The United States of Arugula (23 page)

Though the critic Alexander Cockburn would later rather contemptuously
describe David as a progenitor of the now ubiquitous “cookbook pastoral” voice, this sort of writing was all but unknown to Americans in the 1960s. In David, Waters had at last found a food person in the Anglophone world who was speaking her language, calling for an honest, straightforward cookery “carried out with care and skill, with due regard to the quality of the materials, but without extravagance or pretension,” to quote from
French Provincial Cooking
(1960), the more substantial follow-up to the slender
French Country Cooking.
David’s prose alone was intoxicatingly summery and transportive, but her recipes, so much simpler (if more vaguely articulated) than Child’s labor-intensive
chaud-froid
sauces and boned birds served
en croûte
, made possible the reality of bringing the bounty of the rough-hewn Provençal farm table right to your flecked-Formica countertop: duck with figs,
ratatouille niçoise
, garlic soup, a classic
pissaladière
topped with olives, onions, and anchovies. Waters admired Julia Child, and was as enamored of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
as any culinarily adventurous young woman in the sixties, but David touched her soul. Here was a representation of French cookery that offered a dream fusion of the countercuisine’s pro-natural, anti–white food goals and Waters’s own romance with the “little no-star restaurants and bistros and cafés” that she’d experienced in France.

Such was the impression that David made on Waters that when the opportunity arose in 1967 for Waters to go to England to earn a degree in Montessori education, she chose to do so in part because going to England might afford her the chance to meet her idol, who at the time was running a kitchenwares shop in London not unlike Opton’s. And so, Waters moved to London for eight months, with Goines coming along to study calligraphy. She made her pilgrimage to David’s Bourne Street shop and saw the great author in the flesh, but couldn’t summon the nerve to introduce herself. (They wouldn’t formally meet until years later, when David, making her first trip to the United States in the early 1980s, came to Chez Panisse as a guest of the
Gourmet
wine columnist Gerald Asher.)

After getting her Montessori certification, Waters bummed around Europe for a few more months before resuming her life with Goines and their
Grove Street dinner parties. One of the frequent guests at these dinners was Bob Novick, another ex–Sproul Hall arrestee, who, late in 1968, started up an alternative newspaper with a fellow FSM alum, Marvin Garson, called the
San Francisco Express Times.
Novick asked Waters to contribute a weekly cooking column for the paper, with Goines doing the artwork and calligraphy. The column, called “Alice’s Restaurant” after the Arlo Guthrie song—which was itself about another countercuisine heroine, Guthrie’s friend Alice Brock, who ran a hippie-friendly café in Stockbridge, Massachusetts—was Waters’s first foray into being a public food person.

From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the
Express Times
recipes—for things like vichyssoise, chicken breasts florentine, carrot bread, and “Russian beef borsch”—are, by Waters’s later exacting standards, cursory, primitive, and not totally cool on the from-scratch front; she uses canned cherries for her cherries jubilee (!), and, for the crust of her cheese and onion pie, recommends a “store-bought pastry stick”(!!!).
*
But her disciplined pâté maison and chicken biryani were a far cry from the improvised, overseasoned hashes and stews that were popular in stoner circles at the time—“disgusting hippie crap,” as Luddy remembers with a shudder—and she did make a point of urging readers to use a cream cheese “without gum” for the filling of her blueberry tart.

By the time she was seriously considering giving up her day job as a Montessori teacher to open a restaurant, Waters had amicably split up with Goines, and was living with Luddy. Her new boyfriend’s connections in the film world broadened her social circle considerably. She got to know Francis and Eleanor Coppola, who had started up the American Zoetrope studio in
an old San Francisco warehouse in 1969, and, with Luddy, she traveled to the island of Noirmoutier, France, to stay as a guest of the filmmaking couple Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda. While Luddy talked movies with his hosts—the directors, respectively, of
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
and
Cleo from 5 to 7
—Waters hung back in the kitchen with Demy’s mother, who prepared the sorts of gutsy, unpretentious French meals that Elizabeth David wrote about.

In Berkeley, Waters’s dinner parties with Luddy were even more elaborate affairs than the ones she’d hosted with Goines, rich with culturati like Jean-Luc Godard and Susan Sontag and political activists like Abbie Hoffman and Huey Newton, the Black Panther leader. “It was radical chic, like Leonard Bernstein,” says Bertino. “All these people would come through their modest little bungalow, Alice would cook this lovely dinner, then more people would come, and Tom would screen a film, and then Alice would serve Armagnac afterward, and there would be these group political discussions.”

Luddy was also the one to turn Waters on to the films of Marcel Pagnol, in particular the director’s Marseilles trilogy from the 1930s, which the couple took in at the Surf Theater in San Francisco. The three films,
Marius, Fanny
, and
César
, follow the intertwined lives of a group of Provençal characters from youth to late middle age. The setting dovetailed nicely with Waters’s Elizabeth David obsession and affinity for all things Provençal, and she saw in the characters’ vicissitudes and passions a reflection of her own tight-knit, argumentative Berkeley set; not for nothing did Waters, an incorrigible romantic, start dressing in 1920s and ‘30s period clothing—cloche hats, berets, and vintage dresses that made her look a bit like Orane Demazis, the actress who played Fanny, the trilogy’s female protagonist. “We were all wearing vintage clothes then, because you could buy them for nothing,” says Bertino. “It was more glamorous than hippie clothing. Alice would get these beautiful 1920s beaded dresses for $10 that would fall apart after she wore them four times, but it didn’t matter because they barely cost anything.”

Waters’s favorite character in the Pagnol trilogy, or at least the one she grew mistiest over, was Panisse, a kindly, besotted sailmaker who offers to
marry Fanny when she learns she’s pregnant by another man, Marius, who has forsaken her for a life at sea. When Waters started casting about for names for her restaurant, Luddy suggested that she name it after Panisse.

It was another of Luddy’s film buddies, a Berkeley junior professor and fledgling filmmaker named Paul Aratow, who provided the impetus for Chez Panisse to become a reality. Aratow had spent time in France and Italy on a Fulbright fellowship, was an even more accomplished home cook than Waters,
and
he was willing to put up some of his family’s money to support the venture. “He had confidence up the kazoo, chutzpah, which Alice didn’t have. He really helped get us off the ground,” says Luddy. “He was very good in meetings, and would probably have made a greater impression on somebody loaning you money or equipment than Alice.” Aratow was the one who cut a deal to buy a run-down house on Shattuck Avenue off Vine Street, not too far from the Cheese Board and Peet’s, as the restaurant’s site—“an ugly, squat, two-story, Hollywood-type stucco apartment house that I tore apart with four or five hippie carpenters,” he says.

As 1970 turned into 1971, Aratow and the head carpenter, Kip Mesirow, hammered and sawed away, retrofitting the house with Mission-style woodwork and light fixtures, while Waters kept teaching at the Montessori school, planning menus at night. Victoria Kroyer, a former doctoral candidate in philosophy, was hired to be the chef, despite having zero professional cooking experience, because Aratow liked her confidence and the influences she cited: Michael Field, Elizabeth David, and Alice B. Toklas. “It was that impetuous—’You’re hired!’—and I guess it was just my lucky day,” says Victoria Wise, who now goes by her married name.

Waters’s friend Lindsey Shere, who lived down the block from the apartment she’d shared with Goines, agreed to come on board as pastry chef. Goines agreed to design and letter the menus. And Waters herself was responsible for the front of the house, hostessing, coordinating with the kitchen, and making sure everything looked perfect, from the flowers to the (mismatched) flatware. “It was sort of like those Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movies—’Hey, let’s put on a show!’” says Goines. “Which seems
kind of dorky, but that’s exactly what happened. It had the same innocence, and what was lacking in skill and experience was made up for in enthusiasm and intent.” To ensure that the staff could concentrate on getting the meal just right, there would be a set dinner menu every night of three or four courses, with no à la carte choices.

CHEZ PANISSE SERVED
its first dinner on August 28, 1971: an appetizer of pâté
en croûte
(an un-Provençal nod to Julia Child, whose haute, buttery tendencies were mitigated, in Waters’s mind, by her boosterism of French cookery and general wonderfulness), a main course of duck with olives, a salad, and Lindsey Shere’s almond tart. Waters wore a vintage beige lace dress. The kitchen wasn’t finished yet, there was insufficient silverware (Waters would return to the flea market several times that week for reinforcements), and the five waiters kept bumping into each other, because Aratow and Waters hadn’t yet figured out that the smallish dining room required only two or three. But for all the naïveté and rank amateurism, Chez Panisse’s principals knew they’d struck a nerve. “It was exactly the right historical moment for this to happen in Berkeley,” says Wise, who somehow kept her bearings in the kitchen that night. “The educated clientele, the professors and students who had been to Europe, were waiting for a restaurant like this.”

“We knew in a couple of days that we had something really hot,” says Aratow. “The place was jammed. People were coming over from San Francisco to eat in Berkeley. I mean, that never happened.” At the time, the most influential food writer in San Francisco was Jack Shelton, who published a dining-out newsletter with a circulation that hovered around 20,000. He reviewed Chez Panisse eight months into its existence and was hesitantly positive, calling the food and service uneven, but noting, by way of compliment, “I have never, ever been bored.”

The fixed price the first few months was $3.95, which was both a terrific value for a four-course meal and suicidally inexpensive considering the restaurant’s high overhead—the remodeling costs, Waters’s insistence on the
finest ingredients and floral arrangements, and her and Aratow’s “come one, come all” approach to staffing, which meant that there were as many workers in the restaurant as there were customers in the dining room. But it was still pricey for young Bay Area counterculturists. “I went to dinner on opening night with Ronnie Davis, who started the San Francisco Mime Troupe,” says Bertino, “and we thought it was outrageously expensive, and fancier food, richer food, than we were accustomed to eating.”

To Bertino, Chez Panisse’s opening marked a signal moment of retreat from the barricade-storming ethos of the sixties, of “backing away from politics and going into other things, food being one of them.” Just two and a half years earlier, on April 20, 1969, many of these same diners had taken part in the seizure of a vacant plot of land that was owned by the university, planting vegetable gardens, installing park benches and playground equipment, and naming the usurped parcel People’s Park. (Aptly for residents of a budding foodie mecca, the invaders celebrated into the night by drinking wine and dancing to the music of a hippie band called the Joy of Cooking.) Governor Ronald Reagan, who had defeated Pat Brown in 1966 in part on a pledge to “clean up the mess in Berkeley,” sent in the National Guard to retake People’s Park, resulting in the biggest Berkeley ruction since the Sproul Hall arrests—protesters rioted, tear-gas grenades were thrown, one young man was shot dead by deputies of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, and another was blinded by buckshot while watching the proceedings from the roof of Luddy’s cinema.

But the very week Chez Panisse opened, Bertino, Davis, and their pal Huey Newton were dismayed by the underwhelming attendance at an event that, in an earlier time, would have turned out masses of Berkeley radicals: the funeral of George Jackson, the imprisoned Black Panther leader who, eight days earlier, had been shot dead by guards while leading a breakout attempt at San Quentin. Few whites turned out for Jackson; Chez Panisse, on the other hand, kept packing ’em in, night after night.

It’s common for detractors to remark today on the “irony” that a restaurant founded on principles of sixties idealism now caters mostly to an
elite, moneyed clientele. But this gripe actually dates back to the oldest of the old days, when some Berkeleyites had a hard time coming to grips with Chez Panisse’s instant popularity. The Cheese Board collective’s members, despite their friendships with the Panisse staff, were particularly tortured about what their neighbor represented. Bob Waks, who expanded the collective’s product line by baking rapturously received sourdough baguettes, was happy to bake
some
baguettes for Chez Panisse, but not enough to fulfill their demand, because he didn’t want to be seen as a servant of the hoitytoity. Sahag Avedisian, the Cheese Board’s founder, was more confrontational. Though willing to sell his cheeses to the restaurant, he railed against a Chez Panisse employee sent over to buy them for being a “capitalist villain,” and, in one instance in the early seventies, instigated a very Diggers-like stunt: a “streak” through the restaurant in which several members of the collective, Avedisian included, ran into Chez Panisse stark naked, exposing their bottoms and genitalia to bemused customers.

But despite the concerns of people like Bertino and Avedisian, Chez Panisse wasn’t a retreat from politics—it
was
politics, a representation of what American food could be if people weren’t complacent about gassed, flavorless tomatoes and frozen TV dinners. The counterculture generated plenty of misbegotten movements and lysergically distorted belief systems that would later cause its members to feel disillusioned or embarrassed, but the fresh-food movement wasn’t one of them. In fact, it might well be the counterculture’s greatest and most lasting triumph.