Time Travel to the Stars: Jeremiah to be Exact
Jeremiah Tower was an enigma of a person, a superstar who fell from grace fueled only by his own hubris. At the height of the California Cuisine movement, he seemingly paved the way for what would become the new normal in current restaurants. He began his career at Chez Panisse and then went on to helm his restaurant, Stars, which is the topic of this paper. As someone who loves to dine out for my enjoyment and the enjoyment of others, Stars resonates with me with its ability to create an entertaining space for people from all walks of life.
Stars had a 15-year run from 1984 until 1999. In a similar fashion to Chef Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry, many prominent chefs of the 21st century worked at the flagship California cuisine restaurant. Chefs like Dominique Crenn, Mario Batali, and Steve Ells cut their teeth in the open kitchen for all guests to see. The restaurant was very unassuming from the outside; one would have to walk through an alley and confront the realities of San Fransisco in the 80’s to grace its doors. But once you did and began the ascent up a few stairs into the 150-seat dining room, the magic Tower worked hard to create became revealed to you. You could see most of the dining room and the bar from each corner of the restaurant, and it was not only a place for a great meal but one to host guests and parties. On a busy night, over 500 guests would dine at the noisy, inexpensive restaurant and might happen upon any number of socialites including the original A-lister Denise Hale.
In the summer of 1984, the restaurant began as a partnership between Towers and his partner Doyle Moon, another restauranteur in the San Fransisco scene. In the fall of 1988, Tower outbid Moon and became the sole owner of Stars, and as his popularity as a chef grew, he became an integral part of the restaurant experience. The restaurant had both regular diners and those coming in for the sole pleasure of dining, and the popularity of this restaurant marked the beginning of dinner as an evening activity. Currently, we wouldn’t think twice about an evening out eating at a restaurant, but in the mid-80s, dinner was something to do on the way to a show. Furthermore, at Stars, sitting, eating, or drinking at the bar became the new ‘best seat in the house.’ As Towers explains, he was inspired by several restaurants and brasseries he admired in New York City and in Paris. He wanted to create a restaurant with character, with photographs of celebrities on the walls, a restaurant for models and socialites, and a place with energy and superb ingredient-driven food (Fort, 2017).
Some of the concepts from Stars that resonate with me are the open kitchen serving California cuisine, the unique energy in the dining room, and the overall guest experience. The bustling new type of ‘American brasserie’ inspired by his travels worldwide would have been a novel place to eat locally procured food with friends. I have always loved dining at restaurants with an open kitchen concept, as I like to be connected to the kitchen and watch how the cooks move and act. As a regular diner, some of the patrons developed a likeness to the way different cooks prepared certain dishes and looked forward to dining when they worked certain stations (Tenaglia, 2017).
The beginning of ‘California cuisine’ as a novel way of cooking food intrigues me, as does the restaurant's design. During his early years at Chez Panisse, Tower cooked mainly French food. that all changed in 1976 when he crafted a localized menu for the Northern California Regional Dinner that highlighted the bounty of California with foods like Tomales Bay oysters, Big Sur trout, Sonoma figs, and pears from the Fan Fransisco Farmer’s Market (Hare, n.d.). Tower has said that he believes a plate should consist of a few good components, no more than four. I resonate with this simplistic view of menu development and style, especially in a restaurant meant to entertain, where it’s expected to order more than one dish. Other Stars staples like roast pork with mango salsa, cornmeal blinis with lobster and caviar, and steak tartare with ancho chili are foods that I would have loved to eat. Using regionally inspired ingredients like cornmeal, ancho chili, and mango as highly flavorful and unique components resonates with my appreciation of global food.
The restaurant held a theatrical vibe with some of the best service in San Fransisco. This resonates with me as a former theater kid and someone very particular about hospitality and service in dining. I have always loved dining out and entertaining and have done my fair share of it through various friendships and jobs over the years. Nothing can beat a great setting, great energy, and hospitality to match and that’s exactly what Stars provided. Many accounts feature Chef Towers floating about the dining room with a glass of champagne in his hand, and the generosity with which he showed his patrons made it the place to be for those with money. I am sure many of the patrons loved to interact with him while eating caviar or drinking champagne, but the open and vibrant nature of the restaurant resonates with me. Being able to hear and see other parts of the dining room and bar and add to the collective energy of the dining room is one of my favorite parts of dining at a restaurant. Another thing I like about the accounts of the Stars experience was that it was inclusive, a place where women could partake in all parts of the business whether bartending, serving, or in the kitchen like Chef Dominique Crenn (Miller & Miller, 2020).
As the years went on, Stars began to lose money, to the tune of 1 million dollars per year, until the business could no longer sustain itself. I like to think of how the business could have pivoted and changed, however sometime when a restaurant’s time is due, it’s due, and that’s exactly what happened to Stars. One could be skeptical of how extravagant the restaurant was and if it was really inclusive for all, or just the rich and famous of the time, but I would have loved to experience Stars in it’s heyday and see just how innovative the cuisine was compared to the rest of the industry.
References:
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