The United States of Arugula (21 page)

“
THE MIXED-GREEN SALADS—FOR SURE, YOU CAN BLAME ME FOR THEM,” SAYS ALICE
Waters. “We were doing those very early on. I think lettuce was my first passion. I was bringing seeds over in the early seventies from France and planting ’em in my backyard, wanting a French kind of salad, with frisée and mâche. I’m sure I have contributed to the awful demise of the concept of mesclun, just by promoting it in many, many, many ways. And now, of course, one of those big companies has grabbed on to the idea, and they cut up big lettuces and put ’em in a bag, mix ’em up, and call ’em mesclun. Who is it—Dole pineapple or somebody?”

Well, Dole actually uses the term “Salad Blends,” but the point is, Waters, beneath the veil of self-effacement, is taking credit, rather than blame, for transforming the American concept of salad from shredded iceberg and tomato wedges to a jungly mixture of whole, just-picked tiny leaves of various textures, shapes, hues, and flavors.

Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse, which opened in 1971, has some legitimate claim to being the most influential dining establishment in America since Le Pavillon, and there are many more things for which she and/or it can take credit: the mantra of “fresh, local, seasonal ingredients” now chanted by any chef or home cook of integrity; the high profile the organic movement currently enjoys, particularly where professional cooks are concerned; the popularization of such gourmet name brands as Laura Chenel’s Chèvre and Niman Ranch meats; the formalization of the position of “forager,” the person at a restaurant whose job it is to seek out the best local ingredients and establish working relationships with farmers and suppliers; and the early careers of, to name but a few chefs of national reputation, Jeremiah Tower, Judy Rodgers, Deborah Madison, Mark Miller, Paul Bertolli, Jonathan Waxman, Mark Peel, and Joyce Goldstein.

Chez Panisse is a pretty but unassuming place that sits on an okay but not particularly attractive stretch of Shattuck Avenue in the northern part of Berkeley, California. It doesn’t feel like “an important restaurant”—there’s a downstairs dining room done up in woody Mission style where a single bill of fare is served at a set price every night, and an upstairs café with an à la carte menu and an open kitchen where you can watch the cooks work the grill and bake pizzas in the wood-burning oven. The waiters are friendly without being affrontingly informal, and the prices are eminently fair—the most a meal can cost (as of this book’s publication) is $85 a head for a weekend-night prix fixe, or about a third of what you’ll end up paying at the French Laundry or Alain Ducasse. The food is unfussy and ingredient-driven, usually constructed around a main course that’s essentially an idealized version of your standard “meat and two veg” combo—one night it might be an aged Niman Ranch shell steak with spring peas and truffled mashed potatoes; another night it might be a Hoffman Farm chicken stuffed with wild mushrooms and greens, served with Chino Ranch carrots, turnips, leeks, and a horseradish sauce; and still another night it might be Laughing Stock Farm pork cooked in the fireplace with cardoon gratin, served with black kale and rosemary roasted potatoes. You might smirk at the menu’s relentless use of proper-noun pedigrees, but the overall Chez Panisse experience is, in a word, unpretentious.

Yet, paradoxically, no restaurant in America has inspired, yea,
invited
, more cultish worship and precious food-crit overdrive. Chez Panisse is the ultimate manifestation of the baby boomers’ contribution to the American food revolution, tracing its bloodlines directly to the Free Speech Movement that rocked the University of California’s Berkeley campus in late 1964. As with all things great and boomerish—the rock music of the sixties, the civil rights movement,
Rolling Stone
magazine in its heyday—the magnitude of Chez Panisse’s achievements is tempered by a certain cloying self-aggrandizement. This is a restaurant that never lacked a sense of its own importance, and was celebrating its birthday with commemorative limited-edition posters as early as 1973. Not for the Panissers the just-a-cook humility of a Pierre Franey or the shruggy nonchalance of a Marcella Hazan—these are folk who revel in the fact that they changed the landscape, man.

“We’ve always had this joke, those of us who have been exposed to Chez Panisse or worked there, that Alice thinks she invented food,” says Bill Staggs, who joined the restaurant’s staff as a cook in 1972 and wound up its maître d’, working there on and off until 1993. Not that Waters is the only culprit; in February 1973, when the restaurant was desperately in need of a new chef, she met her match in Jeremiah Tower, a strikingly handsome libertine full of vim, vigor, vintage Krug, ambitious menu ideas, royalist pretensions, and himself. Tower would soon emerge as the Lennon to Waters’s McCartney, the combustible half of a wondrously complementary partnership that would produce magical results but engender perpetual arguments (even among those who had never met either person) over who deserved credit for what.

It’s a backhanded compliment to Chez Panisse, a measure of its significance, that credit is such a bugaboo. Some of the restaurant’s early principals feel they’ve been expunged from its history and haven’t been sufficiently acknowledged for their contributions in making the restaurant what it is. Some of Waters’s forebears in the Bay Area feel that they don’t get enough credit for having done what Chez Panisse did before Chez Panisse even existed. In the sixties, for example, a Berkeley restaurant called the Potluck took a very similar approach, serving a fixed-price, French-influenced menu, and its industrious manager, Narsai David, was foraging for fresh, seasonal ingredients
before the practice had a name, “going out to the ocean to harvest mussels when no one dreamed of putting mussels on the menu,” he says, “and going up to Napa Valley in April and harvesting bushels of wild mustard blossoms and using them to marinate a lamb loin for our spring festival.” Some old-timers on the East Coast are irked that Chez Panisse is credited for innovating practices that have long been commonplace in Europe; even the ever-gracious Jacques Pépin, remembering the humble garden plot outside of Lyons that his family tended during the worst days of wartime privation, can’t help but note with a twinge of annoyance, “My parents were organic gardeners before the word ‘organic.’ They grew our vegetables with horse manure we gathered from the streets and never used chemicals. But they didn’t make this big deal of it!”

Factor in Chez Panisse’s status as the springboard for the whole California cuisine movement, and the self-regard becomes even more acute. When
Saveur
published its special California road-trip issue in May 2001, the centerpiece of which was a reunion of Chez Panisse alumni for a potluck dinner on the Bolinas estate of Esprit founder Susie Tompkins Buell, it was arguably the smuggest issue of a food magazine ever put together. “This is one of those ‘If they dropped a bomb …’ events,” wrote the road trip’s organizers, native Californians and
Saveur
editors Colman Andrews and Christopher Hersheimer, as they chronicled the progression of their gang of California food royalty from cocktail hour—“little groups of us walk back inland, glasses in hand, like characters in some romantic French movie, through dense, low, golden sunlight”—to the “old Portuguese dairy barn” where the meal was eaten.
*

Yet Chez Panisse must be given its due, for it expanded the possibilities
of what food could be in America, and of who could be a chef. Whereas Le Pavillon’s Franey and Pépin went about their training very much the old-fashioned way in their native France, literally going from short pants to apprenticeships in professional kitchens, Waters and Tower, in their hubris and naïveté, simply threw out the rule book; neither had ever worked in a professional kitchen until Chez Panisse. That they pulled it off, using their self-taught lessons in French cuisine as a launchpad for their own intuitive take on Franco-Californian cookery, is remarkable. Like the original Haight-Ashbury flower children who attracted legions of young seekers to the Bay Area in 1967, Waters and her cohorts have exerted a magnetic pull on smart young men and women with big culinary dreams in their heads. Charlie Trotter, now one of America’s most esteemed chefs, remembers being so “caught up in the whole West Coast, Bay Area, Napa Valley, Chez Panisse, Jeremiah Tower mystique” as a young Illinois nobody in the early eighties that, on a whim, he upped and moved west one day with nothing but his bicycle and a backpack, knocking on Chez Panisse’s door like a just-off-the-bus Duluth homecoming queen banging on the gates of Paramount Pictures—“and they promptly shooed me off the property,” he says.

“
ALICE AND I GAVE
frequent dinner parties,” says David Goines, who was Waters’s live-in boyfriend in the mid to late 1960s. “It became more and more obvious that what was needed were ingredients that we couldn’t get, or ways of cooking that weren’t common. The whole trend of American family cooking, since the 1940s, had been toward faster and easier, and things that were already prepared. It was gradually whittling away the very essence of what it meant to cook dinner for your family. It’s like the story of the farmer who decided that his mule was eating too much, and he gradually fed the mule less and less. And just when he’d trained the mule to live on nothing, the damn mule died on him. That’s kind of what’d happened to American family cooking.”

In 1966, the year he and Waters became a couple, Goines was an intense,
bespectacled kid with a stentorian speaking voice and deeply held convictions—not just on food but on civil rights and free speech. He had been, in fact, one of the prime movers in the Free Speech Movement (FSM), which erupted on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in the autumn of 1964, his sophomore year at the school. Between the civil rights movement, the antinuclear movement, and rising discontent with America’s military presence in Vietnam, student activism was snowballing, and the Berkeley administration had moved on September 21 to ban all political organizations from soliciting on campus. Goines was suspended from school on September 30 for violating this ban, though the cause for which he was soliciting was a local one—the
SLATE Supplement to the General Catalog
, an “unauthorized” publication that offered frank evaluations of the Berkeley faculty, and whose parent organization, the rabble-rousing left-wing student group SLATE, had had numerous run-ins with the administration.

The very day after he was suspended, several young members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Goines among them, set up a table on campus, again in direct violation of the university’s policy. One of their number, a recent UC-Berkeley graduate named Jack Weinberg, began to pontificate against racial discrimination and institutional suppression. On cue, the police swarmed in to arrest Weinberg, who, taking a page right out of the civil-disobedience playbook, let his body go slack, forcing the cops to carry him off and bundle him into a waiting squad car. What the police didn’t anticipate, though, was that dozens of CORE members and other student agitators would surround the car before it could pull away, staging an impromptu sit-in around the vehicle. One demonstrator stuck an apple in the car’s tailpipe; Goines dug his thumbnail into the valve of the tire nearest him, letting the air out. As hundreds of people gathered to witness the protest or participate in it, another student and FSM firebrand, Mario Savio, climbed onto the roof of the marooned vehicle and announced that he was “publicly serving notice that we’re going to continue direct action” until the university acceded to student demands. Savio’s speech was followed by several
more, including one by Goines. The demonstration stretched well into the following day; Weinberg spent a total of thirty-two hours inside the car.
*
The Free Speech Movement, to that point a story with little resonance beyond the Bay Area, became national news when photographs of Savio atop the car appeared in the October 2 papers. It became a still bigger story on December 2, when some 1,500 Free Speechers, singing a rousing rendition of “We Shall Overcome” led by special guest protester Joan Baez, poured into Sproul Hall, the main administrative building on the Berkeley campus, taking over all four floors of the building and settling in for a prolonged sit-in. (Baez split early, but not before helping distribute peanut-butter sandwiches to the diehards.) By the wee hours of December 3, Governor Pat Brown had called in the California Highway Patrol to defuse the situation. When it was over, the police had arrested 800 demonstrators, the largest mass arrest in California history. Most of those arrested got off with probation, but Savio and Weinberg were each sentenced to 120 days in jail; Goines was sentenced to 60 days, which he served, for legal-wrangling reasons, in two separate installments, one in 1965 and one in 1967.

ALICE LOUISE WATERS
didn’t know Goines when both were undergraduates at UC-Berkeley, but he was precisely the kind of non–Ken doll she’d hoped to meet when, in January of 1964, she transferred—indeed, fled—up north from the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus with three of her fellow disgruntled sisters at the Alpha Phi sorority. “The women we’d met in Santa Barbara were all lined up to get married when they were twenty-two,” says Eleanor Bertino, who roomed with Waters on both campuses and also had been her classmate for one year at Van Nuys High School in Southern California. (Waters grew up in Chatham, New Jersey, but moved west with her family in 1961, her last year before college.) “We pledged the same sorority at Santa Barbara because it was the only way you could have a social
life,” says Bertino. “Very shortly, there were four of us who were like ‘Oh, my God—this is not for us.’ There had to be something more exciting and interesting than living in a sorority. Halfway through our sophomore year, we all transferred to Berkeley. None of us were politically involved, but we just liked the fact that there was activity going on up there. I mean, we were nice girls, not radical at all. I remember going to see an English teacher of mine before I left Santa Barbara, and she said, ‘I’ll send you brownies in jail.’ I had no idea what she was talking about.”