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Three times a week, a truck putters 45 miles south from a farm in Sonoma County, headed for Berkeley’s North Shattuck neighborhood, filled with plump, corn-bred, nine-week-old ducks.
The ducks, better known as Liberty Ducks, are descended from Denmark and destined for a two-story, vine-covered culinary Mecca. The birds are bred, nurtured and sold by a Northern Californian fourth-generation farmer, and they represent a nearly four-decade-old philosophy of the restaurant Chez Panisse and its founder, Alice Waters.
“We ended up very quickly on the doorsteps of the organic farmers,” Waters said of her first years in the restaurant business.
Fresh fruits, vegetables and meats organically cultivated by local growers, like the ducks brought from Sonoma County Poultry, pepper a menu as focused as Waters’ passion. One of the most decorated, respected and renowned chefs in America, she is credited by many with re-popularizing the old idea of serving unaltered, garden-fresh foods, an effort that has influenced places far beyond Chez Panisse’s white-clothed tables.
Dressed in a shin-length charcoal dress and wrapped in a multi-colored scarf, Waters sat in a back room on the second floor of her restaurant and, as she talked about her ongoing love affair with clean, healthy foods, sipped on a Blue Bottle Coffee latte splashed with organic Straus Family cream made 60 miles north of San Francisco.
She talked in a soft, elegant tone but glowed with excitement when she mentioned straight-from-the-garden ingredients, helping children eat healthier diets or her long-term relationship with California farmers – her “friends,” she said.
“Every time I’m buying food, I’m supporting those people who are taking care of the land,” the 64-year-old Waters said, brushing back her short, maple-colored hair as a chef in the kitchen behind her chopped fresh shallots.
“I couldn’t have done what I do in another market just because she’s really created the drive for everyone to do similar things and to have the same sort of attention to products,” said Jim Reichardt, owner of Sonoma County Poultry. “She created the market.”
Reichardt and farmers like Karen and Ben Lucero, owners of Lucero Organic Farms about 75 miles northeast of Berkeley, talk about Waters with reverence, almost as if they owe their livelihoods to her work.
“It’s a blessing to everyone,” said Karen Lucero, who supplies Chez Panisse with strawberries. “She’s buying the produce and doing lovely things with it.”
When Waters, who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967, opened the restaurant in 1971, full of ideas and dreams from her time spent studying in London and traveling in France, she said she didn’t have the same commitment to sustainable products that she does now, instead focusing just on serving French-inspired “delicious food.” She even grimaced when asked about the wooden panels made from redwood trees outlining Chez Panisse’s second-floor walls, although she quickly added that the bottom floor was made from recycled lumber.
Waters’ search for those delicious ingredients eventually led her to the local farmers and their organic produce like the strawberries from Lodi and the ducks from Sonoma County.
“She’s so keen on the prime ingredient and cooking as a simple process,” said Paul Bertolli, a Chez Panisse chef from 1982 to 1992, current book author and owner of California salumi producer, Fra’Mani. “The stuff that used to come in the door was such that you just didn’t want to screw it up.”
Bertolli said that although his time at Chez Panisse launched his career, and he loved working for Waters, she was, at times, challenging.
“When I was working with her in the kitchen, she’d say ‘Paul, make this taste good.’”
Bertolli remembered one occasion when Waters wanted to serve anchovies even though they were still mostly frozen, making them almost impossible to scale, clean or cook. He said they stacked grills on top of each other because the fish kept slipping through the grates.
“I looked at her and said, ‘Alice, this is crazy. Then she said, ‘as Elizabeth David said, ‘good cooking is trouble’” Bertolli remembered, laughing. “She would ask me to do crazy things.”
Michael Bauer, the San Francisco Chronicle’s food critic since 1986, said that drive for perfection and sometimes impractically high standards have made her successful in the restaurant business and beyond.
“What Alice has done really well is stick with Chez Panisse. She’s had basically a singular message,” Bauer said. “I think the other thing is that so many other chefs have cashed in monetarily on their vision. She’s really stuck to her vision.
“Her restaurant has become a platform, but not a platform to line her own pockets,” he said. “It’s a platform for her own visions.”
Bauer also said Chez Panisse is one of seven restaurants – among thousands – he has awarded four stars.
“I gave her four because she does what no one else does,” he said. “I think that it’s still magical.”
Chez Panisse has also been included among S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants since Restaurant Magazine began the rankings in 2002, and they awarded Waters the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants Lifetime Achievement award in 2007.
Other awards include the 1997 James Beard Humanitarian Award, Bon Appetit magazine's 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award and most recently the 2008 Global Environmental Citizen Award she received along with Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations.
“We felt like Ms. Waters’ work with sustainable food has been groundbreaking,” said Kathleen Frith, associate director at the Center for Health and the Global Environment, which gives out the award. “I think she has done a great job helping people understand how our food choices are linked to both our health and the health of the environment.”
Beyond the lofty awards and international praise, Waters’ love always leads back to the beauty of pure, simple food, like her favorites – garlic and parsley – and a desire to share that “deliciousness” with the rest of the world.
“You have the opportunity of awakening your senses. You have the pleasure of eating with your family and friends,” she said. “You have a sense of time and place. You feel connected to a community.”
