In the 1970s and ’80s Californian Tower was at the pinnacle of the Bay Area restaurant world because of his central role in Berkeley’s Chez Panisse and his founding of Stars in San Francisco. Martha Stewart calls him “a father of American cuisine,” and the many food writers interviewed here can’t help but agree.
Handsome, charismatic, the man who pioneered the concept of the open kitchen and perhaps the first of the modern celebrity chefs, Tower also had so imperious a personality even he has to admit “I seem to piss people off a lot.”