San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A celebrity chef serves up family trauma
In 2024, the long-accepted idea of a cult chef personality has been toppled, first by the headlines, then by fictional works such as the horror satire movie “The Menu” and comedy-drama series “The Bear.” Joining those properties is Liza Palmer’s latest novel, “Family Reservations,” which spins a tale of a toxic Bay Area restaurant dynasty inspired by some very real culinary icons.
Set in Marin County and San Francisco, Palmer’s book follows a trailblazing 1970s chef and restaurant owner named Maren Winter, who fought skeptics, misogynists and more to open Northern Trade, a Michelin-starred beacon of sustainability and female leadership. In the decades since, she’s stayed true to a vision of seasonality and simple, fresh ingredients, even as critics suggest she’s past her prime. Sound familiar?
“When you think of female pioneers, you think of Alice Waters,” admits Palmer, formerly a producer on BuzzFeed’s About To Eat video series. “You think of (Los Angeles baker and chef ) Nancy Silverton. There are very few.” But while the founder of Chez Panisse was definitely on Palmer’s mind, she was also thinking about Shakespeare’s centuries-old parentand-daughter drama, “King Lear.”
“Family Reservations” began as “a sort of justice for Cordelia,” Palmer says, referring to Lear’s youngest and most favored daughter. In “Family Reservations,” Winter’s three adult daughters — Sloane, Jules and Athena — are deeply damaged after a life under Maren’s massive shadow. But unlike “Lear,” the book’s inciting incident isn’t a praise contest — it’s a menu tweak that so enrages Maren that Athena is publicly, humiliatingly banished.
It’s the kind of fine dining dysfunction that was accepted for decades in the industry but has faced reckoning in recent years. Abusive chefs were often excused for their behavior with the expectation that “geniuses don’t have the interpersonal skills the rest of us have, because it takes beyond what humans can do to be that great,” Palmer says. As ugly as that misconduct seems to our contemporary eyes, it seems even uglier when it’s a mother bullying her daughter.
To Palmer, the chaos of a restaurant kitchen also serves as a metaphor for the mental health crisis many people have faced in recent years. “There’s this difference between the frantic action in the kitchen, and the appearance you have to keep up in the dining room that is representative of how a lot of us have been feeling since 2020,” Palmer says.
While few of us have worked in an elite kitchen, many are familiar with the stress and pain of a critical family member. So as Palmer started to write about the Winters’ family dynamics, she started to think about her own childhood — and how that shaped her as an adult.
Palmer made a number of trips to the Bay Area to dine at spots such as Waters’ landmark restaurant and San Francisco’s Ferry Building, which hosts the book’s shattering climax. That food hall’s waterfront setting provided Palmer with one of her earliest visions for the book. “I had this image of all of the women standing with their backs to the bay, the beautiful bridge in the background.”
During one of those visits, Palmer decided the book should be written at the Mill Valley Inn. The two-time Emmy nominee, for the VH1 series “Pop Up Video,” lives in Southern California but spent some of her earliest years in Marin and the Richmond District. “Mill Valley is my magic. It smells like fireplaces and time,” she says.
Driving the round trip from Los Angeles to Mill Valley, her characters’ struggle with generational trauma and anxiety on her mind, sent Palmer on a spiral of her own. “I had such a bad anxiety attack that I had to dump my car in San Jose and take the train home,” Palmer said of one writing and research trip.
Palmer is a funny lady, and her first temptation was to joke that meltdown away. But, instead, she decided to examine that rock-bottom moment unflinchingly, and to write through it. The results are scenes of tension, anxiety and self-sabotage so raw they’re painful to read.
“Novels and movies do us a disservice when it comes to healing yourself,” Palmer says. “It’s just a fun montage of someone getting better with a Noah Kahan song underneath it. I wanted this to be a story about what really happens when broken people find the strength to start healing.”
Dealing with the personal wounds that “Family Reservations” opened meant this book took far longer to write than her last. Danielle Marshall, the editorial director of publisher Lake Union, says she was concerned when she realized Palmer hadn’t released a novel since 2017.
“Then I learned that she had been going through things … that had created this drought in writing,” Marshall says. “Not only did that help me understand why she had this gap in publishing, but it also made me know that she was ready to jump in the deep end with this particular project.”
Palmer is grateful the book “was patient” and allowed her to “keep digging” to find it.
“We want one weekend in Mill Valley to write a book, or one weekend in Hawaii doing yoga on a beach to fix anxiety,” Palmer says. Writing “Family Reservations” taught her that “it’s messy, and it’s complicated.” Not unlike, perhaps, cooking a great meal.