{"id":13828,"date":"2014-06-05T22:48:37","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T14:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=13828"},"modified":"2014-06-05T22:48:37","modified_gmt":"2014-06-05T14:48:37","slug":"famed-chef-tower-has-third-act-in-mexico-eating-tacos-and-writing-dictionary-of-sex-and-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2014\/06\/05\/famed-chef-tower-has-third-act-in-mexico-eating-tacos-and-writing-dictionary-of-sex-and-food\/","title":{"rendered":"Famed chef Tower has third act in Mexico, eating tacos and writing dictionary of sex and food"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo<\/a>
Photo from gastroenophile.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

MERIDA, Mexico\u2014Jeremiah Tower plunged through the seafood aisles of this city\u2019s central covered market, wrinkling his nose at a pile of limp grey sharks before his gaze landed on a pair of plump and glistening freshly caught octopus.<\/span><\/p>\n

The man who once ran two of America\u2019s most famous restaurants popped his first purchase into a monogrammed tote bag, then moved on to find the rest of lunch\u2014bright orange chilies, brown beans, radishes, black blood sausage and a thick slab of Yucatecan pork belly fried crisp in its own fat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, he ate a late breakfast of cochinita pibil\u2014the famous shredded pork slow-roasted in orange juice\u2014and tender chunks of suckling pig topped with crackling pieces of fried skin.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m 100 per cent satisfied and it cost me $3,\u201d he declared. Making food like this is \u201call I ever tried to do,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tower made his name during the \u201870s at Alice Waters\u2019 Chez Panisse, the famed Berkeley, California, restaurant that helped spawn a fresh-local renaissance in American cooking. He later became one of the first modern celebrity chefs at Stars, a San Francisco brasserie he says grossed $9 million a year serving cornmeal blinis and truffled lobster to Luciano Pavarotti, Barbra Streisand and other luminaries of \u201880s and \u201890s.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now Tower\u2019s third act is underway in the capital of Yucatan, the tropical Gulf Coast state whose richly spiced, fat-laden and pork-heavy Mayan cuisine has produced what Tower calls a handful of world-class dishes. It\u2019s a very different life. The 71-year-old shops local markets in the mornings, visits taco stands for lunch, spends his afternoons working on a new book, an illustrated dictionary of the historical intersection of food and sex.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStars was the place to be and such an important restaurant in culinary history and then it dissipated and Jeremiah sort of disappeared off the scene,\u201d said Dana Cowin, editor-in-chief of Food and Wine magazine. \u201cThere are not a lot of people like that. Jeremiah was one of the great founders, or if you want to say philosophers, of the idea of California cuisine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Tower acknowledges missing the glamor of days when he was one of America\u2019s best-known chefs. And he regrets the missed opportunities to capitalize on fame, something today\u2019s top chefs seem so adept at.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen things are great, some people they don\u2019t pay any attention. What I should have done? The list is so long,\u201d he says. \u201cI never thought about how to turn this into $40 million, unfortunately,\u201d he says, gesturing at the remains of a lunch of braised octopus in black mole and pork belly on sauteed brown beans with chili-lime sauce and fresh radish salsa.<\/span><\/p>\n

But he doesn\u2019t regret leaving California. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing worse than an old tired chef hanging around waiting for something to happen,\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Tower tells it, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was the first in a series of natural and man-made disasters that pushed him from San Francisco to New York to New Orleans to his new home in Mexico. The destruction in San Francisco\u2019s Civic Center devastated business for Stars, which he said lost $9 million in four years after the quake.<\/span><\/p>\n

He moved to Greenwich Village, but after 9-11 headed to New Orleans. He was scuba diving in Cozumel, Mexico, when Hurricane Katrina hit and destroyed most of his possessions. Tower stayed in Mexico and a few months later, he says, Hurricane Wilma destroyed most of what he had left.<\/span><\/p>\n

The man who once owned an apartment in San Francisco, a house outside the city and a warehouse full of art and furniture, now can fit his possessions into a couple of suitcases. \u201cI can move in four hours in a pickup.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Before the global economic crash, Tower, who has an architecture degree from Harvard, bought, renovated and sold a series of colonial homes around central Merida. Now, when he\u2019s not writing, he takes the bus to the Caribbean coast for days-long scuba diving trips, a post-restaurant life hobby he says has become a passion.<\/span><\/p>\n

He said he doesn\u2019t miss much about the days of Stars, where he turned the dining experience into theatre, once flew an employee to Paris to prove that the chicken there was better and, as he tells it, even put thousands of dollars of Veuve Clicquot Champagne on the curb because it wasn\u2019t fresh enough for him.<\/span><\/p>\n

The food world, of course, has moved on, though Tower still travels to eat and keep abreast of trends. He finds the current obsession with molecular gastronomy interesting, noting that the scientific techniques that allow chefs to create flavoured smokes and foams are reminiscent of the elaborate French cuisine that was revolutionized by his hero Auguste Escoffier during the 19th century.<\/span><\/p>\n

And Tower\u2019s star may be rising again. He\u2019s embraced social media, is working with partners to develop a seasonal restaurant on a farm on Orcas Island, Washington, and Anthony Bourdain\u2014who credits Tower with transforming the way Americans eat\u2014is working on a documentary about him.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a hero of mine,\u201d Bourdain says. \u201cJeremiah was a true innovator, an important original, and probably the first American chef anyone wanted to see in the dining room. He was an integral part of a power shift that has changed menus all over the world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MERIDA, Mexico\u2014Jeremiah Tower plunged through the seafood aisles of this city\u2019s central covered market, wrinkling his nose at a pile …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":13829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-food","mauthors-michael-weissenstein","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}