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The Children Of Chez Panisse

Food and Wine / May 2006

Last November, chef Daniel Patterson wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine questioning whether Alice Waters and her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, have had too much influence on the food community. He suggested that Waters’s theory of simple, seasonal, local, organic cooking threatened to stifle chefly creativity. The food world went into a flutter.

It’s true that over the last three and a half decades, Chez Panisse has influenced the way American chefs think about food and its origins. And nowhere is that impact more direct than here in Northern California.

To which we say, what’s not to like?

We not only embrace the essential vitality of the cuisine at Chez Panisse as our own, we delight in the many restaurants opened by chefs trained there.

Chefs who have cooked at Chez Panisse emerge from its kitchens as from an artists’ commune—if not a seminary. They come out energized to practice and propagate the Gospel According to Alice, and we say, amen, hallelujah, and let’s check out Eccolo or Quince or Pizzaiolo or...

Chez Panisse has made an indelible mark on its progeny, and, as a result, enhanced the Bay Area’s restaurant landscape. So you don’t always have to return to the mother: You can dine at the restaurants of the children of Chez Panisse.

Charlie Hallowell
Pizzaiolo

Charlie Hallowell is the chef-owner behind Pizzaiolo, the instantaneously popular Neapolitan pizza restaurant that opened in Summer 2005 in Oakland’s Temescal district. Hallowell began cooking at Chez Panisse when he was 21, and, unlike most cooks, he knew nothing about the restaurant’s cult status.

"My only cooking job had been in this shitty restaurant in Fisherman’s Wharf," says Hallowell. "I stumbled into the job at Chez Panisse. I had no idea who Alice Waters was. I didn’t even know that people really went to cooking school. I thought organic food was brown rice and seitan [chewy wheat gluten]".

"After a few weeks ordering pantry items and taking inventory at the restaurant, Hallowell realized how different the life of a cook was at Chez Panisse. "I never thought that my job and my ideas about the world would line up," he says. "But it started to dawn on me right away that there was more integrity at Chez Panisse—by leaps and bounds—than at any other place I had worked. Everybody was good at what they did. Everybody worked as a team. They took pride in what they did and were committed to being cooks."

Hallowell was so impressed that he stayed for eight years. He worked his way through the four positions on the café kitchen line, including the wood-fired oven station that would be the impetus for the pizzas and wood oven–cooked dishes at Pizzaiolo, where the menu also offers seasonal appetizers and salads, two pastas that change daily, and a daily special such as braised short ribs.

"At Chez Panisse, there was this awesome mentor-student relationship," Hallowell explains. "When it’s applied properly from both sides, it can be a profound relationship. You learn how to do these beautiful things and how to really think about food."