OF THE TABLE
Feast on documentary about America’s first true celebrity chef
If you have any interest in food and the history of modern American cuisine or find yourself bingewatching Anthony Bourdain, you are going to make a hearty meal out of “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent.”
Before Bourdain was Tower, as you learn from this marvelous documentary portrait that captures the inspired and charismatic, if also troubled, soul of the man. He transformed the modern American restaurant into a place of worship, a museum, a theater, a movie and a bit of a bordello. He also changed the modern American restaurant into the coolest place in the world to visit.
Beyond the focus on local food and wine, the American restaurant as envisioned by Tower at his San Francisco restaurant Stars, an American brasserie, became the place where you could find magic every day, and you could eat it.
Perhaps the first true American celebrity chef —the progenitor of the likes of Wolfgang Puck, the aforementioned Bourdain, Mario Batali and Martha Stewart, all of whom appear in the film to sing Tower's praises for the most part — Tower is meticulously depicted in this mostly loving but also frank and microscopic portrait from Lydia Tenaglia, who was the executive producer of “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.”
Mixing interviews with Tower and his friends — some of them former — and colleagues with existing footage and reenactments, Tenaglia builds an impressive biography, as well as a cultural history of the 1970s and '80s in American food history.
It begins with Tower's privileged if also lonely childhood taking exotic trips with his wealthy parents and voraciously reading menus beginning at age 10 and graduating to trying out recipes from Escoffier. As an adult chef at Berkeley's trend-setting Chez Panisse, founded and run by Alice Waters, Tower exudes an air of authority and English-boardingschool-bred aristocracy, and, as he repeatedly reminds us, he is obsessive. Despite being gay, Tower has an affair with pixie-like Waters, probably because they were always together in the kitchen.
In San Francisco, Tower creates Stars and is in almost complete control. With its 80-foot mahogany bar, brass rails and famous and powerful patrons, Stars embodied the more-is-more aesthetic of the 1980s, as well as Tower's flair for theatrics.
A disastrous and humiliating attempt at a comeback as chef at New York City's storied but out-of-fashion and “chef-killing” Tavern on the Green after a long, self-imposed exile in Mexico is the subject of the film's third act. Tower wants to be in control of everything again. But he is not, alas.
Tenaglia gets astounding access to Tower in his comeback attempt at Tavern, and the result is perhaps too painful to watch at times, but always fascinating. The most common setting in the film may be a kitchen. But “Jeremiah Tower” is first and foremost a portrait of an artist.
(“Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent” contains profanity.)