Alice Waters

Alice Waters, (born April 28, 1944, Chatham, New Jersey, U.S.A.), American restaurateur, chef, and food activist who was a leading proponent of the “slow food” movement, which billed itself as the healthy antithesis to fast food.

Waters studied French culture at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1967. She participated in the 1960s Free Speech Movement, and the idealism that was then prevalent at Berkeley was reflected in her ideology throughout her career. She studied abroad for a time in France, and it was there that her love of farm-to-plate dining took hold. Following graduation, Waters spent a year studying at the International Montessori School in London before returning to California to teach.

In the 1970s the United States was still years away from the “foodie revolution,” which by 2009 had brought farmers’ markets and organic foods to a larger audience. Waters’s prescient passion for whole, unprocessed foods inspired her and her friend Lindsey Shere to found a market-inspired restaurant in Berkeley, California, despite having little capital and no experience as restaurateurs. When Chez Panisse opened in 1971, it was with a relatively untrained staff, a set fixed-price menu that changed daily, and an uncompromising dedication to a vision that seemed to many untenable: Waters wanted to create meals that used only locally grown seasonal ingredients, and she wanted to forge relationships with the producers and suppliers of these ingredients.

These exacting tenets kept the restaurant in debt for its first eight years of business; it was frequently saved from bankruptcy by loans from Waters’s friends. When Chez Panisse finally started turning a profit, Waters had time to devote herself to other facets of food activism, such as the Garden Project, which provided produce to the San Francisco county jail and work opportunities to its former inmates. In 1996, to celebrate the restaurant’s 25th anniversary, Waters founded the Chez Panisse Foundation, which funded programs that educated young people on responsible agriculture.

The advocacy venture for which she became best known was the Edible Schoolyard, originally established in 1995. Waters began the program by planting a garden in the yard of Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. A cooking classroom was installed a few years later, and by 2009 the Edible Schoolyard was a thriving educational tool, though not a source of lunchroom produce. The program expanded to include affiliates in other cities, including New Orleans and Los Angeles. From the Edible Schoolyard grew Waters’s new cause, that of persuading the government to increase funding to improve school lunch programs. Her indomitable dedication to providing schoolchildren with more healthful-eating options earned Waters a fair share of detractors, who argued that seasonal food was a dispensable luxury for already underfunded schools. As with her restaurant, however, her philosophy regarding the project was “If we do it right, the money will come.”

The James Beard Foundation named Chez Panisse outstanding restaurant and Waters outstanding chef in 1992; the foundation also presented her with a lifetime achievement award in 2004. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, received the French Legion of Honor in 2009, and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2015.

Alice is the author of sixteen books including her critically acclaimed memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, and the New York Times bestsellers The Art of Simple Food I & II, and The Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Waters

About Chez Panisse

Chez Parnisse website: https://www.chezpanisse.com/reservations/

In 1971, Alice Waters and a small band of friends founded Chez Panisse. This neighborhood bistro was named for Honoré Panisse, the most generous and life-loving character in Marcel Pagnol’s 1930’s film trilogy about waterfront life in Marseille (Marius, Fanny, and César), as an homage to the sentiment, comedy, and informality of these classic movies.

From the very beginning, Alice and her partners tried to do things in a way that reflected how it feels to have a dinner party at home, with generosity and attention to detail. The restaurant, located downstairs, is open for dinner Monday through Saturday, by reservation only.

Chez Panisse Restaurant features a nightly-changing, fixed menu composed of three or four courses, each one designed according to the season’s bounty and highlighting the finest sustainably sourced, organic, peak-of-their season ingredients, including meat, fish, and poultry.

Chez Panisse Café, located upstairs, opened in 1980 offering an alternative to the set menu served in the downstairs Restaurant. From Monday through Saturday, also by reservation, the Café provides a moderately priced à la carte menu for lunch and dinner. It has an open kitchen along one side with a charcoal grill and wood-burning oven. Then menu is inspired by the farmers’ market and changes twice a day.

Alice and Chez Panisse are convinced that the best-tasting food is organically and locally grown, and harvested in ways that are ecologically sound by people who are taking care of the land for future generations. The quest for such ingredients has always determined our cuisine. For nearly 50 years, Chez Panisse has invited diners to partake of the immediacy and excitement of vegetables just out of the garden, fruit right off the branch, and fish straight from the sea. In doing so, Chez Panisse has established a close network of suppliers who, like the restaurant, strive for both environmental harmony and delicious flavor.

Chefs:

On August 28, 1971, Victoria Wise cooked the first-ever meal at Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley, California (it was a classic French dish, Duck with Olives).  In 1973, she opened Pig-by-the-Tail Charcuterie, a landmark establishment that helped define Berkeley’s emerging “gourmet ghetto” as an epicenter of culinary innovation and redefined the notion and style of “deli” in America

In 1972, Jeremiah Tower became the chef de cuisine of Chez Panisse, replacing Victoria Wise. While at Chez Panisse he was in charge of the kitchen and the menus. He left in 1978 and went on to open Santa Fe Bar and Grill and Stars in San Francisco, in the 1980s.
Jeremiah Tower, Anthony Bourdain & Lydia Tenaglia Discuss “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent”

Paul Bertolli served as the head chef of Chez Panisse from 1982 to 1992. With Waters, Bertolli co-wrote the cookbook ‘Chez Panisse Cooking’. He later went on to become the head chef of Oliveto, an Italian restaurant in Oakland, California, and now owns Fra’ Mani Handcrafted Foods (https://www.framani.com/about-framani/)

Articles:

The chef responsible for the now-ubiquitous farm to table movement is still an icon
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/alice-waters-berkeley-california-family-meal/index.html

Life’s Work: An Interview with Alice Waters
https://hbr.org/2017/05/alice-waters

Alice Waters on Sex, Drugs and Sustainable Agriculture
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/dining/alice-waters-chef-author-book.html

Take a Peek Inside Farm-to-Table Pioneer Alice Waters’s Wonderfully Stocked Fridge
https://www.vogue.com/article/chefs-fridges-alice-waters

New York Times articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/alice-waters

Chef Alice Waters
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/27/783390766/chef-alice-waters?t=1591626276788

National Endowment for the Humanities
https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/alice-waters

Penguin Random House – Chef, author, activist, and founder of Chez Panisse restaurant and the Edible Schoolyard Project
https://www.prhspeakers.com/speaker/alice-waters

Videos

The Edible Schoolyard Project

Other