Chez Panisse at 40
If the restaurant world had farm teams, Chez Panisse is where the talent scouts would hang out.
The Berkeley restaurant, cofounded by food activist Alice Waters 40 years ago, is famous as a pioneer of serving fresh, local food in season. But in culinary circles it may be just as well known as the training ground for a number of leading lights of the food revolution.
To name just a handful: Jeremiah Tower, founder of the former Stars restaurant in San Francisco and one of the originators so-called California cuisine; Paul Bertolli, who served as head chef from 1982 to 1992 and went on to become head chef of Oliveto, an Italian restaurant in Oakland, before opening the gourmet salumi company Fra’ Mani; and Russell Moore, co-owner of Oakland’s Camino restaurant. Add to that Dan Barber of the Blue Hill restaurants in New York, Suzanne Goin of Lucques restaurant in Los Angeles and Steve Sullivan, cofounder of the Acme Bread Company.
What made Chez Panisse such a talent incubator?
“Part of Alice’s genius I think is to see a spark of something in people and to figure out if that spark relates to a little fire that she’d like to have going in the restaurant for a while,” says Sullivan, who started at Chez Panisse as an 18-year-old busboy and went on to become the restaurant’s baker before founding Acme, which still supplies Chez Panisse.
Waters herself thinks it may be due to the restaurant’s “philosophy of food,” sourcing food at its freshest and teaching cooks to prepare food simply and use the tastiest ingredients.
The culture of Chez Panisse also plays a factor. Chefs are challenged by daily menu changes and must decide what they will serve based on what is in the market and looks good. The restaurant also ignores conventional kitchen hierarchy — chefs do as much grunt work and prep as everyone else in the kitchen.
“It tapped into a kind of creativity,” Waters says. “You’re never taking anything for granted.”
Waters has always served as executive chef, though these days she devotes much of her time to running the Chez Panisse Foundation, a non-profit organization that funds the Edible Schoolyard, a kitchen and garden program integrated into the academic curriculum of an urban middle school.
A number of the festivities for the 40th anniversary — the official birthday is Aug. 28 — center on fundraising activities for the foundation, which is relaunching as The Edible Schoolyard Project. The program, which began in Berkeley, has a number of affiliates elsewhere and the expanded goal is to build a national curriculum for food education.
The guest list for the anniversary weekend includes such food luminaries as author Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) and Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food. Also attending is musician David Byrne, writer and editor Ruth Reichl, and actor and Edible Schoolyard ambassador Jake Gyllenhaal.
In a world where restaurants open and close in the blink of a season, 40 years is a milestone, one Bertolli credits to “unrelenting commitment to singular purpose — simple, pure food.”
Thinking of the anniversary, Waters was feeling “incredibly sentimental and overwhelmed. I guess excited, too, at the possibility of just jumping up on the table and trying to really gather this unstoppable movement together.”
Reaching 40 also means a lot of memories.
Bertolli vividly remembers “the night I made Bouillabaisse with Lulu Peyraud and the Lingcod jumped out of the box and nearly took her arm off.” Also, “the night Alice asked me to scale, fillet, and grill 880 anchovies — eight to the customer. One of the major challenges of my culinary career.”
And Moore will never forget the Dalai Lama’s visit. “It was this incredible process of creating a menu, she marks it up, you argue and debate, and then you have something spectacular and you serve the Dalai Lama. I tried to play it cool but when he walked in he just exuded peace and it was an unforgettable moment.”
On a more prosaic note was the time Moore decided to make paella for 350 people at staff meal and “had the crazy idea that I could cook it all in one pan. I built this tremendous fire but I ended up with heat stroke and had to go lie down with my feet in a bucket of ice water.”
Moore sees Chez Panisse as “an environment where the competition is fierce and everything is critiqued, which is intense and amazing all at once. You learn how to take something apart and make it better. The standards are so high that when you emerge, you are armed with the tools to do just about anything.”