Weekend Cooking: Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent (Film)

Do you know who Jeremiah Tower is? I hope you do. But regardless of whether your answer to that question is yes or no, you should take some time to see the 2016 documentary Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent, directed by Lydia Tenaglia and Morgan Fallon. Anthony Bourdain both appears in the film and is one of the producers.

I know Chef Tower first from his association with Alice Waters and Chez Panisse and later from his San Fransisco restaurant Stars. He also had a brief tenure at Tavern on the Green. He is most known for transforming the American food and restaurant scene and for being one of the first to promote the idea of eating local foods.

Beyond his resume, however, I didn't know much about who Tower was as a person. The movie is primarily documentary, mixing vintage footage and family photographs with more recently shot scenes. The film also uses some reenactments when Tower tells us stories about his privileged and eccentric but less-than-ideal childhood.

After watching Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent, I have a different view of the chef as a man: I admire how he rose above a difficult youth and his vision for how best to pursue one's passions, yet I wonder how much of his aloneness is his own fault or perhaps manufactured to create a kind of mystique.

I loved hearing from the range of food elites who appear in the documentary, such as Martha Stewart, Ruth Reichl, Stephen Torres, Wolfgang Puck, and Anthony Bourdain. We also meet other people who knew the chef well, such as friends and people who worked with him.

If you're interested in the rise of the American food scene and the local food movement, then you should get to know Tower, one of the very first celebrity chefs. Although food and cooking are strong threads in Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent, the focus is much more on the chef than on showing beauty scenes of the food he cooked and served at his restaurants.

The documentary is currently streaming on Netflix and is well worth your time. Here's the trailer.

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