Chez Panisse is considered the home of Californian Cuisine. Dean Riddle talks to its founder and guiding light, Alice Waters. Portrait by Kelly Bugden.
Already a national treasure in her native US, Alice Waters looks set to achieve a similar status in France. This summer, The New York Times reported that the respected restaurateur and author of popular cookbooks had agreed to open a 330-seat restaurant at the Louvre, in Paris. Quoted in the Times article, Helene David-Weill, an official with the museum, said, 'Alice Waters is the quintessence of taste and savoir-faire. She searches for perfection. Alice loves France and understands the way French people react to food.'
Shortly after the announcement I find myself in the kitchen at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, the restaurant Waters opened in 1971. It's a Friday morning and the pleasant, softly lit kitchen is bustling with activity. Waters appears and positions herself at the end of a table, where, in preparation for the interview and photo shoot, her cooks have assembled a seasonal tableau of fruits and vegetables. She begins at once to fiddle with the arrangement, scattering a mound of fava beans and getting rid of a bowl of avocados and grapefruits. 'There, these will do nicely,' she says, as she beams over a basket of fresh Oregon ceps and a gorgeous heap of artichokes. 'These things are beautifully seasonal.'
In her restaurant and through her many books, including Chez Panisse Cooking and Chez Panisse Vegetables, Alice Waters has inspired a generation of restaurateurs and home cooks to approach food consciously and intuitively, with senses wide open. She implores us to embrace the special bounty of each season, to shop for the very best ingredients, and to cultivate organic gardens at home. From the moment it opened its doors, Chez Panisse has been a company of people who care. In a 1990 essay titled The Farm-Restaurant Connection, Waters states that 'as much as by any other factor, Chez Panisse has been defined by the search for ingredients. That search and what we have found along the way have shaped what we cook and ultimately who we are. The search has made us realise that, as a restaurant, we are utterly dependent on the health of the land, the sea, and the planet as a whole.'
Today, Chez Panisse and other leading San Francisco Bay Area restaurants buy from a network of organic vegetable and fruit growers, and from producers of chemical-free, humanely raised meats and poultry. But this was not always the case, Waters observes. 'It's difficult now to remember the kind of attitude to flavour and quality that still prevailed in the 1970s. There were no farmers' markets in Berkeley, no speciality produce brokers. But soon after we opened, an assortment of people began to show up at our kitchen door, drawn by our reputation for culinary curiosity - neighbours with bunches of radishes and herbs from their gardens, and more eccentric foragers who came with buckets of fresh mussels, berries from the hills, and fish just hours out of the sea.'
Americans are cooking and eating with more awareness and style than ever before, and they are coming to gardening through food. 'Is there an emerging American cuisine?' I ask Waters. 'Well, it's difficult to say,' she responds. 'We live in such a large country. But I do feel something is unfolding. Cuisine, however, is a word I hardly ever use, and I don't really care for the word chef, either. To me, the words imply that your work is done, and I believe cooking to be a work in progress.'
Alice is also enthusiastic about British food. 'I'm very excited by what's going on in England. I know there is an environmental movement there, too, and the culinary renaissance goes hand in hand with that. Many of the most extraordinary cookbook authors have been British. I can't tell you what a huge inspiration Elizabeth David's books have been for me. I recently re-read An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, and I was so struck by her perceptions - it's very much the way I think about food.'
At 19, Alice Waters went to live in France, where she 'learned everything. I lived at the bottom of a market street and took it all in by osmosis, and I hung out in a lot of great French kitchens.' She somehow found the time, before finally returning to California, to go to England and earn a degree in Montessori education, a method of teaching that emphasises training of the senses and encourages self-education. She then taught for a couple of years before deciding that her true love was cooking.
When she was first thinking of opening what would become Chez Panisse, a friend took Waters to see a Marcel Pagnol film retrospective playing in San Francisco. 'Every one of those movies about life in the South of France over 50 years ago radiated wit, love for people and respect for the earth. Every movie made me cry.' She and her partners decided to name their new restaurant after Panisse - a 'slightly ridiculous' but lovable character in Pagnol's Marseilles trilogy - to remind them of the sunny atmosphere and wholesome, good food of Provence.
Regarding her triumphant return to France, and the Louvre, Waters is typically self-effacing. 'We are hoping to collaborate with a whole group of artists, cooks and gardeners - from all over the world, not just France - who believe in and want to express this philosophy of food. It's important to me that we put together a restaurant that will help to teach people the relationship of food to agriculture, and food to art and culture.'
Alice Waters spent her childhood in Chatham, New Jersey, where she once won a costume contest, dressed as 'Queen of the Garden'. At 54, she appears set to cut a smart figure in the international culinary world when her restaurant - with its proposed view of the Tuileries Gardens - opens in the Louvre at the end of the year 2000. The 'Queen of the Garden' still reigns.