Alice's Restaurant

How an expert forager got the Slow Food movement off to a fast start.

ALICE WATERS & CHEZ PANISSE

The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution

By Thomas McNamee

Penguin Press. 380 pp. $27.95

Tucked away on a rapidly yuppifying stretch of Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley sits an unlikely temple: a wooden, twig-encrusted, two-story house with a faintly ethereal air that happens to be one of the most important landmarks in the history of American cuisine. Alice Waters's Chez Panisse has been appearing on lists of the country's very best restaurants for so long now that it's easy to forget how important this unassuming -- in fact, this aggressively unassuming -- restaurant has been to American food.

Thomas McNamee has no intention of letting that happen. In Alice Waters & Chez Panisse, he worships at Waters's shrine, which he sees not just as an important stage in the evolution of California cuisine but as the vanguard of a foodie revolution. McNamee, a first-rate culture and food writer, has produced a sort of authorized hagiography.

It's hard not to like his enthusiasm and impossible not to respect his legwork; McNamee seems to have talked to just about everyone involved with the place since Chez Panisse -- named after a hospitable, jolly character from three 1930s Marcel Pagnol films with whom Waters felt a powerful affinity -- opened its doors in 1971. Back then, it was a shoestring startup long on ambition and short on just about everything else, from funding to waiters to organization to formality.

Waters's great innovation was to bring to America some key food lessons learned as a student in France: an insistence on the freshest, locally grown ingredients, a belief that dining should be an all-encompassing aesthetic and philosophical experience, a concern for the smallest details. The chief concerns of the Chez Panisse philosophy are "environmental harmony and optimal flavor," all rooted in the core belief that "the best-tasting food is organically grown and harvested in ways that are ecologically sound." Waters has honed those ideals and helped found America's "Slow Food" movement -- all with an intensity that, even in the hands of the admiring McNamee, sometimes seems a little barmy.

McNamee insists he "had complete freedom throughout," but he has a tough time getting much critical distance from an institution he clearly adores. He never quite explains how Waters reconciles her laudable belief in democratic informality and accessibility with a weekend charge of $85 for the prix fixe dinner, not including a 17 percent tip. He includes sidebars that look like recipes but turn out to be long, often indigestible quotes from Waters or her comrades; he reprints decades worth of menus from the Chez Panisse archive (the restaurant changes its fare constantly to keep pace with the nearby produce from its network of suppliers). The result is an uncommonly handsome book -- adorned with nifty period photos and color accents that have been attractively deployed throughout -- that's often an unsatisfying read.

Take, for instance, McNamee's chummy reproduction of some scouting reports from a Chez Panisse forager searching for the perfect lamb. He seems to realize that these go into insane detail -- Joshua's spies sent back less thorough briefings -- but happily concludes, "Only at Chez Panisse." McNamee also uncritically describes Waters's own version of President Reagan's exhortation to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall: a series of increasingly narcissistic letters from Waters urging Bill Clinton to establish an organic garden at the White House. "Mr. President, plant that garden on the White House grounds!" she hectored in March 2000. "I can think of no more powerful way to ground your legacy than to leave behind you a kitchen garden and the compost pile to nourish it." McNamee concludes that the unconvinced Clinton "knew a thing or two about stubbornness, too," not that an exasperated president with a few other things on his plate surely tossed this strident, only-in-Berkeley correspondence over to some hapless staffer. After all, most modern presidencies have produced their own compost heaps without outside help.

And yet, and yet. A visit to Chez Panisse will leave even the most cynical diner a helpless, swooning convert. Beneath warm brass lamps and burnished wood, the kitchen brings on a sublime ricotta cheese salad, spinach crespelle with a glorious spread of local mushrooms, Sierra mackerel in a masterfully calibrated romesco sauce, grass-fed steak from Marin. It's all served up by a stunningly knowledgeable waiter with an easy viticultural expertise that would put most sommeliers elsewhere to shame, in a room whose atmosphere sighs with earthy cheer and serenity. The net effect is to reduce hardened skeptics -- including those whose skepticism was exacerbated by this book -- to humming bars of "I'm a Believer." The meal ends with lime sorbet, sprinkled with sugared mint leaves that seemed to have been cut mere minutes before. Their freshness is so delectably potent that diners leave feeling -- well, ensorcelled, enchanted, enraptured, and longing to return to the house that Alice built. ·

Warren Bass is deputy editor of The Post's Outlook section.