Coming to My Senses

Consider this memoir a prequel, said Pete Wells in The New York Times. Before Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971 and changed American dining forever, she was a girl from New Jersey who had to learn what to want, in the kitchen and outside it. Writing about a year in Paris and 1967 San Francisco, she “describes these discoveries with the intense specificity we all give our life-changing first encounters.” She had no plan to launch a revolution; “before she had an ideology, she had desires.”