Alice’s favorite places
July 15th, 2009
I have it on good authority that Alice Waters’ favorite holiday is Bastille Day and her favorite ice cream flavor is Mulberry (hence this yesterday).
Waters has also shared her favorite places to eat and shop in the Bay Area with Google, of all people, so they could produce a “Alice Waters’ Favorite Places Map”.
Many of her haunts, unsurprisingly, are in her home town. Here they are:
- Berkeley Horticultural Nursery: plants and expertise in north Berkeley.
- Tail of the Yak: artistic gift store in The Elmwood.
- Redbird: High-end clothing boutique in Claremont ‘hood
- Edible Schoolyard: well duh.
- The Gardener: furniture, home accessories and more on Fourth Street.
- Cafe Fanny: named after her daughter, great food.
- Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant: mostly French, very knowledgeable.
- The Cheeseboard: pizza cooperative in Gourmet Ghetto.
- Ici Ice Cream: the queues down College tell you everything.
- Ajanta Restaurant: organic Indian food on Solano.
- Rose Gardens Park: views and blooms in north Berkeley.
- Acme Bread: best pain au levain in California.
- Chez Panisse: duh again.
- O Chame: California-Japanese fusion food on Fourth St.
- Herringbone make-up and beauty products on Shattuck.
For the full map click here. (Note that the map is titled San Francisco and Berkeley but there are several Oakland locations included and one in El Cerrito.)
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Funny that she didn’t include Eccolo on Fourth Street, started by longtime Chez Panisse chef Chris Lee.
Derrick: Agreed. Or Zuni which is run by two Chez Panisse alumni. Having said that, there are a lot of them, and it’s probably difficult to keep count. You may like to read this story I did on just this subject for the Financial Times: http://www.tktaylor.com/?p=111.
Ha, funny for me to read the intro. We know Curt and Mary Jo well.
She does mention Zuni in the large map (my home away from home or something like that is what she says).
And a few years back, I wrote an article about the flip side of the timeline for Edible East Bay: The convergence of events that led to the culinary culture we have here.
@Derrick Schneider
Is that article available on-line? I’d like to read it. I’ve long been struck at how many “cornerstone” food businesses all started within a 5-6 years of one another (a list that would include, say, Chez Panisse, Peet’s Coffee, The Cheeseboard Collective — but also quite a few others). And a lot of other businesses kind of followed from the same wellspring (e.g., there’s a lot of stories about who got their sourdough starter from whom, or who graduated from C.P. and when on to…).
The town must have been really humming. Cody’s had moved to Telegraph just a few years earlier. Annapurna arrived between the founding of Peet’s and the opening of Cheeseboard. Zellerbach hall was built around the same time. Berkeley Rep was founded. Only a few years after C.P. (’73), Yoshi’s opened up for shop.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, picking on the most widely known names.
All of that in a decade 1963-1973, mostly concentrated in the middle of that decade. Must have been “interesting times” in all senses.
-t
@Thomas Lord
Here’s the link: http://www.ediblecommunities.com/eastbay/summer-2006/summer-2006.htm#nowhere
It’s a few years old, and I might write it a bit differently now, but I don’t get to go back and edit it
You might also enjoy “The United States of Arugula” by David Kamp, which is a very well-written account of the modern food movement in America generally (with a fair amount of time spent on Berkeley), and “Alice Waters and Chez Panisse” by Thomas Mcnamee, a somewhat drier but still adept history of the restaurant and the people in it.
@Derrick Schneider
Thanks Derrick. I enjoyed reading that.
-t