I am not sure how many people saw Kath25's terrific diary about How To Save Money the other night, but I feel confident that she did not include tips like "Move to California and start paying rent there before selling your house or finding a job" and "While unemployed, take a vacation to San Francisco on a whim." OK, so there are brighter things I've done... but the visit to the Mecca of sustainable food, Chez Panisse, was worth it.
I've forgotten when I first heard of the Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse and its creator, Alice Waters, but it was certainly by last summer at the latest. Anna Lappe was speaking in Madison and I magnanimously volunteered to drive her to each of her engagements.
Prior to meeting Anna, I read her book, Hope's Edge. Chapter Two profiled Alice Waters and her work. (The only other chapter about sustainable food movements in America describes my former hometown, Madison, Wisconsin, mentioning several friends I met while exploring our local food system and L'Etoile, one of my favorite restaurants in "The Berkeley of the Midwest.")
More below the flip... with pictures!
The trip to San Francisco came up out of the blue. Two weeks ago, I went to San Diego's Drinking Liberally, where I ran into withthelidoff. He told me he was going to San Francisco soon and Southwest had cheap fares. I needed no more encouragement. With those plans in place, I shot out an email to San Francisco Kossacks to let them know I'd be in town so we could perhaps meet up... and I included a long-shot request: I'd love to go to Chez Panisse, if only to look at the menu and drool.
If I'd known asking Kossacks to find reservations at Chez Panisse would be so easy, perhaps I would have asked to meet Michael Pollan too. For that matter, maybe I could have crashed on Markos' couch. Within a few minutes of sending the email, I got a reply from John07801. His visit to San Francisco coincided with mine, and when he called Chez Panisse, they had had a recent cancellation at their cafe and he was able to make Friday night reservations for four.
Friday afternoon, John and his boyfriend Marco picked me up at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, near a coffee shop I'd been hanging out in, and off we went. Time and time again, when I meet other Kossacks, I am blown away by what wonderful, kind, talented people they are. John and Marco of course were no different. I am truly grateful to Al Gore for inventing the Internet so that we could all find one another and form the vast networks of friendships that we have. (I'm only kidding about Al Gore, don't yell at me!)
John and me with the Golden Gate Bridge
After a stop for a scenic view and pictures, we went on to Berkeley, picked up my friend Petrice, and found the restaurant. Unfortunately, it was too dark to take a good picture of the whole building.
What about Chez Panisse earned its international fame? I'll let you read it in its own words:
Alice and Chez Panisse have become convinced that the best-tasting food is organically grown and harvested in ways that are ecologically sound, by people who are taking care of the land for future generations. The quest for such ingredients has largely determined the restaurant's cuisine. Chez Panisse has tried for years to make diners here partake of the immediacy and excitement of vegetables just out of the garden, fruit right off the branch, and fish straight out of the sea. In doing so, Chez Panisse has stitched together a patchwork of over sixty nearby suppliers, whose concerns, like the restaurant's, are environmental harmony and optimal flavor.
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Local, seasonal, and organic foods, just like we discuss here on DailyKos every week. Several people here have commented about growing their own food, joining a CSA, or trying to obtain all of their food from within a 100-mile radius of their homes. Usually, when you go to a restaurant, you must compromise your commitment to sustainability. It's the exception, not the rule, to find restaurant fare that comes free of pesticides, in season, from local sources.
Restaurants in most areas of the country would have trouble offering every item on their menu all year round if they committed to the principles of eating locally and sustainably. What's more, chain restaurants serving identical dishes around the country would find sourcing food locally for each location even more impossible. Chez Panisse handles the challenge gracefully: the menu changes every day based on the ingredients available.
Today's appetizers
(Just an FYI to those who note that Berkeley is one of the few areas in the country where you can grow food year-round: In Madison, there are a few restaurants that are committed to local, sustainable food just like Chez Panisse. These restaurants, L'Etoile and Harvest, manage to serve food year-round without any problem. When I left Madison in December, the farmers' market was still going strong with an extremely wide array of vegetables and fruits, many of which store well for several months.)
We dined at the cafe, which offers a la carte items as opposed to a fixed-price menu. Three of us started off with sunchoke and celery soup with turmeric oil and John got cardoons braised with Meyer lemon and anchovy. (We had to ask the waiter what cardoons were... turns out they are similar to both celery and artichoke and taste a bit like both.) I meant to get a picture of each dish, but our eagerness to taste our long awaited meal got ahead of me.
John finished his entire plate and (smiling) said, "That was TERRIBLE!" So terrible, in fact, that he ate it all up before I was half done with my soup. I, on the other hand, was so excited to try my soup that I forgot to breathe. I had to take a break to catch my breath, which is when I remembered my camera.
The soup had the flavors of both sunchoke and celery, with a smooth and creamy texture. I wasn't sure what to expect from turmeric oil, but it was beyond delicious. As we found with each dish we tried, all of the flavors were present, but each one was balanced in such a way as to avoid overpowering the others.
Just to see if I could push my luck a little bit further, I asked the waiter if Alice Waters was in the cafe. He told me that she was and, pointing out her booth, said that she would love to meet me. He said if anyone asked, I didn't hear it from him. I felt stupid going to pester Ms. Waters in the middle of her dinner, but with the waiter's a little birdie's encouragement, I did it anyway. I would have probably felt more stupid had I returned to San Diego without taking the opportunity to meet a true American hero.
Pardon me for mixing metaphors, but if Chez Panisse is my food Mecca, Alice must be the Dalai Lama of sustainable food. I nervously approached her booth and introduced myself as a fan. She was gracious and posed for a picture with me, and then I scurried back to my table, feeling sheepish that I had interrupted her evening.
Alice Waters & me
Alice opened Chez Panisse in 1971 and opened the cafe in 1980. If you visit the Chez Panisse website, you can read about her many achievements, but I'd like to bring up one here that may be of the most interest to this crowd:
Alice is a strong advocate for farmer's markets and for sound and sustainable agriculture. In 1996, in celebration of the restaurant's twenty-fifth anniversary, she created the Chez Panisse Foundation to help underwrite cultural and educational programs such as the one at the Edible Schoolyard that demonstrate the transformative power of growing, cooking, and sharing food.
For dinner, I went with a pizzetta with wild nettles and pecorino (I usually avoid cheese, but at a place like Chez Panisse, I doubt one even needs to ask if the cows were fed chicken litter and injected with hormones). I liked my meal, but I wish I had ordered what Petrice and Marco got: hand cut pasta with wild mushrooms, leeks, creme fraiche, and breadcrumbs. Mine was good; theirs was better. John got Monterey Bay squid roasted in the wood oven with pork belly, chickpeas, hot chilies, and curly endive. One thing I'll say for being a vegetarian in a fabulous restaurant like this is that it really eases decision-making. If I still ate meat, I am not sure I would have been able to decide what to order with so many mouthwatering choices.
All four of us with our meals
At this point, Petrice turned our conversation to food, asking the table what we thought about the Slow Food movement. Slow Food is an organization that began in Italy, basically working in opposition to today's fast food culture. The promote letting fruit ripen on the vine, and making food from scratch, and generally giving yourself enough time and presence of mind to enjoy your food. I met a woman back in Madison who was involved with the local Slow Food group and she described group get togethers where they tried and compared various expensive olive oils. (Alice Waters, by the way, is an International Governor of Slow Food)
From there, Petrice asked if anyone found Slow Food to be elitist, wondering "Who could expect a working mother of several children to ever do this?" John jumped in with, "My ex-wife."
Many years ago, when John married the mother of two children, the four year old child was incredibly hyperactive and, as I believe John put it, "a pain in the ass." On a strong hunch, his wife - the child's mother - committed to serving her family no more artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives. Practically overnight, the child did a 180. Whenever his old behavior came back temporarily, a little bit of digging would uncover that perhaps a friend gave him a popsicle or some other processed food.
I hope John joins us in the comments, because I was really struck by several things he said, including one comment that he did not think the child enjoyed being a pain in the butt. I bet he's right. I spent a few summers during high school and college working at the special needs preschool where my mother teaches. I remember being annoyed at two pain-in-the-butt three-year-olds who went by the nicknames Pooh and Tigger. As one teacher put it, "Tigger bounces." My annoyance turned to sympathy the day I found out that the twins' birth mother had a serious drug habit while she was pregnant (the twins had since been adopted by another couple).
Anna Lappe had the best response to the accusation that pushing sustainable foods is elitist. She believes that our system that determines that only the wealthy may eat healthy food is elitist. I long for the day when we progressives are able to change that situation. If healthcare is a human right, then we should remember that health begins with access to healthy lifestyle choices. We are throwing our tax dollars away if we pay for Medicaid but refuse to help Medicaid recipients to live a lifestyle that will avoid illnesses and excess medical costs.
From there we began talking about the concept of "going on a diet." Petrice again started us off, saying "I don't believe in the concept of a diet. I believe in changing one's eating habits - but tell me, what is the point of changing what you eat for two weeks until you lose all of your water weight, then going back to however you ate before?"
I love Petrice for saying this. She's one of the more beautiful people I know, but not in a conventional sort of way. She's tall, confident, creative, and always smiling - and probably a lot more secure about herself than most of our "beautiful" cultural icons. She's always been thin (but not skinny) since we met in college, and it just seems right that she doesn't buy into America's diet culture.
I've been thinking about diets a bit lately too. A few weeks ago, I offered a woman I met in San Diego (my former nightmare of a room mate) to help her lose weight, as she felt fat. I didn't think she was fat, but I also saw what she ate. I offered to take her to a farmer's market, since we have a really good one. She said "No, I can't eat fruits and vegetables like you. But if you know of any fat-burning foods, I'd definitely eat them."
Fat-burning foods? WTF??!! Somewhere in that conversation, I told her that I still eat cookies and dooughnuts whenever I want to. The whole time this year while I was losing weight, I continued my cookie and doughnut habit and I never once deprived myself from eating something I craved. When I said that, she was shocked. Absolutely shocked. To her - and to many people - eating to lose weight means punishing and depriving yourself. Eating should be about pleasure, not guilt and punishment. There's nothing like gorging yourself on an entire pint (or two!) of fresh picked strawberries from one of San Diego's farmers' markets. Each berry is the size of a plum and sweet like candy
On that note, speaking of pleasure and sweet cravings, let me share with you our dessert. Petrice went for a Meyer lemon tart with creme fraiche cream, I opted for Persimmon pudding with creme Chantilly, and Marco had Clay's bittersweet chocolate ice cream with chocolate wafers. John stuck to decaf while the rest of us traded tastes of our desserts across the table. Do I even need to describe how good it was? I don't know if I can find the right words.
I tried to remember to take pictures, but when I tasted my Persimmon pudding, I got a little distracted...
Meyer lemon tart
Persimmon pudding
Chocolate ice cream and wafers
Just one last closing thought here about my Chez Panisse experience. In the past year and a half, I've dined at Chez Panisse-style sustainable restaurants exactly six times (including this week). I did not see the bill because our overly generous host got to it before anyone else, not allowing the rest of us to so much as pay the tip (thanks, John, really you shouldn't have!), but I can guess.
The other five times were in Madison. First, I got a bonus of a $175 restaurant gift certificate for recruiting a friend, and I used it for two trips for two to Harvest. After my recruited friend's sixth month at work, I got another bonus, which I used to treat him to L'Etoile. Last summer, I unexpectedly received a large raise, which I used to take my friend Jonny to Harvest. Last, during Madison's Food for Thought Festival, I brought CSKendrick to a reception at L'Etoile for the contributors to the festival.
As you can see, even I reserve sustainable restaurant dining for special occasions, as I can easily drop $50 per person with tip - without ordering wine. I'm not sure what the solution is here, because I know leaving our food system in place is for sure not the answer. Perhaps sustainable restaurant cuisine can be had for less. Another Madison restaurant, The Old Fashioned, focuses on local foods but keeps prices reasonable (reasonable to me... I've heard grad students complain that they refuse to pay $10 for a sandwich). The food is not even in the same league with the meal we had at Chez Panisse, but it's nice to have different options for different occasions. Still, I think we need to address the systemic problem that reserves sustainable, healthy food for the elite.