The United States of Arugula (27 page)

Waters and Tower remained cordial enough for him to make a brief return engagement at the end of 1978, when she was going to be away and wanted someone she could trust to oversee Moullé and his staff. But in the aftermath of that stint, she would tell
New West
magazine that Chez Panisse, under her stewardship, was benefiting from a shift away from the “old conservative menus” (for “conservative,” read “fancy”) of the previous regime. Tower was wounded, telling a reporter that “In the beginning, Alice didn’t know a little vegetable from a rotten one,” and the skirmishes in the press would continue for at least a decade—most notably in 1982, when the first Chez Panisse cookbook,
Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook
, was published, and Tower felt his contributions weren’t sufficiently acknowledged. Later, from
his perch at Stars, the large, vibrant San Francisco restaurant he owned and ran in the 1980s and early 1990s, Tower would deploy the phrase “too Berkeley” as his favorite pejorative.

But even Tower can still admire Waters for sticking to her vision. “She deserves credit for being in love with food, being in love with the neighborhood bistro that should be part of everyone’s life,” he says. “Where you can just drop in, and you say ‘Hi’ to the bartender, and you have a glass of wine that’s interesting and good and inexpensive. And just have a pizza or sit down and have a meal. That’s a Pagnol vision, a European vision—that the bistro was the heart of the village. Her vision was incredibly strong and has never wavered, really, so she deserves credit for sticking by it. To have never given up that vision, and not to have done it another way, like Wolfgang Puck, with a $378 million a year gross income—it’s almost unique in this part of our culinary history.”

There’s also much to be said for the environment Waters fostered, the excitement she generated that so many young countercuisinists wanted their share of. Steve Sullivan, the busboy and gofer who later established the riproaringly successful Acme Bread Company, recalls that his lonely graveyard shift at the restaurant was frequently interrupted by 4 a.m. telephone calls from “college students who wanted to work with Alice.”

“I’d pick up the phone thinking it
was
Alice, telling me to get something else at the market,” he says, “and it was some kid saying ‘I’ve been reading about Chez Panisse and I really want to come to Berkeley and be an apprentice.’”

Among those pulled in by the Chez Panisse mystique, besides Sullivan, were Deborah Madison (or “Debbie,” as she was then known), the lunch-time cook who opened the vegetarian restaurant Greens; Judy Rodgers, Madison’s fellow lunch-shifter, later of Zuni Café; Mark Miller, the sous-chef later to be the Southwestern evangelist behind the Coyote Cafe; and Jonathan Waxman and Mark Peel, both of whom briefly passed through Chez Panisse’s kitchen en route to stardom in LA. Waters, essentially, had a kitchen-staff equivalent of her friend Francis Coppola’s cast for his 1983 film
The Outsiders
, an assemblage of then unknowns and little knowns that included Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, and Patrick Swayze. And as many a Panisser has noted, her motley collection of ex-, current, and quasi-boyfriends was itself an amazing marshaling of disparate talents that she put to good use—Goines for his Art Deco–Art Nouveau graphics sensibility, Luddy for his pull in the film world, Budrick for his provisioning and Mr. Fix-it skills, Robert Finigan for his influence in the food press, the wine merchant Kermit Lynch for his oenological expertise.

“Alice was innocent and frail and weak, but at the same time, she was a bad motherfucker,” says Bishop. “Her determination and her strength, hidden behind that frailty, made that place continue and continue and continue, no matter who left. And
everybody
left. But she didn’t. She is the woman.”

IF CHEZ PANISSE AND ITS GOURMET GHETTO NEIGHBORS WERE A PERSUASIVE ARGU
ment for the joys of living in Berkeley, not everyone was buying it. Concurrent with the restaurant’s rise in the early seventies was a migration north from the Bay Area by shaken and disillusioned activists. Marin, Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt—the counties up the California coast were verdant refuges from the bad vibes of the late sixties, the places to go if you’d been on the barricades, seen too much, and decided to chuck it all and go back to the land. “We were working to create alternative institutions and really were not feeling very good about the government,” says Bill Niman of his circle of friends, which settled in Marin County. “We were quick to think that there was a conspiracy behind every event, and, certainly, the situations with Jack and Robert Kennedy were paramount in our minds.”

But the rural stretches above Berkeley and San Francisco proved so fertile, both agriculturally and ideologically, that even these escape-minded back-to-the-landers ended up being part of the Bay Area’s gourmet revolution. Not that this was necessarily by design. Niman’s rise to foodie fame as a supplier of high-quality, humanely raised pork and beef was slow and gradual, his food career something he more or less stumbled into. Much the same could be said of Laura Chenel, a Sonoma County nature girl who became
the nation’s first commercial producer of goat cheese, and of Mary Keehn, a single mother of hippieish mien, who, way up in the Humboldt County town of McKinleyville, invented a delightfully original goat cheese which she named Humboldt Fog—chalky in the center and gooey around the edges—that eventually became a centerpiece of the “cheese course” frenzy that gripped American fine dining in the 1990s. Though it wasn’t until the end of the twentieth century that the names of Niman, Chenel, and Keehn were familiar even to the East Coast food establishment, all three had been around for a while, products of the same sixties counterculture that gave birth to Chez Panisse.

Niman was a Minneapolis grocer’s son who’d moved to California in 1968, the year he turned twenty-four, in a rush of altruism. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, a cornerstone of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, specifically earmarked public money for poor school districts, and Niman, eager to do his part, got a job teaching middle-school kids in the rural San Joaquin valley, in the interior of central California. Thrilled with the experience but raw as a teacher, he moved on to Berkeley to get more formal educational training. But Berkeley “was already pretty dicey” by the time he joined its school system, he says, fraught with racial tension and “bad energy.” Niman’s sister lived in Marin County, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and she told her brother about Bolinas, a progressive community that was looking for “a New Age kind of teacher.”

Bolinas at that point was one of the most extraordinary places in the United States, its citizens bohemian but civic-minded, druggy but not to the point where they would let their town become a fetid, Haight-style free-for-all. The landscape was too gorgeous to sully: at once rural and coastal, with thick forests of cypress and eucalyptus and large tracts of open pastureland that rolled right out to the foggy Pacific. No town not anchored by a university had a greater concentration of poets. Among Bolinas’s residents in the late sixties and early seventies were Ted Berrigan, Richard Brautigan, Jim Carroll, Robert Creeley, Lewis MacAdams, Alice Notley, and Aram Saroyan.
Niman wasn’t as boho as this crowd—with his mustache and broad shoulders, he looked more like an electrician than a poet—but he knew he’d found the place where he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

Ranching wasn’t originally part of his plan—he was a schoolteacher, after all. But Niman and his future wife, Amy, another teacher, scraped together enough money to buy an eleven-acre homestead, building their own little house and barn on the property. Though Niman’s entrepreneurial future lay in beef and pork, he originally had no cattle and just a few pigs. Like other homesteaders in Marin and points north, Niman kept animals for the simple purpose of self-sufficiency. “It was about producing your own food,” he says. “We had a lot of smart people in Bolinas, Ph.D.s and talented people, twenty- to thirty-year-olds who were very hip and active. And part of being in this community was making it self-reliant: raising our own food. Everybody was diddling in it and dabbing in it and had his own methods. That knowledge was being shared all around town. We would sell wiener pigs, little pigs, to somebody else for meat, and other people were doing vegetables, which they would sell to us.”

It was no wonder that the members of this community were hungry. Among its early cooperative horticultural goals was the cultivation of the perfect marijuana. “There was breeding going on, and exchanging of seeds,” says Niman. “Plantations of marijuana all over the area, in Bolinas, Sonoma, and Mendocino County. If you went to a party in Bolinas, there’d be a mound of big joints, made from the best pot. Everybody was openly smoking, everywhere.”