Keep it simple.

That’s the advice that culinary icon Jeremiah Tower — regarded as the “father of American cuisine” — has for novices interested in cooking good food.

“Buy the best fresh ingredients you can find and treat them very simply,” he advised. “If you get your hands on a beautiful cauliflower, for example, throw it in some boiling water. Take it out, pour olive oil over it, squeeze some lemon juice and add salt and pepper. Food doesn’t get any better than that.”

On May 9, Tower will be front and center at the Hawai‘i Food & Wine Festival’s “Culinary Hero” event, “California Dreamin’.” The dinner serves as a formal precursor to the annual festival, which runs Oct. 6 to 28.

These days, Tower calls Mexico home. At two locales, Cozumel and Merida, the capital of Yucatan, he walks his talk, patronizing stands every morning to enjoy freshly made tacos, and feeding himself simply and deliciously with fresh food grown nearby.

“There are these fabulous radishes in Yucatan that I pick up at market. I chop them, pick a key lime off the tree and give it a squeeze, add some salt and drops of sesame oil. It’s a miraculous thing,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Merida.

Tower’s pared-down preparations speak to the heart of why he is considered an icon in the American food scene. He is credited with being the first American chef to shed a spotlight on fresh, local and seasonal food. In 1976, as part owner and executive chef at Alice Waters’ legendary Chez Panisse, Tower sourced local ingredients to create a Northern California regional dinner. On the menu of the Berkeley, Calif., restaurant, he cited the place of origin for the ingredients in each dish, affording them the same respect given to French ingredients on fine-dining menus. It was groundbreaking.

“When you went to the fancy French restaurants in the ’70s, you were still getting Dover sole from Dover,” chef Mario Batali said in “The Last Magnificent,” a 2016 documentary on Tower’s life and career. “Jeremiah brought Petrale sole (a California fish) to the table with the same reverence, the same celebration of its unique location. And that’s where the movement changed.”

Tower said he had few better options.

“No one can possibly grasp what it was like. What’s in a Whole Foods Market today wasn’t available then. You could barely buy olive oil. Fresh herbs didn’t exist. There was absolutely nothing.

“Everyone thought that great restaurants used certain ingredients, like foie gras and truffles. But these were frozen or in cans. I couldn’t afford them and didn’t want to buy them. We had geese raised in Sonoma for cassoulet and some local goat cheese, but that was about it.

“Fresh and local — that’s all I knew.”

Going forward, the food was dubbed California Cuisine, but the approach turned into a nationwide revolution. Local product was no longer just a means to a good dish, it was the point. The philosophy hit Hawaii’s shores about a decade later, inspiring Alan Wong and 11 other isle chefs in their creation of Hawaii Regional Cuisine.

“He was a pioneer,” said Wong, who as a fresh-faced chef traveled to California to visit Chez Panisse and Stars, a wildly popular restaurant that Tower opened in San Francisco. “Culinary school at the time was all about classical European cooking. Jeremiah Tower showed the importance of cooking with the things around you, embracing local ingredients, culture, dishes — and being proud of it.

“A lot of young chefs were influenced by him, and I was one of them.”

Wong remains a champion of Hawaii’s producers, and a new generation of chefs is following suit. The philosophy is a segue to understanding 21st-century food issues and a beginning for tackling them. Today, eating fresh and local has become a means of supporting sustainable food systems, the local economy, personal health and the health of the planet.

In “The Last Magnificent,” Tower notes that as a child, he read menus before he read books. As a teen, he read the culinary doctrine of Auguste Escoffier and was whipping up gourmet dinners in his college apartment. During that era, he said, aspiring home cooks would teach themselves by cooking their way through cookbooks such as Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” filled with complicated, time-consuming recipes.

These days, with so many folks short on time, he recommends selecting cookbooks based on favorite foods. His own favorite on the basics: Richard Olney’s “Simple French Food.”

“It doesn’t matter if ‘French’ is in the title. There are a lot of simple dishes. If you read it and cook from it, you will learn wonderful lessons on how to cook at home,” he said.

Or better yet, “start watching Grandma. Get her to teach you.”

Tower sold his Stars restaurants in the late 1990s. Since then, he’s been an avid writer, authoring a number of books, as well as a newspaper column and magazine articles. Tower also hosted a PBS cooking series and had a short stint in 2015 as executive chef of New York’s Tavern on the Green. He continues to offer consulting services, from teaching engagements to restaurant design.

But for all that, he primarily cooks for himself these days. So who better to toss out ideas for the fledgling home cook? After all, his groundbreaking philosophy of fresh and local applies as well at home as it does at a five-star restaurant.

Tower encourages all cooks to explore flavors and seasonings they enjoy. In Hawaii, where myriad ethnic seasonings and sauces abound, this is especially pertinent. Do a little bit of research, he advised, then try using them in unexpected ways.

“By all means, bring international food to your plate,” he said. “I do a mixed vegetable soup with drops of sesame oil and Sriracha sauce — and I’m living in Mexico. I have that along with the habanero chilies I eat every day.”

His final advice: “Everybody should know five dishes they can make without any trouble at all. When you get home from work, pour a glass of Champagne or white wine, or open a can of beer, and start boiling some salted water, then go take a shower. By the time you get out, your water is boiling. Add some pasta. Chop tomatoes, cook it with some garlic, ginger, olive oil, salt and pepper. Pour it over the pasta and squeeze some lemon over it — 30 minutes after you’ve come home, you have a meal. And it’s so easy and so delicious.

“Learn how to do these things and you can look after yourself.”

THE POWER OF CELEBRITY

In 1984, Jeremiah Tower opened the game-changing Stars, a bright, lively, grandiose restaurant with a huge bar and a new concept, the open kitchen. It was in this glitzy setting that the chef turned the dining experience into an event unto itself, and Stars drew socialites, politicians and celebrities as well as neighborhood regulars.

Part of the glamour was Tower himself, who came out of the kitchen to mingle with customers in the dining room. His success at Stars was punctuated by James Beard awards, in 1987 for “Jeremiah Tower’s New American Classics” cookbook, and in 1996 for outstanding chef.

The celebrity chef phenomenon that Tower cultivated continues today in force.

Kelvin Ro, chef-owner of Diamond Head Market & Grill, met Tower in the late 1990s when Honolulu was being considered for another Stars venue.

“He was just so inspiring,” said Ro, who assisted Tower in opening Stars restaurants in other cities. “To see things from the perspective of a fabulous restaurateur was an eye opener for me. It gave me an expanded perspective on restaurants.”