Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolut, (Paperback)

from efear

I've got to hand it to McNamee: Not only did he make a lovely sense out of the lovely disorder going on at Chez Panisse, he carefully crafts the depiction of Alice Waters, so as to capture all facets of this prism personality. In the late 1960's, Waters, an admitted Francophile and dreamer, opens...

from flemmily

Really this is a biography of two things: the woman and the restaurant. This book does an excellent job of describing how the two have influenced each other. It also wonderfully portrays their shared aesthetic, a sense of taste that is not just in the food, but in everything.

from GraceZ

So great to read this book. Lots of insight into the restaurant I know so much about from a very different perspective. I loved learning about its messy, disorganized history, and seeing how it all came together.

from mstrust

A bio of both the famous restaurant in Berkeley and it's founder, sometime chef and public face of Waters. It begins with Waters' childhood and I really thought that there was no need to go back quite that far, but as you go through her college years and the beginnings of her interest in food, an...

from Harlan879

This is a very inconsistent book about a really interesting character. The first half of the biography, about how Waters got interested in food and the influences that led her to be a leader of the California/New American cuisine movement, was fascinating. The combination of hippie hedonism and c...