19: Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, Thomas McNamee

The subtitle is so long that blogger won't let me fit it all in this post's title: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution


So. Alice.

The woman clearly has taste:

[...] Alice went out looking for a place of her own. In Hampstead, her eye was drawn to a tall Victorian house with a turret. "I've always loved turrets," she enthuses. There was a sign out front advertising a room to let, and the room was at the top of the turret! [...] "There was no central heating. You fed a space heater with shillings. The kitchen was in a closet across the hall—a two-burner hot plate with a tiny broiler underneath. I didn't care. I was living in a turret."

And later:

"She lived in a ship's captain's mansion."
"With a turret!" Alice exclaims. "Just like in London, but much grander."

She is an indefatigable perfectionist:

In Alice's vision, Chez Panisse would never be grand, but it would never compromise on quality. The utmost in craftsmanship and effort would characterize its every creation. If the staff worked as hard as she did, and with the same meticulous care, they would be well rewarded; if they did not, they would not last. It was simple: "No corners cut," she told everyone. "Ever."

And scatterbrained at times. An event planner Alice interviews remembers:

And when [Alice] opened the binder, all the pages fell out, and she was also talking, and she couldn't concentrate on what she was trying to say, so I took the binder from her and said, "Why don't I do this while you talk?"

Or, in the words of a radio and television producer friend of Alice's:

Alice likes to be a presence, but being on a stage just gives her vertigo, makes her levitate. We always say, "Did you stay in your body that time?" Sometimes I watch her words come out of her mouth like little birds getting hatched. It's so painful to watch her find her words. [...] When only the simple phrase "thank you" needs to come out, her nerves are jangling and she bumbles her next line, and she'll say, "I'd like to thank mmm..."—and it just gets lost.

Her aesthetic (mismatched silver, oak chairs and tables, french crockery, elaborate flower arrangements, organic vegetable still lifes) reminds me of a friend's and her mind that runs a hundred miles a minute, sometimes dropping things, not being able to focus on everything at once, struggling with sentences, reminds me of another. Her striving for perfection reminds me of both.


What about the restaurant then?

I want to go, much as I did before reading the book.