Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical,
Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food
Revolution
By Thomas McNamee (Penguin Press, $28)
Chez Panisse opened in 1971 in Berkeley,
California. The brainchild
of Alice Waters, then 27 years old, the restaurant became famous
for its great
food, offbeat charm, and devotion to using homegrown,
high-quality ingredients. For his book,
author Thomas McNamee
received untrammeled access to Waters and to her family, friends,
business partners, and employees to produce a chatty, authorized
tome. It is a biography of Waters and her restaurant, but it is
also a primer on how to make a restaurant successful despite
seemingly overwhelming odds. For foodies, not incidentally, the
book also contains recipes scattered throughout, often placed next
to a text reference to a specific dish.
Waters grew up in
New Jersey, in a financially comfortable family.
Her father's insurance job moved the family to California, where
Waters attended high school and then stayed for college.
Intelligent, popular, petite, and attractive, she breezed through
life. Food did not figure prominently in that life, however, until
1965, when the undergraduate Waters traveled to
France for
education and enjoyment. With a friend from college, she learned
the French language, enjoyed the culture, and fell in love with the
restaurant food. Returning to Berkeley, a University of California
campus in political turmoil, Waters found peace and enjoyment by
cooking French meals. Her reputation as a talented amateur chef
grew. She had a satisfying career teaching at the Berkeley
Montessori School, but she knew she wanted to cook professionally,
so she began figuring out how that might happen, plotting what kind
of restaurant she wanted to open. As the 1970s began, Waters
located just enough financing and just the right existing building
to follow her dream.
McNamee organizes the book chronologically. Readers who care little
about the business of running a restaurant might find portions of
the book boring, because the month-by-month detail is, well,
detailed. But anybody who enjoys eating superb food in a restaurant
setting is quite likely to consume every word. The tension within
the book is minimal. Feuds with chefs and co-owners arise,
certainly, and a fire closes the kitchen for a few weeks, yet
readers know the restaurant will survive into 2007. Because the
dramatic arc is weak, the book is best read slowly, savored a
chapter a day, in much the way a Chez Panisse meal is eaten, course
by course. - Steve Weinberg