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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37855 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.com
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

From Publishers Weekly
Talk about dish: McNamee's book is a gossipy history of the famed restaurant and a biography of the individual behind its three-decade rise from humble beginnings to international renown. Alice Waters was a young, single American woman with strong, confident sense and vision but little experience in the restaurant business when she moved to Berkeley in the 1960s. She loved food and cooking, and dreamed of opening a restaurant; her passion and enthusiasm eventually produced a location, a crew and a clientele. The book chronicles the following decades with extensive detail from a behind-the-scenes viewpoint, going from stovetop to bedroom, from opening night right up through the restaurant's recent 35th anniversary. Larger-than-life personalities abound, but the primary focus is Waters, whose success occasionally comes across as attributable to accidents and other people as often as design. The author researched restaurant archives and interviewed dozens of willing subjects with Waters's approval, and the result is a mélange of reverential biography with restaurant and food history. Sidebars scattered throughout the text provide additional anecdotes and insight into Waters's favorite dishes. Serious foodies will devour this memoir. B&w photos. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Warren Bass

Tucked away on a rapidly yuppifying stretch of Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley sits an unlikely temple: a wooden, twig-encrusted, two-story house with a faintly ethereal air that happens to be one of the most important landmarks in the history of American cuisine. Alice Waters's Chez Panisse has been appearing on lists of the country's very best restaurants for so long now that it's easy to forget how important this unassuming -- in fact, this aggressively unassuming -- restaurant has been to American food.

Thomas McNamee has no intention of letting that happen. In Alice Waters & Chez Panisse, he worships at Waters's shrine, which he sees not just as an important stage in the evolution of California cuisine but as the vanguard of a foodie revolution. McNamee, a first-rate culture and food writer, has produced a sort of authorized hagiography.

It's hard not to like his enthusiasm and impossible not to respect his legwork; McNamee seems to have talked to just about everyone involved with the place since Chez Panisse -- named after a hospitable, jolly character from three 1930s Marcel Pagnol films with whom Waters felt a powerful affinity -- opened its doors in 1971. Back then, it was a shoestring startup long on ambition and short on just about everything else, from funding to waiters to organization to formality.

Waters's great innovation was to bring to America some key food lessons learned as a student in France: an insistence on the freshest, locally grown ingredients, a belief that dining should be an all-encompassing aesthetic and philosophical experience, a concern for the smallest details. The chief concerns of the Chez Panisse philosophy are "environmental harmony and optimal flavor," all rooted in the core belief that "the best-tasting food is organically grown and harvested in ways that are ecologically sound." Waters has honed those ideals and helped found America's "Slow Food" movement -- all with an intensity that, even in the hands of the admiring McNamee, sometimes seems a little barmy.

McNamee insists he "had complete freedom throughout," but he has a tough time getting much critical distance from an institution he clearly adores. He never quite explains how Waters reconciles her laudable belief in democratic informality and accessibility with a weekend charge of $85 for the prix fixe dinner, not including a 17 percent tip. He includes sidebars that look like recipes but turn out to be long, often indigestible quotes from Waters or her comrades; he reprints decades worth of menus from the Chez Panisse archive (the restaurant changes its fare constantly to keep pace with the nearby produce from its network of suppliers). The result is an uncommonly handsome book -- adorned with nifty period photos and color accents that have been attractively deployed throughout -- that's often an unsatisfying read.

Take, for instance, McNamee's chummy reproduction of some scouting reports from a Chez Panisse forager searching for the perfect lamb. He seems to realize that these go into insane detail -- Joshua's spies sent back less thorough briefings -- but happily concludes, "Only at Chez Panisse." McNamee also uncritically describes Waters's own version of President Reagan's exhortation to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall: a series of increasingly narcissistic letters from Waters urging Bill Clinton to establish an organic garden at the White House. "Mr. President, plant that garden on the White House grounds!" she hectored in March 2000. "I can think of no more powerful way to ground your legacy than to leave behind you a kitchen garden and the compost pile to nourish it." McNamee concludes that the unconvinced Clinton "knew a thing or two about stubbornness, too," not that an exasperated president with a few other things on his plate surely tossed this strident, only-in-Berkeley correspondence over to some hapless staffer. After all, most modern presidencies have produced their own compost heaps without outside help.

And yet, and yet. A visit to Chez Panisse will leave even the most cynical diner a helpless, swooning convert. Beneath warm brass lamps and burnished wood, the kitchen brings on a sublime ricotta cheese salad, spinach crespelle with a glorious spread of local mushrooms, Sierra mackerel in a masterfully calibrated romesco sauce, grass-fed steak from Marin. It's all served up by a stunningly knowledgeable waiter with an easy viticultural expertise that would put most sommeliers elsewhere to shame, in a room whose atmosphere sighs with earthy cheer and serenity. The net effect is to reduce hardened skeptics -- including those whose skepticism was exacerbated by this book -- to humming bars of "I'm a Believer." The meal ends with lime sorbet, sprinkled with sugared mint leaves that seemed to have been cut mere minutes before. Their freshness is so delectably potent that diners leave feeling -- well, ensorcelled, enchanted, enraptured, and longing to return to the house that Alice built.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

A great short story, but long on the read
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.

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!)

Interesting life, but author failed
I enjoyed reading this because of the subject's devotion to fresh, local, sustainable food, but was disappointed in the writing. The book is mainly a compilation of quotes from Alice Waters and her friends and people she's worked with - there's no synthesis provided by the author, no insight. It seems on the surface to be giving an honest portrait of the woman and her restaurant, but I just felt that there was a lot left unrevealed and unanalyzed. Instead of giving a clear-eyed assessment, this book fit into the mold of every project Alice has embarked on: She handpicked her biographer and gave him full access to sources so that it feels like a community effort, but she also made sure the book only carried the tone she desired - the tone she envisioned it should have - and was too impatient to provide or allow any introspection.