The Ottawa Citizen / Saturday, August 31, 2002 / Section: The Citizen's Weekly: Style / Byline: Peter Hum

BERKELEY, California - At North America's most influential restaurant, staff begin arriving each morning around 6 to receive the produce, meats, fish and poultry that grateful foodies will consume through the day. About half an hour later, the chef starts work, drafting lunch and dinner menus and assigning tasks such as the washing of lettuce or making of pasta. By mid-morning, shortly before Chez Panisse Café -- the upstairs offshoot of the downstairs culinary mecca, Chez Panisse -- opens, the kitchens on both floors are abuzz as chefs tend roasting pans filled with short ribs and trays of summer berry cobblers.

Alice Waters, North America's most influential chef and the food visionary who founded Chez Panisse 31 years ago, has not yet arrived. Although, perhaps, that doesn't matter so much anymore. "Her presence is always felt," says Waters' assistant, Cristina Salas-Porras.

It is mid-June. Waters, 58, was away for the beginning of the month, crossing the United States to promote her latest cookbook, Chez Panisse Fruit. But this week she is back in Berkeley to recharge her batteries and keep tabs on the restaurant before hitting the road again.

She enters Chez Panisse through the back door, and although she is a tiny person in unassuming, organic clothes -- a cotton dress and a hat, as usual -- the buzzing in the kitchen ratchets up several notches as she greets her staff. The scene is less like a general inspecting her troops, more like an enthusiastic child during show-and-tell; Waters arrives bearing a long, dried, flattened sausage under one arm and two jars in her hands.

The sausage comes from the owner of a high-end cheese store in Boston, a kindred spirit who attaches huge value to unadulterated food with unpretentious roots. To Waters' surprise, the jar of cherries in grappa, the clear Italian pomace brandy, came from Provence. "I thought they were great, in terms of texture," she says. "I thought this was cherry time for us, and we should do some cherries like this." When she speaks, the faintly nasal quality of her vowels marks her as New Jersey-born.

Waters also holds a jar of Korean honey, given to her by an Indian friend. " I think it has a great taste, and I wondered whether we could make it, or whether it's something inexpensive enough that we might want to buy it," she says, rhyming off tantalizing options. "Maybe it could make an ice cream or a glaze on a tart ... " It comes then as no surprise that as many of the chefs work their ingredients and develop their dishes, Waters is in the back of their minds. " People would say, 'Alice would really like this,' or 'Alice would not like this,'" Salas-Porras says.

Yet, the way of eating -- and even living -- that Waters personifies is even more important than the mouth-watering details of the foods served in her restaurant. "A lot of people here want to make Alice's vision happen," Salas-Porras says. That holds true not just for Chez Panisse's chefs, but also for innumerable North Americans, as the thinking that has been at Chez Panisse's core since its inception increasingly influences our daily fare. Whether we're dining out or eating at home, the trend toward using
top-quality, local produce when it's in season seems never to have been stronger.

It's true, of course, that far too many North Americans still subsist on fast, frozen and convenient foods that Waters considers disheartening, soul-numbing and artificial. True, too, that many restaurant-goers seek thrills and novelties rather than the purity and integrity that she preaches. While their hearts flutter for towers of food or tandoori foie gras, Waters only offers the simplicity of the best ingredients as they are.

But the philosophy that puts healthier, ecologically sound basics at the heart of eating -- think organic food, think farmers' markets -- is fighting the good fight against Happy Meals and Pizza Pops on one hand and bad fusion flavours on the other. As we buy more mesclun and organic cauliflowers at Loblaws or heirloom carrots and potatoes at the Parsifal School organic market, as we find more references to the provenance of vegetables and meats on Ottawa-area menus, we can only wonder how much Waters and three decades
of her crusading are to blame, how much of a touchstone she is for a lifestyle movement.

Years before Chez Panisse glimmered in Waters' eye, long before she was gathering special sausages and jars of honey, she was working toward a degree in French cultural studies at the University of California at
Berkeley in the mid-1960s, in sync with the free-speech movement and other counter-cultural forces. Shortly before she opened the restaurant, she was a Montessori School teacher. At heart, she remains an idealist and a teacher.

"I felt we could change the world," she recalls. "I still believe that. I didn't know that food would be the way we could do this, but I think it is." Contrary to the old Arlo Guthrie song, you cannot get anything you want at Alice's restaurant. (In fact, Chez Panisse is not that Alice's restaurant. It belonged to Alice Brock, and was in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.)

Since Chez Panisse opened its doors in 1971, its dinner menu has consisted of a single fixed-price, multi-course menu that changes daily. Call them rigid, but Waters and her staff are essentially determined to do one thing and do it right each day.

On the night I ate at Chez Panisse, the $65 U.S. four-course menu began with amuse bouche and then a salted cod and spinach tart with marinated Chioggia beets and beet greens. The emphasis on quality, not quantity, was obvious. The flavours and textures of the tart and beets were mouth-filling, but more than that, they tasted fundamental. It was clear that Chez Panisse was all about unpretentious but optimally sourced and prepared food. The second course of saffron and wild fennel broth with littleneck clams and local rock
fish was more unassuming -- principled and honest rather than flagrantly flavoured. The star of the evening was a generous slab of wild king salmon, caught hours earlier, cooked just to done. Dressed simply with lovage and capers, it was meltingly and intensely flavourful, like a Technicolor version of the salmon found under shrink wrap or even behind grocery-store counters in Ottawa. With it came carrots, turnips and fingerling potatoes from the nearby Chino Ranch farm. With every forkful, it dawned on me that the sad thing about eating at Chez Panisse is knowing that, after, you will almost always have to settle for much less. Like a consolation, the server brought us some Bing cherry clafoutis with frozen almond milk parfait. My
wife's lemon verbena tea came from a fresh handful of lemon verbena steeping in a transparent teapot. (As if we should have expected otherwise.)

And so it has been, more or less, since foodies began making their pilgrimages to Chez Panisse on Shattuck Avenue, not far from the Berkeley campus, even if Waters never meant to create an institution.

In the introduction to her Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, Waters wrote that her esthetics of food are rooted in childhood memories and experiences. "'A picky eater,' my father would say, and I wouldn't eat just any old thing. I wanted green beans and rare charcoal-grilled steaks every birthday," she wrote. Young Alice was more than picky; what she appreciated was fresh, local produce. "Though I never had anything unusual to eat when I was little, I was lucky to have tasted fresh fruits and vegetables from the garden," she wrote. "I remember sitting out in the strawberry patch, happily devouring those fresh berries. I can still taste the applesauce made from the fruit of my apple tree, and can smell the apple blossoms."

After graduating from Berkeley in 1967, she trained in the Montessori method in London and travelled for a year in France. "I began eating all kinds of wonderful things I'd never tasted before," Waters wrote. "It was the first time for so many foods -- oysters, crayfish, mussels -- and I liked everything." When she returned to the United States, Waters -- an enthusiastic amateur chef who threw many a dinner party -- was keen to
recreate the food she loved during her sojourn in a setting where she and her friends could eat and discuss politics.

The restaurant has developed over the decades, beautified but still essentially rustic, with oak floors, soft lighting, copper lamps, a floral arrangement and basket of produce greeting patrons, and a view of the
kitchen and its wood-burning oven. "I don't think Alice ever expected it to be this fancy or this beautiful," Salas-Porras says.

Named after a character from the Marcel Pagnol novels much-loved by Waters, Chez Panisse opened in its current location, a former plumbing shop, with its fixed, nightly menu. In the beginning, Waters couldn't figure out how to offer more than one entree per night. As well, the one-meal-for-all philosophy contributed to her new restaurant's homey feel. While Chez Panisse has become more of a business and less of Waters' lark, the feel of the place persists. Chez Panisse is not the least bit snooty, filled with everyone from the well-dressed and well-heeled to casual students and professors from the nearby campus. The restaurant and Waters have won numerous awards -- the 1992 James Beard Foundation awards for outstanding
restaurant and chef come to mind -- but there are no boastful plaques to cause customers to oooh and aaah.

In its early days, Chez Panisse was more of a lark or mission than a business. "There was a joyful abandon in creating a completely inedible meal," David Goines, a friend of Waters since the mid-1960s, told Salon.com." There were several memorable disasters. This was part of the experimentation." Wrote Waters: "This was during the late '60s, in Berkeley. We all believed in community and personal commitment and quality. Chez Panisse was born out of these ideals. Profit was secondary."

Steadily, Waters developed her cuisine. She had begun by drawing upon the classic recipes and books of Richard Olney and Elizabeth David, writers who celebrated the down-to-earth cooking of France and Italy in the decades before Chez Panisse opened, when North Americans thought of fine dining as rich, posh French fare for moneyed gourmets.

Waters, to the contrary, does not answer to being called a "gourmet." She stands for eating well on her terms, even if high prices on the menu are required to sustain her restaurant's supply chain. But there are no airs or pretensions attached. "It just seems such a natural, obvious way to eat, experience life and find meaning in life," she says. "It's an everyday experience that gives you pleasure and wakens your senses. Why wouldn't you want to participate in it that way? Why wouldn't you want to find time for that? This is something that's delicious and inspiring," she says. "People don't know that anymore."

Over the years, a succession of talented chefs attracted by her principles enriched Chez Panisse, so that eventually it stopped losing money. Waters hasn't cooked at Chez Panisse since the birth of her daughter in
1981. But while she has left the kitchen, she keeps a close eye on many other aspects. "I work all the time with the chefs as they write the menus," she says. "I'm always going to the market and looking and seeing what's happening. I eat upstairs probably three times a week at least. I eat in the kitchen one or two nights a week. I'm trying to inspire them when they need it, change things, shuffle things around so that they can do their best work."

Now Chez Panisse seems like a uniquely enlightened workplace of a restaurant, designed to counter the burnout of kitchen work. Chefs rotate, spending several days in the kitchen, a day in the office, and a day
" foraging" for ingredients. All staff -- from dishwashers to chefs -- eat together at a table. Staff do not work overtime. Among the floor staff is an architect who still works one day a week out of love for Chez Panisse's
culture. The restaurant seems self-sustaining, in an ideal supply-production loop with a network of 70 organic farmers and ranchers that ensure it never lacks top-notch ingredients.

"When I looked back after 25 years at what had happened, we had come together as a community of people who sort of cared about each other or were responsible for each other," Waters says. "That was something I never anticipated. I thought, 'Well, we might be able to eat some good food.' I didn't know it would kind of pull people together in the way that it has. It's a wonderful feeling. It gives me a sense of security, knowing the
people that grow food, that I need them and they need me."

Sitting at an empty Chez Panisse table after showing her chefs some of her discoveries, Waters speaks of the high and low points of her book tour. It has been gruelling, but she realizes how important her appearances are for both for book sales and the issues that are close to her heart. What continued to strike her as she flitted from city to city was the painful predominance of fast food.

"You are completely aware of that when you're travelling and realize that every concession at every airport in this country is about fast food. There's nothing else. Wherever you stop on a freeway, it's completely about
fast food.

"I think that the vast majority of people are eating out in fast food restaurants. We are a fast-food nation. Painfully, we are. It's not food for me. It's really not food. It's not produced by people who care about my
nourishment, it's not produced in natural ways. They figure out what it should taste like and add the chemicals to make it taste like that. It's obviously destroying the agriculture, and it's teaching us fast-food values. Everyone who goes into those places thinks that food should be cheap, that it should be fast, that it should be the same all the time, (that) it's OK to eat hamburgers and hotdogs and pizza every day, Cokes, it's OK to eat by yourself. I think it's destroying our culture and our agriculture."

In the world of celebrity chefs, Paul Prudhomme has his seasoning mixes, Jean-Georges Vongerichten has his Vong sauces, Wolfgang Puck (whose eclectic, designer-pizza vision of food comprises one definition of
California cuisine while Waters' fare is another) offers a comprehensive 28-piece bistro collection of stainless steel cookware. Canadian TV chef Ken Kostick endorses soup pots. Waters has none of these, but has established the Chez Panisse Foundation dedicated to creating public education projects that use food traditions to teach young people values.

The foundation's first effort was the Edible Schoolyard project, in which children at Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle Schoolplant, garden, harvest and cook their food for lunch rather than become yet another
American school in which fast-food franchises take root in the cafeteria. Waters is close to setting up an Edible Schoolyard project at Yale University, which her daughter Fanny (also named after a Pagnol character) attends. America's bluebloods are in equal need of basic food values, Waters says. "We're going to try to engage the kids in the process of growing and cooking and serving the food that they eat in the dormitories and the cafeterias. We think this is kind of essential education that every kid needs to live on this planet."

Recently, Waters has been taking her message to television, appearing on the cooking shows of chefs who might seem to have have far different motives. She has appeared on the show of the exceedingly chatty, chili-loving New Yorker Bobby Flay. "We did it because we got to talk about sustainable seafood issues," Salas-Porras says. Waters appeared on Emeril Lagace's TV show, even though the blustery, catch-phrase spouting king of broadcast cookery might seem like her antithesis. "He's actually a really honest, sweet guy," says Salas-Porras. Besides, Waters was glad to be able to address Lagace's 70 million viewers.

On Martha Stewart's show, Waters made crepes. "I love making crepes. I almost opened a creperie before I opened Chez Panisse," she says. Did the TV people expect Waters would do something more chef-y? "They always do. I never do." Of course, Waters has been approached to host her own cooking show. But to
see her in the format that boxes in other celebrity chefs would be unimaginable. Consider the contempt she has for the unreal convenience of shows that hide tedious details off-screen, preferring to show ingredients
pre-cut and arranged in a magical mise-en-place. "Everything's already," she says, snapping her fingers. "Just put this in there, put that. It's not that simple.

"I would like to do something in real-time. Real-time," she emphasizes. "I think the first one will be garlic soup -- garlic, broth, thyme, boil that up with good garlic, salt and pepper. Really, a three-ingredients kind of
approach."

Waters says she might like to stay behind the scenes of a cooking show rather than be the face of the program. She has a friend, a stand-up comedian who is also a great cook and a gardener, who perhaps could be the star.

The key thing would be to maintain a show that stressed the basics, true to Waters' values. "I think we need to almost begin at the beginning. Like line up the eggs and beans and just take a look at it. This is what this is," she says. "I want people to get the sense of what this is about, sort of from the ground up."

Perhaps like-minded guests would appear to show people what they've forgotten. "I think of my Sicilian friend who makes a fire, just right there -- an iron worker, comes with a little grill -- and he cooks so simply, so
instinctually," Waters says. "Sometimes there are too many things between that experience ... and the one
that people normally see on television," she continues. "I'm just thinking about how we really don't know how to cook, in general ... Our peasant food in this country is fast food, unless we've had a grandmother who has taught something that's stayed in the family as a recipe. We don't know how to put things together to make them tasty."

In last year's Chef's Night Out, authors Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page asked scores of chefs about the most important meals of their lives. "Chez Panisse was the single most frequently mentioned restaurant," they write." Over the last 30 years, it seems every self-respecting American chef has, for the same reason, made a pilgrimage."

Yet throughout her book tour, Waters was surprised at how many young chefs came to her to profess how strong her influence has been. "They say, 'Oh, you've been so important in my cooking,'" Waters recalls. "Of course, I ask them, 'Are you buying from organic, sustainable farmers?' and they say, 'We're trying to, we're trying to,' and I say, 'But you must! You must do everything!' And they go, 'Oooh, OK.'"

Waters' influence does not stop at the 49th parallel. You will find like-minded people in Ottawa, among home chefs who prefer to buy their meats and produce from organic farmers. You will find kindred chefs at Domus,
where chef John Taylor presides, or at the Rideau Club in Ottawa, which brags of vegetables that come from Bryson Farms in Shawville. The Urban Pear, a four-month-old restaurant in the Glebe whose business card bears the Waters-esque motto "Fresh, local, seasonal," seems right in sync with Chez Panisse's example.

Of course, Ottawa is not California. Still, The Urban Pear's co-chef and co-owner Summer Lichty, when she is not dashing to the Byward and Parkdale markets for farmers' produce, strives to deal with Ottawa-area and West Quebec producers for everything from fiddleheads to foraged mushrooms and wild ginger, from ducks to venison. "They have different things. We know where it's coming from," says Lichty, 25, who trained at the Stratford Chefs School. Its program is overseen by Master of Cuisine Neil Baxter, whose training includes time spent working at Chez Panisse. While at the school, Lichty also attended a workshop by former Chez Panisse chef Peggy Smith, who explained Waters' philosophy. "We would prefer to support local people," Lichty continues, "rather than people in California."

The best of that lot, after all, already have their champion.