

I remember a hot afternoon in Marrakesh in midsummer. I had wandered around trying to decide where to have lunch. No restaurant looked suitable: too crowded, too expensive, too empty, too everything. I walked back to my hotel outside the center of town, woke the owner, and he graciously explained that at three o’clock there is no food. I asked if I could use the kitchen, a request that so horrified him that, suddenly wide awake, he told me to sit in the garden. Half an hour later, he appeared with a bucket of ice studded with beer bottles dripping with condensation in the 110-degree heat, a bottle of olive oil, a plate of salt, a loaf of bread, and a huge platter of sliced tomatoes that he had just picked from the garden, and which smelled as if they were still ripening in the blazing summer heat. They were covered in chopped herbs and freshly ground pepper. I felt satisfied, and immensely privileged, like a prince in a tiny but momentarily perfect kingdom.

We had no ovens that would cook regular-size pizzas. Individual ones were the way to go. What went on top had to be cheap and easy. I decided on a fresh California goat cheese (still new to the world in those days) and Sonoma beefsteak tomatoes, a new idea until a hundred or so people more than we expected showed up and the cheese and tomatoes were all gone. In our walk-in refrigerators there were still fresh ingredients from the previous night’s bouillabaisse (clams, prawns, squid, crab, lobster, onions, saffron, garlic, and fennel), so I decided to scatter everything on top. I was sagging a bit, and everyone was buying me champagne, which slowed me down even more. Word went out that the chef needed a boost. In sauntered a friend of one of our waiters with a black-leather-coated accomplice. Flashing a gold-toothy smile as he glided by me, he pulled a plastic bag out of his coat, then dumped half a pound of white powder on top of the chest freezer at the back of the kitchen. He cut it into several long lines and handed me a straw fashioned from a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill. In an instant, I was back at the stoves. Then a conga line formed (this time not for the pizza), snaking out through the kitchen, into the dining room, and up the stairs into the bar. The night was a huge success, premiering three new trends: individual pizzas, the freedom to use any topping one wanted, and the drug that made all the long hours possible, then impossible, in the kitchen. 

[In 1975], Jim Beard told me that if he had to choose four restaurants in the United States to revisit, they would be the Four Seasons and the Coach House in New York, Tony’s in Houston, and Chez Panisse—“but before writing this in my column I want you to cook for me out of your own home kitchen.” I didn’t have any money at the time, and didn’t have a home or a kitchen, but a rich Texan college mate of mine had both. I was very nervous to be cooking for Jim, and up to the morning of the day of the dinner, I still couldn’t decide what to serve. I wandered around Chinatown in San Francisco, looking for my usual inspiration from the markets. When I saw several deep-sea urchins, each the size of a large grapefruit, I knew I must have them. With Jim and the other guests waiting at the table, my heart was in my throat as I opened the oven door. But when I did, I saw the scheme had worked. The spines were intact, a wonderful ocean smell wafted into the kitchen, and best of all, the soufflé mixture had risen above the crater-like openings of the shells, puffy, pink-beige, and beautiful. Jim tried a spoonful. No word was said. He looked up, and rolling his eyes slowly around the room, said: “My God, that is the best thing I have ever tasted.”

In 1976, I left the kitchens of Chez Panisse to go with Richard Olney on a wine and food tour of his favorite restaurants and wineries in France. All were places one could visit on one’s own, but not with private lunches at Château d’Yquem and Lafite, with those wines following us to the next few restaurants, hand-picked months before by Richard, the owners, and the cellar masters. There was the 1959 Romanée-Conti in the cellars of that domaine; rare old Krugs in the private rooms of that house, the same wine following us to a dinner with Bocuse and, at my request, the Bresse chicken stuffed with truffles and poached in a pig’s bladder. There was a glorious dinner at Taillevent, and nightingales singing outside our windows at Georges Blanc. But it was the swans swimming up and down the stream at the bottom of the garden at the Auberge de L’Ill that had me transfixed—that, and the glass of Krug in my hand as I watched. We ate fresh morels in cream with a loin of white veal, and a Pithiviers filled with Moroccan almonds for dessert. But it was the fish course that haunts my mind still. A large white dish was put in front of me, an ivory-colored sauce around an off-white mousse of something I guessed might be pike from the river outside, fish that had once swam with the swans. I tasted the sauce: obviously, a reduced stock of fish bones with cream and Champagne. Perfection. But even more staggeringly perfect was the moment after I dug into the timbale with my fork, and out tumbled boned frog thighs the size of my little fingernail. It had all the elements to create a long-term favorite memory: perfectly balanced, delicious, and with an artistry from the kitchen I have rarely seen surpassed.

I often visited Paris’ greatest brasseries on their fullest nights to get ideas for my soon-to-be restaurant, Stars, in San Francisco. Inside the front door at Bofinger, at a small table just large enough to hold two people and the biggest seafood presentation I had ever seen, were seated two thin, couture-house models of extreme physical presence. In front of them was a four-layered pyramid of ice-filled trays, groaning under all the best shellfish and crustaceans that both the Atlantic and Mediterranean could offer. I stared. Each of them had long, Elizabeth Arden–fire-engine-red lacquered nails; each was using her little finger nail for picking crabmeat out of the shells and transporting the delicacy onto her tongue, between lips the same color as the nails. When I left 90 minutes later, they were still there, still working on all that sacrificial seafood. “Right,” I said. “I want a restaurant where this happens.”

Ken Hom, the famous BBC Chinese chef and worldly consultant, said come to lunch. Paris, he said, a place called L’Arpège. (It was recently famous again because its genius chef and owner, Alain Passard, had declared to all his devoted clients that he was now turning the menu vegetarian—not quite, as it turned out, but almost entirely.) “He’s a friend,” Ken said of Passard, “so he will treat us well.” I took that to mean we would be drinking Bâtard-Montrachet instead of Pouilly-Fuissé, as well as eating as well as one could anywhere. I saw truffle soup on the menu. Surely no Bocuse influence here, I suggested to Ken. “It will be much better,” Ken said. “Go ahead, order it.” The vegetable table menu these days was 390 Euros, but this lunch was 30 years ago, and I think the soup was 50. What arrived was a large, open, white soup plate, filled to its inner rim with a puree the color of a Paris winter sky threatening to storm. I dipped my properly large spoon into the aromatic liquid, lifted it to my mouth, and nearly fainted: a puree of perfect Périgord black truffles with France’s finest cream. Well, that was that!

A huge white platter covered with what appeared to be cocktail napkin–sized, tissue-thin slices of beef at least 80 percent fat took my breath away. Not just because of the fortune it cost (as I knew from our $500 sirloin steak a few days before, in Tokyo). But also, because I was not sure what to do with it (as the guest of honor, I had to take the first piece), and just as sure I did not want to eat all that cold fat. I was on tour with executives of the Japanese Restaurant Association, on the occasion of their leader being made a National Living Treasure by the Emperor—the first time anyone in the hospitality industry made the grade. Of all the cities we visited, my favorite was Kyoto, in great part because it was the first time I heard of, and then tasted, shabu-shabu. My guests enjoyed my ignorance in the most perfectly Japanese-mannered fashion, by the eldest of the group wielding his chopsticks. I imitated, swooned with pleasure, and with that first mouthful thought he had left the meat too long in the hot broth. The next piece I left in for half the time. Both were fabulous, but I loved the half cooked best, as thoughts of what else could be dipped like this and introduced to San Francisco at Stars flooded my mind: thin carpaccios of lobster and petrale sole; Jerusalem artichokes in a black truffle–infused broth; and even pounded-out honeydew melon in a hibiscus flower “soup.” It was a long flight back to California, and the thought of lawsuits from spilled boiling broths turned my mind back to the safety of our delicious, 27-day dry-aged steak with French fries as the safer way to go.

The dish made famous by the greatest and most modest of masters, Alexandre Dumaine of the Côte d’Or in Saulieu, was one that people like the Aga Khan, Orson Welles, and Grace Kelly would travel far to enjoy, defining the Michelin term “worth the journey.” Dumaine’s dish was a whole capon, [stuffed] with whole fresh black truffles, some under the skin as well, then encased and sealed in a pig’s bladder and opened in front of the rapturous guests. The [version] Ken Hom cooked for me in Catus, France, is a bit easier, especially since I don’t know where to get the bladder.