From The Inside

Working at Stars Restaurant

Recently I have been thinking about my years working at Star Restaurant. So in tribute to Throw Back Thursday, here’s an essay I wrote in 2016 when the documentary, The Last Magnificent, about Jeremiah Tower came out.

With Jeremiah and Julia Child at Stars.

I went to see the documentary, The Last Magnificent, profiling the hugely influential chef Jeremiah Tower, with anticipation, curiosity and some reservation. Having cooked at Tower’s landmark Stars restaurant from its first year in 1984 until I left in 1995, as a savory cook, sous chef, and then switching —with Jeremiah’s encouragement—to pastry chef, I have strongly held memories and opinions both about Jeremiah and the restaurant.

The documentary focuses on Jeremiah’s personality, and the path that lead him to create Stars Restaurant. The producers wanted to give Jeremiah the recognition he deserved in American culinary history. I applaud and thank them for that. But not mentioned in the opera of JT’s (as we called him) life and times onscreen is the extraordinary experience of what it was like to work at Stars in its heyday.

Jeremiah is Jeremiah. He is unique. All of us who worked for him and dined at Stars knew that, and now because of the documentary the world knows it too. But I argue that most wildly creative people feelsomewhat alienated from the rest of us. True geniuses—everybody from artists and musicians to architects and technological innovators—just don’t think like the rest of us; they operate on a different wavelength and in some ways live in their own worlds. Maybe Jeremiah didn’t have the EQ we managers strived to have but that’s not what we, or the world, needed from him. We needed Jeremiah to be Jeremiah, to create the vision. And he needed us to make his culinary dreams a reality day in and day out. We each had our role, knew what it was, and worked hard at it. We also knew we were part of something much bigger than ourselves. We put up with Jeremiah’s personality and he put up with ours. At times his leadership was contentious but together we built a culture-changing restaurant; even back then we could feel that we were making history and we all treasured that opportunity and treated it like gold.

When discussing Stars, many focus on the dynamic dining room. An important part of Jeremiah’s vision (he held a degree in architecture from Harvard), it was one of a handful of restaurants at the time that set the tone for the restaurant dining rooms we eat in today. It was a sprawling, multilevel space with an open kitchen, expansive bar, and an energy that bounced around the room like a pinball. But as electrifying as the ambiance was, including debonair Jeremiah himself strolling the dining room with his omnipresent flute of Champagne and the piano playing, people wouldn’t have come back time after time if it hadn’t been for the hyper-creative and expertly executed food.

I started on the savory side, opening oysters, making pizzas with morels and grilling lamb crépinettes and bratwurst for the bar menu. Once I moved to cold salad, Jeremiah stood at the corner of my station for several weeks to keep an eye on me. (He did this with all the newbies.) It was also the perfect vantage point to watch the entire kitchen and the dining room. It was his favorite spot, except for the end of the bar, where he “held court.” I had a huge knot in my stomach every day going to work wondering if I could keep up with the seemingly endless orders for steak tartare with ancho chili purée, grilled prawns with tomato vinaigrette salads or the Caesar salad with its made-to-order dressing and perfectly arranged romaine leaves.

After I had pushed through the terrors of the cold salad station and moved into my life as pastry chef, I would get to work around 5:30 in the morning. The only other person in the 8,500 square-foot restaurant at that hour was the purchasing agent. In my kitchen clogs, I would walk across the soft gold starred carpet to the bar to make myself a cappuccino, marveling in the emptiness that in twelve hours would be replaced by the nightly party, so crowded that you could barely see the stars on the carpet, or find a spot at the bar. Every morning I looked forward to that walk, reflecting in that moment of solitude how the day would transform into a completely organized and orchestrated frenzy.

We wrote new savory and dessert menus every day. It never crossed our minds to make the same food two days in a row. After dinner service Mark Franz, the head chef, and the dinner crew would sit down with beers and hash out dishes for the next day. (The pastry team and I sorted out our menu during the day as we did production.) Any leftover bits and pieces of food and ingredients went to Stars café. Their menu was the original and the ultimate mystery basket challenge every day. And of course Jeremiah, the God of our little universe, had the final say on all menus.

Jeremiah has one of the best palates I have seen in my lifetime in kitchens. He can coax the most flavor out of ingredients, even something simple. Auguste Escoffier’s phrase “Faites Simple” (“Keep It Simple”) was his daily battle cry and it is imprinted now on the memories of cooks and chefs across the country. (It would make a good epitaph but I am sure Jeremiah would like something more colorful.) His personality may have been at times complicated but his food was straightforward, elegant and arresting—you took note of it before, and while, you ate it.

The dynamic dishes kept the cooks excited and coming back to the heat of the kitchen, the long services (5:30 -11:00 all out), and the endless prep to keep up with the volume. On a Saturday night it wasn’t unusual to prepare 600 dinners and 300 desserts. It’s a testament to perseverance that we were able to maintain the highest quality of food and put out that many dinners night after night. We were taking the best techniques and recipes of classic European and American dishes, cooking with the highest quality local and seasonal ingredients, and formulating a new cuisine. There was so much creative interchange it was intoxicating. Grilled sweetbreads, braised lamb shanks with artichokes, brioche filled with warm lobster and poached garlic cloves drizzled with lobster and chervil beurre blancs- the nightly menus created at Stars broke new ground.

In pastry, Jeremiah introduced me to traditional sabayon- the most ethereal sauce- more velvety and billowy than pastry cream, as creamy as crème anglaise. It was and still is the perfect sauce to serve with or in a dessert. We created numerous variations- Champagne, calvados, orange, amaretto, chocolate, espresso and even once with Chateau d’Yquem. Oreos became Stareos with chocolate shortbread cut into Star shapes and sandwiched with mascarpone filling. Traditional Italian tiramisu morphed into trifles with peach and raspberry or passionfruit, coconut and mango. Dull dense English steamed puddings with some love, care and new flavors like rum walnut and blueberry molasses became best sellers. We were teaching the customers and ourselves how amazing, decadent, and unforgettable food could and should taste. We were constantly on the internal quest to create one amazing dish after another. We lived and breathed food and creativity.

The kitchen staff make-up at Stars was stellar. Many of the line cooks and pastry cooks could have been sous chefs, some even chefs. It was like having all Olympic athletes on a college team. Yes, there were entry level cooks, but even their caliber was above their peers. You had to be fast, and you had to be good. Either/or didn’t cut it. As exacting and intense as it was, we wouldn’t have been anywhere else. When you are pushing yourself as hard as you can, shoulder-to-shoulder with gifted colleagues who are doing the same, you create an unbreakable bond. We supported each other both mentally and helped each other get all the work done. We were a team.

There were of course some extremely tense moments when Jeremiah would dress down a cook over an under or over cooked dish or something sloppily plated, and we would all cringe with sympathy mixed with relief it wasn’t us, but we never let those moments smother the bigger picture. I was not a big partier in those days but even those who did go out after work, as was common in the restaurant world, showed up every day with their A game no matter the excesses of the night prior. It wasn’t just that they didn’t want Jeremiah to yell at them if they slacked off; they didn’t want to let their colleagues or the overall mission down.

Jeremiah was demanding but he was also fun to be with and was exceptionally generous. He would take chefs and cooks to culinary events in other cities and would bar no expense to expose them to new food dishes and wines. On his 50^th birthday a group of us went to the Bordeaux region of France to taste Premier Crus. He financially supported many employees with AIDS. He has a fabulous dry sense of humor and a quick wit. Catching the glint in his eye while we all laughed is one of my favorite Jeremiah memories. One year on New Year’s Eve he turned the clock back so we could get all the desserts out before midnight when all bedlam would break out and the waiters wouldn’t be able to make it across the dining room. Jeremiah may have altered reality occasionally, but it was always for the benefit of the customer.

When I talk to young cooks today, I am sorry that they weren’t able to experience Stars and the changing culture of food in this country first hand. Restaurants like Stars are now commonplace. The food revolution that Jeremiah and other restaurateurs created has been assimilated. But being there on the front lines was an indelible, intense experience that I and my peers will never forget. It was, on its own terms, historic. Am I looking back at this period with rose-colored glasses? Perhaps. But If it was possible to go back and recapture a moment in time, the majority of us who were there at the time would sign up in an instant. I would be first on the list.