San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The future of Chez Panisse
Alice Waters on her succession plan and the greatest threat facing the restaurant
Chez Panisse was supposed to reopen its dining room this month, bringing life into the storied Berkeley restaurant during its historic 50th year in business. But management decided to postpone until 2022 out of safety concerns over COVID-19, as the converted craftsman’s cozy charm doesn’t allow for social distancing.
The change means there’s been little public celebration for the famous restaurant, widely heralded as the pioneer of California’s farm-totable cuisine. Instead, it has continued to diligently serve pizzas for takeout and sell produce farmers’ market-style on Sundays.
That said, Chez Panisse’s 50th anniversary coinciding with a worldaltering pandemic has, in its own way, solidified certain values for founder Alice Waters. She’s confident in the restaurant’s vitality, and “it will go on as long as it can,” she said.
“The thing that’s kept us alive is our rigid seasonality,” Waters said during a recent interview at her North Berkeley home. “For people whose menus don’t change, it’s very hard to be inspired and feel like you’re connected to nature and something that’s always changing.” The pandemic has forced many restaurateurs to reevaluate their business models and promise changes like raising wages or adding surcharges, all the while struggling with an industry-wide staffing shortage and supply-chain issues. At Chez Panisse, however, Waters said the team has been talking about how to keep the restaurant alive for decades — and that many of the workplace benefits other restaurant owners are just now implementing have long been a given at Chez. The restaurant added a service charge back in 1989 to pay for health care and vacation for employees. Waters also instituted a co-chef policy in the ’80s, allowing those leading the kitchen to work three days a week but get paid for five to avoid burnout.
Looking ahead, Waters said it all comes down to education. The former Montessori schoolteacher spoke to the importance of internships, with staff assuming the role of teachers, as well as Chez’s connection to the University
of California. In both cases, students cycle in and out of Chez’s kitchens and then move on. Waters says these efforts, rather than specifically bringing in more diners, are vital for spreading the values of Chez Panisse, especially amid climate change.
“It’s a way to deeply implant the ideas, the values of stewardship, community, diversity and nourishment,” she said. “These are the values that are important for us to live on the planet together. We really have to learn them.”
Waters doesn’t plan to retire because she doesn’t believe in the concept, which she described as “an American idea” of working too hard and then going off on a cruise ship and feeling lost late in life. She credits
attending UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement for her anticareerist attitude, lacking traditional expectations for Chez Panisse and instead thinking about how she simply wants to live life. She still wants to start a commune, perhaps on a farm in Italy.
A succession plan — for when Waters, 77, dies or takes off for overseas commune living — has always been in place, she said. The restaurant operates with the same board of directors that it’s had since the early days, a group of friends dedicated to keeping Chez’s history and principles intact.
“Every year we decide, do we want to do the restaurant for another year? Are we liking it? Is it inspiring to do it? Are we communicating the values?” she said. “I really trust the younger people who are working at the restaurant to breathe life into that always. And that’s the succession plan.”
The biggest threat to Chez’s future, Waters said, is climate change. That’s because the restaurant is completely dependent on local farmers, ranchers and fisheries. And that’s why her chief priority these days is getting more people to buy organic, sustainable ingredients from local producers — an effort tied to her nonprofit, the Edible Schoolyard Project, which supports nearly 6,000 programs around the world.
That’s also why she’s so focused on collaborations with the University of California. She’s actively fundraising to build the Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education at UC Davis, which she hopes can begin construction in spring 2022. The multifaceted project will train educators on Waters’ “edible education” methods that could be put into practice in classrooms, cafeterias and community gardens, plus host a cooking school, a farmers’ market and a film and lecture series on regenerative agriculture.
Waters is also helping open a restaurant at the Hammer Museum on the UCLA campus with the goal of connecting beautiful food with beautiful art. That restaurant, like Chez Panisse, is holding out on opening until it feels safer to do so.
Meanwhile, Waters said she’s still finding fresh inspiration in local produce, like yellow-and-maroon tomatoes she’s never seen before and otherworldly beets that “seemed to come from another dimension.” She has more time to connect with neighbors growing fruit in their yards as well as locals who have launched new small businesses.
“The longer we are closed, the longer we’re reflecting not only on where our food comes from, but we’re building our local community,” she said. “The more that we kind of wake up to the world that we live in and understand our interdependence, the better.”