40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering [Hardcover]

Alice Waters (Author), Michael Pollan (Afterword), Calvin Trillin (Foreword)

Book Description

Release date: August 23, 2011

Chez Panisse opened its doors in 1971. Founded by Alice Waters, the restaurant is rooted in her conviction that the best-tasting food is organic, locally grown, and harvested in ecologically sound ways by people who are taking care of the land for future generations.  The quest for such ingredients has always determined the restaurant’s cuisine, and, over the course of forty years, Chez Panisse has helped create a community of local farmers and ranchers whose dedication to sustainable agriculture assures the restaurant a steady supply of fresh and pure ingredients.
 
In Forty Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering, Alice takes readers on her journey from the humble and visionary beginnings of the restaurant, through its rise and the acclaim, to the Café and the influential Chez Panisse Foundation. Organized by decade, the book includes a wealth of archival material and photographs—menus; invitations; pictures of Alice at the restaurant and around the world, with those who have passed through her life—and interviews from public figures and cooks who have been inspired by or mentored at the restaurant.
 
This tribute to the delicious food revolution that began with Alice Waters and Chez Panisse is an important work for anyone who cares about food, sustainability, and the powerful legacy that Alice has built.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2011: In 1971, a young Montessori teacher with no cooking experience beyond having friends to dinner inspired some of these friends to help her open a restaurant in Berkley, serving one perfectly delicious meal each night. In 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering, Alice Waters gives a lively history of how this modest beginning grew into a mecca that helped catalyze the rise of local food culture. Photos and ephemera that evoke each decade come alive through vivid little stories from 90 other collaborators and patrons—the chefs, waiters, fishmongers, farmers, winemakers, bakers, food writers, and friends who grew with the restaurant into an extended, cross-generational family.

First galvanized by political action at UCLA in the mid-‘60s, Waters experienced a more personal revolution in Europe: Paris taught her how food “anchored life to the land” and café culture built community; in London, she devoured the culinary classics Elizabeth David, internalizing her ethic of seeking fresh, local ingredients and “leaving well alone”; and in Greece and Turkey, she awakened to the transformative power of hospitality. Backed by an inventive crew, Waters brought all these elements to life at Chez Panisse, buying directly from growers (giving them, for the first time, bylines on the menu) and cultivating a hospitality that extended into the community through incredible parties and initiatives like the Edible Schoolyard Project. Beyond creating four decades of memorable meals, Chez Panisse demonstrated how restaurants can shift America's cultural relationship to agriculture and eating, a change that gains momentum each year. Destined to become a food-lit classic, this gorgeous volume pays homage to the power of gathering around a table, culminating in this luscious truth: "ripeness is all." --Mari Malcolm

About the Author

ALICE WATERS’s influence on American cooking is unrivaled. She opened Chez Panisse (named Best Restaurant in America by Gourmet) in 1971, Chez Panisse Café in 1980, and Café Fanny in 1984. She founded her career on creating dishes using fresh, local, and seasonal ingredients long before sustainability was a household term. Among her many awards, Alice has received the James Beard Best Chef in America, Humanitarian, and Lifetime Achievement awards, and most recently the French Légion d’Honneur. In 1996, she created the Chez Panisse Foundation to fund the Edible Schoolyard, a model of edible education in the public school system. She is the author of eight cookbooks, most recently In the Green Kitchen and The Art of Simple Food. For more information about Alice and Chez Panisse, please visit ChezPanisse.com and ChezPanisseFoundation.org.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; First Edition first Printing edition (August 23, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307718263
• ISBN-13: 978-0307718266
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 1 x 11.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #339,029 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alice Waters is the visionary chef and owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. She is the author of four cookbooks, including Chez Panisse Vegetables and Fanny at Chez Panisse. In 1994 she founded the Edible schoolyard at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, a model curriculum that integrates organic gardening into academic classes and into the life of the school; it will soon incorporate a school lunch program in which students will prepare, serve, and share food they grow themselves, augmented by organic dairy products, grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, and fish - all locally and sustainably produced.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sumptuous Feast.... August 23, 2011

By RAND H.

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Just spent the afternoon with this gorgeous book and feel as if I've whiled away the day lingering over a sparkling champagne lunch with Alice and friends. I've only had the pleasure of dining with them once - what a shame, considering the many trips I've made to San Francisco. I had expected a book of essays with pictures sprinkled throughout but instead found a virtual trip back in time, a beautiful, evocative picturebook with essays sprinkled here and there. If you're expecting recipes, I'd recommend one of the many Chez Panisse cookbooks as there isn't a recipe to be found here. And you won't mind, either. Worth every penny. I'm ready to start packing for a quick trip to Berkley. Merci beaucoup, Alice!

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Food, Good Read October 3, 2011

By Ellen C. Waff

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This retrospective of the famous 'Chez Panisse' is a delightful read. It becomes obvious that Alice Waters is only one player in the development of an entirely new genre of restaurants, indeed a new way of looking at the food we eat. Many friends pulled together to change the world of food. The locavore movement started here. Interesting that this bunch of radical-ish Berkleyites made a real change happen in the world that they never would have suspected in the late 60's and early 70's.

15 of 22 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars secrets about the early days October 13, 2011

By Secret Admirer

Format:Hardcover

By Paul Aratow

Special to the Los Angeles Times

September 1, 2011
It was an obscure, dingy, two-story apartment building, converted from an old house, in an ignored part of Berkeley. Not expensive to buy. It had good bones. I tore it down to the studs and started to rebuild.

I was pretty much on my own, since Alice Waters, my 50-50 partner, was busy at her job at the Montessori school. Our backers, Berkeley lawyers, a special breed, had promised to be our partners, but a few weeks into the reconstruction they decided to pull out of the deal. That hurt us badly, since they had been our construction funding source.

Panicked, Alice and I scraped and begged for cash and managed to cobble together enough to keep going, as long as we did most of the work on an excruciatingly limited budget. We took loans of $300 or $400 from everyone we could, plus help from our families.

Maybe we would have had an easier time if we had been able to explain to them that 40 years on, this little place we were calling Chez Panisse would be regarded as one of the most important restaurants in the history of American dining. But even in Berkeley in the 1970s, that would have been a stretch. Still, this month, while most of the food world fetes the restaurant, it's good to remember that its birth was far from painless.

I got involved in the restaurant because I had been dinner-party friends with Alice and her then-boyfriend, Tom Luddy. They asked me to join them as a partner and run the kitchen because, although Alice had a lot of ideas about food, she had never worked in a restaurant. Nor had I, but I was a talented amateur cook, giving large dinner parties for my academic colleagues, and relatively fearless about new ventures.... But it turned out that cooking was only part of the overwhelming requirements of the start-up.

As city inspectors came by to examine the exposed rafters and struts, more and more requirements piled on me. They were sympathetic, but rules were rules. We had to re-plumb, rewire, shore up, fireproof. Every directive was a stab in the wallet.

Our plumber, a good guy but old, gimpy and not underweight, made an economical deal with us, but we could not afford to pay his assistant. So I enlisted a free assistant ... me. In the mud in the cramped crawl space under the crumbling building, I learned to solder copper pipe. For me, covered with mud, lying on my back, torching the copper, this was a truly memorable moment in the Chez Panisse chronicles. And much more was to come, making the muddy condition an apt metaphor for the early pre-opening days.

Four carpenters and I worked on the construction job. I hammered and sawed with them. You might say the carpenters were hippies. They were talented but slow, taking time to enjoy the Berkeley version of coffee breaks on frequent occasions. Their pay was way below scale, but they got a home-cooked lunch on Fridays. They were a happy crew.

It was a tear-out-and-design-as-you-go project, with no documented plans, just a vision in my head.

As funds allowed, we finished the rooms. We even managed to keep the original toilets and staircase from the previous structure. I wanted to give the dining room a Provençal feeling. We put it downstairs, next to the kitchen, first, at my insistence, with a small window into the kitchen; now no wall at all. Our genius finish carpenter, Kip, back from two years in Japan studying Asian carpentry, made some brilliant cuts in cheap redwood bender board that gave the dining room a very elegant and French look.

Right off the farm

The hard-cash problems became even more serious. It was time to outfit the kitchen and dining rooms.

Unremarked in Chez Panisse history is the first direct-from-the-farm purchase. An advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle sent me to Sonoma County, where a farmer had a barnful of used kitchen equipment. It is noteworthy what I had to avoid stepping in to get a look at the goods. (Not just mud.) Fact: The first farm-fresh purchase was a huge stove. We also got our refrigerator there.

Of course, when you buy equipment out of a barn, you never know what you're getting. One of my most vivid memories of the early days was finding a large fetid puddle under a refrigeration unit that contained our precious food supply.

Outside, we put a face on the front of the building. Old doors were our cement forms to retain the planting dirt. My brother Charles, a Beverly Hills dentist, was the only guy I knew who could mortar bricks, and he came up to build the stairs and walkway into the building. Artist David Goines made us a sign in his brilliant style that morphed into menu headings, posters and our logo.

Alice shopped for chairs, tables, flatware -- all used but perfect for the venue. And all cheap.

Now for the final problem -- the cuisine. We aimed for bistro-trattoria food, and I convinced Alice that our best shot was a single menu that changed every day. This turned out to be a great stroke, since we published monthly schedules of our dishes, again beautifully designed by Goines. People would put them up on refrigerator doors and mark days and dishes that they wished to try. We offered things that could not be found then in American restaurants, such as coq au vin, cassoulet, pasta fresca and pâté.

Since many Berkeleyites had passed our construction site, our presence and opening were well known. We were triple-booked the first night, and the restaurant has been fully booked for the last 40 years.

None of us had ever been in the restaurant business, except as an occasional waiter. The first days were furious, with Jerry flitting around the dining room, Vicky and Leslie jamming at the stoves, and Alice glowing with excitement. I was in charge of the kitchen, acting as chef de cuisine due to my extensive knowledge of French and Italian cooking, and Alice was "front of house."

Somehow, we did it.

Five years later, I moved to Los Angeles to produce films and sold out my half of the restaurant. But I am grateful that I had the opportunity to participate in the creation of a legend.

Happy birthday, Chez Panisse. Out of the mud grows the lotus.

Paul Aratow is the author of "La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange." He is a film producer living in Los Angeles. Read more ›

5.0 out of 5 stars I want to celebrate birthdays. January 13, 2013

By Delisa Toole

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is amazing. Buy it.
Alice has modeled "The Power of Gathering" for 40 years.
Her celebration of milestones on this journey are captivating.

This book makes you want to mark the special moments in the passions you pursue. Don't let time click by, take the time to stop, invite the people who have shared in your work, and celebrate together your contributions to make an impact in the world.

Alice models celebrating what you do in life, with the ones you do life with.

5.0 out of 5 stars ... has it been 40 years already ... January 12, 2013

By Ina Braun

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

... I hope to go there one day ... in the meantime I can dream of Alice Waters' magical place and how much she has inspired cooking near and far ... thank you Alice and all who surround you!

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars eat what alice eats October 3, 2011

By Stanley Warmbrodt

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

you can't go wrong with alice. however, the selling of her book by amazon was a mess, first listing at $25.00 and then upped to $37.50. similar
thing with the new MIETTE baking book. received notice AFTER receiving the long anticipated book that the measurements were wrong. regardless, it is a beautifully designed book. one just wishes they could proof read.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars chez panisse January 17, 2012

By tjkelly

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

We were disappointed in the book because it contained no recipe's. It did have some of her menu's from "historic" events that she hosted, but not the recipe's for the dish's. A fairly interesting history, but unless you're in her fan club, you may be disappointed...we returned our copy.

14 of 36 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Much Ado... September 1, 2011

By The Scone Ranger

Format:Hardcover

Ms. Waters place in the pantheon of culinary luminaries is secure without this overdrawn "love me more" tome. She has an undeserved reputation of having awakened America to sustainable, organic gardening and buying local. The list of unrecognized men and women who were blazing natural food trails long before Waters would fill two volumes the size of her latest work. If you need a vicarious trip through her life, then this is a must read. Otherwise, lavish the money on an excellent meal at some deserving restaurant where you live.