Thomas McNamee - Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution

By now, everyone in this country who can tell the difference between an clair and an entrecte (and quite a few who cannot) knows who Alice Waters is.

She is, of course, the creator of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, one of the fountainheads of California cuisine, which some demanding judges consider the best restaurant in the United States. It is indisputably the most influential one. Before Chez Panisse, even the grandest American restaurants relied on imported, often canned or frozen products; today, the Waters credofresh, local seasonal, and where possible organic ingredientsis followed by hundreds of farmers markets, thousands of restaurants, and millions of home cooks.

Her approach wins plaudits abroad as well as at home. I remember a conference at the opulent Manoir aux QuatSaisons near Oxford, involving leading chefs from the United States, England, and France, where she dazzled her peers. They had arrived with trunks full of raw materials; she brought a few Meyer lemons and not much else, and relied for the rest on the Manoirs wonderful gardens and products on offer in the region, very simply prepared and served. All the chefs whom I asked said that her meal had been their favorite. It made the other meals seem somehow overwrought.

What is little understood, and what Thomas McNamee makes abundantly clear in this penetrating biography, is how unlikely a revolutionary Alice Waters is.

For one thing, she is no chef, at least in the generally understood meaning of the term. She has never attended cooking school and never served the same kind of rigorous apprenticeship, working in a succession of well-established kitchens, as have generations of European and more recently American culinary stars. She cooks, yes, and beautifully, but with some reluctance, and she has run Chez Panisses kitchen only very episodically.

She isnt much of a businesswoman. Well into its period of ascendancy, Chez Panisse lost money, despite the best efforts of a series of business managers (including Ms. Waterss father) to impose fiscal discipline. Her habitual extravagance made their work hard and often all but impossible. In 1972, when the restaurant had been operating for less than a year, no less than thirty thousand dollars worth of wine was unaccounted for.

Nor is she really a writer, despite the excellence and enormous success of her cookbooks. Like so much of her work, they are the products of her interaction with a group of friends, even when her name is the only one listed on the title page, as is sometimes the case.

Perhaps most surprising, the restaurants mature style, marked above all by simplicity, evolved much more slowly than is generally appreciated. It is hard to believe, when one is faced with a trademark Chez Panisse dish like a salad with goat cheese, dependent for its impact on the quality of the greens and the care of the preparation, or a rustic soup of root vegetables, that Chez Panisse once served dishes of extraordinary complexity with no evident connection to northern California.

This was especially true during the tenure of Jeremiah Tower in the kitchen. He reveled in special dinners including surrealistic dishes inspired by Salvador Dal or haute cuisine extravagances like duck stuffed with oysters, shallots, and its liver. A far cry, those, from the eventual house cuisine, influenced by Alices experiences in the south of France, based on fresh herbs, newly picked vegetables, garlic, and olive oil.

So what assets did Ms. Waters bring to the project if not the usual skills of the successful restaurateur? Several.

Perhaps most important, what her old friend Eleanor Bertino calls an iron will. A determination to press on when the staff or her private life was in turmoil, which has not always been visible to the casual observer, disarmed perhaps by her elfin appearance. Eleanor Bertino again: There has always been this interesting contradiction between the delicate little way Alice looks and how she really is. [She wore] these antique hats, delicate little hats that lay close to her headshe looked just like a Pre-Raphaelite angel.