When Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse on Aug. 28, 1971, the Berkeley restaurant served pâté en croûte, roast duck with olives and plum tart for its first night of service.
The 50th anniversary celebration this past weekend was a more casual affair. While Chez Panisse is doing takeout, the restaurant is closed due to the pandemic. But the mood was still uplifting, as masked onlookers listened to Waters speak about those early years and of building “a restaurant that felt like a home.”
To the small group gathered on the sidewalk, including a few original staff members, Waters talked about working directly with farmers and producers from the beginning to source local and seasonal ingredients, and how it paved the way for the farm-to-table movement here.
“Fifty years is proof that this works,” said Waters, who is also the founder of the Edible Schoolyard, a project that has brought 6,000 hands-on programs to schools around the world.
California walnut farmer Craig McNamara introduced Waters, calling her “a philosopher with ideas for how we should live.” Another farmer and chef, Matthew Raiford of Georgia, recalled the first time he met Waters and couldn’t help but “fanboy out.”
Fritz Streiff, a Chez Panisse employee of 50 years, credited Waters with “dismantling the hierarchical culture of restaurant kitchens.” He called the restaurant “a remarkably egalitarian place” from the start.
As Waters spoke, an ACME Bread Company truck pulled up for delivery, giving Waters the opportunity to talk about founder Steve Sullivan, who got his start baking bread at the restaurant as a busboy in the 1970s.
“I told him, ‘Why don’t you start a company, and we’ll buy the bread?’” Waters said. “This is what could be happening in the public schools. We need the food. We need the jobs. It would be a huge economic stimulus.”
Waters also spoke about the future, including the new Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education, a training center and collaboration with UC Davis that will be located at its Aggie Square campus in Sacramento. Construction will begin later this year.
At the end of the short celebration, a bowl of seasonal fruit — topped with five lit candles — was handed to Waters, who grew emotional before plucking a fresh fig and declaring, “I must taste!”
We sat down with Waters to learn more about the institute, her new book, “We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto” (Penguin Press, $26) and find out Waters’ plans for reopening the restaurant in October.
Q: Can you tell us more about the Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education?
A: It’s a very big project. I feel like its time has come. We need a big center for teaching food service directors, cooks and staff in public schools how to feed children deliciously, affordably and regeneratively. We’ve designed it so we can actually feed people, too. Probably 350 at a time. We want to teach a regenerative way of cooking, but also reimagine a way of running a restaurant and food service on campuses. We have to design the spaces to support and inspire the people who work there; where everyone has a meaningful job. There’s no back of the house. It’s one house.
Q: That’s how you ran Chez Panisse from the start, right?
Yes. When I started Chez Panisse, I had never worked in a restaurant kitchen before and I was just thinking about how we did it at home. I thought it was important to have the expertise of a whole group of people. And it was very important to me that I do the prep work for my own meal. How strong is the garlic? You’re smelling it and pounding it. It’s so simple, and it’s the way we have cooked since the beginning of time.
It’s just at some point, it became a place for men to dominate, I dare say. Some of them have been extraordinary at teaching us around the world. But we are very vulnerable right now because of the fast food culture and its values. It takes a lot of work to step out of that system and say, “I can do this differently.” Chez Panisse always had a lot of female chefs working there, too. I think of Lindsey Shere. She had the most wise and generous demeanor. She was a perfectionist, but she taught everyone how to do pastry and how to taste.
Q: Your new book, “We Are What We Eat,” is your plea for Americans to commit to a slow food culture. Can you talk more about that?
A: We can’t expect that food is going to be cheap. Ever again. It can be affordable. But cheap is something else. I’ve done a whole book which is going to come out next year about school lunch. And I have purchased all the food retail organic, and I have made every dish, including culturally-diverse foods, for less than the reimbursement from the USDA. We’ll have instructions on how to make it for six people or 100, so it can be used in cafeteria kitchens.
But this current book is about understanding the urgency around climate and health right now. Just think that as recently as 60 years ago, we ate entirely locally and seasonally in this country and entirely without pesticides or herbicides. This was in my childhood, and yet here I am 70 years later. It only happened with advertising and trying to make money off of food and making us think that we couldn’t cook and that everything should be fast and cheap and easy. And it’s destroyed everything, including our values. That it is OK to eat in your car. That we should be able to get anything we want 24/7. All of these things and many more have destroyed our food culture.
Q: How did you wrangle an entire UC system to join you in your endeavors?
A: You know, they have their own local food initiative. They also have a carbon neutrality initiative for 2025. Janet Napolitano (University of California president from 2013 to 2020) asked “Why couldn’t food be part of the carbon neutrality initiative?” I said it could be, and it should be. There are so many extraordinary people in California who have been thinking about the environment for so many years, and there is so much that we need from the leadership of a great land-grant university like the UC system.
What we need for these students is hope, and this is the most hopeful and delicious project that is addressing climate change. Everyone’s terrified. We have to do something tomorrow. And the beautiful thing is there is land. There are 265 acres owned by UC in Richmond, and they have never cleaned it up since the war. They could do that in a year with a cover crop, I bet. That gives me hope. We could plant a garden every day on a campus. The students would love to take care of the vegetables. You learn so much.
Q: What are you most excited about doing when you reopen Chez Panisse in October?
A: I really want to celebrate a lot of people who have worked here at the restaurant over the years and have contributed so much. We’ll have many guest chefs and also guest producers, whether it’s ACME Bread Company or Bob Cannard’s farm, chef Suzanne Goin or chef Gilbert Pilgram. We want to them bring back and taste their food again.
