40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering

8/6/2019 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering

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C L A R K S O N P O T T E R / P U B LI S H E R S

N E W Y O R K

Foreword by Calvin Trillin | Afterword by Michael Pollan

th e powe rof gath er ing

yearsof

Alice Watersand friends


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CALVIN TRILLIN (writer): I once referred to Alice

Waters as the Emma Goldman of the New American

Cuisine. Shes a revolutionary, and I have to believe that

her revolutionary approach was affected by what was

happening at the University of California at Berkeley

when she arrived there as an undergraduate in the six-

ties. I was in Berkeley not long after Alice arrived; I had

come to do a piece on the Free Speech Movement for

The New Yorker.I found that the student radicals I met

had a style (a word they used a lot) that was militantly

inclusive and nonhierarchical. The organization they

most admired, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee, which provided the young shock troops for

the civil rights struggle in the South, was said to make

decisions by letting the consensus emanate. Before the

Berkeley radicals got deflected and eventually consumed

by the Vietnam War, they were interested in organizing

around issues that were specific and close at handa

rent strike in substandard housing in Oakland, say, or

working conditions on the farms of the Central Valley.

If their interests had been culinary rather than political,

they would have been locavores.

In those days, when good food was intertwined in

the American mind with fine dining, the style of lead-

ing restaurants was neither inclusive nor nonhierarchicalnor local. The chef was a magisterial figure in a towering

toque. The menu needed but a single word to designate

the high quality of an ingredientimported.The waiters

wore tuxedos and the matre d seemed to have been

hired for his ability to make patrons feel that they didnt

quite deserve to be on the premises. Every middle-size

American city had a couple of versions of this restaurant.

I called it La Maison de la Casa House, Continental

Cuisine and speculated that the continent they had in

mind was Antarctica, where everything starts out frozen.

Chez Panisse was instrumental in overthrowing that

regime. It uncoupled good eating from fanciness. Its

menu included takes on humble street food, like pizza

and calzone. It hired the sort of chefs who wore baseball

caps rather than toques and might have found them-

selves drifting into kitchen work after getting bored with

graduate studies in anthropology. It was wildly inclusive.

The growers were an honored part of the operation. The

customers knew they deserved to be on the premises and

didnt seem to mind that Alice was serving up, with the

heirloom tomatoes and free-range chicken, some strong

views on the connection between good food and sus-

tainable agriculture. Now, every middle-size American

city has a couple of restaurants that are modeled, in one

way or another, on Chez Panisse. Like any good radical,

Alice seemed interested from the start in creating not an

empire but a network.

I tend to eat in the upstairs caf at Chez Panisse rather

than in the more formal dining room downstairs, but I

find it comforting to know that the dining room is there.

Why? Because for fifteen years, beginning in the late six-

ties, I was in a strange town every three weeks for aseries ofNew Yorkerpieces, and my last resort for finding

something decent to eat was to approach the motel clerk

and say, Not the restaurant you took your parents to

on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary; the restaurant

you went to the night you got home after thirteen months

in Korea. In Berkeley, Im pleased to say, those are the

same restaurant.

Foreword by Calvin Trillin


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To put this history together, first my collaborators and I

pored over thousands of photographs, menus, and other

ephemera, looking for memorable images that would be

expressive enough to tell the story all by themselves.

After we had arranged the pictures in more or less

chronological order, and after I had written about what

they meant to me, I invited nearly a hundred friends to

contribute their recollections, too. Regrettably, hundreds

more friends of the restaurant who have also been indis-pensable members of the Panisse family have been left

out; and without their stories, this book can only be frag-

mentary, incomplete, and subjective. But in the end the

only story I can tell is my own. So here it is: my story,

mostly in pictures; the story of what I have learned and

how the restaurant has come to flourish.

For decades, Chez Panisse has been serving its guests

not just food, but ideas. The real story of this book is

how a few simple ideas about food and cultureideas

that are accessible to anyonewere planted in my mind

before the restaurant was founded and became convic-

tions that took root, blossomed, and bore fruit, to be

propagated from Berkeley back out into the world.

What are these ideas weve been serving? They

are neither new nor radical. In fact, they are as old as

humankind. Most important is the universal idea that

we have an obligation to support the farmers, fisher-

men, and ranchers who are taking care of the planet at

the same time they are nourishing us, and an equally

solemn obligation to nourish our children, who are

depending on us for a livable future. Another idea is

that our full humanity is contingent on our hospitality:

we can be complete only when we are giving something

away; when we sit at the table and pass the peas to the

person next to us we see that person in a whole newway. Finally, and critically, weve been serving forth

the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its

parts. This concept explains, among other things, how

a restaurant like Chez Panisse becomes not just a place

to eat, but also a convivial venue for celebrating and

savoring particular moments in time, a forum for politi-

cal engagement, and an ongoing opportunity for artistic

collaboration.

Our vision at Chez Panisse has always been of a world

where delicious food enriches the celebration of life and

strengthens our connections to nature and culture. To

turn this vision into reality, we need to gather together

at the table and prove that the authenticity we crave can

exist right under our noses. This is the power of gath-

ering: it inspires usdelightfullyto be more hopeful,

more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive.

An Introduction and an Invitation by Alice Waters

I would like to invite you to share

a personal and impressionistic chronicleof the evolution of a small restaurant

and caf in Berkeley, California,

called Chez Panisse.


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Documents

40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering