Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon People

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."
By Amy Reiter
[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]

Complete archives for People

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Alice Waters | page 1, 2, 3

What's so remarkable about Alice Waters is that ever since she began her mission more than 25 years ago, she has been at the helm of a revolution. What Waters has in mind is social change on a grand scale. She says that once we return to the land -- spurning homogenized, mass-marketed artificial foods that deaden our spirits, separating us from our essential selves -- we will return to one another. She believes that sitting down together for a family meal is the best way to instill family values.

Waters is committed to the idea that if we take the time and care to put nourishing food on our plate, we will in turn renew our communities, our world and ourselves. Eat junk, and you demean yourself and destroy the environment. Eat natural, organic ingredients grown nearby and produced in season, and you will improve yourself, the community and the world.

Alice Louise Waters was born April 28, 1944, in Chatham, N.J. She came of age in the tumultuous late '60s in Berkeley, graduating from the University of California in 1967 with a degree in French cultural studies. During her college years, she was involved with local politics, working for the congressional campaign of journalist Robert Scheer, who to her great dismay was defeated. Still, Waters was committed to doing good. While so many of her compatriots seem to have long ago abandoned their mission, Waters has maintained a crusader's energy, intent on changing the world, one fava bean at a time.

At age 19 Waters had spent a year traveling in France. "I lived at the bottom of a market street, and I took everything in by osmosis," she once told the New York Times. "This was my first connection with farmers' markets and real food. I loved what I ate and I wanted that kind of food here." What she came to realize was that "the best-tasting food came from the people who were taking care of the land and nourishing it. These were the organic farmers."

When Waters returned to the United States, she got a job teaching. At night, she would cook for friends. "Chez Panisse began as an offshoot of dinner parties," says David Goines, who has known Waters since 1966 and designed and illustrated "The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook" and "The Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook." "Alice wanted to have her friends to dinner every night. The only way to do that was to open a restaurant." In 1971, Waters took out a $10,000 loan -- her father mortgaged his house -- and with her friend Lindsey Shere opened a Provence-style bistro in an old wooden house on Shattuck Street, not far from the Berkeley campus.

Goines says that her idea "was to cook foods quite different from the preeminent style" -- in other words, haute cuisine. "The food began with very much a French country overtone, simple and uncomplicated. You served a fresh fish and left it alone. You didn't tart it up with all sorts of sauces. This basic philosophy matured over the years into Alice's search for fresh, pure ingredients."

The people who cooked and supped at Chez Panisse during those early days resembled a cabal trying to reinvent the world, not capitalists hoping to launch a posh restaurant. Back then, "There was a joyful abandon in creating a completely inedible meal," says Goines. "There were several memorable disasters. That was part of the experimentation."

But the restaurant didn't make money. For years Chez Panisse lost a small fortune. The truth is, it costs dearly to make a perfect, simple salad. Eventually, Chez Panisse grew up, becoming more of a business and less of a playhouse. And in the process it also became a shrine to new American cooking. Waters' recipe for success was never a closely guarded secret. Her cuisine has always been basic and down-to-earth, just the sort of Mediterranean cooking Pagnol himself would have loved.

But newcomers to the restaurant can feel shortchanged by its apparent simplicity. If you're looking for sculptured "art" food, well, don't go to Alice's restaurant. Dinner is disarmingly plain, nothing more elaborate than a small watercress and beet salad; a bowl of vegetable broth; grilled fish; and for dessert, a single pear sitting on a plate. And every morsel, perfection.

What does such an effete aesthetic possibly have to do with Waters' call to arms? Chez Panisse is among America's best restaurants and is priced accordingly. The five-course, prix fixe dinner costs up to $68 a person. Critics claim that Waters is nothing more than an armchair liberal espousing idealistic notions, meanwhile entertaining the wealthy and privileged. Goines insists that from the beginning, Waters has never aspired -- unlike some of her hippie-turned-millionaire brethren -- to make a killing off a good idea.

"Alice's vision is extremely clear," he says. "She's not concerned with the restaurant. She's concerned with good food. If you were to light a fire and burn the restaurant down, she'd keep going. She's on a mission."

Waters would argue that indulging in delicious food is not separate from doing good works. The two acts are inexorably intertwined. "The sensual pleasure of eating beautiful food from the garden," she told the New Yorker, "brings with it the moral satisfaction of doing the right thing for the planet and for yourself." Chez Panisse is not there to feed the masses. The restaurant is a model for others to aspire to.

Next page | What about those who can barely get by on food stamps?