California Dish: Dirty Soap Suds A Bestseller Do Not Make
Editors Note: TheLastLaugh.net has some advice for celebrity chefs: Spilling old secrets is just plain sour grapes.
TheWeeklyChuckle Not ones to resist a good, dishy read, we recently ploughed through California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution. Written by 'celebrity chef' (just ask him, he'll tell you how famous he is) Jeremiah Tower, the book is chock full of....
nasty.
That's right, nasty. And nobody likes a titillating tale better than we do but Tower's bitterness over not being as famous as former Chez Panisse restaurant partner (and someone's sex partner) Alice Waters, is, at times, scary. Never has anybody with that much success been so in need of therapy. When he's not endlessly quoting every single press clipping he ever received, he's shamelessly name dropping about so-called important socialites that nobody cares about. And if that were not enough bitterness to digest, Tower goes even further by bragging about every man and woman he's ever bedded. We began to wonder which chapter would contain the best to worse sex ever rating chart was going to be, that's how tacky this publicity hog got.
And if that were not enough to brown your crust, Tower seems to think that humiliating the dead appropriate. That he talked about servicing James Beard sexually (and felt compelled to discuss, god help us, size) was downright pathetic. We aren't trying to be picky but since when did the culinary world try and pass itself off as a bad episode of Sex And The City?
And yet, the humor in all this literary rot is that he brags, non-stop about winning all these awards and accolades from The James Beard Foundation.
Excuse us? You were servicing the old man, right? Right?
Unless things have changed, if a woman did that she'd have clearly been using sex to further her career; professional death in most cases (unless you were early Sharon Stone of course). What Tower doesn't get is that most people actually get the connection between sexual favors and professional advancement. And his shameless obsession with publicity and his rage over Waters not sharing the limelight only makes the book that much more distasteful. In fact, if you start out disliking Waters for clearly not giving Tower his due, you end up feeling empathy for her after endlessly enduring his half baked innuendos including his suggestion that he nailed her gorgeous 21-year-old boyfriend once upon a time.
Honestly, some people just have no discretion and Towers takes the cake.
Recommendation: If you are a serious foodie, read the menus and the extensive Bibliography; both are excellent, but skip the main course. Everything else Tower spins in California Dish is simply going to leave a bad taste in your mouth.
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