Executive Chef Alice Waters Chez Panisse, Berkeley, CA

Alice Waters Cooks A Dream
By Wendy Musk
Photos by Alan Bartl & Maren Caruso

A COPPER CAULDRON SIMMERS WITH A SUFFUSION OF AROMATIC HERBS AND.
THE EARTHY ESSENCE OF AUTUMN VEGETABLES HARVESTED IN RIPE PERFECTION.
A GLOW IN THE BALSAMIC CALM OF THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA SUN, ALICE WATERSS
TEACHES REVERENCE FOR LIFE. THE EVENT IS THE ROBERT MONDAVI
GREAT CHEFS 2000 SERIES. AND SHE IS COOKING A DREAM.

Waters is a visionary, the acknowledged forerunner of the organic food movement, who would invite the world to dine, extended family all, were there a farm table long enough and organic produce plentiful enough within an hour's drive of her beloved restaurant, Chez Panisse. On October 16th, however, it was a select few, supporters, admirers and colleagues, who gathered amid the simple elegance of the Mondavi vineyards to share the gentle pleasure of her expertise, and wisdom.

Click on Images for Captions

The scene is a pastoral one; Alice Waters and staff quietly chopping vegetables for the afternoon meal. Congregated around the Cutting board, participants share thoughts along with recipes for homemade vinegars.

Hostess Margrit Mondavi, an accomplished chef herself, chimes in with her favorites from her perch upon a countertop. The chopping complete, all migrate to the patio for the grand event, creating fish soup in a copper cauldron on an open wood fire.

The ingredients look too beautiful to cook as they slide into the heated olive oil releasing a fragrance that draws all into a circle around the kettle. Ever enthusiastic, Robert Mondavi returns again and again to peer into the cauldron and inhale the delicate aroma, much to the group's amusement.

Nourish the Body. Nourish the Earth. Nourish the Soul. This is the message Alice Waters imparts through the metaphor of fresh ingredients. To cultivate the art of living one must live in reciprocity with the living earth. To serve a garden salad a la Alice Waters, one must cultivate not only a garden, but also a community of growers and providers with like-minded integrity. And that is exactly what she has done.

Waters explains, "When the cafe opened, we had a limited choice of produce suppliers. Like most restaurants, we got our fruits and vegetables at the cornmercial produce terminal and a few local markets. We desperately wanted better raw materials, but for years we thought the only way we could get them was by starting a farm ourselves, or by having a farmer grow things just for us. Only gradually have we learned that it takes a network of suppliers, some forty in all. whom we have discovered over the years. This network has become indispensable to us. It is not just a list of purveyors, but a community of people who share our goals of providing fresh, perfectly grown food while promoting a sustainable agriculture that takes care of the earth."

Waters judges freshness not by the day but by the hour. Like her mentor, revered French master chef, Alain Chapel, she is committed to a menu dictated by the pick of the day. "All the ingredients arrive at the kitchen hours after they have been harvested." To that end Waters employs a full time Forager, whose responsibilities entail locating organic farms and establishing sustainable relationships with both land and farmers. Waters own father was the original Forager-in-Chief at Chez Panisse. He discovered eccentric biodynamic farmer, Bob Cannard, cultivating 35 acres on a wooded hillside above the floor of the Sonoma Valley. "Bob grows a great variety of produce, from tiny watercress and tender baby lettuce to spicy rocket, pungent herbs, earthy potatoes and succulent apricots, peaches, figs, and raspberries. In the spring he forages for miner's lettuce. In winter he grows enchanting radicchios, including the pale yellow~green, maroon-spotted Castelfranco variety." Waters' staff drives to Cannard's farm everyday in summer and every other day in winter, selecting the freshest fare and dropping off the restaurant's fruit and vegetable scraps for the farm's compost. It is a mutually creative cycle.

Alice Waters was born in the spring season of 1944 in Chatham, New Jersey. A graduate of University of California at Berkeley in 1967 with a degree in French Cultural Studies, she pursued a teaching degree at the Montessori School in London, followed by a year of travel throughout France. She returned to California inspired and with a group of friends opened Chez Panisse, in 1971, in a cozy two-story house in Berkeley. Their signs and matchbooks read, "Cafe and Restaurant." Waters explains,

"I believed that our new establishment could be all things to all people. Chez Panisse, I thought, could have a flower-bedecked dining room with white linen and candlelight and soigne cuisine and at the very same time it could be a bustling neighborhood bistro, with butcher paper on the tables and old-fashioned straight-ahead fare where you could get as much or as little as you wanted. I must have known at some level that these were irreconcilable fantasies, but that didn't stop me." The restaurant was open seven days a week from seven-thirty to two in the morning. The daytime chalkboard menu offered simple dishes a la carte, and the bohemian clientele was encouraged to linger. At dinnertime lights were dimmed, the checkered oil cloth table toppers were replaced with fine linens tO accompany the ambitious prix-fxed four and five course dinners. When the satisfied patrons departed, the formal restaurant metamorphosed back into a cafe. "It never quite worked."Waters explained.

"The restautant was such a huge success that people started making reservations weeks in advance and we didn't have enough tables." To appease the cafe regulars, many of whom were students, without suffiencient pocket change to afford the prix-fixed menu, Chez Panisse opened for coffee and croissants in the early morning. Frustrations mounted. Clearly, expansion was the solution.

A trip to Italy with colleagues and friends inspired and defined the concept behind Chez Panisse Cafe. "We ended up in Torino one freezing November night, outside a little restaurant. We could see a fire burning inside and it pulled us in. And there I had my first pizza out of a wood-burning oven. We all thought it was the best thing we had eaten on the whole trip. We shared several pizzas and a few bottles of wine and by the time we left we had it all figured out. We would turn upstairs at Chez Panisse into a cafe, open day and night, with an exposed kitchen, a grill and a big brick wood-burning pizza oven, and downstairs would remain a restaurant with a single carefulIy composed, fixed-price menu."

The concept of service evolved too. To provide the freshest fare, Waters reasoned, one must have the freshest staff. Hence, a dynamic correction to the grueling yet commonly accepted business practice of working chefs seven days a week on twelve hour stints was initiated. The Cafe would maintain two chefs on a rotating schedule of three days on, three days off. The innovation impacted not only quality and creative variety, but also the Cafe's ambience. The alignment of business practice with Waters' holistic philosophy inspired new levels of hospitality and community. "I think this is one of the best organizational moves we ever made. The line cooks, prep cooks, and interns who work under the chefs learn twice as much, and the food is twice as good and always different."

Alice Waters brings a woman's attention to the experience of others. One suspects that had she not become one of the world's most acclaimed executive chefs she would have been a painter. Mounting the stairs at Chez Pannisse Cafe the customer is drawn into aesthetic communion. "Every day, a designated cook decides what produce looks the most beautiful and the most nearly as if it had been picked that very morning, and arranges it for display on the counter in front of the salad-making station." It is a palette for the palette, evoking a glorious seventeenth century Spanish still life painting. Composition is all. Waters describes it best, "a basket of tiny spiny purple artichokes or purple striped eggplants; a few untrimmed bulbs of fennel with their feathery green tops; an enormous cardoon plant looking like a giant swollen head of celery, a rainbow cornucopia of multicolored glowing tomatoes, some still on the branch; a few huge tumescent boletus mushrooms or a pile of perfect morels, smelling faintly of the woods." The colors and textures of the still life are meant to be a hint, enticing the senses and highlighting the ingredients of the day.

NOURISH THE BODY. NOURISH THE EARTH. NOURISH THE SOUL. THIS IS THE MESSAGE ALICE WATERS IMPARTS THROUGH THE METAPHOR OF FRESH INGREDIENTS. TO CULTIVATE THE ART OF LIVING, ONE MUST LIVE IN RECIPROCITY WITH THE LIVING EARTH.

Watets approaches her art with the patience of a gardener and the heart of a teacher. That is why, in 1993, in collaboration with the principal of Martin Luther King jr. Middle School in Berkeky she ilutiated the Edibk Schoolyard Project, [now the largest grantee of the Chez Panicce Foundation], to teach children abouc paticnce, susuinability, and the principles of ecology.

An abandoned lot adjacent to the school was selected as the garden site. Asphalt was removed in December of 1995. It took two years for the soil-enriching cover crop to prepare the former parking lot for planting. Now, on an given day, thirty students participate in the lessons of nature's bounty, transforming the daily harvest into a sit-down rneal. "The shape of the garden continues to evolve as crops are rotamd and beds are reconfigured. Eventually, we hope to edibly landscape the entire school campus, creating a beautiful school with in a garden." This is how Waters nurtures the future, with a replicable program that feeds the child, mind, body and soul.

Waters is the author of several books, induding The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, Fanny at Chez Panisse, a storybook and cookbook for children [dedicated to her 17 year old daughter, Fanny], Chez Panisse Vegetables, and most recendy the inspiring, Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook. The recipient of numerous prestigious awards, Waters was named one of the world's ten best chefs by the magazine Cuisine et Vins du France, Best Chef in America and Best Restaurant in America by the James Beard Foundation. She is also a supporter of the Convivia Slow Foods Movement whose thoughtful members question the virulent spread of fast food venues and their effect on the health and wellbeing of the world's people.

ROBERT MONDAVI TAPS HIS TEASPOON AGAINST THE PERFECT CURVE
OF HIS WINE GLASS. HE AND MARGRIT RISE TO PROPOSE A TOAST.
“TO ALICE WATERS." HE TURNS TOWARD HER WITH A WIDE SMILE.
THE MOST WONDERFUL THINGS AT THE TABLE TRULY HAVE
THEIR ROOTS IN SIMPLICITY.

At the Mondavi Vineyard, dinner is served. The dining hall is suffused with a Rembrandtian inner light. The depth and warmth of Alice Waters' sharing has created another extended family gathered at table. Fall Vegeable Bagna Cauda is prepared with attention to every detail. The raw vegeables are picture-perfect and straight from the garden, sliced thin and sprinkled with sea salt. A warm anchovy sauce is offered for dipping or spooning at the diner's discretion. La familia di Robet Mondavi Pinot Grigio 1999 accompanies this engagingly light appetizer. Next, the centerpiece of the meal, Fish Soup Chez Panisse cooked outdoors in a copper cauldron over a Wood Fire. It is the symbolic synergy of the day's teachings, the congenial exchange of ideas, the autumnal palette of green, gold and orange, and exquisite ingredients. Robert Mondavi Napa Vailey Sags Leap Saugivnon Blanc 1998 and a Garden Salad with shailot Vinaigrette counterpoint.

The ending of the event, like the meal, is poignant, pure and sweet, Galcrte Amandine and Caramel Pear Ice Cream with Mondavi's Napa Valley Moscato d'Oro 1999, is accompanied by a deep and abiding sense of satisfaction and nurturance. There is gratitude in the air. Robert Mondavi aps his teaspoon against the perfeact curve of his wine glass. He and Margrit rise to propose a toast. "To Alice Waters." He turns toward her with a wide smile.

"The most wonderful things at the table truly have their roots in simplicity."

Chef's Recipes and Other Related Links:
Caramel Pear Ice Cream
Fish Soup Cooked over the Wood Fire
Fish Soup Chez Panisse
Galette Amandine with Caramel Pear Ice Cream
Garden Salad with Shallot a Vinaigrette
Peking Duck Breast Grilled over Vine Branches
Straw Potato Cake
Fall Vegetable, Bagna Cauda
Fall Vegetable Ragout with Mushrooms

Other Related Links:
Alice Waters - Bio