 Director Lydia, director. I'm from New York. Director Lydia Tenali, I'm trying to, trying to. That was good. Yeah. That's what I'm gonna call her from now on. I wasn't raised to enjoy the Brooklyn palette that was raised to disguise my voice. Director, director Lydia Tenali is the last magnificent, is an amazing documentary playing right now in theaters all over America. The movie produced by Anthony Bourdain chronicles the life and times of Jeremiah Tower, who pioneered California cuisine and the modern incarnation of the celebrity chef. I'm going to go so far as to suggest that you, Jeremiah Tower, are responsible for farm to table and the whole idea of locovores. According to Anthony Bourdain, it all starts with Jeremiah Tower, who revolutionized the American restaurant by turning it into a celebration of cooking, as well as local ingredients. Thank you for joining us. Well, thank you, David. Thank you for inviting me on the show. I know nothing about food, but food is like comedy. Everyone is an expert. Everyone can tell you if it's good or bad. They can't explain why it's good or why it's bad. Can you be a food critic without being able to cook? Well, you can certainly, let me think about the word critic for a minute. You can certainly be a major food figure. I mean, Julia Childs, for instance, couldn't cook, but she recognized good food. I mean, she couldn't even roast a chicken, but that's true. It's true. She would admit that too, right? Not really. I don't think she ever admitted that, but anyway, so, but she can certainly recognize great food. And I've been told by people who worked with Craig Claiborne, and he couldn't cook with a terrible cook. And that's why he had Pierre Freyne do all his cooking and testing for the New York Times. But that didn't matter. He knew what delicious food was. You don't have to be able to cook it to know it. Taste. Food is a combination, I think. Taste is a combination of smells, textures, how it lands on your tongue. Musicians are born with perfect pitch. They can be taught relative pitch, but you're either born with perfect pitch or you're not. Does the same apply to a chef when it comes to taste? Is there such thing as perfect taste and relative taste? And do you have perfect taste? You know, I've read about that, and I think it's true that some people, I mean, one's tongue and whole system in the mouth and nasal passages, you know, and sinuses are built to be more accepting of all the nuances of taste, which of course is smell and everything. Yes, I think that just like that, in terms of perfect pitch, there is a perfect pitch of being able to taste things that one is born with. Yes, I agree. In the documentary, there's one of your chefs and he hits the glass. He says there's a tone, there's a tone, and that you would introduce a tone to your chefs, and they'd say, oh, we got to do this. What does he mean by a tone? That's certainly one of my favorite parts in the movie in The Last Magnificent because he just hits the glass with his knife and says that's what we were looking for. And it's, you know, that clarity, that simplicity, the clarity, the moment. You don't have to spend 15 minutes looking at diving around into your 15 ingredients that somebody's put on the plate to figure out that it's a mess. It's the clarity of a great saxophone note. You know, it's a great clarity of Benny Goodman on the clarinet. It's a great clarity of a brilliant color, that simple, that easily seen, that easily tasted. Somebody who is brilliant at music, they hear a symphony different than I would. I watch comedy, I guess, differently than other people do. When you bite into something, what are you tasting? You described in the Q&A afterwards having a hot dog at a Walmart in Mexico and you took, you took two bites. One bite was delicious and then the second bite, you said that's it, I'm done and it made you sick. But that first bite of a Walmart hot dog, you said it was a riot of colors and taste. What are you tasting? Well, you know, I'm not immune to the power of chemicals. If it was made by Exxon, you know, I, sure, I approve of gasoline after all. But what's going through your brain when you bite into something as mundane and poisonous as a, as a Walmart hot dog? I'm being serious. What, is there a feeling? No. Is there a memory? No, it's sort of a rush of the whole combination of flavors. And then of course, seconds later, or not seconds, but you know, a minute or two later, I'd realize that rush is completely artificially created. I admire that, but I certainly don't want to eat it. American fast food tastes wonderful at first bite because it's just, it's very carefully orchestrated music. But of course, it's not fast food, it's fast death. They have little eyedroppers that they can put on a bland piece of meat and turn it into serloin because of the smell. It's mostly about the smell. In the documentary, you collect menus dating back hundreds of years and in acting their sense memory, you recall an emotion and then apply it to the character in the scene. Does the same apply to cooking? Can you remember a taste without having the actual food in front of you so that when you're coming up with your own menu, is there a taste you have in your head and you're trying to achieve it? Or when you're preparing a menu, is it empiricism, trial and error, and you stumble into something you like? Or is this, I hate to say, platonic absolute taste that you have in your head? But are you imagining a taste? I know somebody who told me she can remember what I smell like from, you know, 30 years ago. Do you remember a taste? Well, I hope that's a compliment. I was living in Berkeley at the time, I don't think it was a compliment, but do you have like a taste that you can remember just in your head? Yes, I do, and also if I think of putting an ingredient or putting two or three together, I can immediately taste it. So it makes it a lot easier to actually cook it if you've never cooked it before. You head for those tastes, and so when you get there, when you lift that spoon of sauce to your mouth and you taste it, you realize that was what was in your head, and that's your benchmark, that's your success. That's in your head without any of the smells, any of the ingredients in front of you? True, yes. I mean, it must be an accumulation of all the things I've tasted and cooked and all the things I've loved in my life, but you know, that's how I can write a recipe for a cookbook without ever testing the recipe and have it come out fine, as people say. Wow. In the movie, they show a young version of you going through these menus. There's a thing called tasting menus. Can you actually read a menu and taste it? Just by reading it? Yes. Yes. I mean, I taste the way I think it should be. I mean, if it says, you know, in the old menus, you know, turtle consomme, I have tasted that kind of consomme when I was seven or eight. I've never seen it again because, you know, now it's illegal. But I did have it, you know, in London's finest restaurant in the fifties, and I remember what it tasted like. So it just, I just read that word on a menu and I can, it's in my head, you know. Wow. Almost the same as putting it in my mouth. That's incredible. Can that be getting back to perfect pitch versus relative pitch? It can be taught to have relative taste, right? I guess somebody, if they're trained, they can begin to taste things just by reading it? Oh, sure. Sure. I mean, for instance, in a kitchen, once, you know, one time in shape and each were cooking dinner and then my one assistant at the time, Willie, became ill. So I grabbed the dishwasher who was 19 or 18 or something. I said, here, I cooked it. He tasted it. He cooked it himself. It was about 85%. I said, no, taste it. Now, remember not do it again. And he got it right. So he never washed dishes again. Wow. But somebody else couldn't, you know, been there all night trying to reproduce that. Right. So I started doing comedy in San Francisco. So you either were born funny or you're like me. You learn how to be funny. You know, Robin Williams, guys like Steven Pearl, Jeremy Kramer, these guys were just born funny. They can't help it. They can't help it. And they can spot another funny person. They just know they can sniff out another funny person. Can you sniff out somebody who has taste? When you get someone a young cook, you know, or somebody who's just new to the restaurant, for example, and you have them taste something, it's the ones who go quiet. It's not exactly as if their eyes roll in the back of their head, but they're quiet. They don't jump around and say, oh, great. That's fabulous. You know, blah, blah, blah. They stay, they're sort of stunned into silence, even if just for a few seconds. Those are the ones. And you know it. You know. Yes. You can just tell by their, you know, you look at their face and you look at their body language and how they're standing and how they react when this sort of pleasure sweeps over them and makes them still for a second. You know, you've got to cook. Almost a genetic thing, or they were raised a certain way. I think so. However, that's brought to the table. Sorry, no pun intended. That is always my way of recognizing somebody who can be trained and to be a great cook. And then when you're dealing with them, you don't have to say it to them. You know, they know, and you just treat them differently while you're running the restaurant. Right. A year later, they've moved up and passed everybody by. Well, like, you know, at Starz, it was Dominique Cren, she came in and I put her on the line the first day. I could just tell she was somebody who was going, knew what she was doing, was going to know what she was doing. And now she's, you know, one of the most female chefs in America in the world. I saw the documentary Thursday. It just washed over me. I saw at the IFC in New York City. There are some people who can't imagine a time that we didn't celebrate local cuisine. I think it was Mario Batali who says in the documentary that you can't really understand a place unless you pay attention to the smells, the breeze, and it's all contained in the local food, the grass, the herbs. I love that. That, for me, that explained everything about you because I can't imagine a time in my life because I lived in Berkeley and I lived in San Francisco. I can't imagine a time in my life when Berkeley and San Francisco had an inferiority complex about the local grown food. But before you, they did? Well, you know, it's impossible. People just can't believe that all the stuff we have now didn't always exist. But when I started at Chaponese, I mean, the only olive oil was, you know, one market down miles away in Oakland. The only fresh fish was, you know, in Chinatown in San Francisco. There were no herbs. I mean, I used to, when I walked to Chaponese to cook in the morning, I would steal nasturtiums and rosemary from people's walls. It's impossible to believe that none of that happened. I mean, now that the whole United States has won whole foods market, you know, it's just sounds ridiculous to say that that didn't always exist. In the documentary, it shows you go into a farmer's market in Mexico where you spend a lot of your time. You started to prepare a dish for your neighbors in Mexico. They said, this isn't, I don't remember the name of the town you live in. I don't want to violate your privacy. But let's, for all intents and purposes, call it, I don't know, Juarez. And they would say, this is not Juarez cooking. And you say, well, it should be. Well, I can happily say that it's merida in the Yucatan. And it's the Mayan cuisine. And they have three or four dishes that are absolutely world class. And one of them is built on that black chili paste called chilmole, which is, you know, from incinerating basically, our bold chilies, then grinding them up and making a paste. And that's what I put on the octopus in the film. Right. One of my favorite things, chilmole. Talk to me about why it's important in terms of the planet. Why, if we do farm to table, why being a locovore is so beneficial to helping save what's left of this planet? Originally, I mean, it all started up because the, there wasn't anything much to buy. So I, you know, encourage people to go up into the hills in Berkeley and pick mushrooms. I mean, the boat boys who came back would caught a salmon or a conger eel. They'd bring it to the back door of shape and ease. And so it started because that was what was available. But in fact, it's all about, you know, the local stuff is going to be probably the best quality, the freshest. The local produce and ingredients are going to be the, you know, the freshest, probably. And the local ingredients haven't been flown in from Chile on, you know, on a huge jet. In terms of using up our resources, the most gentle impact on the planet is to use local food. One of the things that struck me in the documentary was I hope I'm pronouncing this word probably equanimity that you seem to have an equanimity. When things went wrong, you kind of smiled and went through it in the lead up to this interview with you. We had a technical problem and I got really frustrated because it was a machine and not a human being. I had to reboot the computer and I'm very intolerant of machines when they screw up. But when people screw up, I'm very forgiving. Is that the way you run a restaurant? I don't think you have a temper. I think the impression I got from the movie was you were very demanding, a control freak. You expected the best from everybody. But I don't get a sense that you panicked when people screwed up. I don't think you can succeed in a restaurant without nurturing everybody. Panicking is counterproductive because, you know, the people are waiting for their dinner. You can't go out and say, I mean, I can go out and say the electricity is off, but they already know that. I can say the cook, you know, just decided he doesn't want to do this and that's inexcusable because then I would do it. So actually I can forgive machines and disasters and hurricanes and riots, earthquakes. It's much more the human beings that I can forgive. But on the other hand, if they're screwing up, usually means you haven't trained them properly. You know that scene in The Last Magnificent where the young Chinese cook burns the food and I said, you know, what do you think you're doing? And then it turns out he'd been put on the station by the chef to cuisine, which I didn't notice that he didn't know what he was doing. So I went over for the rest of the night and started to cook with him and show him how to do the food. And he turned to me and said, well, chef, you know, I don't know how to cook. I laughed. I thought that was the sweetest thing a cook ever told me. You know, I don't have to have a cook. And I said, well, here we go. That's all we're going to do. The Last Magnificent is it's an amazing documentary. It really is. And thank you for doing this. I found stunning. And it's such a great lesson. You went to Harvard, got a master's in architecture. You are obviously well educated and brilliant. And you run a restaurant. You are paying attention to things that other people would say are beneath you. For example, the flowers. When you were running stars, you spent six months on the flowers, learning how the flowers were arranged, how much they cost to the vendor was the mindfulness of that. If you want to have a successful business or run a campaign for office like Hillary Clinton, God is in the details. Absolutely. I mean, if you in the broad sense, there's no point having good food if the service is lousy or vice versa. I mean, this perfect waiter or waiter giving you perfect service brings you lousy food. None of that makes any sense. It has to be a perfect balance. So it's the feel of the restaurant, the look of the restaurant, the food, the service, the choices that the owner has made to provide fairly priced, wonderful wines by the glass, you know, great cocktails. And I don't mean cocktails with smoke coming out of them. I just mean, you know, properly made with very good ingredients. You know, I bartended one day a week at start, so I could keep my hand in and see how the bar really ran, you know, on what was possible, what was impossible. So yes, it's God is definitely in the details all the time. I had a guest on the show last week who's a comedian and an aspiring Major League Baseball pitcher. He wanted to be a pitcher. He went to Arizona State University. And I asked him about the intersection of stand up comedy and pitching. And the question I had for him is, when you're pitching or doing stand up, you are totally in the moment and totally focused to the exclusion of everything else. So when you're running a restaurant, that is the ultimate escape from everything. Is there time when you're running a restaurant to think about anything other than the restaurant? And I bring that up because you quit you walked away from it. I guess you went to Manila, New York, Mexico. I'm a control freak. Most people are right. How do you give up all that control? And are you able to let go? Most chess or adrenaline freaks. And so, you know, you know, absolutely hoped on high levels of adrenaline. So I mean, that was one of the things to manage. And I sat down and made a list of, you know, how could I, I mean, I wrote three books now and the fourth I'm working on since I left stars. So I wasn't sitting around doing absolutely nothing. But a book doesn't really provide a solution to all those adrenaline levels. So I went diving with sharks. I figured that would be, you know, the equivalent to a Saturday night at stars. And it was, you know, you'd fall ever backwards from a panga into, you know, a little pack of six foot leopard sharks. I mean, that definitely is that because you wanted to become the ingredient? The fresh ingredients. And look, it was right off the boat. And they didn't eat you. They didn't eat you. They definitely, definitely within 100 miles. Within 10 feet. One of the things I realized watching The Last Magnificent is they talked about the level of consistency night after night. It's not good enough to be a genius. One night. You have to create a dish and you have to make that same exact dish 5,000 times. Does it have to taste exactly the same? Are all 5,000 dishes, are they going to taste exactly the same? No, because you've got various people cooking it. And also in a busy restaurant, if I was cooking that dish all night long, it wouldn't be exactly the same. But it has to be equally as good and it has to be as close as possible to the original intent. If it's a piece of perfect fish with a little bit of prawn shell essence and muscle and clam and lobster stock and perfect olive oil and a couple of herbs thrown in, fine. But it can't taste all of herbs or all of olive oil or all of the lobster essence. It has to be a balance. And if you get that balance, there is a small range of changes that you can have and it's still be fantastic. You're running a restaurant. I blindfold you and I give you the same exact order. Two dishes, a pasta dish. They're about to go out. Could you sample each dish and tell me why they're different? What was done differently on a subatomic level, on that granular level? Are you able to taste two identical dishes that are about to go out and tell the story of how it was prepared? Well, I mean, blindfolded. I'm not so sure because, you know, visual smell, body language of the person cooking it, you know, the way it's plated, everything comes into play. I mean, that's the only way I could keep my eye on every dish that went out of there because I'm looking at all those things. You know, I'm looking at how much sweat is on the cooked brow. So blindfolded, I could probably tell you why they taste different or taste the same, but I couldn't give you the whole story because I would be missing a lot of it. After you left San Francisco, molecular, is it called molecular? Yeah, molecular cuisine. Molecular cuisine. That's cooking style. Is that a new phenomenon? And is that real cooking? I mean, trying to recreate the taste of a cigarette in a sorbet, is that moving the bowl forward? Is that important? It does move the bowl forward. It is important, I think, but at the same time, it's, you know, in a way, it's always a side story. The way cuisine Mastur was, the way Neuvel cuisine was, for somebody who loves cooking professionally, that is always intriguing and you learn from it and it changes your style a bit. But that particular molecular cuisine in the hands of four or five people in the world is genius and intriguing and wonderful. It's not everyday food. Unfortunately, that stuff is very difficult. So in the hands of somebody not that great, it's just rubbish. Like foam, for instance, you know, from El Bulli in northern Spain. When he made, you know, a foam of, let's say, wild mushrooms, it was absolutely the pure essence, the smell, the taste. I mean, the whole thing is if you had a pound of fresh mushrooms on your plate, but it was a tablespoon of light, wonderful thing, you know, very easy on your body, but fully satisfying. Well, if somebody thinks they can put that in a can and pump it up with gas and shove it all over every plate they do, then they've made a big mistake. So it is very, very educational and very inspiring. But it's only for the hands of a very few people and it's temporary. We're on Pacifica Radio. It started in Berkeley, Pacifica Radio, and we're on KPFK in Los Angeles. Pacifica Radio far left, beyond left. It's so left, we might as well be on the right. There's no difference. Sometimes they meet. Yes, they do. So I lived in Berkeley in the 80s. I didn't go to Berkeley. I went for the revolution. The Sand and East is in stand-up comedy. And Shay Penise, Shay Penise is in Berkeley. I had a lot of friends who went to Berkeley for students living on top ramen. Shay Penise was where you ate. If you were lucky enough to be rooming with somebody who had rich parents visiting from out of state. Talk to me about the politics behind Shay Penise. It was, it is an exclusive restaurant and the incredible food, notwithstanding, how do you square a world-class restaurant rising from the progressive movement's ground zero, Berkeley? The revolutionaries from the left or the right, no one is ever so happy to get into that hotel suite or into a limousine as the, as those people. I mean, look at, look at, you know, Moussey Tung, look at Lennon, look at Tarrion from the French Revolution. I mean, they, they invented a whole new fashion of men's clothes minutes after they got off the street. The sans croix. Well, yeah, the sans croix. Yeah. I mean, nobody wants to be cold and hungry. And if it involves, you know, 800 thread Egyptian cotton sheets, then so much the better. But of course that, as you saw in the film, The Last Magnificent, that was a bit of a problem when I, I was not very Berkeley. Berkeley, when I first got there, I think it was a three or four course menu for $6.50. So that was 1972, but it still was only $6.50. When I took it at $7.50, because, you know, we had no money, we're going broke. There was Pactle V, another revolution in the streets because their favorite place was now an expensive restaurant. Seems ridiculous now when, you know, that $7.50, you will get your glass of water in New York or Beverly Hills. So they saw that as a bit of a problem, but they also love to eat. There is a phenomenon of people who leave San Francisco and resent it. Do you resent San Francisco? Do you, do you think there's a work ethic there, or are people slaves to the lifestyle? Do you like what San Francisco has become, or is that a tough, is that an unfair question to ask you? It's not an unfair question. It's actually a very clever one because most people wouldn't even know that question exists, whether it's about me or any other people, as you say, who leave San Francisco. I've always found San Francisco a little bit difficult because it's so self-congratulatory. And, you know, about the bay. Well, excuse me, everybody. Have you seen Sydney Harbor? Have you seen Venice? You know, I mean, but Sydney Harbor, Hong Kong Harbor are much more exciting than the bay in San Francisco. But of course it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, has a great food culture. It's just that one gets a little tired of hearing everyone say how fabulous it is. Yeah. I live there for 12 years. Is there a work ethic there? Was it hard to find people willing to, to sacrifice their lifestyle for the puritanical work ethic? Well, yes, because if they, if they didn't, they couldn't work at Starr. I mean, it was just clear. I mean, yes, it wasn't as difficult as you make it sound, but compared to Sydney, which I just did in terms of the beauty, I mean, if I would, was doing a promotion for Starr at the region hotel in Sydney, and you know, the cooks, if the surf was up, they just didn't show up for work. I mean, I was supposed to be swanning around the kitchen, showing people this and that, and I ended up cooking two stations. It was amazing. Well, you've been very generous with your time. I hope you come back. I have a theory about taking the job at Tavern on the Green. I think, like most people, you're a control freak, and it was your way of directing the movie. The Last Magnificent is an amazing documentary. And my theory is you took that job at Tavern on the Green because you figured it, the documentary didn't have a third act. That's my... That's what the director thinks, but it's not true. Jeremiah Towers' latest book is Table Manners, How to Behave in the Modern World and Why Bother, and go see The Last Magnificent. You were very generous with your time. Thank you so much, Jeremiah Towers. Thank you very much, David, for putting me on the show. Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.