Nurse the Hate: The Last Magnificent

I watched a film on Jeremiah Tower last night called "The Last Magnificent".  Here's the quick plotline.  He was a chef that was instrumental in developing the “New American” cuisine, which is essentially the punk rock revolution of cooking.  He was working at Chez Panisse in Berkley in a kitchen full of hippies that were all fucking each other trying to duplicate French cuisine.  While that was probably all kinds of fun when they weren’t working, it wasn’t that satisfying being a tribute band to French cooking.  That’s when the light bulb went off and he thought, “wait… we have great ingredients here!  Why apologize because these aren’t French sourced oysters or French wines.  Let’s show off our best with great technique!”.  Ta-da!  At about the same time bands across America were thinking “Why are we trying to be Yes and sings songs about wizards and shit?  Let’s do our own thing.”, something like minded was going on in restaurants.

The guy is really fascinating.  He was brought up in an emotionally detached home, sent to horrible sounding English boarding schools, and lived a double life as a closeted gay man in the 60s.  As times changed, so did he.  Always an iconoclast, he was perfect for his time.  He rejected Harvard and the blue blood East Coast lifestyle, did tons of drugs, and drifted to the West Coast where he just happened to walk into Panisse as a self-taught chef.  He is clearly a big shiny personality that is also a world class pain in the ass.  After tremendous success at a restaurant called Stars in SF, he dropped out of sight.  Poof.  Gone for 15 years.

He resurfaced to take on the daunting challenge of running Tavern On The Green in NYC.  A huge restaurant with too many tables, too many owners, and too much stacked against greatness, Tower also had a long list of enemies that were looking to seek payback over slights he had made to them in what appeared to be some sort of coke fueled decadence in the 80s.  Why?  Why would he put himself in a position so likely to fail?  He quoted Proust.  “Work while you still have the light.  Let the flesh grow old, crumble… what are my great expectations and what have I done? Well, that remains to be seen.”

Tower is interesting in that he appears to be the lead role cast in his own movie in which only he has the script.  He is taking chances with his art, if that’s what we can call cooking and restaurant presentation (and I think we can).  He is performing with the highest stakes in his profession knowing full well that scorn and shame are the most likely outcome.  Yet, he still goes for it.  And he fails.  The film shows him being cast out and leaving his small New York apartment with an oil painting from childhood and lucky amulets from his travels.  He presumably heads back to Mexico to take stock if he still has any remaining light.

Tower is like a once great athlete that decides on a comeback.  Against all odds, he worked to get back in position to simply walk back up to the plate and compete against the toughest competition.  His competition was not only the New York restaurant scene but also his significant past.  In the end his failure to succeed to the impossible expectation level set for him was not so much tragic as inevitable.  While he might not have hit a home run, I respect the man for picking up the bat and taking his cuts.