Alice Waters And Chez Panisse

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.

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 span generations and is in tune with the seasons, the land, and human appetites. So writes Alice Waters of the opening of Berkeley's Chez Panisse Café on April Fool's Day, 1980. Located above the more formal Chez Panisse Restaurant, the Café is a bustling neighborhood bistro where guests needn't reserve far in advance and can choose from the ever-changing à la carte menu. It's the place where Alice Waters's inventive chefs cook in a more impromptu and earthy vein, drawing on the healthful, low-tech traditions of the cuisines of such Mediterranean regions as Catalonia, Campania, and Provence, while improvising and experimenting with the best products of Chez Panisse's own regional network of small farms and producers. In the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, the follow-up to the award-winning Chez Panisse Vegetables, Alice Waters and her team of talented cooks offer more than 140 of the café's best-recipes--some that have been on the menu since the day café opened and others freshly reinvented with the honesty and ingenuity that have made Chez Panisse so famous. In addition to irresistible recipes, the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook is filled with chapter-opening essays on the relationships Alice has cultivated with the farmers, foragers and purveyors--most of them within an hour's drive of Berkeley--who make it possible for Chez Panisse to boast that nearly all food is locally grown, certifiably organic, and sustainably grown and harvested. Alice encourages her chefs and cookbook readers alike to decide what to cook only after visiting the farmer's market or produce stand. Then we can all fully appreciate the advantages of eating according to season--fresh spring lamb in late March, ripe tomato salads in late summer, Comice pear crisps in autumn. This book begins with a chapter of inspired vegetable recipes, from a vivid salad of avocados and beets to elegant Morel Mushroom Toasts to straightforward side dishes of Spicy Broccoli Raab and Garlicky Kale. The Chapter on eggs and cheese includes two of the café's most famous dishes, a garden lettuce salad with baked goat cheese and the Crostata di Perrella, the café's version of a calzone. Later chapters focus on fish and shellfish, beef, pork, lamb, and poultry, each offering its share of delightful dishes. You'll find recipes for curing your own pancetta, for simple grills and succulent braises, and for the definitive simple roast chicken--as well as sumptuous truffed chicken breasts. Finally the pastry cooks of Chez Panisse serve forth a chapter of uncomplicated sweets, including Apricot Bread Pudding, Chocolate Almond Cookies, and Wood Oven-baked Figs with Raspberries. Gorgeously designed and illustrated throughout with colored block prints by David Lance Goines, who has eaten at the café since the day it opened, Chez Panisse Café Cookbook is destined to become an indispensable classic. Fans of Alice Waters's restaurant and café will be thrilled to discover the recipes that keep them coming back for more. Loyal readers of her earlier cookbooks will delight in this latest collection of time-tested, deceptively simple recipes. And anyone who loves pure, vibrant, delicious fare made from the finest ingredients will be honored to add these new recipes to his or her repertoire.

Chez Panisse opened its doors in 1971. Founded by Alice Waters, the restaurant is rooted in her conviction that the best-tasting food is organic, locally grown, and harvested in ecologically sound ways by people who are taking care of the land for future generations. The quest for such ingredients has always determined the restaurant’s cuisine, and, over the course of forty years, Chez Panisse has helped create a community of local farmers and ranchers whose dedication to sustainable agriculture assures the restaurant a steady supply of fresh and pure ingredients. In Forty Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering, Alice takes readers on her journey from the humble and visionary beginnings of the restaurant, through its rise and the acclaim, to the Café and the influential Chez Panisse Foundation. Organized by decade, the book includes a wealth of archival material and photographs—menus; invitations; pictures of Alice at the restaurant and around the world, with those who have passed through her life—and interviews from public figures and cooks who have been inspired by or mentored at the restaurant. This tribute to the delicious food revolution that began with Alice Waters and Chez Panisse is an important work for anyone who cares about food, sustainability, and the powerful legacy that Alice has built.

In 2001 Chez Panisse was named the number one restaurant in America by Gourmet magazine -- quite a journey from 1971 when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse as a place where she and her friends could cook country French food with local ingredients and talk politics. As the restaurant's popularity grew, so did Alice's commitment to organic, locally grown foods and to a community of farmers and producers who provide the freshest ingredients, grown and harvested naturally with techniques that preserve and enrich the land for future generations. After thirty years, the innovative spirit and pure, intense flavors of Chez Panisse continue to delight and surprise all who visit, and even those who cant get there know that Alice started a quiet revolution, changing the culinary landscape forever. Inspired by Chez Panisse, more and more people across the country are discovering the sublime pleasures of local, organic vegetables and fruits. Now join Alice Waters and the cooks at Chez Panisse in celebration of fruit. Chez Panisse Fruit draws on the exuberant flavors of fresh, ripe fruit to create memorable dishes. In this companion volume to Chez Panisse Vegetables, discover more than 200 recipes for both sweet and savory dishes featuring fruit. Glorify the late-summer peach harvest with Peach and Raspberry Gratin, and extend the season with Grilled Cured Duck Breast with Pickled Peaches. Enjoy the first plums in Pork Loin Stuffed with Wild Plums and Rosemary. Preserve the fresh flavors of winter citrus with Kumquat Marmalade or Candied Grapefruit Peel. Organized alphabetically by fruit -- from apples to strawberries -- and including helpful essays on selecting, storing, and preparing fruit, this book will help you make the very most of fresh fruits from season to season. Illustrated with beautiful color relief prints by Patricia Curtan, Chez Panisse Fruit is a book to savor and to treasure.

The New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed memoir from cultural icon and culinary standard bearer Alice Waters recalls the circuitous road and tumultuous times leading to the opening of what is arguably America's most influential restaurant. When Alice Waters opened the doors of her "little French restaurant" in Berkeley, California in 1971 at the age of 27, no one ever anticipated the indelible mark it would leave on the culinary landscape—Alice least of all. Fueled in equal parts by naiveté and a relentless pursuit of beauty and pure flavor, she turned her passion project into an iconic institution that redefined American cuisine for generations of chefs and food lovers. In Coming to My Senses Alice retraces the events that led her to 1517 Shattuck Avenue and the tumultuous times that emboldened her to find her own voice as a cook when the prevailing food culture was embracing convenience and uniformity. Moving from a repressive suburban upbringing to Berkeley in 1964 at the height of the Free Speech Movement and campus unrest, she was drawn into a bohemian circle of charismatic figures whose views on design, politics, film, and food would ultimately inform the unique culture on which Chez Panisse was founded. Dotted with stories, recipes, photographs, and letters, Coming to My Senses is at once deeply personal and modestly understated, a quietly revealing look at one woman's evolution from a rebellious yet impressionable follower to a respected activist who effects social and political change on a global level through the common bond of food.

“Chez Panisse is an extraordinary dining experience. . . . It is Alice Waters's brilliant gastronomic mind, her flair for cooking, and her almost revolutionary concept of menu planning that make Chez Panisse so exciting.”—James Beard Justly famed for the originality of its ever-changing menu and the range and virtuosity of its chef and owner, Alice Waters, Chez Panisse is known throughout the world as one of America's greatest restaurants. Dinner there is always an adventure—a different five-course meal is offered every night, and the restaurant has seldom repeated a meal since its opening in 1971. Alice Waters is a brilliant pioneer of a wholly original cuisine, at once elegant and earthy, classical and experimental, joyous in its celebration of the very finest and freshest ingredients. In this spectacular book, Alice Waters collects 120 of Chez Panisse's best menus, its most inspired transformations of classic French dishes. The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook is filled with dishes redolent of the savory bouquet of teh garden, the appealing aromas and roasty flavors of food cooked over the charcoal grill, and the delicate sweetness of fish fresh from the sea. There are menus here for different seasons of the year, for picnics and outdoor barbecues and other great occasions. Handsomely designed and illustrated by David Lance Goines, this is an indispensable addition to the shelf of every great cook and cookbook readers. “A lovely book, wonderfully inventive, and the food is very pure.”—Richard Olney

Offers a look at an organic garden on school grounds, which are tended and harvested by students and the benefits that arise from it.

Chez Panisse is a restaurant in Berkeley, California, run by Alice Waters and her large group of friends. Her daughter Fanny's stories of this busy place are a friendly and funny introduction to the delights of real restaurant life, and her recipes show how easy and inexpensive it is to make good food with basic ingredients and simple techniques. Opening up the magic world of cooking to children, Alice Waters describes, in the words of seven-year-old Fanny, the path food travels from the garden to the kitchen to the table. Teaching kids where food really comes from not just from the market but from farms and people who care about the earth, Fanny at Chez Panisse has lessons on the importance of eating with your hands, of garlic and of composting and recycling. It is also a delightful beginner's cookbook with 46 recipes that will tempt children into the desire to cook and eat with whole hearts, alert minds and all the senses. From banana milkshakes and green apple sherbet to cherry tomato pasta and black beans and sour cream, as well as spaghetti and meatballs, french fries and pizza, there is something here for every child to prepare and enjoy.