The Times reviews the new Bar Panisse, as well as its more famous next door neighbor. This is a glorious bit of food writing, and makes me want to stand in the “chatty line of locals.”
Sit down at Chez Panisse and dinner starts, just like that. No scripted introduction, no mission statement, no spiel. Not even a little, “Have you dined with us before?”
If you didn’t already know that Alice Waters opened this place 55 years ago in Berkeley, Calif., that it became one of the most important restaurants in the country, mothering the modern farm-to-table movement and an era of rustic, ingredient-obsessed American cooking that leaned heavily on France, well, you could wrap up dinner and polish off your pluot galette without anyone tipping you off.
You might expect Chez Panisse to hammer home the values of building education and community through fresh local food that Ms. Waters has been promoting for decades, that it would pause now and then to flex. But dinner here is never didactic. It flows in the quiet, straightforward way of a bistro that’s been around forever. Service is calm, self-possessed, attentive, sometimes a little detached in the way that makes Americans complain about Parisian restaurants.
Here’s a shot I took of Chez Panisse’s upstairs kitchen back in 2017. If you can, go.
