Coming to My Senses

Starred review from July 17, 2017
Chef and restaurateur Waters (In the Green Kitchen, etc.) offers a personal view of her early life in this intimate and colorful memoir. The founder of Chez Panisse Restaurant and Café in Berkeley, Calif., Waters recalls a happy though gastronomically dull (e.g., frozen fish sticks, iceberg lettuce) upbringing in Chatham, N.J., as one of four sisters born to a Democrat mother and Republican father. Her supportive parents sent her to the University of California, Berkeley, where in the 1960s she became a political activist, aligning herself with the free-speech movement and the protest against the Vietnam War. She traveled to France for a junior year abroad and fell in love with all things French, eventually declaring the French history as her college major. Waters also fell in love with French food during the trip; her tastes and senses were, in her words, “awakened.” Waters began to dream of opening a restaurant; she purchased a house in Berkeley and in l971, at the age of 27, opened Chez Panisse—a unique, organic, locally sourced restaurant with a prix fixe menu and just one main entrée served each evening, producing an experience much like dining in a private home. Readers will be charmed by Waters’s adoration of exquisitely prepared food. Her anecdotes and her descriptions of friends and customers (many of whom were filmmakers, artists, and prominent thinkers of the time) bring the era and the restaurant to the mind’s eye in vibrant detail.

June 15, 2017
The veteran and much-honored chef and writer returns with a memoir that shows how bumps, bruises, and even youthful confusion and clumsiness can form the Yellow Brick Road.Waters--founder and longtime owner of Chez Panisse Restaurant and Cafe in Berkeley, California, and the author of numerous other cooking-related titles (My Pantry: Homemade Ingredients That Make Simple Meals Your Own, 2015, etc.)--came of age in the 1960s and lived her youthful years in such a free-spirited way that they seem almost to define, if not caricature, the era: France for a junior year abroad, where she rarely attended classes; numerous sexual relationships with evanescent commitments; some time teaching in a Montessori School, which she realized was not for her; and an almost magical life in Berkeley that has enabled her to meet celebrities in a variety of areas, including music, cinema, cooking, and graphic design. Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971--"chaos" and "mayhem" abounded--but it caught on very quickly and served as a launching pad for even greater success. Waters employs an interesting technique for her asides, divergent thoughts, flashbacks, and ruminations: she puts them in italics. They occur often and deal with such sundry things as a clambake, French bread, cheese, meeting Francis Ford Coppola and President Bill Clinton, and getting hooked on movies--a passion she now ranks right near cooking. The author does an artful job of showing how even the most apparently unrelated experiences helped lead her to her profession. She is also quite frank about her failures; her relationships with lovers, friends, and colleagues; and her pride in remaining a part of the 1960s counterculture that nourished her. She also writes affectionately about her parents and siblings and her colleagues. An almost charmed restaurant life that exhales the sweet aromas of honesty and self-awareness.

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September 1, 2017
As a girl in 1950s America, Alice Waters ate pretty much the same food as every other middle-class child: macaroni and cheese from a box, spaghetti from a can, and lots of bacon. Slightly wild and often mischievous, she showed little promise of becoming a founder of a world-famous restaurant, author of cookbooks featuring fresh, local foods, and notable culinary figure of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Only as a young college woman trying out countercultural livingnever a hippie!did she become interested in cooking. In her charming memoir, she recounts stories of both her youth and maturity in nearly every chapter, ending the book with a story about opening the now celebrated Chez Panisse. By including youthful antics, world travel, and brushes with celebrities, such as Julia Child, James Beard, and Francis Ford Coppola, Waters has written an engaging memoir that should be popular with many baby boomers and aspiring gourmets.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Waters' is a creative, tremendously influential, even legendary champion of local, organic, healthy, and delectable food.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 1, 2017

Chef, restaurateur, activist, and author Waters writes about her childhood and formative years leading up to the opening of her iconic Berkeley, CA, restaurant Chez Panisse. Waters grew up in New Jersey in a loving and supportive family with three sisters. She recalls her involvement in the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, the politically turbulent 1960s, and her opposition to the Vietnam War. A trip to France during her junior year of college was a life-changing experience, as she fell in love with the country's food and lifestyle, later incorporating those elements into Chez Panisse--a radical restaurant at the time that focused on organic and locally grown food and served one menu per evening. The author writes vividly about the major influences in her life (art and cinema), the artistic circle of friends she surrounded herself with in Berkeley, and the roles they played in her life and business. Failings along the way (such as training to be a Montessori instructor then realizing that she did not have the patience for teaching) are depicted with honesty and humor. VERDICT An engaging and entertaining memoir that will appeal to culinary fans as well as general readers.--Phillip Oliver, formerly with Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2017

In 1971, Waters committed a revolutionary act. She opened Chez Panisse, which did something unheard of at the time. It featured a single fixed-price menu that changed daily to take advantage of the best seasonal organic produce, which helped change how America cooks, eats, and thinks about food.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2017

Chef, restaurateur, activist, and author Waters writes about her childhood and formative years leading up to the opening of her iconic Berkeley, CA, restaurant Chez Panisse. Waters grew up in New Jersey in a loving and supportive family with three sisters. She recalls her involvement in the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, the politically turbulent 1960s, and her opposition to the Vietnam War. A trip to France during her junior year of college was a life-changing experience, as she fell in love with the country's food and lifestyle, later incorporating those elements into Chez Panisse--a radical restaurant at the time that focused on organic and locally grown food and served one menu per evening. The author writes vividly about the major influences in her life (art and cinema), the artistic circle of friends she surrounded herself with in Berkeley, and the roles they played in her life and business. Failings along the way (such as training to be a Montessori instructor then realizing that she did not have the patience for teaching) are depicted with honesty and humor. VERDICT An engaging and entertaining memoir that will appeal to culinary fans as well as general readers.--Phillip Oliver, formerly with Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.