Harvard offers 50 concentrations, yet food or cuisine or cooking do not make an appearance in any of their titles. However, some alumni have leveraged their Harvard educations to enter careers in cooking. The Independent spoke to a trailblazer of modern American cuisine, Chef Jeremiah Tower ’66, GSD ’69, and famous internet food entertainer, Nick Digiovanni ’19, to learn how Harvard impacted their journeys into the world of cuisine.
“The food at Adams House was shit,” said Tower. “So I cooked in my closet in junior year at Adams House. I would cook truffle omelettes and drink great wines.” While the quality of the food at Adams hasn’t changed much since 1965, American cuisine has grown significantly. Jeremiah Tower’s revolutionary cooking at restaurants like Chez Panisse in Oakland and Stars in San Francisco is a massive reason why. By elevating the bounty of the American breadbasket with a classical French ethos, Tower has helped lead a charge that influenced the flavor profile of most domestic haute cuisine today. Instead of attempting to totally transform ingredients, Tower elevated each ingredient’s inner sparkle. At Harvard, he studied architecture, but he went on to have one of the most storied careers of any American chef.
Nick Digiovanni, on the other hand, can probably be found somewhere on your phone right now. He started his culinary career by becoming the youngest-ever MasterChef finalist. Digiovanni now boasts almost 6 million followers on TikTok, and is currently the youngest college-educated person on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Food and Drink. At Harvard, Digiovanni created his own concentration in “Food & Climate” because he wanted to do something he loved that was also practical. Unlike Tower’s experience at Harvard, Digiovanni’s cooking was not relegated to the closet. In fact, he completed his degree while cooking for a local restaurant.
A seemingly reluctant trailblazer, Digiovanni wanted to address how Harvard didn’t help students explore the uncertainty of life. Describing how he felt at the beginning of college, he said, “I was just completely lost. I didn’t think there was enough guidance, freshman year especially, to help kids figure out what they actually want to do. Everyone comes into school, and is like, ‘I’m going to be pre-med or go into economics,’ and they just do it because all their friends are doing it. It makes it really difficult to narrow down on what you want to do.”
Meanwhile, Tower reflected on his time at Harvard with enthusiasm. “We shut down Harvard,” he said while recounting a story of rebellion in 1969. “My most exciting memory of that period was when I gave a dinner for a whole bunch of revolutionaries from the Students for a Democratic Society. We drank champagne and when the champagne was empty we filled them up with gasoline, made Molotov cocktails, and threw them at the architecture building. I didn’t realize you can’t make molotov cocktails out of champagne bottles; they bounce. That was my architecture career.”
Despite the limited discussion at Harvard of pursuing nontraditional careers after college, Tower and Digiovanni found spaces to pursue their passions for food. Digiovanni was thrust into the spotlight directly after graduation when he became a finalist on MasterChef. But he believes his fame was launched not by the television screen, but by the iPhone screen: “TikTok is what started it all for me,” he said. “That’s what gave me the ability to control where I brought my whole fan base. Suddenly having this massive base of almost 6 million people, just having that power and having so many people trust you for good advice—that’s pretty cool.” Now, only after graduating Harvard, Digiovanni is fielding offers to be America’s next man in the kitchen, following the footsteps of culinary icons like Gordon Ramsay and Bobby Flay.
Tower, on the other hand, took a little longer to get his bearings. While dreaming of making underwater buildings in Hawaii and living in San Francisco, Tower found himself “peeling potatoes. [My friends] were all driving Porsches and I was, you know, getting paid $400 a month,” he said. “I realized I couldn’t get a job as an architect. And so I was actually totally free. That ever-chaotic chance moment came along, and when I grabbed it, I was the chef at Chez Panisse.” Entirely out of the chaos, Tower walked into a kitchen, demanded an interview, “added some salt and cream to the soup,” and started his journey.
Digiovanni and Tower offered advice for readers contemplating whether to pursue a culinary career. Tower simply suggested reading; in fact, the aspect of his Harvard education that he uses most today today include, “knowing how to research, knowing how to read. My advice to people working for me or trying to work for me is go read cook books.” Digiovanni’s advice was to remember the breadth of the restaurant industry. “It’s such a massive industry,” he said. “You can go into hospitality, hotels, or running a bakery or a restaurant.” The industry even appeals to those interested in computer science: Digiovanni explained that “you can go into the technological stuff—companies, like Toast, that help restaurants run their infrastructure.”
The tales of these two chefs, half a century apart, highlight the impact of one’s mindset at Harvard on their life after Harvard. Both Digiovanni and Tower had a final piece of advice for students: if you’re curious, cook! And if you ever find yourself in your closet cooking omelettes, don’t forget to whip the eggs at the last second.
Noah Tavares ’24 (noahtavares@college.harvard.edu) prefers eating over cooking.