She has been an activist for causes ranging from school food to sustainability to climate change – always drawing connections between better-tasting food and social and environmental healing.Īnd she has pushed back against skeptics who say that eating locally and organically is affordable only for a small elite. Waters asserted from the start that food from a more local, small-scale agricultural system wouldn’t just taste better – it also would improve lives and human relations. Joyce Goldstein commented in her 2013 book “Inside the California Food Revolution”: “I did not set out to write an encomium to Alice, but I’ve got to hand it to her, she drove the train of the ingredients revolution.”
Another Chez Panisse veteran, Jeremiah Tower, created a more aggressively elegant cuisine at his San Francisco restaurant Stars.īut food historians acknowledge Alice Waters’ innovation, persistence and dedication. Chez Panisse alumni Mark Miller and Judy Rodgers went on to found new restaurants that explored beyond the modified Mediterranean aesthetic that inspired Waters. Many other California restaurants and chefs helped catalyze this revolutionary turn to local ingredients and an eclectic aesthetic. As farmers and foragers realized there was a market for seasonal local products, they started producing for it – laying the foundation for today’s farm-to-table movement.Ĭathy Pavlos, chef-owner of the restaurant Provenance in Newport Beach, California, explains what California cuisine is and how it has evolved since Alice Waters helped launch the movement in the 1970s. Beef bourguignon and duck with olives were out spicy crab pizza and warm goat cheese salad were in.
Then, between 19, the restaurant gradually shifted to what would become its focus: “California” or “New American” cuisine. In 1989, Waters still found it challenging to obtain good butter, olives or prosciutto.Ĭhez Panisse’s menus were carefully faithful to French models in its early years. Besides a few Chinese and Japanese markets, the restaurant had to depend on urban gardeners and foragers who knew where to find wild mushrooms and watercress. Produce was the hardest, and attempts to create a farm run by the restaurant failed. But she struggled to find high-quality foods. Waters firmly believed that a restaurant could be no better than the ingredients it had to work with. In the United States, alas, “Everything is fresh all year round and is never quite fresh, if you see what I mean.” “ Dining at the Pavillon,” a 1962 book about New York’s Le Pavillon, quoted its notoriously arrogant owner, Henri Soulé, ruefully observing that he was unable to obtain things that the ordinary French shopper took for granted: young partridges, primeurs (early spring vegetables), Mediterranean fish like red mullet or rascasse and properly aged cheeses. agriculture and livestock production made them difficult or impossible to find. Elsewhere, imitators were more preoccupied with sauces, technique and fashion than with what actually went into their dishes.Įven if chefs wanted better raw materials, the industrialization of U.S. There, basic products such as chickens from Bresse, oysters from Belon or saffron from Quercy were exemplary and sought-after. In 1970, the food writer Mimi Sheraton commented, “You can’t buy an unwaxed cucumber in this country … we buy over-tenderized meat and frozen chicken … food is marketed and grown for the purpose of appearances.”Īt that time, high-end dining was still defined, as it had been for 300 years, by France. Where food came from and even what it tasted like were less important. AP Photo/Susan Walsh Beyond French cuisineĭespite some grumbling about tasteless tomatoes, restaurant diners and shoppers in the 1970s cared primarily about low prices and the availability of a variety of products regardless of season. Alice Waters, executive chef and owner of Chez Panisse, at a farmers market in 2009.