Chez Panisse is a French restaurant in an old home in
Berkeley, Calif. Its menu is set, like that of a dinner party, and
changes every night. Whether or not you’ve eaten there, you’ve felt
its influence, which has rippled through the West and the world
over the past 37 years.
The organic craze and its more
recent cousin, the local-food movement, owe more to Chez Panisse
than perhaps any other institution. The late food writer R.W. Apple
Jr. declares it “indisputably the most influential” restaurant in
the United States in the introduction to Alice Waters and
Chez Panisse, by veteran nature writer Thomas McNamee.
Chez Panisse is generally thought of as the brainchild of
Waters, its primary proprietor. But that’s not the whole story, and
McNamee tells the rest of it, tracing the restaurant’s roots back
to 1960s Berkeley.
Waters, a University of California at
Berkeley graduate, fell in love with food during a semester abroad
in France, and long nurtured a dream of a restaurant imbued with
that country’s flavors – culinary, aesthetic and cultural. She
brought her exacting taste to bear not just on the restaurant’s
food and decor, but on its cooks, servers and purveyors, whom she
chose more for their mindset than their experience. She made a
fetish of freshness above all: “We gathered watercress from
streams, picked nasturtiums and fennel from roadsides, and gathered
blackberries from the Santa Fe tracks in Berkeley,” Waters recalls
in the book. Over the years, Waters’ emphasis on local sourcing
grew into larger crusades for environmentally informed eating of
all kinds, particularly healthy school lunches.
McNamee
quotes Julia Child chastising Waters in 1981 as “unduly doleful”
about American produce. “Visit any supermarket and you’ll see
plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables,” Child said. But Waters has
since won that argument, having helped convince much of the
culinary world that vegetables bred for toughness, raised on
pesticides, transported in shipping containers and stored in
warehouses are not just tasteless, but fundamentally immoral.
A strength of the book is its population of colorful
personalities, from the flamboyant chef Jeremiah Tower to an
eccentric, depressed psychiatrist-turned-forager named Gerald
Rosenfield. Unfortunately, the recipes sprinkled through the text
are intentionally vague – too much so to be useful. Although
Alice Waters and Chez Panisse is not a cookbook,
it offers one very important recipe: how to create a small business
that can change the world.
Alice Waters and Chez
Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately
Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution
Thomas
McNamee
351 pages, hardcover:
$27.95.
Penguin, 2007.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline How a restaurant changed the world.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
