The New York Times Magazine
November 6, 2005
I was talking to my friend Eric Lau recently as he drove to Santa Monica, Calif., for dinner. He spoke happily of his recent engagement, and less happily of his boredom in running Oswald, a restaurant in Santa Cruz that he has owned for almost a decade. When I suggested that he move to San Francisco – where I’ve lived and cooked for 16 years, and where I’m about to open a new place- he paused for a moment. “I like San Francisco and all, but I don’t know. It’s just so sure of what’s good – so self-righteous, yet so conservative about food. It’s the tyranny of California cuisine that gets to me.
I couldn’t help drawing him out on this point. “You mean the tyranny of Chez Panisse?”
He laughed. “Yes, that’s what I meant, I just didn’t want to say it.” And then, raising his voice as if speaking for the record, he added, “Although, don’t get me wrong: I love Chez Panisse.”
And therein lies the problem. We all love Chez Panisse – maybe too much. Chez Panisse, the progenitor of what we have come to call “California cuisine,” has become not just one voice but the only voice speaking out on the values and the mission of that cuisine, particularly in Northern California. Alice Waters, the restaurant’s founder and a tireless promoter of fresh and local food, has become to us what Beatrice was to Dante: a model of righteousness and purity, reminding us of our past sins while offering encouragement and inspiration on the path to heaven. The only path to heaven. So deeply embedded is the mythology of Chez Panisse in the DNA of local food culture that it threatens to smother stylistic diversity and extinguish the creativity that it originally sought to spark.
When it opened in 1971, Chez Panisse was as much a symbol of Berkeley’s fight against the Establishment as were long hair and bell-bottoms. It was also a clean break from the expensive patrician restaurants of its time, like Ernie’s and the Blue Fox, where the chefs used classical French technique to mask the mediocrity of their ingredients. Inspired by the food she ate on a trip to France and the culture that it expressed, Waters sought out local, organic and sustainably raised ingredients, which she used in her reasonably priced, multi-course menus. Chez Panisse was, as she wrote in the introduction to “Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook,” “a place to sit down with my friends and enjoy good food while discussing the politics of the day.” It soon created a new paradigm: the fine restaurant-cum-neighborhood gathering place. The dishes she served – like cassoulet, mesclun salads of perfect greens and herbs, and pear tarte Tatin – were based on regional French cuisine, which derives its emotional power from both a communal understanding of dishes handed down from generation to generation and a strong connection to the land. The agricultural and political climate of the Bay Area was a perfect fit, and Waters’s delicious revolution quickly took root and flourished, eventually assimilating into the mainstream.
More significantly, Waters wedded the idea of organically grown vegetables and a simple, traditional way of cooking them to the moral imperative of a healthier and more caring world, a place where people spend time together at the table. She connected how we shop, cook and eat to a shared set of underlying beliefs that a friend half-jokingly called “the Bay Area rendition of Republican family values.” Over time, Chez Panisse came not only to dominate our local food scene but also to define who we are as a culture.
Today, there are two points on which most people seem to agree. The first is that the majority of the food in the Bay Area is delicious; the second is that it is not very innovative. Top restaurants like Zuni Cafe and Oliveto, run by former Chez Panisse chefs, serve regional Italian food, as do other highly regarded restaurants inspired by the Chez Panisse aesthetic, including Delfina, Quince, A 16 and Pizzaiolo. Even when channeling the home cooking of other countries like Vietnam (the Slanted Door) or Peru (Limón), the chefs stay true to the primacy of simplicity and cultural authenticity. The exceptions are so scarce as to constitute a statistical anomaly; few of the 20 people I spoke to for this article could think of more than two or three examples.
“I feel that, at this point, simplicity is verging on complicity,” noted Anya von Bremzen, a food writer and cookbook author. “Considering that San Francisco is one of the great eating capitals of the world, there is a strange lack of ambition among its chefs.” One senior editor of a national food magazine, who asked not to be named, agreed wholeheartedly: “Pasta with deep-flavored ragus is always delicious and filling, but none too subtle or delicate. It’s the difference between good grub and cuisine.” The San Francisco-based food writer Patricia Unterman described the local restaurant cooking as “an elegant and simple way of cooking tasty food,” at the same time admitting that “we are definitely missing innovative high-end restaurants.” The local chef Michael Mina said it more directly: “Chez Panisse has taken over the style of cooking in the Bay Area.”
The local chefs I talked to are an eloquent and persuasive bunch, and after a while I started to feel as if I were losing a semantic shell game. When I asked why the intricate and much-admired cuisine that Thomas Keller serves at the French Laundry in Napa has had so little influence on the way that Bay Area chefs cook, they pointed instead to Keller’s tremendous respect for ingredients and the French tradition, thereby co-opting him into the movement. Resurgent cooking techniques like sous vide were dismissed as artificial. When I broached the idea of a culinary monoculture with Judy Rodgers, the chef and owner of Zuni Cafe, she agreed: “Perhaps there is a similarity in cooking styles,” she said. “But I don’t see that as a bad thing.” She went on to refocus my misplaced attentions on the more important issue. “All I care about is making delicious food,” she concluded. “When there’s plenty of delicious food in the world, then I’ll start worrying about creativity.” It made me feel vaguely ashamed for asking. I was further disoriented by the way that they all framed the definition of creativity to include making traditional dishes in a slightly different way. “Individual expression is vital,” Waters herself explained to me. “It’s what brings out diversity. Everyone can have an heirloom tomato salad, but the way it’s interpreted is a beautiful thing – as long as there is purity.”
Many chefs cited the small size of the city and the limited disposable incomes of San Franciscans relative to New York and its inhabitants as reasons for not being able to support high-end restaurants, yet every night diners fill restaurants like Jardinière and Boulevard, where entrees run close to $40 for their baroque takes on French home cooking. There is a faux-populist aversion to “fancy food” at work, perhaps because of a residual association with the hoary temples of classicism that Chez Panisse overthrew. But the issue is clearly not expense when dinner at Oliveto can easily top $200 for two. The issue is that everyone seems content with one narrowly defined style of cooking. This happy coincidence of chefs, customers and members of the press all trapped in the same culinary “Groundhog Day” goes largely unquestioned. A San Francisco diner said: “When I go out for a Wednesday-night meal, I don’t want something in gelée. I want a pork chop or a bowl of pasta.” I heard this repeatedly. Craig Stoll, the chef and owner of Delfina, offered a view of local chefs as shepherds of sorts, herding the ingredients from farm to table. “I can’t separate the cooking style from the ingredients,” he said. “The style is defined by the ingredients.” Another chef talked about “the point of view of the carrot.” Seriously.
Waters told me: “Maybe the most important point is that people have been eating in a certain way since the beginning of time. Chez Panisse food is an expression of this traditional way of cooking, of an everyday agrarian experience that gives beauty and meaning to our lives. I wanted to import not only the taste of the cuisine but the lifestyle.” There is no question that Alice Waters has fundamentally changed how the Bay Area eats for the better; through her Edible Schoolyard program and other initiatives, she continues to pursue what she called her “mission to find a more balanced way of approaching food.” But as the simple, delicious $200 dinner for two – not including wine – that I recently had at her restaurant (not to mention the phenomenon of the $5 heirloom tomato) demonstrates, something has gone awry. How can we build an egalitarian society based on a lifestyle that so few can afford?
“We need to make this way of eating more accessible,” Waters acknowledged. Until then, I’m troubled by the possibility that, as the Bay Area has become increasingly wealthy and more ideologically self-selecting, the Chez Panisse ethos has become a touchstone for the tastefully furnished stone houses and rolling, lavender-covered hills of an elite preindustrial agrarian fantasy. I worry that we have begun to reflexively equate an aesthetically beautiful lifestyle with a morally good life, and that the way we cook and eat has become bound up in that mix.
This is not an argument about the validity of organic and sustainably raised ingredients, which I support, nor is it a criticism of Chez Panisse itself, which I admire. This is an argument against the dogma of using those ingredients to create only comfortable home cooking with no particular point of view. If, in the words of the chef Rodgers, “the accretion of good sense by a community of cooks leads to good cuisine,” then perhaps an infusion of individuality, culinary experimentation and openness to new ideas can lead to great cuisine. We need more chefs like David Kinch of Manresa in Los Gatos, who uses local ingredients, precise technique and a generous helping of imagination to create a modern, innovative and highly personal style of cooking. As Jan Newberry, the food editor of San Francisco magazine, asked: “Why isn’t there room for all of it? It’s not an either-or-proposition.”
As for my friend Eric, I’m still thinking about a dish that he recently made. In a glass, he layered minced celery; then warm tapioca flavored with clam cooking liquid and butter; and topped this with three perfectly poached clams and bright green parsley oil. It was a brilliant and unusual combination of flavors, textures and temperatures, and a testament to the fact that delicious and different can peacefully coexist. What a revolutionary idea.
