Did you know that Alice Waters was just 27 years old, with no formal culinary training, when she opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA in 1971? You’ll learn that plus a lot more about this iconic Chef in her lovely new memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook. Waters takes us on a journey through her early life right up to the day the doors opened at 1517 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. You’ll have the chance to connect the dots from her repressive early childhood, wilder high school days, activist college life, and into her bohemian early 20s. It was then that Alice Waters met many of the friends and colleagues who helped shape and in some cases quite literally build her dream of a restaurant into existence.
I love looking at old photographs, and it was a delight to see so many photographs from Waters’ life shared throughout the memoir. She also shares excerpts from letters, giving us an intimate glimpse of who she was as a young woman.
Waters has led an extraordinary life, and the experiences she catalogs in the formative years pre-Chez Panisse are filled with humorous anecdotes about food, fascinating stories about film, and you’ll even hear about the time she missed out on dinner with John Lennon! Waters also reveals the origins of her love of garlic, and lays out the connections which helped create the Garlic Festival at Chez Panisse. Overall the book is a fascinating catalog of both the successes and failures that led her down the road to opening Chez Panisse.
My favorite part of the book, old photos aside, is the narrative which leads to the explanation of the naming of Chez Panisse. Could you imagine Alice Waters being famous for a restaurant called Le Metro? That was her original idea! I’m grateful for her friends who served as a sounding board when it came to names; I couldn’t imagine Chez Panisse by any other name.