Magnificent? Not so much
In a New York Times review of the Central Park eatery Tavern on the Green in 2015, critic Pete Wells hoped celebrity chef Jeremiah Tower would rescue the restaurant in the manner of a film character who comes out of retirement for one last heist. “The story and scenery are so perfect that somebody really should make a movie out of it.”
Now someone has. But like the one-last-con movie, it’s easier said that done — and easier done than done well. Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent, directed by food documentarian Lydia Tenaglia (and produced by fellow chef Anthony Bourdain), starts off strongly before wandering into narrative thickets and needless chronological shifts.
Certainly, Tower deserves his return to the spotlight. Ask someone to name a famous chef and they’re unlikely to remember the man who went to work at Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1972, helping bring Alice Waters’ California restaurant to international notice.
He left in 1978 after some bitter disagreements (he seems constitutionally drawn to the occasional quarrel) and opened Stars in San Francisco in 1984. In spite of operating in a dodgy neighbourhood, the place soon became a hangout for the likes of the Beastie Boys, Baryshnikov and Gorbachev — in other words, everyone.
Then at the turn of the century, he walked away from it all, only to surface more than 10 years later for a brief, fractious stint at Tavern on the Green, where he complained that the clueless owners once asked him if lamb meat came in white and dark varieties.
Tenaglia does her best work with the bones of Tower’s biography. Born in 1942 to rich, globetrotting parents, he grew up in hotels, garden parties and the occasional ocean liner, but always near the kitchen and fascinated by what was going on there. “Before I read books I read menus,”
he says. He remembers surprising his parents by being out of school — seems each thought the other had enrolled him.
During his university days in the ’60s, Tower witnessed student revolutions but failed to join; he discovered he was better at mixing drinks than throwing Molotov cocktails. After a failed career as an architect (his ideas about underwater buildings were ridiculed), he decided to style himself after Lucius Beebe, the Boston dandy whose nickname, The Last Magnificent, gives this film its title.
Then comes fame at Chez Panisse and Stars, as well as infamy at Tavern on the Green. But by the end of the doc’s twohour runtime, it starts bouncing between present and past.
Perhaps the problem is that the 75-year-old chef doesn’t have a simple conclusion to his story. It’s never explained just why he disappeared in the late ’90s, or what brought him back.
“There’s a locked room inside Jeremiah Tower,” says Bourdain at the beginning of the film. “I sure haven’t been there.”
By the end, neither have we.