How Chez Panisse began

When Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, she wasn't trying to start a food revolution. Here's how her neighborhood restaurant became the epicenter of the organic movement.

Alice Waters never ate in a restaurant until she went to France in her junior year of college. "That's when my whole world opened up," she recalls. "Everything was so beautiful there. I even remember my first French meal: a brothy root-vegetable soup with lots of parsley and garlic. It was amazing."

After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, Waters became a teacher at a local Montessori school. She loved the philosophy -- Montessori is "all about educating the senses and learning by doing" -- but decided she wasn't a very good teacher.

"My students -- four-year-olds -- wanted to know everything, and I felt I didn't have the answers," she says. "So I quit and opened a restaurant, borrowing cash from my father, who mortgaged his house."

Chez Panisse opened in 1971. It lost $40,000 in the first three months.

"In no time I had 50 employees, and I didn't know how to manage any of them," Waters says. "We were open seven days a week from 7:30 a.m. to 2 a.m., serving breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was too much. We were hemorrhaging money. I had to lay off half of my staff, and we stopped serving breakfast and closed on Sundays."

An angel investor, cookware store owner Gen Opton, stepped in to pay the bills and help Waters learn to run a business. The restaurant began to stabilize -- and then, in 1975, a glowing review in Gourmet put Chez Panisse on the national radar.

"Suddenly people were coming to the restaurant, but for the wrong reason: They wanted to be seen here. It wasn't about the food anymore," Waters recalls. "The restaurant became so busy that my friends couldn't get in! It was moving away from what I had wanted Chez Panisse to be: a simple, homey place where people could eat wonderful food. Getting back to that took years of personnel changes and menu simplifications."

It took eight years for Chez Panisse to become profitable. "I always said that if we survived the first five years, we'd be here forever," Waters says.

Today, she owns only an eighth of the business. Key staffers have been given shares over the years to keep them excited about and invested in the business.

"Part of my philosophy is to try to give employees a great quality of life. My guiding principle is to put myself in their place and ask what I would find desirable in a job," Waters says. "I also feel that it's impossible for a chef to work productively six days a week. Chez Panisse chefs work three and are paid for five. This way they have a day to go to the market and get inspired to cook. It also gives them time to have dinners at home with their families."

"I never tell the chefs what to cook. That's up to them. I'm here to taste," Waters says. "I love walking into the restaurant and being surprised."

Here, a pastry chef whips up a chocolate sauce. Chez Panisse is Mediterranean in spirit, but its seasonal menu incorporates dishes from around the world. Diners can peer into the restaurant's open kitchen and interact with the chefs.

"The people who eat here and the people who cook here need to be connected," Waters says. "That's why we have an open kitchen. Customers can walk into the kitchen and ask for seconds."

A dessert perches near peaches in Chez Panisse's kitchen. "We're driven by fresh, seasonal food that we buy at farmers' markets," Waters says. "From the very beginning we have worked to develop relationships with farmers."

Waters' belief in staying small and local extends to her business philosophy. Chez Panisse-trained chefs have gone on to launch dozens of new ventures and a few gourmet food chains, but Waters has resisted expansion.

"I couldn't imagine trying to operate another restaurant!" she says. "That's why there's no Chez Panisse East or Chez Panisse Las Vegas."

Those who haven't made it out to Berkeley can experience Waters' core culinary principles through her bestselling 2007 book, The Art of Simple Food.

"Learning about food and where it comes from has also always been important to me. It goes beyond the restaurant," she says. "I have a vision of what must happen for the good of the planet. I truly believe we need to turn our food system upside down and get back to the way food has traditionally been produced. It's about growing food locally, eating it in season, producing it without pesticides and preserving it for the winter months by canning."

Waters vision is global, but her main experimental ground for exploring it remains the neighborhood restaurant she's now managed for almost 40 years. "Running a restaurant is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge," she says. "As soon as you're done, you've got to start over again."