Dear Chef 002 | Jeremiah Tower

What is “Dear Chef”
Dear Chef is inspired by old-fashioned letter-writing columns – the ones where you could ask an expert for advice about how to clean stains out of a shirt, or how to deal with your rebellious teenager.
Whereas we may not care too much about shirt stains, we do care about connecting our chef community around the world with industry leaders and innovators. We want to create opportunities for you to be directly mentored by men and women you’ve only read about before.
To participate, just log on to Facebook starting on Monday morning – the 20th of November – and go to the Chef’s Roll Facebook page. We’ll make a post kicking off this “Dear Chef”, and you can comment on that post asking your question(s). Throughout the day, Jeremiah Tower himself will be logging in to his personal Facebook account to answer you directly. He might not be able to get to all of the questions, but he’ll try to get to most of them.
Who is Jeremiah Tower?
At the height of his culinary career, Jeremiah had as much notoriety as any Hollywood star. But then he disappeared from the restaurant scene.
His name is closely associated with Chez Panisse, where he wrote the menu back in the 70’s, inventing what became known as California Cuisine. After a dramatic falling out with co-owner Alice Waters over the future of Panisse, he went out on his own, opening San Francisco’s luxurious “Stars”. He continued refining his craft there, training a host of generational talents. Dominique Crenn, Joey Altman, and Mario Batali all came up through the ranks at Stars.
After selling Stars in 1998, Tower moved to Mexico, where he avoided the spotlight for almost 15 years. It’s only now, in 2017, that he’s becoming a household name once more, thanks in large part to the Anthony Bourdain-produced documentary “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent.”
We were thrilled to host Tower as one of our VIP guests at our recent “A Night at The Mansion” chef party at the former Versace Mansion in Miami, and we’re thrilled to now give you, our global chef community, the opportunity to ask him anything you want: advice about how to manage a kitchen, his take on current trends, or about the documentary itself.


|Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent is now available via CNN on demand through cable and satellite systems, as well as via the CNNgo app. The film is also now available for Oscar consideration!