How a Berkeley Restaurant Changed What's On Your Plate
Note: This is the second of a 2-part series on restaurants that rock. Part 1 is here . Julia Child Only ten years separate the 1961 publication of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking from the 1971 opening of Alice Waters’s trailblazing restaurant, Chez Panisse , in Berkeley, California. In that decade, Americans would experience two sea changes in the way we eat. Both women revolutionized food. Child demystified fine dining and made the culinary arts accessible to anyone with a cookbook, a kitchen, and loads of patience, while Waters, the not-quite-hippie who became friends with Child, focused on local ingredients and ignited the farm-to-table movement. Waters embraced some tenets of the counterculture but was too refined to live on hippie staples like tofu, brown bread, and nutritional yeast. Her food was French-inspired. Alice Waters Waters’ farm-to-table thinking is now so ingrained in our food culture that I yawned audibly when a supposedly cutting-edge local cult...
