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Nothing Personal
Shave me
Sharon Stone's close shaves with dairy; Dubya gets 2-D for "King of the Hill"; Christina Ricci, not fat; and ... Porn again? Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez bring the Mitchell brothers to the screen in "Rated X."
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[11/16/99]

People Feature
I wanted to be a millionaire
In which our hero braves technical difficulties, arctic temperatures and too many geography questions in his quest for a fast fortune.
By Steven Scott Smith
[11/16/99]

Nothing Personal
Women of the year: Talking on eggs
Liddy Dole and Jewel? Katie Couric and Naomi Wolf? Glamour magazine's annual awards ceremony was an odd-couple omelet.
By Amy Reiter
[11/15/99]

People Feature
Merle Haggard
For 35 years the country music legend's been kickin' ass and making God laugh -- he don't need no stinkin' sound check.
By Elizabeth Bukowski
[11/15/99]

Nothing Personal
Hackman's prose, models pose, King of Pop now King of Poe?
Gene hacks out novel without a ghost; photos you don't want to see of the organ you're sick of hearing about; Cindy, Rebecca and Daisy on the trials and tribulations of being paid to stand. Plus: Michael Jackson IS Poe!
By Amy Reiter
[11/13/99]

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By Leslie Crawford

Nov. 16, 1999 | It's impossible to fathom, but there was a time when fine, upstanding gourmets didn't find words like "free-range" and "organic" on their dinner menus; a time when Americans thought frisee was a ballet position and mesclun a hallucinogen. But that was before Alice Waters had her way with our palates. Not only would the founder of Berkeley's famed Chez Panisse restaurant single-handedly change what we ate. She would alter how we thought, how we "felt," about our food.

If Waters weren't so passionate about the healing life force teaming inside natural foods organically grown and simply prepared, she would never have managed to communicate her message to a nation of people raised on canned peas and meatloaf. For we have Waters to thank for those sublime baby greens -- the kind you see in profusion at even the most commercial chain supermarkets -- that mercifully replaced iceberg lettuce.

And iceberg's demise is just the tip of Waters' contribution to our culinary evolution. We also owe Waters thanks for introducing our taste buds to simple pleasures, saying no to the overwrought cuisine that dominated "gourmet" dining for decades and abolishing the pretension that masked the elegant essence of unadorned, nourishing fare. As San Francisco food critic Patricia Unterman noted, "Julia [Child] set the stage for the culinary boom in America by teaching people how to cook, and then Alice Waters took everyone to the next step by teaching about ingredients." We are in Waters' debt for teaching us how to eat a peach, how to savor every bite. And to America's small, organic farmers, she is, as the New York Times dubbed her, "a patron saint" who has shown chefs and diners alike that unprocessed, unadulterated, chemical-free food ranks somewhere up there next to godliness.

Among foodies -- critics, gourmands, colleagues, farmers -- Waters is the top of the food chain, an innovator whom the New York Times dubbed the "Mother of American Cooking." Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker called her the "Materfamilias to a generation of chefs." And not only American chefs. Waters' aesthetic has had a dramatic impact on European cuisine as well, most notably in France (not a country that has taken kindly to America's sense of taste) where, Gopnik writes, the legendary winegrower Aubert de Villaine, co-director of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the greatest wine estate in France, "speaks of her in hushed tones."

Indeed, she is regarded as a sort of high priestess -- a spiritual leader who showed the way to serve and eat locally grown food in season. Yet for all the fanfare, Waters is a most unusual flavor of celebrity chef. Though she's had an abundance of offers over the years, she has never marketed herself or franchised her restaurant. Neither has she starred in a nationally syndicated cooking show or hawked a line of frozen pizza or BBQ sauce. Her only commercial endeavors include a line of cookbooks and Cafe Fanny Granola. Compared with the likes of Julia Child, Wolfgang Puck or Emeril Lagasse, Waters is a culinary wallflower.

Included in Waters' family tree -- those who've worked under her charge -- are such renowned chefs as Paul Bertolli, founder of Oakland's Oliveto Cafe and Restaurant and co-author of several Chez Panisse cookbooks; Mark Miller of Santa Fe's Coyote Cafe; Deborah Madison, founding chef of San Francisco's upscale vegetarian restaurant Greens; Jonathan Waxman, co-proprietor of New York's Jams; and Jeremiah Tower, former proprietor of Stars, one of San Francisco's trendiest restaurants in the '80s. Gourmets worldwide make pilgrimages to her flagship restaurant Chez Panisse and the restaurant's less formal upstairs cafe -- both named for French author Marcel Pagnol's Provençal hero Panisse -- as well as to Cafe Fanny (named after her teenage daughter, who was named after another Pagnol character), a diminutive, Parisian-style cafe located a few miles away. Chez Panisse is at the heart of the "gourmet ghetto" of specialty food shops that have sprung up around it in the past 30 years.

President Clinton has dined at Chez Panisse, and Waters has been the chef at several Bay Area dinner parties given in his honor. And Martha Stewart makes a point of stopping at the restaurant when she's in the Bay Area. Waters' five cookbooks, most notably "The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook" and "Chez Panisse Vegetables," are classics. Her cornucopia of food awards includes being ranked one of the world's 10 best chefs by the prestigious Cuisine et Vins du France magazine and receiving, in 1992, the James Beard Foundation's award for the Best Restaurant and Best Chef in America. Most recently, she's been invited by the French to open a restaurant at the Louvre, a project that, if realized, will be completed in the next decade.

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