The cooking language of David Tanis
David Tanis – one of the storied chefs in the history of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse who, more than any other, helped define that restaurant’s cooking style – has a giant reputation. In reality, he’s of short stature, incredibly reserved, with a humility that is always a surprise when you compare him to chefs of his age with far fewer accolades.
In 1981, he started at Chez Panisse
baking bread, then, a year later, became the chef of the restaurant’s upstairs cafe. In 1991, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to be the head chef at Cafe Escalera, which he ran for seven years before returning to California in 1998 to share head chef duties in the main downstairs restaurant with JeanPierre Moullé. In 2001, Tanis moved to Paris, and in 2005, he began the most enviable job for a cook: working and living for six months in Paris and working the other half of the year at Chez Panisse (Moullé had the same arrangement, although he opted for Bordeaux during his six months in France.)
In 2011, Tanis retired from Chez Panisse and moved to New York, where he began writing a weekly cooking column for the New York Times called “City Kitchen,” which ran until 2019. Now, he writes a monthly seasonal-menu column for the newspaper and has under his belt four cookbooks, the most recent being 2017’s “David Tanis Market Cooking.”
Top; chef and author David Tanis shows how to make simple and tasty dishes with items bought at a farmers' market
in Los Angeles. Above, Tanis adds Parmesan cheese to a salad made with radish and arugula.