According to the NRA (National
Restaurant Association), 71% of adults surveyed in 2013 said they are more
likely to visit a restaurant that offers locally-produced food items. Twenty years ago, the surveyors might not
have thought to ask the question, unless they were from California – specifically, Berkeley – where Alice Waters
has been championing locally sourced food since 1971. Alice’s restaurant, charmingly named Chez
Panisse, at 1517 Shattuck Avenue, was and is an ongoing demonstration that “how
we eat can change the world.”
The subtitle of
Thomas McNamee’s book, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, “The
romantic, impractical, often eccentric, ultimately brilliant making of a food
revolution” says it all. In 1971, at a time when fast food restaurants were
springing up like weeds in summer, a charismatic and energetic young woman with
more ideas and passion than common sense and money opened a small restaurant in
a shabby little house in a sleepy area of Berkeley, California. Neither Alice nor her staff had much in the
way of restaurant experience or culinary training, but despite the odds, and
two devastating fires, the restaurant remains one of America’s dining Meccas
because of who Alice Waters is and how she changed the way Americans eat.
During Alice Waters’ time in France in the mid-1960s she
discovered that her sense of taste was more highly tuned than the average
person’s. Additionally, her “taste
memory” was such that she could replicate flavors she had previously enjoyed
and create new flavors by combinations of tastes remembered. Of critical importance to flavor, she found,
was the freshness of her ingredients. In
Paris, Alice had lived above the market street where she shopped daily for her
foods. Upon returning to the US, Alice
began cooking for her friends and developed a reputation as an innovative
cook. When she opened the doors of Chez
Panisse on August 28, 1971, the line of people waiting for a table wrapped
around the block. It would not be the
last time she ran out of food.
The American food renaissance began in the early 1960s with
the publication of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
and her PBS TV series “The French Chef”.
Having lived for several years in France where she trained at Le Cordon
Bleu, Mrs. Child and two friends developed a methodology for cooking in the
French style with commonly available American foods. Her emphasis was on technique and practice so
that cooking well would become second nature; the quality and freshness of
ingredients were assumed to be inferior to what could be found in France and
the recipes reflected that. Thanks to
Julia Child, Americans learned to eat quiches, soufflés, pâtés, and mousses and
our restaurants improved as a result.
At the same time that Americans were learning to eat gourmet
foods, factory farming began to overtake family farms. These massive farms produced pesticide-laced fruits
and vegetables as well as antibiotic- and hormone-saturated meat and poultry. In addition, agricultural laboratories
developed artificial means of extending the shelf life of fresh foods so they
could withstand weeks of refrigerated storage before appearing at a grocery
store. The result of these innovations is
abundant and low-cost produce and meats, sadly lacking in flavor and
nutrients. Moreover, the long range
effects of ingesting chemicals, antibiotics, and hormones are not fully
understood, but are certainly not benign.
The food we eat is a product of where and how it is
grown. Alice understood at an early age
that foods grown from healthy soil, and animals raised on small farms by caring
farmers not only tasted better, but were better for us. As she became knowledgeable about farming
practices in her constant quest for local food sources, Alice developed a
vision of feeding America, and the world, in a way that would nourish both the
consumers and the earth. Her growing
celebrity paired with her vision inspired what came to be called the “Slow
Food” movement.
Rome, Italy, is a place where the continuum of history lives
in plain sight. In the late 1980s,
McDonalds opened an outlet at the foot of the Spanish Steps, one of the city’s
greatest gathering places. The outrage
over this assault on culture, tradition, and history led to the founding of
“Agricole”, the world’s first official Slow Food organization. If “fast food” is mass-produced in factories
weeks or months before it is sold, “slow food” is grown on small farms,
harvested at peak ripeness, and quickly brought to a chef’s kitchen for
consumption that same day. Italian food
has always been “slow” which is why it tastes so much better in Italy than in
America. The appearance of McDonalds in
the heart of the eternal city signaled a coming and unwelcome change to
centuries of land stewardship and food production in Europe. Alice Waters endorsed the Slow Food movement
and became a vocal advocate.
How Alice Waters not only kept her ineptly managed restaurant
alive and changed the way Americans feel about fresh foods is a fascinating and
well-told story. One of Alice’s gifts is
that she is a people magnet. She has
always had many friends and as her fame grew, she attracted celebrities to her
circle. This access to the rich and
famous enabled her to reach a wider audience than her restaurant patrons. She began lecturing and publishing books,
traveling frequently, and delegating responsibility for Chez Panisse to
others. Her management style, if she has
one, is capricious. She breezes into the
kitchen, examines this, tastes that, and as often as not changes the entire
menu requiring emergency produce runs and reprints of the menus (if time
permits). Surprisingly, turnover is low
as employees know they will never find another restaurant where the sourcing,
preparation, and presentation of food is a quasi-spiritual experience.
In 1983 Alice gave birth to her only child, Fanny, and her
worldview changed abruptly. Suddenly a
“grownup” she circulated a memo to the restaurant staff stating the “five
causes for immediate dismissal:”
- Stealing from the restaurant or employees
- Being drunk on the job
- Fighting on the premises
- Throwing food on the premises
- Smoking marijuana on the premises during hours of operation
Her biggest concern, however, was that her child grow up
appreciating and having access to untainted food. This led to the nurturing of farmers who rejected
the use of pesticides, chemicals, and other unnatural substances, opting
instead to renew the soil with compost and crop rotations. Procuring organic food for the restaurant
became a daily race against the clock as suppliers were scattered all around
and transportation arrangements were a challenge to choreograph.
After several years of complicated logistics, one of Alice’s
friends, Sibella Kraus, set up a meeting of organic farmers and restaurateurs
which resulted in more efficient means of bringing the farm to the table while
broadening the market for clean produce.
Farmers and chefs began working together to coordinate menus with
seasonal produce and the results have been far-reaching. Farmers’ markets once scarce, are now regular
fixtures in major cities and towns throughout the US, giving people access to
fresh vegetables and fruits as well as baked goods, preserves, honey, and
crafts.
As Fanny grew and entered school, Alice noticed how few
children ate nutritious lunches and this prompted her to champion an “edible
schoolyard” program. Her vision was an
interdisciplinary program in which the children would tend the garden while
learning about plant biology, teamwork, and planning and sequencing of
tasks. Garden produce would supply the
school cafeterias with fresh vegetables and fruits; organic waste would be
composted and eventually returned to the garden beds. Alice, ever the visionary, viewed the
schoolyard gardens as a way of healing the planet from the ground up. She lobbied President and Mrs. Clinton
relentlessly about planting a kitchen garden at the White House, but they never
warmed to the idea. Alice’s dream of a
White House kitchen garden finally came true in 2009 when Michelle Obama
enlisted a local elementary school to plant a garden at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue.
The economics of running a restaurant are sobering: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics roughly
60% of restaurants fail within the first three years of operation in spite of
being run by seasoned professionals with strong financial backing. Alice Waters’ food service experience
amounted to making small sandwiches in a department store tearoom across one
summer, and a few short stints as a waitress.
Her financial backing was a small loan from her parents. Chez Panisse literally ran on Alice’s will
power for years, losing money and running up debts thanks to sloppy bookkeeping
and non-existent inventory control. The
financial story of Chez Panisse and Alice Waters reads like a combination of
ponzi scheme and check-kiting scandal, but the story of the food is pure fairy
tale, with Alice as the Artemis-like heroine.
Given all this, it is almost miraculous that Chez Panisse is
still thriving at the age of 42. If you
ever have the pleasure of dining there pay attention to the details: the place settings, flowers, lighting, and
plating. Your menu will feature a
woodblock printed cover and list the four course set menu inside. At Chez Panisse, there are no choices so you
have to be willing to eat what you are served, even if it is different from
what is printed on your menu; because if Alice isn’t happy with something, it
will not appear on your plate. Dining
at Chez Panisse is never the same twice so if you don’t like it the first time,
you will the second or third time you go.
Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, written by one of her
many close friends, may change the way you think about food and might even
inspire you to plant a kitchen garden.
If we are what we eat, this book is definitely food for thought.
Menu from Chez Panisse, Saturday September 17, 2011
Copyright 2013 Teresa Friedlander
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