When critically panned, underperforming Tavern on the Green hired culinary legend Jeremiah Tower as its head chef in November 2014, it sounded like a recipe for kitchen hell.
It turned out to be just that. Tower, a pioneer of New American cuisine and a mentor to Mario Batali, was out after just five months.
But no one knew just how bitter and ugly the breakup was. Behind the landmark Central Park eatery’s serene brick-and-glass facade, Tower, then 71, was cursing the owners and berating young cooks over horrible reviews — my own among them. Tavern owners Jim Caiola and David Salama, meanwhile, grew fed up with Tower’s out-of-bounds attempt to run the restaurant beyond the kitchen.
Was it Tower’s fault for plunging into the no-win Tavern situation after he’d spent 15 years in Mexico, restoring old houses and scuba-diving? Or Caiola and Salama’s for giving the job over to a great chef who was nonetheless absurdly unsuited to Tavern’s high-volume, tourist-driven environment?
Blame all hands — as is clear from the new documentary, “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent,” directed by Lydia Tenaglia. For sure, its loyalties lie more with Tower. The film — which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016 and will screen Friday at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema — pretentiously portrays him as a kind of deity-in-exile in Cozumel, where he’s shown wandering amid ruins with the grave visage of Max von Sydow digging up demonic amulets in “The Exorcist.”
Tower — as tall, handsome and seductively erudite as his name suggests — achieved fame, bordering on worship, while running the kitchen at Alice Waters’ seminal Berkeley, Calif., restaurant Chez Panisse in the 1970s and ’80s. But their legendary partnership — the pair were lovers, even though Tower was openly gay — soured, partly over her preference for classic French cooking.
Gifted but enigmatic, Tower is a sex-loving party animal possessed of a deep melancholy streak: “Let the flesh grow old,” he intones to lugubrious cello strains in the film, among many musings he quotes from a diary he kept as a student at Harvard. After Chez Panisse, he launched his own restaurant in San Francisco. Stars — a legend for 15 years — was as famed for its celebrity clientele as for its food. It made Tower America’s first “rock-star” chef. But, after he closed it in 1999, he led a reclusive life in Mexico — wishing, like Greta Garbo, to be left alone.
Tower’s comeback attempt at Tavern on the Green was “either a masterstroke, or a stroke of madness,” I wrote on Nov. 4, 2014. “I’d hope for the first, but bet on the second.” Or, as food writer and popular TV host Anthony Bourdain puts it in the documentary, which he co-executive-produced, “Holy f–k! Why would Jeremiah Tower come to New York to work in one of the biggest, most thankless operations?”
Tavern serves up to 700 at a time from morning till night — volume on a scale Tower had never handled. The well-meaning but in-over-their-heads owners’ only previous restaurant was a small Philadelphia creperie. Tower took the helm without any skilled cooks or managers who’d worked for him before — as if Tom Brady were to take over a losing high school team 15 years from now.
Tavern on the Green had been closed for five years when Caiola and Salama relaunched it, redesigned and shorn of its famous Crystal Room, in April 2014. It got off to a rocky start. Original chef Katy Sparks quit after a few months and there were lots of empty seats. But two breaks bought it breathing room. It didn’t have to pay a $1 million annual license fee for five years under a sweetheart deal with the city. And the ferociously tough New York Hotel and Motel Trades union, Local 6, gave Caiola and Salama a two-year grace period before workers would organize under the union banner.
Tower took the helm without any skilled cooks or managers who’d worked for him before — as if Tom Brady were to take over a losing high school team 15 years from now.
Tower waded in on an optimistic note.
“Everybody dive in. Let’s start cooking!,” he declares in the film to cheers by the awestruck kitchen crew.
The honeymoon didn’t last long. Tower’s vocal exasperation with his team, and the lousy food it was turning out, made me wonder why the chef and the owners allowed cameras to record the misery. (The film, which was Bourdain’s idea, was meant to tell Tower’s life story before anyone knew he’d be going to Tavern; shooting resumed when the announcement was made.)
“This lime is unacceptable,” he berates a cowering bartender. Tower thrusts the offending citrus in his face. “How much would you pay for that? Would you put that in your mouth?” (Tower told me by phone from the Yucatán, “It was part of my training technique at Stars.”)
“You’re burning that,” Tower snarls at a lowly line cook. “You think you’re going to use that? … I told you to keep your eyes on it. You burned it!”
Tower’s rage spills over into the dining room, although he’s only supposed to be in charge of the kitchen.
“I think Jeremiah understands that David and I have carte blanche in the rest of the restaurant,” Salama says, reasonably. But Tower seethes that there are no cocktail napkins on tables. Managers say they’ll take it up at a meeting.
“Get the goddamn cocktail napkins on the table,” Tower erupts.
On Feb. 26, 2015, Tower reads my downbeat review while sitting at the bar. “I’m better than Katy Sparks but not that much better,” he groans. “Then, it tears us to pieces.”
Later in the film, Tower faces his team in the kitchen, where he declares a salad “horrible.” He warns, “I’m drawing a line in the sand. We’re not going to prove that The Post is right.”
The New York Times’ Pete Wells piles on a week later, writing, “The fun stops when the food arrives.”
Caiola and Salama admonish Tower, telling the chef that the reviews are “the result” of the freedom they gave him.
“So now we have to actually monitor you and we’re going to take charge of the food,” Tower recalls in the film. “I thought, ‘Really — these are the ones who asked me whether lamb has both dark and white meat … for f–k’s sake!’”
Caiola and Salama hope that Tower will quit, but he refuses, giving them no choice. When Tower takes a few days off, it’s all the reason they need. Tower gets a text from his lawyer: “They said the damage is done … they are not moved by attempts to keep you on.”
Nobody knows how much Tower was paid at Tavern. No lawsuits were filed. But on April 23, 2015, Tavern announced that it had parted ways with him and he would be replaced by little-known chef John Stevenson.
Tower told me last week that he’d just begun building a solid team at Tavern when the ax fell. He might have made it work with more time. Back living full time in Mexico, he still comes to New York and rides “on the back of Mario Batali’s motorcycle on the way to his restaurants.”
But why, with an illustrious career behind him, did he go to Tavern, a move that was guaranteed to end on a sour note?
“I didn’t know it was a sour note,” he tells me. “As I say in the film, I have a fatal attraction for the slim chance.”
Meanwhile, Tavern, now under its fourth chef in three years, faces a challenge tougher than any kitchen drama. The owners are in a grueling negotiation with union boss Peter Ward — who can make Jeremiah Tower seem like the sweetest kid on the block.