In the Restaurant by Christoph Ribbat

Author:Christoph Ribbat [Christoph Ribbat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782273103
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chez Panisse is burning. It is a Saturday night, 7 March 1982, and Alice Waters is standing out on the street, separated from her restaurant by the fire department’s cordons. Flames are lashing out from the top floor. Maybe she is even responsible for the fire herself, for the evening before she had been working at the grill. The cause will never be determined.

Her restaurant has managed to establish itself despite constant drug-taking amongst the workforce, and despite employees who see no problem in regularly making wine and food disappear. Business has been going well. The value of Chez Panisse has recently been estimated at $1.5 million. Craig Claiborne was there in 1981. He declared Alice Waters to be a ‘chef of international repute’, and described a pizza calzone from the Chez Panisse café as ‘a triumph of taste and imagination’. A large New York publishing company is preparing the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, in which Alice Waters lays down her philosophy: the simplicity, the quality, the connection between the restaurant and her private kitchen. (‘Sometimes’, she writes dreamily, ‘I may pull a bunch of thyme from my pocket and lay it on the table; then I wander about the kitchen gathering up all the wonderfully fresh ingredients I can find.’78). But now the restaurant is burning, and to Alice Waters it feels as though her child is imprisoned inside the blaze. It is only a matter of minutes before the flames will engulf the weight-bearing columns of the wooden construction. If they do, the building will be completely destroyed.

Chez Panisse survives. And Alice Waters treats the fire as an opportunity to reinvent the restaurant. She realizes that its world is too narrow, based on too small a circle of people. She wants to open it up, for the people, for the customers. Because this is Berkeley, she finds intellectual assistance close by. She joins forces with Christopher Alexander, who has created a new architectural theory at the University of California. His work A Pattern Language, published just a few years before, leads architectonic achievement back to systemic connections, rather than independent strokes of genius. Alice Waters claims that the book becomes her bible.79

Alexander’s urbanist manifesto calls for easily comprehensible entities, for openness: small shops, street cafés. His inspiration comes from shops in Moroccan, Indian and Peruvian towns, stores barely larger than 15 square metres. But a large beer hall is also part of his urban vision, a place where people can sing and shout, where they can ‘cast off their worries’ at long tables offering great freedom. Alexander’s example: the Munich Hofbräuhaus.80

Based upon these principles, the renovation of Chez Panisse commences. Confronted with the fact that the wall between the kitchen and the dining room has been destroyed by the fire, Waters decides not to rebuild it. Just two weeks after the blaze, the restaurant reopens. The kitchen is refurbished, and no longer looks improvised but highly professional. Previously the white-uniformed chefs were hidden away. Now customers can watch them work.

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