Chef’s life a banquet of sensual discovery
BERKELEY, Calif. — There's something you should know about Alice Waters, the celebrated chef who changed the way America eats.
She grew up eating frozen peas, frozen fish sticks and canned fruit salad for dinner. To complete this incongruous picture, Waters adds, "I grew up with iceberg lettuce and Wishbone dressing."
Waters and her restaurant Chez Panisse are credited with pioneering the farmto-table movement and introducing mesclun to the masses. But she wasn't always a revolutionary, and she wants people to know that.
Her journey from a childhood of 1950s convenience cooking to the heights of American gastronomy is the subject of her new memoir, released this month.
In "Coming to My Senses: the Making of a Counterculture Cook," Waters tells richly detailed, occasionally spicy tales of her early years, the travels, transformative meals, friendships and love affairs — there were many — that changed the course of her life and led her to open Chez Panisse in 1971, without any formal culinary training.
Seated in a sunlit alcove of her iconic Berkeley restaurant, which is still booked weeks in advance, Waters, 73, is animated, engaging and personable.
The towering culinary figure stands a diminutive 5-foot-2 and boosts herself up on an extra banquette cushion before discussing her
life story over a pot of herbal tea.
Waters has published more than a dozen books through the years, mostly cookbooks, a few about the restaurant and two illustrated children’s books. But none had prepared her for writing her memoir.
“This is a very personal book. At first, I didn’t know whether I could do it,” Waters, said. “But I knew I had to do it honestly, or not do it at all.”
The book tells selfdeprecating anecdotes of early encounters with culinary greats such as Julia Child and Paul Prudhomme, and recollections of her suburban New Jersey childhood. As a teen, she drank too much and stayed out past curfew. Waters was briefly a high-school cheerleader and in a college sorority until getting kicked out on “morals charges” — drinking and staying out late.
She recounts painful memories she had never publicly discussed, including an attempted rape in the mid-70s when a man with a knife broke into her Berkeley apartment. She escaped by jumping head first out a second-story window. It left her terrified but ultimately empowered by her survival instinct.
“A lot of things I never talked about are in this book. It’s hard for me. And I have to keep remembering why I’m doing this,” she said.
Waters is mindful of her legacy and this book is part of it. It helps connect dots and tell her story, she hopes, to a new generation.
“I want to really make a connection with the counterculture of this country, with the young people that are curious about my past and how I came to open a restaurant when I was 27, without any experience at all. I want to tell them everything that empowered me — and made me stronger.”
Waters stopped cooking full-time in the kitchen years ago. But when home, she’s usually at the restaurant, eating meals and fine-tuning the menu, the lighting — “I just never get it right. I want it to be perfect.”