Chez Panisse: Eighties
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 Two: The Eighties
The revered and reviled New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who had begun her career in Berkeley in the 1950s, writing in small journals and broadcasting on the independent FM station KPFA, summed up the movie version of the seventies as an era of unrelieved cynicism, where everything had its price and only fools hesitated for a second before gearing up to take the money and run, usually after leaving a welter of corpses behind. Was it Watergate? The crash of so many raised hopes from the decade before? How was it that you could leave the theater in 1967 after seeing Bonnie and Clyde, which ended with the massacre of its heroes, with a stronger sense of possibility, of energy, of life, than you felt in the seventies walking out after The Godfather or The Godfather, Part II two years later, both of which ended with the triumph of its hero?