So great to read this book. Lots of insight into the restaurant I know so much about from a very different perspective. I loved learning about its messy, disorganized history, and seeing how it all came together. ( )

Okay, I admit I sped read through the last chapters, because after a while the saga of Chez Panisse and Alice Waters becomes the same story over and over again: Great Idea! Passion! Disaster! Revival! New People Just in Time! and so on.

But for a while it was fascinating at many levels: gossip, the sheer bravado of opening a restaurant with extraordinary (and often strange) concepts, the details of people coming and going and menus and recipes (recipes given in a prose recording of "well, then you take the butter, not too much, mind, and you go and get some of those radishes that we planted last week, the baby ones, wash off the grit, and then go grab the baby lamb and the knife..." sort of way). And the business details-- well, there aren't many in true business sense, but it is a tale of not being stopped by silly things like limited cash. Or fire.

Baby lamb brings up one of my problems with many a culinary book, which is that as a vegetarian I do start to shudder at the detailed pages on things like blue trout and baby lambkins. But that's just my problem.

Alice has been majorly influential, at least here on the left coast. Fun to read. ( )

Really this is a biography of two things: the woman and the restaurant. This book does an excellent job of describing how the two have influenced each other. It also wonderfully portrays their shared aesthetic, a sense of taste that is not just in the food, but in everything. ( )

A bio of both the famous restaurant in Berkeley and it's founder, sometime chef and public face of Waters.

It begins with Waters' childhood and I really thought that there was no need to go back quite that far, but as you go through her college years and the beginnings of her interest in food, and the fact that her father figures into the later success of the restaurant, it makes sense to have the background.

Chez Panisse has repeatedly been voted the best restaurant in America, but its rise happened slowly and in a way that probably wouldn't happen these days. Who could get away with being backed by drug dealers? And the success happened despite Waters' utter lack of business skills, and her confusing desire to attend the Sorbonne, to cook for her friends, to open a restaurant, but not to be the chef. I found it really strange that she built her life around food and held the title of chef while avoiding the actual cooking most of the time. Which brings up another thing about the book; I thought it would be a kind portrait of Waters and for the most part it is. But about halfway through McNamee begins showing cracks in the Panisse family and it gives a more realistic view of what it's like to have had such a group effort that benefits one person more than the others. ( )

This well-put-together book follows a petite child of the 60s - present at the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley - to her current status as the epitome of California - no, American - cuisine. Everyone who is at all interested in food knows Alice Waters, and this is her story. It is also the story of her restaurant, Chez Panisse. But it turns out that the restaurant is but a launching pad for Alice's global movement of cultivating and consuming fresh, local and mostly organic food.

Yes, a lot of time is spent on menus and preparation of the food at Chez Panisse, but it was just this careful, innovative and obsessive work that brought attention to Alice. Using that attention, she seeks, near the end of the book (taking her to age 62), to change the way the world eats.

The business of restaurants (not Alice's strong point) is examined, and the pivoting of Chez Panisse around its varied chefs over 35 years (Alice was rarely one) is well descirbed. Photographs of all the important folks in the story, and sidebars of recipes and cooking techniques, make the book a very attractive one, as does its Calfornia Craftsman style design.