The great American food revolution of the last half of the twentieth century arose predominant from cookbook writers. The singular exception to this rule originated within a whimsically amateurish Berkeley, California, restaurant whose inspired owner accomplished no less than a redefinition of the American eatery. In 1965, Alice Waters, unexceptional student, jetted to France and found herself transformed by French cooking in general and especially by their careful attention to detail in preparation, presentation, and service. Returning to Berkeley, she opened her own version of a bistro, imagining a table where the war-protesting counterculture might gather and develop its own revolutionary culinary aesthetic. Thanks to Alice's charisma and young, creative chefs such as Jeremiah Tower, Chez Panisse grew, institutionalizing the arc of Alice's own journey from worshipful re-creation of French haute cuisine to a bracing new California cooking based on exceptional local produce. McNamee documents this innovative era, providing portraits of the many personalities who graced both Chez Panisse's kitchens and its dining rooms. This book will be of great interest even to those readers who have not enjoyed her restaurant but do enjoy reading anything about food--and who doesn't? Mark Knoblauch
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Review
A great pleasure for foodies, chronicling an unlikely revolution. -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review, December 15, 2006
A wonderfully entertaining, gossipy glimpse inside a kitchen that continues to surprise and delight. -- Paul Laskin, Seattle Times
McNamee's clear-eyed assessment avoids the usual platitudes about California cuisine and shows how one individual with an understanding of food can carve out a personal identity and at the same time make culinary history. -- Patrick Kuh, New York Times Book Review
McNamee, an erudite journalist, essayist, poet and literary critic, paints a particularly vivid picture of this enfant terrible of the kitchen. But he also lays out the whole tableau of Chez Panisse, one peopled with an alternately brilliant, dedicated, madcap and/or stoned lot of characters who percolated through Alice-land, each in his or her own way changing the landscape just a bit. -- Karola Saekel, San Francisco Chronicle
The book offers a fascinating glimpse of some of the people who started what would become the megalithic natural foods movement -- J. M. Hirsch, Associated Press
This immensely readable book ... is remarkably unlike the typical, breathlessly laudatory authorized biography, thanks to McNamee's rounded and convincing portrait of a controversial figure in American cooking. -- Irene Sax, Saveur
Though much has been written about her, "Alice Waters and Chez Panisse" promises to be the definitive work on the life and career of this enigmatic and remarkable woman for years to come. -- Tom Cooper, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Tom McNamee's addictive tale of Chez Panisse is full of gems-Alice Waters dressed as a vegetable garden is one-and explains exactly why the Queen of Local Food deserves credit for a revolution. She foraged for one reason: local food tastes better. What's remarkable is how her fierce passion for flavor actually created more farmers, ranchers, watermen, and other small producers. Farmers and eaters owe Alice Waters a great debt. -- Nina Planck, author of Real Food: What to Eat & Why
What [McNamee] does beautifully is capture the spirit of the restaurant and its spiritual growth, as well as its place in American culture. -- Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
[A] scrumptious, tonguewagging and thoughtful new biography.... [McNamee] supplies enough savory ideas and spicy details to satiate most foodies and perhaps inspire a new generation of "eco-gastronomes. -- USA Today
About the Author
Thomas McNamee was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1947, and grew up there and in New York City. He graduated from Yale University in 1969. He is the author of The Grizzly Bear, Nature First, A Story of Deep Delights, and The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone. He wrote the documentary film Alexander Calder, which was broadcast on the PBS American Masters series in 1998 and received both a George W. Peabody Award and an Emmy. His essays, poems, journalism, criticism, and natural history writing have been widely published, and he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Warren Bass Tucked away on a rapidly yuppifying stretch of Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley sits an unlikely temple: a wooden, twig-encrusted, two-story house with a faintly ethereal air that happens to be one of the most important landmarks in the history of American cuisine. Alice Waters's Chez Panisse has been appearing on lists of the country's very best restaurants for so long now that it's easy to forget how important this unassuming -- in fact, this aggressively unassuming -- restaurant has been to American food.
Thomas McNamee has no intention of letting that happen. In Alice Waters & Chez Panisse, he worships at Waters's shrine, which he sees not just as an important stage in the evolution of California cuisine but as the vanguard of a foodie revolution. McNamee, a first-rate culture and food writer, has produced a sort of authorized hagiography.
It's hard not to like his enthusiasm and impossible not to respect his legwork; McNamee seems to have talked to just about everyone involved with the place since Chez Panisse -- named after a hospitable, jolly character from three 1930s Marcel Pagnol films with whom Waters felt a powerful affinity -- opened its doors in 1971. Back then, it was a shoestring startup long on ambition and short on just about everything else, from funding to waiters to organization to formality.
Waters's great innovation was to bring to America some key food lessons learned as a student in France: an insistence on the freshest, locally grown ingredients, a belief that dining should be an all-encompassing aesthetic and philosophical experience, a concern for the smallest details. The chief concerns of the Chez Panisse philosophy are "environmental harmony and optimal flavor," all rooted in the core belief that "the best-tasting food is organically grown and harvested in ways that are ecologically sound." Waters has honed those ideals and helped found America's "Slow Food" movement -- all with an intensity that, even in the hands of the admiring McNamee, sometimes seems a little barmy.
McNamee insists he "had complete freedom throughout," but he has a tough time getting much critical distance from an institution he clearly adores. He never quite explains how Waters reconciles her laudable belief in democratic informality and accessibility with a weekend charge of $85 for the prix fixe dinner, not including a 17 percent tip. He includes sidebars that look like recipes but turn out to be long, often indigestible quotes from Waters or her comrades; he reprints decades worth of menus from the Chez Panisse archive (the restaurant changes its fare constantly to keep pace with the nearby produce from its network of suppliers). The result is an uncommonly handsome book -- adorned with nifty period photos and color accents that have been attractively deployed throughout -- that's often an unsatisfying read.
Take, for instance, McNamee's chummy reproduction of some scouting reports from a Chez Panisse forager searching for the perfect lamb. He seems to realize that these go into insane detail -- Joshua's spies sent back less thorough briefings -- but happily concludes, "Only at Chez Panisse." McNamee also uncritically describes Waters's own version of President Reagan's exhortation to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall: a series of increasingly narcissistic letters from Waters urging Bill Clinton to establish an organic garden at the White House. "Mr. President, plant that garden on the White House grounds!" she hectored in March 2000. "I can think of no more powerful way to ground your legacy than to leave behind you a kitchen garden and the compost pile to nourish it." McNamee concludes that the unconvinced Clinton "knew a thing or two about stubbornness, too," not that an exasperated president with a few other things on his plate surely tossed this strident, only-in-Berkeley correspondence over to some hapless staffer. After all, most modern presidencies have produced their own compost heaps without outside help.
And yet, and yet. A visit to Chez Panisse will leave even the most cynical diner a helpless, swooning convert. Beneath warm brass lamps and burnished wood, the kitchen brings on a sublime ricotta cheese salad, spinach crespelle with a glorious spread of local mushrooms, Sierra mackerel in a masterfully calibrated romesco sauce, grass-fed steak from Marin. It's all served up by a stunningly knowledgeable waiter with an easy viticultural expertise that would put most sommeliers elsewhere to shame, in a room whose atmosphere sighs with earthy cheer and serenity. The net effect is to reduce hardened skeptics -- including those whose skepticism was exacerbated by this book -- to humming bars of "I'm a Believer." The meal ends with lime sorbet, sprinkled with sugared mint leaves that seemed to have been cut mere minutes before. Their freshness is so delectably potent that diners leave feeling -- well, ensorcelled, enchanted, enraptured, and longing to return to the house that Alice built.
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