everyones mad at alice waters ;_;

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2009/01/the_limitations_of_the_alice_w.html?ft=1&f=93568166

Alice Waters Was a Foodie Hero. Now She's the Food Police.

Alice Waters: The famous Berkeley local-foods advocate, seen here looking friendly at a book signing, had a substantially less friendly run-in with another chef at an inauguration party. Scott Wintrow/Getty Images

by Todd Kliman

The big story in the food world this week was not that Top Chef host Tom Colicchio might have saved cookbook author Joan Nathan's life by performing a Heimlich maneuver on her at a pre-inaugural party at her house in Washington, D.C. on Sunday.

It's what took place in an upstairs room of that same house.

Marian Burros disclosed the closed-door mano-a-mano between feisty ex-White House chef Walter Scheib and righteous locavore Alice Waters for the New York Times' Diner's Journal blog.

How the feud started and how it ended, and why even a good "-ism" is still just an "-ism," after the jump...

The food feud has long roots, as I wrote in this space two weeks ago; it goes back to Scheib's days at the White House, when he resented having to prove himself to Waters as a champion of local and sustainable farming and fishing practices.

After the election, Waters went public in arguing that the Obamas ought to appoint a White House chef who would be a force for her movement. That rankled Scheib, who had mentored the current chef, Cristeta Comerford. (The Obamas have decided to retain Comerford.)

Waters and Scheib eventually reached a detente, Burros writes.

But that's not the news here. What is? The fact that someone finally had the guts to stand up to Waters' inflexible brand of gastronomical correctness.

A generation ago, her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, birthed a revolution, putting a new emphasis on farms and the importance of mastering simple, elemental things. It changed American food, and it changed American cooking.

But a generation later, it's not hard to see that what Waters espoused was really just an -ism. A good -ism, a necessary -ism -- but an -ism all the same. And -isms have their limitations.

Why, for instance, should top-flight chefs content themselves with using only what's local and seasonal when the emergence of new technologies has made it easier than ever to bring in delicacies from around the globe?

Yet many do. I've even seen some chefs so desperate to be perceived as gastronomically correct that they have lied about their purveyors on their menus.

Thanks to Waters' influence, a generation of ambitious chefs now confuse process and result. Shout-outs to their sources fill their menus, and transparency has become synonymous with integrity and honesty.

But do we really need to know the provenance of an egg? And more to the point: Shopping is not cooking.

At the moment, the best, most exciting food in the world, most critics agree, is to be found in Spain. Yes, the country is blessed with an abundance of good natural resources. But its chefs look around the world for inspiration and are more inclined to want to manipulate and enhance flavors than to present them simply.

And why not? Cooking, after all, is not about doing good; it's about tasting good.

Waters, like a lot of radicals, believes the movement will never end. She simply can't see that the revolution she helped lead has calcified into something doctrinaire and even repressive, not liberating and uplifting.

Todd Kliman is a James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic and the food and wine editor of Washingtonian magazine. The Wild Vine, his book about the Rosetta stone of American wine, is due in 2009.
1:18 PM ET | 01-23-2009 | permalink

"shopping is not cooking" is a good line, and true, but i also think kliman doesnt really get it

Why, for instance, should top-flight chefs content themselves with using only what's local and seasonal when the emergence of new technologies has made it easier than ever to bring in delicacies from around the globe?

I missed the part where you could download Kobe beef now.

Alice can be a bit self-righteous, but on account, this 'ism' is still important. I agree that a perfect dedication to locavorism (or whatever it's called) is lacking in humor not to mention variety, but the 'shopping is not cooking' line, while funny, is patently bullshit. Where you buy your steak, how it was raised, how it was butchered - these are mightily important in how it tastes. The same goes for any fruit or vegetable I can think of (except for the butchering part).

"Driving, after all, is not about doing good; it's about feeling the full-throated roar of a 5-litre engine fling you down the M-25 so fast you wonder if you've still got any clothes on"

I'm confused about the connection between locally-sourced food and not wanting to enhance or manipulate its flavor. Or have I missed the point?

yes, shocking as that is

yeah that's really weird, like they say, spain has amazingly good quality produce and that's definitely part of why their food is so aweseome.

Where you buy your steak, how it was raised, how it was butchered - these are mightily important in how it tastes. The same goes for any fruit or vegetable I can think of (except for the butchering part).

this is true--but his point is that just buying local vegetables and a grass-fed steak doesnt guarantee you a good meal. i dont know what san francisco is like but every third resto in brooklyn is all "organic! local!" or whatever and 70% of those are worse than places that dont brag about it.

i mean i love alice waters to death and i think kliman is missing the important sustainability/environmental bit about not wanting to use thousands of pounds of jet fuel, but--growing veggies in your backyard doesnt make you a world-class chef.

everyone's acting like it's a commercial
acting like life is a big commercial

i guess i superficially understand the nutritional, environmental, socially conscious reasons for eating locally but isn't limiting your food sources by transit radius a fundamentally arbitrary restriction? to extend the example of michael white's steak -- is it more correct to choose a local butcher with dubious processes, or is it better to go for the higher-grade meat from a more reputable source that's twice as far away?

the second one, but you have to ride the cow back to your house so you dont use fuel

real answer: i dunno--depends on whats important to you and how you end up weighing those decisions--i dont think the waters school has a super-specific answer to questions like that, since the locavorism bit has less to do with do i drive five miles or ten miles and more to do with--do i support local farmers who use very little fuel to transport cherries to my farmers market, or do i support big agribusiness who use thousands of pounds of fuel to shuttle cherries to my trader joes. i mean thats simplifying it, but.

i hear you on the end result, tho, max -- there is a restaurant in prov that is all local and there are some good menu items but sometimes the result is a lunch menu listing a $7 organic pb&j on local artisinal bread

The problem with this article is that nobody thinks that locally-sourced food automatically tastes better.

haha yes they do

obviously there is a big economic / class piece to this discussion about how food that is more "correct" (to borrow a phrase) takes more effort to obtain, if not always more money

xp tracer have you never heard anyone rave about how "fresh" something tastes

Rah to Kliman for taking on these mighty intellects

yeah but couldnt the 'fresh' thing have to do w/ food being seasonal? or do you guys think that things that are in season dont taste better

The problem with this article is that nobody thinks that locally-sourced food automatically tastes better.

i think some advocates do tbh but i also don't think that's a problem with this article. it's a weird and artificial limitation and i think the article argues from the perspective that enviornmental concerns, ultimately, should be subordinated to culinary ones not vice versa. that's really all he's saying

lol dear spoild rich people yr not saving the world w/yr restaurants - get a clue

ps i will totally eat all yr food thx

t_g yeah yeah, but it's an expectations game -- some people will go to a locally-sourced restaurant where they are more inclined to think it tastes better because it is local, especially if they are paying extra for that privilege.

that, and culinary discernment / gourmandism is still a HUGE aspirational affectation

My favorite local restaurant is v. big on localvore options and it's where I pick up my CSA deliveries and etc. The reason I go there in the first place, however, is that the food is fucking fantastic because they're great, artistic cooks, and the price is about the same as most comparable restaurants in the area. You can have both, very easily.

i would wager (not with 100% confidence mind you) that if you gave your average aspirational foodie a chateaubriand from omaha steaks and told them it was locally grass-fed they would remark on how "fresh" it tasted

No Ned you must choose!

"gourmand" means "eats a lot" btw

not really btw

when people say o yr such a foodie i go naw im a fucking glutton bro

i think you're looking for the word glutton, but they both start with the letter g, so

xpost hi fives

stlyin on u

i can understand people getting mad at alice waters, maybe they just needed an excuse. i'm on her side. . . but i saw this PBS special once where she started talking about how special this strawberry she held in her hand was. . . ugh

Taste is obviously not the same as ethics, though I can see how some people would enjoy their meal better if they feel less guilty about it. I am not a locavore fanatic. There are several foodstuffs that I regularly import from abroad, mostly 'processed' items like cheese, wine, and cured meats and I have no compunction in doing so. I will not hold it against a chef one whit if s/he imports truffles in season or flies in Maine lobster or whatever but buying and sustaining local meat and produce isn't just about morality, it is about taste. Local produce eaten in season at the optimal moment is simply more delicious. I have come to find that local grass-fed beef is tastier, local free-range chicken is too. I wouldn't ever be doctrinaire about these things, certainly not to the extent Alice is, and I have my little un-pc preferences (organic avocados, for example, I generally find horrid) and I am not so impressed by 'green' claims in a restaurant (no-one cares if their brothel is using 'sustainable' bedclothes, but it's a nice touch) but if you are making food and you haven't taken the locavore arguments into account or they haven't affected your cooking, I'm unlikely to like your food or trust your culinary aesthetics.

growing veggies in your backyard doesnt make you a world-class chef

Que it means eating more for the love of eating than for discernment of taste

where I pick up my CSA deliveries

144 years after Appomattox!!

i thought it meant "eats a lot" that's what u just said

no-one cares if their brothel is using 'sustainable' bedclothes, but it's a nice touch

i only go to brothels with locally grown grass-fed hookers

no-one cares if their brothel is using 'sustainable' bedclothes, but it's a nice touch

Sounds like a good niche market in Nevada somewhere.

144 years after Appomattox!!

The tomatoes will rise again.

epicureanism then / stfu tracer

An ecologically sustainable brothel would be an awesome starting point for a sit-com

suddenly this thread is forested with dicks

in general a lot of what people want to experience when dealing w/food or art or whatever is concept - they wan lots bloggable braggable ideas cause the basically subjective nature of the experience just doesnt give them the credentialed toehold they desire - tasting and smelling and looking at food is not enough

ive complained abt this before but its really annoying when u go out to dinner and people just want to talk abt the food and other food - its like r u worried maybe u dont hav any taste and might as well eat a whopper instead or what - whats the ocd big deal

hormone-free, locally-raised, free-range dicks. which is what the sustainable hookers eat.

xp

quick, someone harvest the dicks and make an omelette

ice craem OTM, i start humming "is that all there is?" when dinner conversation turns into food appreciation club

whats the ocd big deal

I dunno, but I find I talk about food a lot, like some people talk about music or politics or art. With the exception of sleeping, dying and fucking, you can't get much more basic to human experience than eating, especially in groups.

Which is more irritating/aspirational, people who prefer to eat local food regardless of what it tastes like or people who prefer Kobe beef drizzled with Chilean octopus eyeballs and served with Alaskan moose cum?

growing veggies in your backyard does not make you a world class chef

Of course no one has claimed this.

First off, what the fuck is wrong with being 'aspirational'?! Irritating people are people who talk about food not because they had an awesome fucking dining experience but because they think that such talk is cool or something. People who try to be cool generally annoy me unless they're very, very good at it or have a memorable sense of humor.

growing veggies in your backyard does not make you a world class chef

Not only has no claimed this but conversely using produce you find in the dumpster behind Safeway doesn't make you more 'real', either.

dosa. uddupi palace is similar and cheaper.

rasoi in the mission used to be good pakistani/north indian food but I haven't been there in a long time. I did see Blixa Bargeld there once though.

Blixa doesn't eat though.

Vik's in Berkeley. :)

vik's is good! i've been there.

but in SF proper? when i lived in SF, i was let down time and time again. there seems to not be much indian food that is both good and cheap

i've eaten at Dosa which i thought was terrible - street food dressed up and 3x more expensive than it should be, you can get better meals in queens for $6

"steve shasta should i go to chez panisse when i visit?"

One thing i will say about Panisse and the cafe is that they're total factories; good but such destination places that they've become kind of anonymous. If I were to recommend anything in SF, it would still be Frances (super hard to get into) but I am at (still local to me) the unfortunately named Starbelly a lot these days.

I always find Herbivore insipid and somehwat dry.

I do not like Pakwan or Uddupi Palace. They do a few things okay but that is the exception to the rule in my experience.

Chez Panisse is fine, it definitely depends on the audience though. What kind of cuisines are you drawn to?

― it's a meme i made and i like (Steve Shasta), Tuesday, July 12, 2011 3:05 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark

classic french, sushi, "new american" shit at times but it really depends on the place.

i guess i'm thinking if i have time for one pricey/"special" meal it may underwhelm? idk.

Only good thing to get at Herbivore is juice. Hate that place.

always find Herbivore insipid and somehwat dry.

Hmm, well, I only had a red curry vegetables over quinoa - which was okay both for flavor and moisture content - but obviously a very small sample size so YMMV. Service was a bit on the slow side. I thought it was a nice option to have around, not necessarily a destination place for out of town visitors to seek out.

Herbivore is the ultimate in jack of all trades, master of none. They spread themselves too thin trying to appeal to every type of cuisine as long as there's no meat in it.

The real problem with Herbivore is that they don't employ anyone who knows how to cook. I've made tastier vegan food in my pajamas.

And their fake meat dishes pale in comparison to Golden Era, or even a modest hole in the wall like Great Wall in Rockridge.

Ha, I was just thinking of Golden Era, now that's some fake meat!

Have yet to have *great* Indian food in SF. It's usually fine and hits the spot, but seems to lack something. Have probably had this discussion many times before though. (I'm British btw). I guess it depends what you order too.
Pawkan was among the best, imo, but another time I had takeout from there and it wasn't great so ymmv.

But yeah with Herbivore, when the best facet of a restaurant focusing on one theme is their Happy Hour, you gotta clean house. xp

Herbivore wasn't the most original vegan menu I've seen - mostly all the standard stuff you'd expect to find in a basic vegan cookbook. There are some better vegan places around here in NJ. The juice was pretty good though, and anyway, we were tired of walking and it was there, so what can I say.

I think the best fake meat I've had in SF was at Angkor Borei, actually.

btw my derision for Herbivore was directed specifically at the Berkeley location, but it doesn't sound like I'll be rushing out to try the Mish one anytime soon. Angkor Borei, otoh looks heavenly.

I'm not usually one to complain about service, but the service at Herbivore was uniformly terrible the couple of times I have been forced to go there.

I had BRUTAL service at the one on Divis. My experience at the Mission one was better.

Yeah I should mention that I've only been to the Divis one.

Angkor Borei is really good!

I hate the Mission one, but have only been there once maybe 10 years ago.

classic french, sushi, "new american" shit at times but it really depends on the place.

i guess i'm thinking if i have time for one pricey/"special" meal it may underwhelm? idk.

― call all destroyer, Tuesday, July 12, 2011 12:45 PM (12 minutes ago)

Depending on how splurgy you're feeling, I'd recommend Benu or The Dining Room at the Ritz Carlton, both of which immediately popped to mind.

Benu's chef Corey Lee was the chef de cuisine at The French Laundry for 10 years. IMO the best restaurant in SF hands down. It's pretty new, not a lot of people seem to know about it still which is good. A perfect blend of East Asian/California/Classic French gourmet.

The Dining Room is pretty posh and antiquated but the food is amazing. Chef Ron Siegel has a long pedigree in SF and Napa (I think Corey replaced Ron at The French Laundry). Ron was the first American to win Iron Chef Japan and I believe the first non-Japanese to unanimously sweep.

Others to consider:
Alexander's Steakhouse (Japanese style american steakhouse)
Chez Spencer (Cali/French, Japanese chef)
Coi (modern but not molecular excercises, really falling in love with this place)

I'm afraid you might find Chez Panisse a little too quaint.

fucking hippies not interested in serving me at herbivore

Chez Spencer is very, very good.

thanks steve, will check those out.

Benu's chef Corey Lee was the chef de cuisine at The French Laundry for 10 years. IMO the best restaurant in SF hands down. It's pretty new, not a lot of people seem to know about it still which is good. A perfect blend of East Asian/California/Classic French gourmet.

benu is one of the places profiled in that gq piece i linked to in the revive

I feel like, as I get older, a lot of the top end places hold less appeal to me because they're so unrelentingly rich. I've been curious about Benu since Shasta first mentioned it but I have two friends who said it was really good but very, very rich.

You're not drinking enough wine!

i watched that les blank film about garlic, and a very young alice waters and chez panisse are in there. she's cooking some kind of stewed figs thing with honey, wine, rosemary, and garlic. it looked fucking amazing but i cannot for the life of me track down a recipe for anything similar. help a brother out.

Coi is amazing, and you don't feel too stuffed when you leave (prob 75% of the dishes in the tasting menu are meat-free), but OTOH, if you spend >$200/person for a meal, maybe you want to feel stuffed.

amateurist, my copy of "chez panisse fruit" has a recipe for "dried figs poached in red wine" that includes honey and wine but no rosemary and garlic.

You're not drinking enough wine!

Horsefeathers!

amateurist, my copy of "chez panisse fruit" has a recipe for "dried figs poached in red wine" that includes honey and wine but no rosemary and garlic.

― moonship journey to baja, Tuesday, July 12, 2011 11:27 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

share?

As the 10 day countdown til CP turns 40 y/o beginning, there should be more retrospective pieces like these in the pipeline:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/14/MNH21KBTVS.DTL&ao=all

With luck, I'll be eating there in about five weeks.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid374632111001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAAADEw9EQ~,h1MFhv8o8KH4Pz94oWeQK6-s80p1y6W8&bctid=1105907318001

kind of random that this is the thread to bump but thx to shasta and m. white up there--we had a great meal and great time at chez spencer last night.

i was going to go all in on the dining room at the ritz carlton but it was closing up for a while as of our first full day in town.

in our wanderings we also ended up at alembic which i was thinking was mostly a place for drinks but i was quite pleasantly surprised by their food.

if you ever go to Drink in Boston, Josie (owner?) commanded the bar at the Alembic for many, many years.

I think I mentioned this elsewhere but she has tended bar at the James Beard Awards galas.

oh cool! i knew josie had worked in sf but didn't know where.

one of the dishes my gf ordered there (grilled nectarines/burrata/speck, with the perfect amount of charcoal smokiness) is going to be lodged in my memory for quite a while.

i went to alembic when i was in SF a couple weeks ago, had some fantastic bone marrow & assorted offal meats

SF food

amateurist, my copy of "chez panisse fruit" has a recipe for "dried figs poached in red wine" that includes honey and wine but no rosemary and garlic.

― moonship journey to baja, Tuesday, July 12, 2011 11:27 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

share?

― by another name (amateurist), Thursday, July 14, 2011 1:05 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

?!?!?

Let me take a stab:

Boil wine and then reduce to a simmer
Add dried figs

Cook until soft.

cover dried figs in red wine
add splash of water
add 1/4 cup honey for each cup of red wine
add cinnamon stick, orange peel, juice of one orange, piece of vanilla bean
simmer until figs are tender
strain poaching liquid and boil until reduced for sauce

kind of random that this is the thread to bump but thx to shasta and m. white up there--we had a great meal and great time at chez spencer last night.

...

― call all destroyer, Wednesday, September 21, 2011 8:14 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Weirdly, that was the same night I ate at Chez Panisse. (For a second I misread and thought that we were all there at the same time.)

Anyway, I had a really great meal there. More traditional than some of the high-end places I've been to lately, but that didn't matter with everything so fresh and flavorful.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/the-food-delivery-start-up-you-havent-heard-of/414540/?single_page=true

"I stopped ordering from Sprig back in the spring, because (a) I don’t like that future and (b) they sent me a truly sub-par chicken sandwich."

Marian Burros disclosed the closed-door mano-a-mano between feisty ex-White House chef Walter Scheib and righteous locavore Alice Waters for the New York Times' Diner's Journal blog.

trivia: same chef that mysteriously disappeared recently

i'm learning a lot about food in this thread but it's amazing how almost every factoid is stated like "duh how obvious" indie-rocker-lightbulb style. foodies.

Man, WaPo review of her new memoir is damn harsh!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/alice-waters-got-us-to-eat-healthy-what-more-can-she-teach-us-in-her-new-book/2017/09/07/65bf7f5c-8c02-11e7-84c0-02cc069f2c37_story.html?utm_term=.f919e36986ac