At the June opening party for Stars Palo Alto, the local investors in the Lytton Avenue restaurant feted and fawned over famed restaurateur Jeremiah Tower.
Mayor Joe Simitian presented the father of California cuisine with a key to the city, and general partner Jim Baer raised his glass to welcome to Palo Alto the man whose name is synonymous with the term "celebrity chef."
Four months later, Baer is ready to welcome a new chef into Stars' trademark open kitchen.
In a move that has Bay Area food pundits and gossip columnists abuzz, San Francisco's Square One owner Joyce Goldstein has been hired to replace Tower, whose title at Stars Palo Alto was "chef-operator."
Unlike his landmark San Francisco Stars, Tower does not own the Palo Alto incarnation. He licensed the Stars name and menu concept to Baer and about 70 other investors. As part of the agreement, Tower said he would be in the Palo Alto kitchen at least 10 days a month.
Baer said the "consulting arrangement" with Tower had not worked out. While the tony, two-tiered restaurant is shoulder-to-shoulder with diners every day of the week and there are rarely enough coveted reservations to go around, service problems and other concerns of the investors have continued into the fourth month of operation.
"We're bringing in some other consulting chefs, including Joyce Goldstein, to strengthen our resources. (Tower) continues to be involved as the visionary," said Baer.
Baer did not have specifics on who other "consulting chefs" might be.
Goldstein, who specializes in eclectic Mediterranean cuisine at her Square One restaurant, said she "was not at liberty to discuss the specifics" of changes she will make to the restaurant and its menu.
"I'm just there to help the kitchen staff," she said. "The public should not expect any big changes right away, because--guess what?--Rome was not built in a day. People's feelings are involved, training is involved and tact is involved. There are people there who have been working very hard, and I want everyone to be happy. I don't want to go in like a steamroller."
Goldstein said she would probably be down in Palo Alto this week.
Meanwhile, Tower said reports of problems--of uneven service or otherwise--at the Palo Alto restaurant "are just garbage." He said his departure from Palo Alto had been planned since opening day, and that he had given the investors a list of chefs he would like to see come in and take over.
"I was never intending to be full-time in Palo Alto and full-time in San Francisco," Tower said. "Obviously, that's impossible. This had been a licensing agreement from the beginning. I was there to set up the restaurant, to build the menu, to get it up and running. "I had been talking for some time to several chefs about taking over for me in Palo Alto. The shocker for me was that they chose Joyce. She was not on my list. I didn't think of getting a big name from the Bay Area, but a big name from New York or Chicago--to get the national press as well as the Bay Area press."
Addressing the issue of the alleged problems at the restaurant, Tower said: "How many ways do you spell success in the U.S.? The public loved it, the critics loved it. The restaurant was meeting and surpassing its budget projections. It met all its goals. I think that's the story." --Monica Hayde Weekly staff writer Heather Rock Woods contributed to this story.
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