Alice Waters

Owner, Chez Panisse; and founder,
Chez Panisse Foundation
Berkeley, California

When most people think of a great chef, they think of a master

technician, an intense white-jacketed maestro, storming around a

kitchen, lighting things on fire, and screaming, in French, because

the fumé is boiling too rapidly.

That’s certainly one path that leads to great food. The other is

one that was forged by Alice Waters at her legendary restaurant

Chez Panisse in the 1970s—a path that she still forges today. It

has nothing to do with scars and burns and kitchen tirades and

everything to do with sourcing the best ingredients and bringing

them together in a simple way. It’s a path informed, almost

entirely, by good taste.

“Taste is a huge part of what I do,” says Waters, from the

kitchen table of her home in Berkeley. “That’s what the restaurant

has always been about. If you get really tasty things, it’s so easy

to cook.”

And while most chefs spend their careers honing their technical

skills (path #1), very few chefs or home cooks work on developing

their palates. This is an easy feat to accomplish, however, in

Waters’s home kitchen, where everything that surrounds her is an