Product Description
The first authorized biography of “the mother of American cooking” (The New York Times)
This adventurous book charts the origins of the local “market cooking” culture that we all savor today. When Francophile Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, few Americans were familiar with goat cheese, cappuccino, or mesclun. But it wasn’t long before Waters and her motley coterie of dreamers inspired a new culinary standard incorporating ethics, politics, and the conviction that the best-grown food is also the tastiest. Based on unprecedented access to Waters and her inner circle, this is a truly delicious rags-to-riches saga.
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Amazon.com Review
You can't tell the story of Chez Panisse, Berkeley's famed restaurant, without relating that of its diminutive founder, proprietor, and sometime chef, Alice Waters. This is what Thomas McNamee does most handily in his Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, a chronicle that begins with the seat-of-the-pants opening night of the "counterculture" venture in 1971, and ends 35 years later with Waters's restaurant an American institution--one credited with birthing California Cuisine, a style devoted to simplicity, freshness and seasonality. The book also limns, with tasty gossip, the ever-evolving Chez Panisse family, including the cook-artisans uniquely responsible for dish creation; follows the attempts, mostly failed, to put the restaurant on sound financial footing; shows how dishes and menus get made; and of course pursues Waters as she broadens her commitment to "virtuous agriculture" by establishing ventures like The Edible Schoolyard and The Yale Sustainable Food Project. The success of Chez Panisse--Gourmet magazine named it the best American restaurant in 2002--has everything to do with Waters, yet she remains an elusive protagonist. Sophisticated yet naive, professional and amateur, hard-driving but emotionally blurry, she invites reader interest but doesn't always satisfy it, as least as presented here. If McNamee cannot quite bring her to life, and if his tale lacks an insider's full conversance with his subject, he still engages readers in the considerable drama of people finding their way--blunderingly, with talented intent--to something new. With menus, narrated recipes, and photographs throughout, the book is vital reading for anyone interested in food, period. --Arthur Boehm
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 Chew on This ( jmalbert2002 )
Two-thirds into the paperback edition of his biography of Alice Waters, Thomas McNamee tells us "If you're a writer, you'll find it very hard to sell an article about an idea unless that idea is embodied in a hero...."
Thus the book Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. Another writer might have developed this material without Alice at the center. A wider lens would have captured Chez Panisse against the background of Northern California from the 60s onward. While the chefs of Chez Panisse were shaving truffles in abundance, the people of California were transforming their culture from Pacific Utopian to one which all but abandoned the idea of the public good. The Free Speech movement and the Hippie Culture ushered in an age of drugs, aided by Governor Reagan, who emptied the mental hospitals, putting men and women on the street who, though helpless in most ways, were supposed to be able to remember to take their meds twice a day. Homelessness and panhandling turned streets like Telegraph Avenue into high crime areas. Where men and women had once shopped for business suits and good shoes, people bought pizza on the street and stepped over sleeping bodies.
During these same years, Californians decided to "reform" their tax structure, creating a system where current homeowners' taxes were frozen at 1976 rates, but newcomers would pay 1% of the purchase price in property taxes. The result years later is a budget nightmare for Governor Schwartzenegger--Properties with market values in the hundreds of thousands continue to be taxed as though they are worth $50K or less.
Disposable income was indispensable to the food revolution in Berkeley. As a resident of the Bay Area from 1960 to 2005, I was among those who would like to have eaten at Chez Panisse, but who never felt she could afford it, despite being a working professional all those years. By focusing his text on Alice Waters, McNamee does not have to address the paradox of her creation-- a restaurant based on a philosophy of eating which is supposed to be good for everybody but is, realistically, out of reach for all but a few. (Check today's menu on the web and see for yourself.)
Lest you think my comments spring from some unfulfilled desire to sit at the privileged table, let me add that in 2005 I moved from the West Coast to Connecticut, and learned that I had, all these years, been the beneficiary of Alice Waters' example. Here, Martha Stewart is the Queen of Cuisine, which has been good for sales of china and linens. Supermarkets are enormous, filled with the bounty of the food industry, but what passes for cooking can be as simple as adding water to a packet of some kind and microwaving for 3 minutes. People are intensely aware of the cost of food, and they don't much care where it was grown/packaged/processed. On the other hand, here in Connecticut, the tax system is relatively fair, public parks and schools have been maintained at a high standard, I can go shopping without stepping over abandoned bedrolls and being hit up for spare change.
Reading Alice Waters and Chez Panisse raised once again for me the issues of healthy eating and privilege in America. And it reminded me that, while I succeeded in getting to Chez Panisse only once or twice in 40 years, I learned very early to prefer fresh produce, to search out food without preservatives, to braise rather than boil, and to appreciate seasonal fruits and vegetables. My children were raised on lunches of apples, raisins, celery sticks, good bread, and peanut butter made without sweetener. Our traditional holiday salad is an Alice Waters recipe, clipped long ago from a local paper. While McNamee does not critique the economics of good eating directly, he gives us a clear picture of the successful development of the organic food movement that is the legacy of this outspoken woman, now a well-known public figure and, "a hero who was also unmistakably, unheroically human."
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 We owe Alice Waters' cooking respect, and gratitude - but, oh, what a horror this book makes her out to be! ( alexknisely )
CHEZ PANISSE is a joy. I've made the pilgrimage four or five times; it's a splurge and a luxury and an indulgence and a delight. One eats wonderfully well there. Alice Waters, the restaurant's proprietor and director, has become identified with so many good things in cooking that who would want to tease those things and their patroness apart?
In buying an authorised biography, then, I expected uncritical adoration. That's what the book contains, larded with a sketchy recipe or a menu here and there. But even in a text meant to endorse Waters' apotheosis, the image presented of the woman is that of a monster of selfishness, destroying one person after another in pursuit of her desires. Sometimes the interests for which she crushes an acquaintance, a co-worker, are culinary; sometimes they're sexual; but what Alice wants, Alice gets, and her vast unconcern for others leaves blood and misery in its wake.
The first half has a narrative line, perhaps because some of the wounds inflicted are scarred over and the men and women interviewed have come to terms with what happened to them in Waters' undertow; they have constructed their own stories to explain their catastrophes, and the author in citing their stories finds his text ready-made. The second half, the more recent history, is flabby and shapeless, remarks rather than literature - A came to cook, B supplied vegetables, C left, D came to cook, Bill Clinton ignored Alice, E decided not to make pastry any more. Boring to the point of demanding to be speed-read.
But in that first half enough sordid fact peeps through the varnish of sanctity to make the book worth reading. Not worth buying, mind you. I made that error, and on finishing it during a flight from San Francisco back to London immediately gave it to the woman in the next seat, who'd "always wanted to eat there but never found the time". Get it through your library and wonder to yourself, as you follow Waters' career - what created this ogress, and however did so many people let her have her way?
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 Interesting but Tedious ( fishaut )
The author explores an important chapter in American culinary history and examines a unique contributor to that history. Once I fought my way through the book, I learned a few things:
1.)the food world has always been full of adventurous and idiosyncratic people and Ms. Waters is no exception.
2.)while her contribution and commitment to evolving the national palate is significant, it is wildly overstated. I am reminded of Jacques Pepin's reaction in his autobiography of their first meeting and listening to her overly serious discourse on her food: what's the big deal?
3.)her single minded drive is typical of all zealots- they are surrounded by acolytes and squish like bugs many of those who they have used, typically by having others do the dirty work. Her exploitation of her ex husband for breeding was notably offensive.
Despite all, Mr. McNamee would have rated 4 stars were it not for execrable writing, filled with inexplicable whining and adulation. Many anecdotes were intended to be revelatory but were mostly perplexing. Sentences were often poorly crafted, with grammar that escaped the editor's eye. Sorry, but a few more drafts would have resulted in a much better book.
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A great short story, but long on the read ( groupworker )
I just finished the book and although I was engaged in the story the first half of the book, the 2nd half really dragged. Maybe if you have had the great pleasure to dine at Alice's restaurant, perhaps the story would have kept your attention better than mine. It's interesting to learn about the evolution of fine dining in this country and the recent movement for slow food. Alice Waters is a hero for her work way beyond the walls of her restaurant. However, the writing was inconsistent.
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Fascinating...
...book about a woman and her restaurant - constantly on the verge of going broke in the early days but went on to become the most influential and inspirational person in the American restaurant business. A must for all foodies (although Alice doesn't like the word!)
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