Celebrating a legendary restaurant

Call it the little restaurant that could – and did.

Alice Waters and a handful of restaurant novices opened the small Chez Panisse in 1971 in a house in Berkeley, Calif. Now one of the most famous restaurants in the U.S. and the world, Chez Panisse turned 40 this year.

That milestone is celebrated in a new book, "40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering" (Clarkson Potter, $55).

The book is a photographic history of Chez Panisse and, by extension, Waters' life, augmented not only by Waters' commentary but also the commentary of a hundred or so friends, many of whom are former employees.

For such an informal history, the book successfully shows how this little restaurant ended up making such a big splash.

Waters became a revolutionary in the food world. And Chez Panisse was born out of the revolutionary ideas and protests of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, where Waters was a student. The movement's warnings of a "sterilized, automated contentment" in this country led Waters to seek "a contentment that was unsterilized and fertile and handmade." She found it working in the kitchen.

The other factor that led to Chez Panisse was Waters' studying abroad in France, which marked her culinary awakening and the beginning of her serious interest in cooking.

The freewheeling environment at Chez Panisse not only made it attractive to customers, but also to employees. Over the years, the restaurant employed such people as:

• Chef Jeremiah Tower. His knowledge of French food did much to raise the restaurant's reputation. Tower later went on to help pioneer California and New American cuisine, writing such cookbooks as "New American Classics."

• Chef Mark Miller. The founder of Coyote Café in Sante Fe, N.M., Miller is a best-selling cookbook author and a pioneer in Southwestern cuisine.

• Chef Deborah Madison. She went on to become the chef at Greens and later a best-selling author of vegetarian cookbooks.

From the beginning, Waters found other people to run the kitchen and cook. That freed her up to think big. As Waters says in the book's introduction, "For decades, Chez Panisse has been serving its guests not just food, but ideas."

Almost everyone who knows of Chez Panisse knows that these ideas involve organic, sustainable agriculture and local, seasonal food. If you had to pin the organic and local movements on one place, you wouldn't go wrong selecting Chez Panisse.

It's ironic that Chez Panisse helped pioneer California cuisine and even more importantly pioneered the American movement toward sustainable agriculture and local, seasonal food. That's because Waters and one of her original partners, Paul Aratow, were avid Francophiles.

The restaurant is named after Honore Panisse, a character in a trilogy of 1920s and '30s French films – "Marius," "Fanny" and "Cesar" – about working-class life in Marseille. The menus and posters – designed by David Goines, an artist and Waters' one-time boyfriend – evoked a Frenchified, art-deco style. And when the restaurant first opened, Waters most wanted to create the food and atmosphere of Provence.

"We were trying to evoke the sunny, good feelings of a world that contained so much that was missing from our own – the simple good food of Provence, the atmosphere of tolerant camaraderie and great lifelong friendships, and a respect for both the old folks and their pleasures and the young and their passions," Waters wrote in the book.

Despite the Frenchness of the food, the kitchen's preparations are simple dishes that focus on the purity of flavors, dishes that allow fresh, high-quality ingredients to shine.

Ownership seemed to be constantly changing because Waters was always givingstakes in the business to chefs and senior waitpersons. But this also means that people who worked there were invested, literally and figuratively.

Chez Panisse set an example of chefs going the extra mile to seek out the best and most local ingredients. Back then, Waters and her staff had to really search to find what they needed locally. Chez Panisse probably hired the country's first restaurant "forager," a person whose job was to supply the kitchen with everything that could possibly be attained from a local source.

Getting to know the farmers soon led to an interest in sustainable agriculture. That soon led to advocacy for more farmers markets. That in turn led to the Chez Panisse Foundation in 1996 to promote school curriculums that teach about food and sustainable agriculture.

The foundation began the Edible Schoolyard project, a combination teaching garden, kitchen and lunchroom. Edible Schoolyards are now cropping up all over the country, including one established at the Greensboro Children's Museum in 2009.

It's been a long road. It's also an impressive legacy.

Charlie Hallowell, a Chez Panisse alum, is now a chef/owner of Pizzaiolo restaurant in Oakland, Calif. He's an adherent of the local-food agenda that he learned at Chez Panisse. He sums up the restaurant's legacy pretty well in the book.

"At Chez Panisse I learned how a restaurant can be much more than just a restaurant. I got a taste of how powerful a small restaurant can be."