Reflections on an Icon

Celebrating a wedding anniversary can be a tricky thing. People always ask, what are doing to celebrate, as though anything less than picnicing on the Great Wall or flying to Paris for dinner at Taillevent would be a testament to infidelity. We missed last year's anniversary, our tenth, when I suffered a back injury that laid me up for several weeks and even forced me to miss an important trade show. I had made reservations at Chez Panisse, a world-class restaurant, an icon of gustatory marvels, that happens to be a local eaterie for us, albeit one that finances only allow us to indulge in once in a while. I kept insisting as I lay grimacing in pain that I would be alright and could make dinner, refusing until the very last to call and cancel our reservation. My back healed, I made a reservation again, intending to recreate what would have been last year, and it was a resounding success. The dinner was perfect as it so often is at Chez Panisse, and it got me to musing on the nature of this famous restaurant, why it's so special, and more importantly, why so many people still don't get it.

Some foodies who make a pilgrimage to Berkeley to eat at Chez Panisse have come away disappointed because they expected tall, architectural dishes, stacked food with a myriad of ingredients coaxed into a perfect state of succulence by a chef who is part Jacques Pepin, part Dumbledore. In fact, thefood tends to be quite simple in both preparation and presentation. Not that the cooks at CP are not highly skilled. Quite the contrary with cooks venturing from all over the country to gain experience cooking there. The simplest way to put it is that CP is all about the ingredients. With close ties to the many farmers, ranchers, bakers and cheesemakers within a hundred mile radius of Berkeley, foods are delivered to CP at their best and peak of ripeness, whether it's a radish or a piece of soft-ripened cheese. My dish, made with handmade pasta (CP makes all their pasta by hand every day) with what was described as a chicken ragu. The sauce was light as could be and the spring peas were still sweet from the field as thought ey had been picked only minutes before. We both began with something I had never seen on the CP menu before, iceberg lettuce with a buttermilk dressing with chervil. Of course, it was the finest iceberg lettuce I had ever had (I can't remember the name of the farm since when I got home I realized I had taken the dessert menu instead of the dinner menu!) and the dressing was ethereal, so good that after the salad was gone I mopped up every bit of dressing with the exquisite Acme levain that is ever present on CP tables. My wife had a spring vegetable stew with Indian spices that was sublime. Every ingredient on each of our plates was as close to perfection as it could be without having dinner in the middle of the garden. For dessert there was no spun sugar fantasies, but rather a bowl of "Churchill-Brenneis Orchard Pixie tangerines and Rancho de Lux Medjool dates". Perfect and delicious. We broke down and shared the "Twin Girls Farm cherry tart with vanilla ice cream" that was intoxicating (or was iit the chilled Bandol rose wine we shared for the meal?). This to me is the essence of what I love about the food world. Pristine, organically grown foods, lovingly prepared and served in an atmosphere that is at once warm, inviting and stimulating. I hope everyone gets to try it one day.

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