"Alice Waters and Chez Panisse" | The whisk that stirred a revolution

"Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution"
by Thomas McNamee
Penguin Press, 380 pp., $27.95

Writing the biography of a living person is always risky — but when that person is a minor deity like Alice Waters, the risks spike like cholesterol after the holidays. How to tell the story of the one-woman culinary sensation — the founder of the legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, the spark behind the Delicious Revolution of sustainably raised, elegantly prepared local fresh ingredients — without either fawning or debunking? And why devote an entire book to this story at all? When all is said and done, isn't Alice Waters basically a celebrity chef with a conscience?

In "Alice Waters and Chez Panisse," journalist and essayist Thomas McNamee deftly brushes such concerns aside. Neither a toady nor a pathographer, McNamee proves that if you write well enough, mesclun salad, blue trout, foraged shellfish, mulberry ice cream and a hot-enough pizza oven can indeed serve as the ingredients of a delicious narrative.

The story starts, fittingly, at Berkeley in the 1960s. Waters was a petite UC coed with a Patty Duke hairdo from Van Nuys High School when, in the fall of 1964, she got caught up in the Free Speech Movement that kick-started a decade of campus protest. Before she could blossom into a full-fledged campus revolutionary, however, she decamped to Paris for junior year abroad, tasted soupe de légumes and discovered that her true passion was French cuisine. The rest is culinary history.

When Waters and friends served the first dinner at Chez Panisse on Aug. 28, 1971, she was, in McNamee's words, a "child-like, slightly out of focus dreamer who opened a restaurant without knowing anything about restaurants." The debut was a semi-disaster — a staff of 55 mostly stoned cooks and waiters trying to get dinner on the table for 50 guests; chaos in the kitchen; an hour lag between appetizer (páté en croûte) and entree (canard aux olives); a line around the block. "What we were all doing," says Waters, was "making it up as we went along. It was totally insane."

By some convergence of karma and zeitgeist, the restaurant survived the early insanity (and the decades of hemorrhaging cash), found its niche, hit a nerve and captured the dining public's imagination. Word got out, first to Berkeley and then to the world at large, that something unprecedented was happening in the funky little house on Shattuck Avenue. Interestingly, the obsession with seasonal local ingredients that Chez Panisse is most famous for came about almost by chance. Waters and her original pastry chef, Lindsey Shere, disappointed with the poor quality of local produce, convinced friends and family to plant fraises des bois in their gardens and to forage for fennel and blackberries in roadside weed patches. Initially, the focus was not home-grown American but classic French — rich, complex, rather erudite French cuisine that became positively Baroque during the reign of Byronesque chef Jeremiah Tower in the mid '70s. The Northern Californian accent in evidence today came later.

McNamee moves the narrative briskly along through the restaurant's 3 ½-decade run, interweaving kitchen drama (lots of drugs and sex), Waters' personal life (many loyal friends and a few bitter ex-friends, lots of crushes on gay men, several long-term relationships, a mostly unhappy marriage and divorce), and the tale of how Chez Panisse evolved from a fancy, fanciful restaurant to a kind of cultural icon. Today, writes McNamee, Chez Panisse has become "a standard-bearer for a system of moral values. It is the leader of a style of cooking, of a social movement, and of a comprehensive philosophy of doing good and living well."

This is a quite a burden for one small restaurant to bear, and the book bogs down a bit in elaborating Waters' transformation from gamine foodie to sustainable saint. Her current work getting school kids to grow and cook their own organic produce and promoting chef-farmer-artisan collaborations through the Slow Food movement is important and worthy. But somehow, in McNamee's telling, the insouciant kitchen magician of the 1970s is a lot more captivating than the frantic celebrity Waters has become.

Chez Panisse was hatched in a spirit of fun and sensuality, and McNamee's book is at its best in conjuring up the pleasure that was and still is at the heart of the enterprise — the complicated, often manic pleasure that producers and chefs and diners share as the bounty of the earth is transformed into exquisite meals. If McNamee doesn't quite convince us (and perhaps doesn't quite believe) that Alice Waters and her restaurant are crucial to the "destiny of humankind in the twenty-first century," as Waters once intoned, he does provide a wonderfully entertaining, gossipy glimpse inside a kitchen that continues to surprise and delight.

David Laskin is the author of "The Children's Blizzard."