Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution

by Thomas McNamee

Overview

The first authorized biography of "the mother of American cooking" (The New York Times)

This adventurous book charts the origins of the local "market cooking" culture that we all savor today. When Francophile Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, few Americans were familiar with goat cheese, cappuccino, or mesclun. But it wasn't long before Waters and her motley coterie of dreamers inspired a new culinary standard incorporating ethics, politics, and the conviction that the best-grown food is also the tastiest. Based on unprecedented access to Waters and her inner circle, this is a truly delicious rags-to-riches saga.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143113089
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/26/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.94(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Thomas McNamee is an American author who writes about culinary history, natural history, and conservation. His credits include four nonfiction books on natural history, two culinary biographies (Alice Waters and Chez Panisse and The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat), and one novel, A Story of Deep Delight. He lives in San Francisco, California.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Charming. . . . What [McNamee] does beautifully is capture the spirit of the restaurant and its spiritual growth, as well as its place in American culture."
-Los Angeles Times

"McNamee, an erudite journalist, essayist, poet, and literary critic, paints a particularly vivid picture of this enfant terrible of the kitchen."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"A wonderfully entertaining, gossipy glimpse inside a kitchen that continues to surprise and delight."
-The Seattle Times

"A rounded and convincing portrait of a controversial figure in American cooking."
-Saveur

"Careering, chaotic, and ultimately inspiring . . . McNamee's clear-eyed assessment avoids the usual platitudes about California cuisine and shows how one individual with an understanding of food can carve out a personal identity and at the same time make culinary history."
-The New York Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

"Charming. . . . What [McNamee] does beautifully is capture the spirit of the restaurant and its spiritual growth, as well as its place in American culture."
-Los Angeles Times

"McNamee, an erudite journalist, essayist, poet, and literary critic, paints a particularly vivid picture of this enfant terrible of the kitchen."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"A wonderfully entertaining, gossipy glimpse inside a kitchen that continues to surprise and delight."
-The Seattle Times

"A rounded and convincing portrait of a controversial figure in American cooking."
-Saveur

"Careering, chaotic, and ultimately inspiring . . . McNamee's clear-eyed assessment avoids the usual platitudes about California cuisine and shows how one individual with an understanding of food can carve out a personal identity and at the same time make culinary history."
-The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

Bibliophiles have books about books; gourmets have books about cooks. Thomas McNamee's richly anecdotal Alice Waters and Chez Panisse re-creates the unlikely story of a Chatham, New Jersey, girl who made good. A 1965 summer trip to Brittany converted this transplanted Californian into a zealous believer in French cuisine and the possibilities of fresh local ingredients. Waters's Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley was not only successful; it generated a food revolution and the rise of California cuisine. McNamee leavens his appreciation of Waters with a keen sense of how circumstances and even accidents helped facilitate this major change in American eating habits. Delicious dish; delightful read.

The story has never been so completely told before. But then, no writer was ever given the access to Waters that McNamee enjoyed, and she comes across in these pages as quirky and passionate, by turns exasperating and challenging — in short, a fully rounded person. McNamee’s cleareyed assessment avoids the usual platitudes about California cuisine and shows how one individual with an understanding of food can carve out a personal identity and at the same time make culinary history.
— The New York Times

Patrick Kuh

McNamee, an erudite journalist, essayist, poet and literary critic, paints a particularly vivid picture of this enfant terrible of the kitchen. But he also lays out the whole tableau of Chez Panisse, one peopled with an alternately brilliant, dedicated, madcap and/or stoned lot of characters who percolated through Alice-land, each in his or her own way changing the landscape just a bit.
— San Francisco Chronicle

Karola Saekel

The book offers a fascinating glimpse of some of the people who started what would become the megalithic natural foods movement.
— Associated Press

J. M. Hirsch

A wonderfully entertaining, gossipy glimpse inside a kitchen that continues to surprise and delight.
— Seattle Times

Paul Laskin

A rounded and convincing portrait of a controversial figure in American cooking.

Saveur

Though much has been written about her, "Alice Waters and Chez Panisse" promises to be the definitive work on the life and career of this enigmatic and remarkable woman for years to come.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Tom Cooper

Charming. . . . What [McNamee] does beautifully is capture the spirit of the restaurant and its spiritual growth, as well as its place in American culture.

Los Angeles Times

McNamee, an erudite journalist, essayist, poet, and literary critic, paints a particularly vivid picture of this enfant terrible of the kitchen.

San Francisco Chronicle

Careering, chaotic, and ultimately inspiring . . . McNamee's clear-eyed assessment avoids the usual platitudes about California cuisine and shows how one individual with an understanding of food can carve out a personal identity and at the same time make culinary history.

The New York Times Book Review

A wonderfully entertaining, gossipy glimpse inside a kitchen that continues to surprise and delight.

The Seattle Times

[A] scrumptious, tonguewagging and thoughtful new biography.... [McNamee] supplies enough savory ideas and spicy details to satiate most foodies and perhaps inspire a new generation of "eco-gastronomes.

USA Today

What [McNamee] does beautifully is capture the spirit of the restaurant and its spiritual growth, as well as its place in American culture.
— Los Angeles Times

Susan Salter Reynolds

This immensely readable book ... is remarkably unlike the typical, breathlessly laudatory authorized biography, thanks to McNamee's rounded and convincing portrait of a controversial figure in American cooking.
— Saveur

Irene Sax

Talk about dish: McNamee's book is a gossipy history of the famed restaurant and a biography of the individual behind its three-decade rise from humble beginnings to international renown. Alice Waters was a young, single American woman with strong, confident sense and vision but little experience in the restaurant business when she moved to Berkeley in the 1960s. She loved food and cooking, and dreamed of opening a restaurant; her passion and enthusiasm eventually produced a location, a crew and a clientele. The book chronicles the following decades with extensive detail from a behind-the-scenes viewpoint, going from stovetop to bedroom, from opening night right up through the restaurant's recent 35th anniversary. Larger-than-life personalities abound, but the primary focus is Waters, whose success occasionally comes across as attributable to accidents and other people as often as design. The author researched restaurant archives and interviewed dozens of willing subjects with Waters's approval, and the result is a mélange of reverential biography with restaurant and food history. Sidebars scattered throughout the text provide additional anecdotes and insight into Waters's favorite dishes. Serious foodies will devour this memoir. B&w photos. (Mar.)

Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Tales of the California chef who helped change the world of food. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

It was hard to get a decent meal in America before 1971. Alice Waters helped change all that. Not single-handedly, of course. But Waters, in France for a semester abroad in 1965, had an awakening: Like Julia Child, whose My Life in France (2000) McNamee (The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone, 1997) nicely bookends, she learned to eat simple food that was fresh and well-chosen. She came home disillusioned with the monstrous cuisine of her native land. "I wanted hot baguettes in the morning, and apricot jam, and cafe au lait in bowls, and I wanted a cafe to hang out in the afternoon, and I wanted civilized meals, and I wanted to wear French clothes," she recalls. She set out for Berkeley, where she absorbed radical ideas and mind-altering substances and opened a restaurant-cum-commune whose inaugural meal, in 1971, was a nice pate, duck with olives, a plum tart and coffee. It cost $3.95, expensive at the time but nothing like the tariff today. Chez Panisse, named after a French film character, was instantly successful, though Waters, as McNamee clearly shows, wasn't the most scrupulous businesswoman. She hired people who thought it might be cool to cook or bake or wait tables, and she watched huge amounts of inventory-especially wine-walk out the door. She refused to dress the staff up in tuxedos and such or impose much discipline on a difficult but brilliant bunch, and her stubbornness nearly proved fatal to the restaurant several times. Even when she took on partners with an eye to imposing budgetary reason, she did what she liked: "No matter what the legal papers said, Chez Panisse, from day one, was Alice's, to be operated, populated, decorated, redecorated, reconceived, fussed over,fiddled with, and loved as Alice saw fit." Amazingly, as McNamee chronicles, the place survived, and thrived, and Waters-likable on every page, if perhaps a touch scattered-helped change the way Americans ate. A great pleasure for foodies, chronicling an unlikely revolution.

Kirkus Reviews