Chez Panisse: 2000s
A Brief History of Chez Panisse in Four Parts
In 2010 Alice Waters asked me to write the text for a book celebrating the 40th anniversary of Chez Panisse, which came out the next year as 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering / Alice Waters and Friends. I wasn’t an innocent bystander; I’d been a member of the board of the directors that managed the restaurant since it was established in 1975, and still am. I wrote one chapter each for the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, and 2000s, centering each on a single incident—the opening in 1971, a table full of coke dealers in the 1980s, Bill Clinton showing up one night in the 1990s, a dinner to mark a friend’s death in the 2000s. The publisher said the book had to be in Alice’s voice, so what I wrote, aside from a few snippets scattered around with the memories and comments of dozens of others, was never published. I’ll be running the chapters weekly, adding dates for those who have died since I wrote, over the next month. I still recognize the place as it was in these pages; I hope others do too.
Part Four: The 2000s
Chez Panisse came into being as a place where people could gather, to mark occasions or go in search of them, and over the years it has become a place of rituals.
That was perhaps especially true in first decade of the twenty-first century. Despite two stock market crashes, the wrecking-ball recession that began in 2008, and California falling into an ungovernable, deteriorating morass, Chez Panisse was finally on firm financial ground. There were crises over individuals and long-range plans, debates over remaining true to the past and shaping the future, but day to day, night by night, the food coming out of the two kitchens could have the laughter, earnestness, and dash of the first year, the tenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth. And rituals were a great part of why on any given night Chez Panisse could seem completely new.