Indeed, the rise of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse was a revolution, getting rid of cheese toppings, red sauces, Veal Oscar, and other well worn restaurant gourmet clichés, and replacing them with a simple but brilliant approach: source the highest quality ingredients and prepare them simply. She accomplished for food what other trailblazers have achieved in winemaking. Just as the best winemakers realize that great wine starts in the vineyard - without great grapes, you cannot make great wine; Water's realized that without great ingredients you cannot make a great meal. Waters was confident and focused. When her approach was criticized by an important French Chef who said: "Zhat is not cooking, zhat is shopping," Water's agreed, maintaining that shopping was more important than cooking.
One would hope that after thirty years, the Bay Area food scene would be ready to move on -- but this does not appear to be the case. Chef culture in the Bay Area is now a tradition-bound food religion with Alice Waters as High Priestess preaching the virtue of the unspoiled perfection of nature and warning against the dangers of technology--or sauces and foams.
There are some who are still innocent, and whose vision is unclouded by this orthodoxy. The food critic for the Wall Street Journal reviewed top restaurants around the country and declared of Chez Panisse that dining there was like eating at a "dinner party thrown by aging hippies with a really great vegetable garden." And now we have Daniel Patterson willing to stand up and complain.
I think he's a brave fellow. His article was met by immediate sniping and attacks, like this one at Le Blog de San Francisco. His article has been attacked as a publicity stunt, and his short stint at Frisson has been mischaracterized. Patterson left Frisson because it quickly morphed into a bar/lounge scene. The owners decided that fine food was too expensive and a distraction to the liquor sales and the general scene. All the early reports I heard on Patterson's food at Frisson were positive, but most of them also commented on the clash with the venue. Do you think Thomas Keller would like to play second-fiddle to a cocktail lounge?
Frankly, I agree with Patterson. The Chez Panisse tradition is a straitjacket holding back culinary evolution here in the Bay Area. Alice Waters and the chefs she trained and influenced have become the tradition-bound lock-step establishment that Waters was rebelling against thirty years ago. They won that battle, but now they are sitting around eating heirloom tomatoes dusted with just the right amount of fleur de sel and congratulating one another.
It is no longer enough to source the finest quality ingredients and prepare them simply. We do not live in a pre-industrial agrarian paradise. Now everyone sources the best quality ingredients, but today's best Chefs also do some of that despised French Chef's "cooking." All art requires creativity and growth. When practiced at the highest levels, food is an art that requires skill and intellect as much as it requires the best raw materials.
Thank God the Bay Area has some chefs like Patterson, Ron Siegel, Thomas Keller, and David Kinch who are willing to build on "California Cuisine" and and start the journey towards something even better.
