Recipe for Success
Words: Rory Ross A pioneer of organic, locally sourced food, Alice Waters has been leading the taste revolution for over 30 years EARLIER THIS YEAR, Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, picked up the Lifetime Achievement gong at Restaurant magazine’s World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. As she received her foodie Oscar [...]
Words: Rory Ross
A pioneer of organic, locally sourced food, Alice Waters
has been leading the taste revolution for over 30 years
EARLIER THIS YEAR, Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, picked up the Lifetime Achievement gong at Restaurant magazine’s World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. As she received her foodie Oscar before thronged superchefs at the ceremony in London (among whom were Ferran Adría of El Bulli, Thomas Keller of The French Laundry and Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck), a friend of Waters whispered: "Sadly, about 70 percent of people in this room have never even heard of Alice, never mind know why she is important."
American restaurateur, champion of the Slow Food movement and the pioneer of Modern Californian Cuisine, Alice Waters’ name may be unfamiliar to anyone who isn’t either a foodie or a chef. But Waters is massively infl uential in determining the way America eats. Her power base is Chez Panisse restaurant which she opened in 1971 in an old two- storey stucco house in Berkeley. She built her career and reputation on the simple premise that great food begins with fresh, locally grown ingredients eaten at peak season, requiring minimal chef intervention. She advocated organic vegetables bought from local farms and not shipped from far-fl ung sources. Back in the 1970s, this was a brave move. People were thrilled by the novelty of being able to import exotic ingredients from around the globe, but Waters was preaching the less glamorous joys of sourcing vegetables from down the road.
Some people consider Chez Panisse the best restaurant in the USA. It is undoubtedly the most infl uential among food-conscious Americans. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the medical profession campaigned against saturated fats which led to the disappearance of heavy, cream-based sauces, chefs turned to Waters to fi nd lighter alternatives. Menus that detail the provenance of each ingredient are another Waters-inspired measure. She can also take credit for the demise of iceberg lettuce in favour of mixed organic greens.
As her follower Skye Gyngell, head chef at Petersham Nurseries in Richmond and cookery writer for The Independent puts it: "Words such as organic, local and sustainable have become fashionable buzzwords in the past few years and perhaps what Alice has achieved does not at fi rst sight at least to the uninformed anyway seem that out of the ordinary. But the fact that it’s become common for restaurants to boast that they source from a ridiculously small radius is due in no small part to the quiet revolution that Waters instigated all those decades ago."
When Waters started out, visiting chefs dismissed her food at Chez Panisse as astute shopping, not cooking. The argument was: if the food is great before you touch it, what’s the point in being a chef? But 36 years on, Waters has attained almost hero status, with eight books, dozens of awards to her name and the moniker "founding mother of American gastronomy".
When we meet at St John restaurant in Smithfi eld, she appears an elfi n, fi ne-boned woman of 63 dressed in a fi ne black crêpey diaphanous top and a jaunty linen scarf, with a soft-focus dreaminess about her. An unlikely food revolutionary, Waters comes from a "lower middle-class family in New Jersey" that never ate out. "My mom was not a good cook," she says, "but my parents did have a garden." Waters’ chef credentials are sketchy. She has had no formal training or apprenticeship and says she hasn’t cooked professionally since her daughter Fanny was born; Fanny is now 23, and studying art history at Cambridge University. Nor is Waters a business woman. Chez Panisse haemorrhaged cash for years; in 1972, $30,000 of wine went "missing". Her staff were friends, not professionals. And yet here she is in 2007 almost classed as Saint Alice! She’s obviously brilliant at something, but what?
She classes herself, however, as "idealistic and uncompromising". Her philosophy is both simple enough for Americans to understand, and serious enough to inspire intelligent cooks like Simon Hopkinson, whose Roast Chicken and Other Stories has been hailed the "most useful cookbook of all time"; and Sally Clarke, whose eponymous restaurant in Notting Hill is modelled on Chez Panisse. Skye Gyngell says simply that Waters "is, for me, the most infl uential, idealistic and romantic fi gure in the whole food world."
Waters herself is more modest: "My ideas are not new. Somehow, we have become disconnected to nature and agriculture. Food is thought of as fuelling up. I think people now have a longing to reconnect." According to Waters, American food went wrong when the fast food industry seduced the continent. "We lacked a strong enough cultural connection with food to offer any resistance. Food has been reduced to cooking at Thanksgiving and Christmas."
Instead, she likes to think that the food at Chez Panisse "captures a moment in time. I want people to remember that they were in Berkeley at the end of April and they had peas, fava beans and rhubarb tart. It is food grown in California but Mediterranean- inspired. We have the same climate, and I was inspired by that kind of cooking."
Her food "awakening" came when, at 19, she studied in Paris for one year. She was immediately stirred by the food markets, the "shock of my fi rst raw oyster from a sidewalk vendor" and exquisite lunches at country restaurants. In Brittany, she fell in love with oysters, lobsters, crêpes and cider. "Every restaurant was an experience for me."
In London, where Waters trained as a Montessori teacher, she found the food scene couldn’t match Paris, except in one respect: Elizabeth David, the late English food writer credited with instigating the food revolution in Britain whose books Waters absorbed "by osmosis". Waters frequented David’s cooking equipment shop in Sloane Square to glimpse her heroine, but never plucked up the courage to introduce herself. "We basically created Chez Panisse for Elizabeth to come and eat here some time," says Waters. "She visited in the early 1980s. I was thrilled; she was charmed."
Waters’ crusade doesn’t just stop at sourcing a better beetroot and writing cookbooks. She spends most of her time fund-raising for the "10 or so" projects that she has on the go. "Alice is a great manipulator," says Sally Clarke, Waters’ chief British disciple, "but not in a derogatory way. She is the ideas person. Through her network of friends and contacts in the arts, politics, the Soil Association, Hollywood, the Slow Food Movement [Waters is vice president of Slow Food International], she can put that idea into a workable mode. Whatever it is creating a garden in a women’s jail in San Francisco, or changing the kitchen at the American Academy in Rome she is the catalyst that makes it work." The Clintons are said to have been extremely supportive of Waters; the Dalai Lama and the Prince of Wales are fans.
Waters reckons her lifetime achievement has been "the possibility of making food an essential part of the curriculum of the public school system in America." She is referring to The Edible Schoolyard, a project idea that came to her while visiting the local middle school in Berkeley she was dismayed to fi nd the cafeteria closed, and school lunches provided by a fast food chain. Within two years, at her instigation, the school had a one-acre organic garden and kitchen classroom. Students learn how to grow, harvest and prepare meals as part of the academic curriculum. The Edible Schoolyard is now being rolled out across the state.
"We need to have a civilising and caring education," concludes Waters, "that teaches kids the essentials of living on this planet, stewardship of land, learning to nourish themselves and learning to communicate with others at the table."
Chez Panisse Café Cookbook by Alice Waters (Harper Collins, £19.99) is available through www.amazon.com
