Chez Panisse
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Chez Panisse is a restaurant located in Berkeley, California, known as the first California cuisine restaurant, a style credited to restaurant founder Alice Waters.
The restaurant was an outgrowth of Waters' interest in the possibilities of fresh local ingredients, inspired by her 1964 visit to France. Waters returned to Berkeley, and the subsequent cooking she did for her friends, using French cooking techniques on fresh local ingredients instead of attempting to reproduce French classics with imported ingredients, eventually led her and her partner to founding the restaurant in 1971.
Since Waters was not prepared to run a commercial kitchen, she partnered with Paul Aratow, a faculty member in Comparative Literature at the University of California who had lived extensively in France. Aratow was a 50% partner in the original restaurant. He planned the reconstruction of an old Berkeley apartment house, supervised the construction of the restaurant, managed the kitchen and "back-of-house" and was the original chef de cuisine. Aratow derived his extensive knowledge of cooking from the classic French cookbook, La Bonne Cusine de Madame E. Saint-Ange, which he translated into English years later.(Ten Speed Press) Aratow sold his share of Chez Panisse after a few years when he moved to Los Angeles to become a film producer.
The restaurant is located in the north Berkeley neighborhood known locally as the "Gourmet Ghetto". Housed in a converted apartment house, Chez Panisse (a name inspired by Waters' love of the films of Marcel Pagnol) originally consisted of a single main dining floor serving a daily fixed-price dining menu and an upstairs cafe, originally more a coffee shop, but the extensive demand for seating meant that meals were served there also. Later the cafe was converted to a more restaurant style room. It did not take reservations -- serving a somewhat less expensive, more informal a la carte-style menu. Chefs who have worked at the restaurant and later struck out on their own include Paul Bertolli and Jeremiah Tower.
Alice Waters is involved with Slow Food and the local food movement. She also is involved in the Edible Schoolyard Project, where elementary school children grow and prepare their own food in gardens and kitchens on campus.
Famous diners at Chez Panisse include the Dalai Lama and President Bill Clinton. With the help of Alice Waters, filmmaker Werner Herzog cooked his shoe at Chez Panisse, eating it at the nearby UC Theater before the premier of the film Gates of Heaven, an event recorded in the documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
Chez Panisse is listed as the #20 restaurant in the world in Restaurant magazine's 2006 list of the best restaurants in the world.
[edit] Reservations
The restaurant books up before the cafe. A reservation needs to be placed up to a month in advance given this restaurant's renown and popularity, and a credit card must be provided to hold the reservation. There is one menu nightly, prix fixe, posted on their website the week before.
