A Quick Tip by Juhnay

Chez Panisse is a Berkeley, California restaurant known as the birthplace of California cuisine, a style credited to its co-founder, Alice Waters.

The restaurant is located in the north Berkeley neighborhood known locally as the "Gourmet ghetto". Chez Panisse has been listed by Restaurant magazine from 2006 to 2008 as one of the top fifty restaurants in the world. In 2006 and 2007, Michelin awarded the restaurant a one-star rating in its guide to San Francisco Bay Area dining.

Named after a character in a Marcel Pagnol film trilogy, Chez Panisse grew out of Waters' interest in the possibilities of using fresh, locally grown ingredients, inspired by her 1965 visit to France, where she ostensibly went to study at the Sorbonne but was seduced by the cuisine. A trip to the south of France that spring, with its cooking based on fresh herbs, vegetables and olive oil, would prove especially influential, as would a visit to Brittany, where she ate fresh mussels and buckwheat crêpes and dined at a small restaurant in an old stone house that crystallized her sense of what good food could be. Waters was influenced less by grand Parisian restaurants that served a predictable menu than by more modest establishments whose chefs visited the markets each day and invented the meal on the spot. La cuisine du marché, market cooking, relies on improvisation and experimentation and puts shopping on an equal footing with technique.

After Waters returned to Berkeley, she ...

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