Alice L. Waters - Chez Panisse Café Cookbook

F OR C ATHERINE B RANDEL , CHEF , MENTOR , AND FRIEND .

T HIS cookbook could not have happened without the collaboration of three dear friends: David Tanis, former Caf chef and the most wonderful cook, who helped plan and write the book, gathering all the recipes, testing, and rewriting them; Fritz Streiff, former Chez Panisse cook and Caf host and my faithful word processor, who went over the manuscript checking grammar, typography, and style; and David Lance Goines, the artist whose illustrations and design for this book so perfectly express its spiritand who has eaten in the Caf since the day it opened.

We were inspired by two unforgettable past Caf chefs, Catherine Brandel and Peggy Smith; the two extraordinary Caf chefs at present, Gilbert Pilgram and Russell Moore; and by my partner Lindsey Shere, who continues to encourage and enlighten us. Alan Tangren, currently pastry chef and formerly our first full-time forager, provided invaluable support by researching and writing most of the material in the chapter introductions; and Kelsie Sue Kerr, another former chef, pitched in with additional knowledge and recipe testing.

The other contributors to the book are the following Chez Panisse cooks and friends: Tracy Bates, Diane Bouma, Phillip Dedlow, Amy Dencler, Anne Dickey, Jenny Emanuel, Michael Emanuel, Brian Espinoza, Niloufer Ichaporia, Sharan Ikeda, Anna Kovel, Christopher Lee, David Lindsay, John Luther, Scott McGehee, Jean-Pierre Moull, Michael Peternell, Gayle Pirie, Tasha Prysi, Charlene Reis, Mary Robida Canales, Jennifer Sherman, Anthony Tassinello, David Visick, and Samantha Wood. I want to thank them all for their dedication to the philosophy of Chez Panisse. I also owe a debt of thanks to all the other cooks, past and present; the hardworking and devoted floor staff; and our loyal customers, who have continued to give us the enthusiasm and criticism we need to help us change and grow.

Finally, my gratitude to our editor, Susan Friedland, for believing in us and our idiosyncratic method of designing and writing cookbooks.

W HEN my friends and I started Chez Panisse, in 1971, in a cozy little two-story house in Berkeley, California, our signs and menus and matchbooks all said Caf & Restaurant. I believed, navely, that our new establishment could be all things to all people. Chez Panisse, I thought, could have a flower-bedecked dining room with white linen and candlelight and soign cuisine and, at the very same time, it could be a bustling neighborhood bistro, with butcher paper on the tables and old-fashioned, straight-ahead fare, where you could get as much or as little as you wanted. I must have known at some level that these were irreconcilable fantasies, but that didnt stop me. We were open seven days a week, from seven-thirty in the morning until two in the morning. In the daytime, we tried to be a caf: We offered a chalkboard menu of simple dishes la carte, and we encouraged people to hang out for hours at tables covered with checkered oilcloth. Then, at dinnertime, we got out the linen tablecloths, dimmed the lights, and served an ambitious fixed-price dinner of four or five courses. And when the diners went home, we tried to metamorphose back into a caf.

It never quite worked. The restaurant was such a huge success that people started making reservations weeks in advance, and we didnt have enough tables. Discouragingly, we found ourselves displacing the caf regulars (many of whom were students and bohemians who couldnt afford the fixed-price menu, which had climbed to a dizzying $12.50 per person) in order to make room for an increasingly homogeneous clientele of well-heeled people dressed up for a fancy occasion. We tried to keep our caf side alive: we opened for coffee and croissants in the morning; and after the dinner service, our friend Bob Waks, who worked at the Cheeseboard collective across the street, would come in to fry potatoes and grill steaks with garlic and black pepper. The trouble was that all of us on the restaurant staff would hungrily eat up Bobs late-night suppers as fast as he could cook them, so we never made any money.

Around this time we started thinking seriously about enlarging our premises, and I went off on vacation to Italy with my friends Jay Heminway, Bob Waks, and Jerry Budrick, who was one of my partners and a waiter in the restaurant. We ended up in Torino one freezing November night, outside a little restaurant. We could see a fire burning inside and it pulled us in. And there I had my first pizza out of a wood-burning oven. We all thought it was the best thing we had eaten on the whole trip. We shared several pizzas and a few bottles of wine, and by the time we left we had it all figured out: we would turn upstairs at Chez Panisse into a caf open day and night, with an exposed kitchen, a grill, and a big brick wood-burning pizza oven, and downstairs would remain a restaurant with a single carefully composed, fixed-price menu.

Back in California, I enlisted the help of our friend Cecilia Chiang, who owned The Mandarin, a San Francisco restaurant. She introduced me to her good friends Lun Chan, an architect, and Bumps Baldauf, a kitchen design expert, who laid out the plans for the new upstairs caf. Somehow we located a cantankerous German bricklayer who claimed to know how to build a pizza oven, and work began. Kip Mesirow, a master craftsman and old friend, recruited a team of superb carpenters who were skilled in Japanese-style joinery. Together they built the caf in Kips inimitable hybrid style, combining elements of traditional Japanese architecture with the California Craftsman redwood interiors of Greene & Greene and Bernard Maybeck, and the Art Nouveau decor of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. We hung the walls with old French movie posters advertising the films of Marcel Pagnol, films that had already provided us with both a name and an ideal: to create a community of friends, lovers, and relatives that spans generations and is in tune with the seasons, the land, and human appetites.

Perhaps appropriately, the Caf opened on April Fools Day, 1980, with Jerry Budrick as the matre dhtel, Steve Crumley (now a matre d himself) as bartender, and a colorful crew of cooks and waiters, some of whom are still at their jobs. Over the years, the Caf has employed a number of other memorable hosts in addition to Jerry and Steve, including my old college roommate, Eleanor Bertino, the brassy journalist Kate Coleman, the affable Fritz Streiff, and our loquacious tea authority, Helen Gustafson. From the start, the place was a hit. We decided not to take reservations in advance, and people started crowding in and waiting hours for a table. Wolfgang Puck came to dinner, loved what he saw, looked up our bricklayer, and designed and built his own open kitchen and pizza oven at Spago in Los Angeles. (Little did he know that our bricklayer didnt really know how to build a proper Neapolitan pizza oven at all. In fact, it was years before we were able to import and install the Italian insert that now makes our oven fuel-efficient and sufficiently hot.) The concept of an open kitchen is a simple one: cooks and diners should interact and cooking smells should fill the room. And in the Caf, they do.