Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution
The Penguin Press, NYC, 2007, hardcover, illustrated, index, repairs to board corners, otherwise condition: very good.
This adventurous book charts the origins of the local "market cooking" culture that we all relish today. When Francophile Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, few Americans were familiar with goat cheese, cappuccino, or mesclun. But it wasn't long before Waters and her motley coterie of dreamers inspired a new culinary standard incorporating ethics, politics, and the conviction that the best-grown food is also the tastiest. Based on unprecedented access to Waters and her inner circle, this is a truly delicious rags-to-riches saga.
There is a moment late in the book Alice Waters and Chez Panisse where author Thomas McNamee describes a dining experience with such detailed romance, it ends up being a little hard to believe. Still, I wanted so desperately to believe it: the purple poetry, the food and the place McNamee paints for us. I wanted to be there, eating and enjoying in that restaurant that was born of hippie haphazard in the early 1970 the place that now is one of the most famous restaurants in the world.
Given the ambling, accidental history of Chez Panisse, it seems a miracle that its still around today. Alice Waters was not a professional chef; she was a Francophile American who dreamt up the whole scheme. She picked a house in Berkley, California, and she and her bohemian friends at first tried their hand at turning out French Provençal cuisine. At different times in this biography, Waters seems shy and thoughtful, sly and manipulative, perspicacious and exacting. And yet Chez Panisse was not profitable at all for its first decade, sex and drugs were quietly accepted as part of the scene, and staff would genially pilfer food and wine without a second thought or, many times, even a reprimand.
Yet, Alice Waters and her restaurant were at the forefront of thoughts that today seem pervasive. Seemingly by accident, Waters and the several chefs she had working with her actually invented California Cuisine light, healthy and simple foods that are marked by their seasonality and freshness (in mass-market terms, Seasons 52 adopts this same thought. Also an excellent Orlando version and my favorite local restaurant - is the California atop Disneys Contemporary hotel.) In California style, elaborate French preparation takes a backseat to keeping the food as simple and flavorful as possible. No longer are plates the product of days of overwrought preparation; they are the culmination of study, application and experimentation in minimal but artful arrangement of flavor and skill.
There were other seminal ideas. Waters and her collaborators also adopted the idea of fostering local growers and suppliers instead of the ecologically damaging and flavor-robbing process of shipping food by truck across the nation. Also, the Slow Foods movement found one of its greatest allies in Waters. Finally, in the last decade, Waters helped start food programs at public schools and colleges across the nation and into Europe.
Thats not to say McNamees book answers all the questions. Why and how Waters became so obsessed with food still seems a mystery at the end of the book its a question thats better to ponder, so McNamee smartly doesnt provide an answer. Also, there are many stories in the book of human romances most of them fiery and short-lived next to the legacy of Chez Panisse and maybe thats the way it should be for a place that has been so influential in changing the American culinary landscape.
