Culinary Revolution - Counter-claim

Counter-claim

Jeremiah Tower has often credited Alice Waters with the invention of the then "new" style of "California Cuisine". He left Chez Panisse in 1977 and began an important career on his own. From 1978 to 1981 he worked at other Northern California restaurants, like Ventana in Big Sur and Balboa Cafe in San Francisco. He also taught briefly at the California Culinary Academy during the school's earlier years, around 1978.

Tower opened his own restaurant, the widely acclaimed Stars in San Francisco; it was a business partnership with the same investors involved in another popular restaurant called "Santa Fe Bar and Grill" in Berkeley, California. Tower knew the chef who opened Santa Fe Bar & Grill, as he was a former colleague at Chez Panisse.

Tower has criticized Waters for taking most, if not all, the praise and credit for the acclaim of Chez Panisse; furthermore, he seems to criticize her for taking credit for the primary leadership in the new "California Cuisine" movement and the American "Culinary Revolution.". He also questions Waters' role as an actual "chef" in the kitchen, implying that she has not cooked in years, then also questions her role in the restaurant altogether. Tower has written about this issue of contention in his book, California Dish: What I saw (and cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution (2003), quoting many of his peers from Chez Panisse for support. Many of these peers have since gone on to other ventures, much as Tower himself has done. Many of them are equally popular and prolific in the ongoing development of the new "California Cuisine" or the "New American Classics" to which Tower refers.

Tower is praised for his contributions by various popular chefs, among them Sara Moulton and Jacques Pepin. On the back of "California Dish" the following quotations appear:

The food of Jeremiah Tower has always satisfied my belly and my soul. He was there from the start and is more qualified than anyone else to tell the story of the American food revolution of the last thirty years

—Jacques Pepin

California Dish delivers on the double meaning implicit in its title—it serves up a longtime insider's juicy perspective on the key players of the American culinary revolution...

—Sara Moulton