After breaking up with Goines, Waters dated Tom Luddy, a film producer and director of the Pacific Film Archive, and they’d stage get-togethers with friends. Waters would cook; Luddy would screen a movie. He introduced her to the film adaptations of playwright Marcel Pagnol’s 1930s “Marseille Trilogy”—Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and César (1936).
I asked Waters about two phrases regarding food and Berkeley that were repeated in multiple interviews for this book: “At the time, there was a culture of food,” and “Food could change the world.” Many attribute the latter to Waters.
“Well, it’s very interesting,” she said. “I didn’t realize that Mario Savio, head of the Free Speech Movement, was Sicilian. I didn’t hear about his life until he died in his fifties [in 1996]. And I just loved hearing at his memorial that he was drinking a bottle of wine every night with dinner with his friends. And surely he had Italian food on the table. And he brought a very big vision of this idealistic world, made it real for all of us who were listening to him. But there was a movement in Berkeley, from back in the sixties, that was probably connected to growing grass, but it was more than that. It was, like, grow your own. You don’t have to be dependent on these big fast-food industries. It was the weaving of politics and food that’s sort of the commune that we can eat vegetables, you can be vegetarian. That was a big part of it. But back before Chez Panisse began, The Cheese Board and Peet’s Coffee, Tea & Spices were already places [in Berkeley], so I knew I wanted to be in this neighborhood. I lived not far away. I think there were a lot of people eating with intention. Whether it was well or not, it was with intention. So as people became more educated and traveled, they became more sophisticated.”
“There was also this other thing called The Swallow Cafe,” says L. John Harris. “The Swallow Cafe gave birth to writers, not chefs, interestingly. So [S. Irene] Virbila of the L.A. Times, Ruth Reichl, myself, Maggie Klein, all were at The Swallow Cafe. And many others who didn’t go on. The Swallow was almost like a pre–Chez Panisse in the sense that it was people who loved working with food but wanted to do it in a way that was real and authentic. It was started by a Cheese Board person. . . . By then The Cheese Board had become a collective business, which was the influence of the owners having lived in Israel and spending time on a kibbutz. The idea was that collectivization was the way to save humanity . . . so you limit profit but you spread authority. Everybody gets an equal share of everything and you work it out through consensus. There was no hierarchy of authority. So The Swallow was like a step toward Chez Panisse in a funny way. And it was connected to the film archives physically. So there was this whole Tom Luddy connection and then that spread itself through Chez Panisse,” named for the widower Panisse in the Pagnol films.
In 1971, Waters decided to take the leap and open the restaurant that had been gestating in her mind, one that would re-create the pleasures of food and the table she’d come to appreciate in France.
“It’s funny. It didn’t seem a big leap at all,” she says today. Maybe this was, in part, because as it had for Marder, LSD gave Waters a nudge: “I only did LSD once,” she says. “It was mind-altering, and all of a sudden, I understood what Bob Dylan was saying. It was a kind of blowing your mind, if you will. Just not seeing the world in that same way.
“I just thought my friends are coming over and I’m cooking for them and they aren’t paying and I can’t teach anymore. And it’s what I had a passion for. I cooked every night. I thought, Well, I can just open a restaurant. I was empowered, really empowered, by the counterculture. I felt like I could open it up and people would come.”
But for all of the influence Chez Panisse would exert on the restaurant and food industries, the role of a chef was largely incidental at the restaurant’s first iteration. Chez Panisse’s first chef was not the icon Waters (less a chef than, in the words of Bay Area chef and California food historian Joyce Goldstein, “a restaurateur and a spiritual leader and an activist”), but the virtually unknown Victoria Kroyer (now Wise), a graduate student at UC Berkeley, who had burned out and decided to throw in the academic towel. By chance, she had much in common with Waters: She’d been caught up in the Free Speech Movement, been to France, loved to cook. An ex-boyfriend happened by the space while it was being renovated, told her to hightail it over there and apply for a job. Wise landed the gig without so much as an audition menu. “I really was the first one, and nobody had the presence of mind to suggest that,” says Wise, who was hired after an interview with Waters’s friend and restaurant investor Paul Aratow and his friend Bobby Weinstein. “We were running around trying to get silverware for the table. There was a leak in the refrigerators, and we tried to have at least one counter in the kitchen free so that we could set something down. It was chaotic and hilarious. Isn’t that crazy?” (Lindsey Shere was appointed pastry chef at a time when even many more formal establishments didn’t enlist a dedicated dessert specialist.)
“If you’re the head of the stoves in a restaurant, well, you’re the chef,” says Wise. “That’s all. But it was exactly the informality of its manifestation that it just was so different. It was freer. If people assumed that being a chef was like coming out of a hotel school or hospitality school—it was not like that. It was much more freewheeling, frankly. And now of course there are culinary schools all over the place and they’re active and they’re full, but there weren’t such things then. I think there was The Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park. That was it. And that was the formal training. We were a bunch of people, you know, kind of smart-ass college kids saying, ‘Well of course we can cook. We’ve been to France. We know what it tastes like.’ And off we went.”
For a sense of the bicoastal nature of the zeitgeist, consider another restaurant, one that opened in New York City, among the industrial lofts below Houston Street—many of them occupied, illegally, by artists—just four months after Chez Panisse, in December 1971. The restaurant was, appropriately enough, called FOOD, and it was created by artist Gordon Matta-Clark and his girlfriend, photographer and dancer Carol Goodden, as a sort of edible installation. Matta-Clark wasn’t a chef, not in the way we understand the role today; he was an artist, one who personified the burgeoning SoHo art scene. Among his claims to fame was Anarchitecture, which was, according to his friend, sculptor Ned Smyth, “a dramatically physical, deconstructivist architecture, rather ahead of its time.” A sort of inner-city Christo, Matta-Clark created conceptual pieces such as “Cuts,” for which he and Smyth cut pieces out of walls of abandoned buildings in the South Bronx, then photographed the altered space, ideally with a window at the far end; if the cityscape in the cutout featured an elevated subway car, all the better. He and Smyth lugged saws, power tools, and a generator into the buildings, sometimes encountering fully furnished dwellings that “looked as if the occupants had simply walked out.” That was spooky, but it was nothing compared to the threat of encountering “junkies who would steal copper wire and pipe to sell as scrap to get money for drugs.” (Though he usually got away with his missions, his cutting of a Hudson River pier necessitated him leaving the country for a spell.)
Matta-Clark also shared of himself via food. The story of the restaurant began on the afternoon he sliced meat from a slow-roasted pig, slapped it between slices of bread, and handed out pork sandwiches to hundreds of people participating in “Under the Brooklyn Bridge,” an alternative-space art show. The day prior to the show, Goodden procured a suckling pig from the Jones Street meat market. They injected it with pepper water, jury-rigged a grill, lit a fire with branches from the swamps of New Jersey, hung a hammock, and spent eighteen hours under the bridge, tending to the pig. The next day, as a saxophone player provided the living soundtrack, Mabou Mines performed a Beckett play, and Tina Girouard fashioned a house from dirt, Matta-Clark sliced the pork and served approximately five hundred people sandwiches.
FOOD was the love child of food and art that was part and parcel of the downtown art scene. There was also the d
inner party circuit to which Matta-Clark and Goodden belonged—one memorable party Goodden hosted in her loft was a spring flower party (a theme guests freely interpreted by bringing flowers, bringing edible flowers, or coming dressed as flowers). Matta-Clark made the semi-joking suggestion that Goodden should open a restaurant. She liked the idea of not giving food away, so she said that she’d do it if he did. Within a week, she’d negotiated to take over the space at 127 Prince Street, at the corner of Wooster Street, that housed Comidas Criollas, a failing eatery. The couple, with fellow artists, opened FOOD, which blended art, cooking, utopian philosophy, and counterculture in a restaurant unlike any the city had seen.
At the time, SoHo was an undeveloped frontier of named streets beneath upper Manhattan’s numbered system, and there were scant few restaurants—mainly just Fanelli Café. Says Bill Katz, who would go on to design Chanterelle restaurant at the tail end of the decade, “It wasn’t SoHo then. It wasn’t called SoHo. SoHo came later; that’s a real estate term. This was before that.”
“FOOD was on the northwest corner of Prince and Wooster,” says Katz. “And it’s mythic because he had artists who would cook, and they would cook the most far-out things you ever could imagine. That was the first restaurant in our neighborhood.”
As at Chez Panisse, the concept of a chef was more necessity than focus at FOOD, which served a vegetarian menu two nights a week and welcomed guest chefs including artists such as Robert Rauschenberg. And the training that would in time become de rigueur for New York City whisks was far from a prerequisite. In August 1971, Smyth, freshly arrived in New York City having hitchhiked from Colorado, answered a notice in FOOD’s window and spoke with Goodden.
“You can be a waiter or busboy,” said Goodden. “But what I really need is an assistant chef.”
“What do I have to do?” asked Smyth.
“Can you chop and boil vegetables?”
“Yes.”
He was hired.
When FOOD opened, there was no telephone, the windows were still soaped, and the dining room—all white walls, high ceilings, and square oak tables under which forty to fifty mismatched chairs were tucked—was still a construction site. Soups and stews were served from a cauldron in the center of the room. The menu changed nightly and ran the gamut: soup accompanied by house-made breads and fresh (notably) unsalted butter; chicken stew over rice; and shrimp gumbo.
There were conceptual dinners that would have been right at home in the 2010s: Matta-Clark’s “Bone Dinner” remains legendary: a meal of oxtail soup, roasted marrow bones, and other dishes; at the end of the meal, the bones were scrubbed clean and strung together to be worn home by guests. At another, he served live shrimp swimming in egg whites. The dish was titled “Alive.” Eat your heart out, René Redzepi.
Graphic designer Milton Glaser and his cocolumnist Jerome Snyder, writing in their “Underground Gourmet” column in New York magazine, rhapsodized about FOOD, which they described as a “restaurant commune.” The last line of the review, quoting a woman at FOOD who recognized Glaser, spoke to the noncommercial idealism of the day: “Please don’t write about this place,” she pleaded.
FOOD, at least in its first incarnation, had a short life, just three years. Goodden sold the space and the new owners kept the name (Goodden couldn’t stop them because it was so generic). Matta-Clark died of pancreatic cancer at age thirty-five, in 1978.
Despite the similarities between Chez Panisse and FOOD, Goodden said that Waters’s restaurant had no influence on FOOD, although she thinks she may have used some recipes from the Moosewood Cookbook (from the vegetarian restaurant that opened in Ithaca, New York, in 1973) during FOOD’s life span. Years later she said she “still [didn’t] know much about [Chez Panisse].” Goodden, a native of England, said that she and Matta-Clark were more influenced by “European food/cooking/shopping/presentation” and the social place of food in European life.
There were, at the time, comparable restaurants elsewhere downtown. In particular, Goodden cited a like-minded delicatessen on Second Avenue and a restaurant called either The Back Porch or The Front Porch, which “oddly . . . kind of had the same ideas as we did—fresh food, homemade food, soups and sandwiches, stews, inexpensive, casual. But they didn’t influence us nor we them.”
Just as Waters found opening a restaurant to be the most natural thing in the world, Wise thought little of morphing into a chef. “It didn’t seem a big deal to me either, to assume the role of a chef. I mean, I was cooking. That’s what I was doing.”
Chez Panisse, as restaurants do, came together: There were red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, mismatched silver, flea market chairs, and fresh flowers. And the opening, as openings are, was chaos: “Just before opening night, Alice walked into The Cheese Board and said, ‘I need help,’” remembers L. John Harris, who pitched in as a waiter. When the night arrived, Waters, in a polka-dot dress from the Bizarre Bazaar, was still nailing a runner to the stairs as customers were queued up outside. Nobody had thought to make a sign, so Goines wrote Chez Panisse with chalk in angular block letters on the wooden fence outside. The opening menu was pâté en croûte, canard aux olives, and a plum tart.
Waters, Wise, and company didn’t even know there was such a thing as restaurant purveyors. “There were a lot of ethnic markets in San Francisco, and at the beginning of the restaurant, we felt that was the place to shop because the ducks were hanging,” says Waters. They also purchased food from a Japanese produce concession at the U-Save on Grove Street and from the Berkeley co-op. The restaurant was sincere but rough around the edges, to put it mildly, without the air of institution or the high-mindedness that attaches to it today.
“Alice, I think, would probably be the first person to tell you that Chez Panisse today is not the Chez Panisse that Alice built, not the Chez Panisse that Alice expected, not the Chez Panisse that Alice wanted,” says Narsai David. “I mean, it has evolved into something far beyond anything that she had ever dreamt of. She started out doing a very, very casual, very simple, straightforward place where the kitchen had the freedom to come up with new ideas and play with different things, and she just made an enormous contribution. But it at the same time was—well, in a funny way it was almost a little too touchy-feely, you know? The silverware was bought used at flea markets and such. I don’t mind the fact that the silverware didn’t match, but when the silver plating had worn off and you had the brass [or] copper base metal on your tongue, it just didn’t feel right. It certainly was not a heavy enough reaction that it interfered with her success. I mean, from day one she was successful.”
Waters’s main role in those first days was technically as a waitress, selling the set menu to customers. The restaurant was initially open from breakfast until late night, but quickly became a dinner-only affair.
One customer in those early days was Mark Miller, a UC Berkeley graduate student studying art history and Japanese anthropology. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Miller had come to Berkeley in 1967. As a break from the rigors of academia, he began cooking out of the New York Times Cookbook and a paperback of one of James Beard’s books. Miller, a friend of Wise’s, would become a part of the fabric of Chez Panisse, often hanging around the kitchen after hours, kibitzing with the staff. He would also go on to start a sophisticated and strikingly designed newsletter, Market Basket, which reviewed food products such as soy sauce and chocolate, long before it was fashionable.
Early reviews for the restaurant were positive. Wise left Chez Panisse, temporarily to follow a boyfriend to Montreal, then after a brief return, for good. In a melding of food and cinema, she became Francis Ford Coppola’s private chef, then opened Pig-by-the-Tail, a charcuterie shop, on the same block as Chez Panisse in what became known as Berkeley’s “Gourmet Ghetto.”
The restaurant placed an ad, interviewed four candidates to replace Wise. Then a fifth emerged: Jeremiah Tower. It’s a sign of how fraught his relationship with the restaurant would become that even the story of his a
udition is disputed: As he tells it, he showed up at Chez Panisse and was asked to taste a soup. He found that it only needed salt, but dolled it up with wine and cream to show off. Waters took one slurp and hired him. Others who were there insist he went through a more lengthy process including writing several proposed menus. However he got the gig, Waters and Tower produced an alchemy that rocketed the restaurant to new heights. Tower, a Harvard grad and food obsessive who had dined all over the world, read menus like novels—studied them like texts—and had regularly thrown extravagant dinner parties in Cambridge, came to the task with a fervor, creating ambitious menus and working with Waters to procure the necessary ingredients to prepare them. The two also began a dalliance, indulging in Champagne and caviar after hours, and sleeping together, which got people’s attention because Tower, though not yet out, was gay.
“The reason Jeremiah became prominent, or was able to, is that he was in a highly liberal, political construct in Berkeley because Alice thought she could make him straight,” says Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant who was around the Berkeley food scene. “It was a real simple situation. He was willing to trade that part of it for opportunity. And by that I mean he was willing to flirt, which is a very minor term for a much more complex situation, right? Alice, I think she believes that it’s just a phase, with anybody. And I love Alice very much and I respect her but that can only be self-involvement. If you don’t understand somebody else’s actual reality, it’s only because you can’t go beyond your own.”
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 5