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 cultural institution recently awarded a prize to a prominent local chef who practices the gospel Waters introduced nearly sixty years ago. It’s still important, but it’s old news.

For people of my parents’ generation, patronizing “serious” French restaurants such as New York’s La Grenouille or Lutèce was the height of fine dining. The ingredients in those stuffy old haute French meals were prized for their rarity, decadence, and labor-intensive preparation, not for being locally sourced. Lutèce "was famous for its Alsatian onion tart and a sautéed foie gras with dark chocolate sauce and bitter orange marmalade" (Gothamist).  

Despite current trends, I still cherish my memories of my parents taking me to French restaurants in New York. 

Today’s top omakase meals, featuring fish flown in from Japan and Australia for same-day consumption, are likewise valued for their exotic, imported ingredients.

Chez Panisse was not particularly exotic. Child herself said that dining there felt like eating in someone’s home. The menu changed daily, based on what was fresh and available from local farmers.

Joe and I visited Chez Panisse in 2007. It was still going strong. Although I cherish many culinary experiences, that meal at Chez Panisse remains an all-time favorite and one of my top five meals. I hope to return someday.

Today, I keep my electronic recipe rotation organized by season. I have dishes I like to prepare at different times of year, depending on the availability of produce. This would never have happened without Waters.

Eating seasonally was a new concept when Waters opened Chez Panisse. Now even a run-of-the-mill Midwestern home cook like me does it.

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