IN LETTERS AS in food, bitterness is a tricky variable. It brings an indispensable edge, but it is also easily overused, with fatal consequences. Given Jeremiah Tower's fame as a chef (much of it self-generated), one might have thought that he would have no trouble bringing his master's touch to the writing of his memoir, California Dish: What I Saw (and Cooked) at the American Culinary Revolution (Free Press, $25). And the first half or so of the book is artfully seasoned, by turns funny, lyrical, lacerating, and informative. Tower commands the page as Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential) only wishes he could.

But then, but then ... things fall apart. The long crash of Tower's Stars empire – beginning with the 1989 earthquake and proceeding through ugly legal skirmishes, scenes with thuggish financiers, and plenty of personal recrimination, with countless bottles of top-drawer champagne to soothe the wounds – is a slogging chronicle that refuses to end. It is as if a ship has sunk but from the depths continues for a good while to emit formless blobs of fuel oil and other debris.

It isn't pretty, but then rise-and-fall stories so seldom are. Tower was present at the creation of the modern Bay Area food scene; he became chef at the nascent Chez Panisse when he was in his early 30s, and he opened Stars – an "American brasserie" modeled on Paris's centenarian La Coupole – in his early 40s. The La Coupole comparison is a melancholy one now that Stars, having sputtered for years, finally went dark for good last spring at age 19.

Tower the memoirist reminds us that, in a real sense, the epicenter of the Loma Prieta earthquake was San Francisco's Civic Center and that its aftershocks reverberated through the area months and years after the main event. Stars reopened four days after the temblor, but the doors now swung back to reveal a changed world of closed freeways, closed government buildings, closed arts and performance institutions. A two-month strike against the San Francisco Symphony, beginning in December 1996, completed the economic strangulation of the neighborhood, but by then Tower was well on his way to a complete divorce from his glamorous restaurant.

He was also on his way to New York, a city whose ethic of conspicuous consumption probably suits him better than did the more conflicted local style of conspicuous consumption and social responsibility. San Francisco has always been two cities existing in parallel universes: the A-list town and the hippie town. Sometimes, as at Chez Panisse, those universes meet, and the stars come into a happy alignment, you might say, as they did not for Stars.