Discount Shopping Online :: Books Alice Waters and Chez Panisse : :

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse
by: Thomas McNamee

List Price: $15.00

Amazon.com's Price: $10.20

You Save: $4.80 (32%)
Prices subject to change.

Used Price: $4.21
Third Party New Price: $7.44

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5092
EAN: 9780143113089
ISBN: 0143113089
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: February 26, 2008
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sales Rank: 57379
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)

Related Items:

Editorial Review:

Product Description:
The first authorized biography of “the mother of American cooking” (The New York Times)

This adventurous book charts the origins of the local “market cooking” culture that we all savor today. When Francophile Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, few Americans were familiar with goat cheese, cappuccino, or mesclun. But it wasn’t long before Waters and her motley coterie of dreamers inspired a new culinary standard incorporating ethics, politics, and the conviction that the best-grown food is also the tastiest. Based on unprecedented access to Waters and her inner circle, this is a truly delicious rags-to-riches saga.

Amazon.com Review:
You can't tell the story of Chez Panisse, Berkeley's famed restaurant, without relating that of its diminutive founder, proprietor, and sometime chef, Alice Waters. This is what Thomas McNamee does most handily in his Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, a chronicle that begins with the seat-of-the-pants opening night of the 'counterculture' venture in 1971, and ends 35 years later with Waters's restaurant an American institution--one credited with birthing California Cuisine, a style devoted to simplicity, freshness and seasonality. The book also limns, with tasty gossip, the ever-evolving Chez Panisse family, including the cook-artisans uniquely responsible for dish creation; follows the attempts, mostly failed, to put the restaurant on sound financial footing; shows how dishes and menus get made; and of course pursues Waters as she broadens her commitment to 'virtuous agriculture' by establishing ventures like The Edible Schoolyard and The Yale Sustainable Food Project.

The success of Chez Panisse--Gourmet magazine named it the best American restaurant in 2002--has everything to do with Waters, yet she remains an elusive protagonist. Sophisticated yet naive, professional and amateur, hard-driving but emotionally blurry, she invites reader interest but doesn't always satisfy it, as least as presented here. If McNamee cannot quite bring her to life, and if his tale lacks an insider's full conversance with his subject, he still engages readers in the considerable drama of people finding their way--blunderingly, with talented intent--to something new. With menus, narrated recipes, and photographs throughout, the book is vital reading for anyone interested in food, period. --Arthur Boehm

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Chew on This
Two-thirds into the paperback edition of his biography of Alice Waters, Thomas McNamee tells us "If you're a writer, you'll find it very hard to sell an article about an idea unless that idea is embodied in a hero...."

Thus the book Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. Another writer might have developed this material without Alice at the center. A wider lens would have captured Chez Panisse against the background of Northern California from the 60s onward. While the chefs of Chez Panisse were shaving truffles in abundance, the people of California were transforming their culture from Pacific Utopian to one which all but abandoned the idea of the public good. The Free Speech movement and the Hippie Culture ushered in an age of drugs, aided by Governor Reagan, who emptied the mental hospitals, putting men and women on the street who, though helpless in most ways, were supposed to be able to remember to take ... Read More

Rating:

- We owe Alice Waters' cooking respect, and gratitude - but, oh, what a horror this book makes her out to be!
CHEZ PANISSE is a joy. I've made the pilgrimage four or five times; it's a splurge and a luxury and an indulgence and a delight. One eats wonderfully well there. Alice Waters, the restaurant's proprietor and director, has become identified with so many good things in cooking that who would want to tease those things and their patroness apart?

In buying an authorised biography, then, I expected uncritical adoration. That's what the book contains, larded with a sketchy recipe or a menu here and there. But even in a text meant to endorse Waters' apotheosis, the image presented of the woman is that of a monster of selfishness, destroying one person after another in pursuit of her desires. Sometimes the interests for which she crushes an acquaintance, a co-worker, are culinary; sometimes they're sexual; but what Alice wants, Alice gets, and her vast unconcern for others leaves blood and misery in its ... Read More

Rating:

- Interesting but Tedious
The author explores an important chapter in American culinary history and examines a unique contributor to that history. Once I fought my way through the book, I learned a few things:
1.)the food world has always been full of adventurous and idiosyncratic people and Ms. Waters is no exception.
2.)while her contribution and commitment to evolving the national palate is significant, it is wildly overstated. I am reminded of Jacques Pepin's reaction in his autobiography of their first meeting and listening to her overly serious discourse on her food: what's the big deal?
3.)her single minded drive is typical of all zealots- they are surrounded by acolytes and squish like bugs many of those who they have used, typically by having others do the dirty work. Her exploitation of her ex husband for breeding was notably offensive.

Despite all, Mr. McNamee would have rated 4 stars were it not for ... Read More

Rating:

- A great short story, but long on the read
I just finished the book and although I was engaged in the story the first half of the book, the 2nd half really dragged. Maybe if you have had the great pleasure to dine at Alice's restaurant, perhaps the story would have kept your attention better than mine. It's interesting to learn about the evolution of fine dining in this country and the recent movement for slow food. Alice Waters is a hero for her work way beyond the walls of her restaurant. However, the writing was inconsistent.

Discount Shopping Online Books and Publications

Books : Alice Waters and Chez Panisse
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Search the web for info about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse

Discount Shopping Online Books and Publications

Books : Alice Waters and Chez PanisseBooks and Publications Average Rating:

Search the web for info about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse

Books : Alice Waters and Chez Panisse
Books and Publications Average Rating: