New American Cuisine

Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant, which opened in 1971 in Berkeley, California, was the spearhead of a food movement in the 1980s that transformed American restaurants. At the time fine dining in America meant French chefs, ingredients, classical cooking techniques, and even menu language. Waters wanted to re-create something more like the food-focused, no-name bistros that enthralled her as a student in France. Immediately popular among educated diners, Chez Panisse was struggling as a business when the self-taught chef Jeremiah Tower took over primary kitchen duties in 1973. Obsessed with freshness, he and Waters developed an informal network of gardeners and farmers to supply substitutes for difficult to import French ingredients. When Chez Panisse opened there was no domestically produced chèvre, free-range chickens, or baby lettuces. After three fevered years Tower had an epiphany, which was encouraged by the celebrated culinarian James Beard. He began to consider northern California’s fresh ingredients in their own right. On 7 October 1976 he prepared a northern California regional dinner, and the menu was printed in English. It was the symbolic beginning of California cuisine and the ascendance of local producers such as Laura Chenel, America’s first commercial goat-cheese producer; Niman-Schell Ranch, now Niman Ranch, which raised beef naturally; and Star Route Farms, California’s first organic farm, run by Warren Weber.