This season of the Berkeley Remix we’re bringing to life stories about our home — UC Berkeley — from our collection of thousands of oral histories. Please join us for our fourth season, Let There Be Light: 150 Years at UC Berkeley, inspired by the University’s motto, Fiat Lux. Our episodes this season explore issues of identity — where we’ve been, who we are now, the powerful impact Berkeley’s identity as a public institution has had on student and academic life, and the intertwined history of campus and community.
The three-episode season explores how housing has been on the front lines of the battle for student welfare throughout the University’s history; how UC Berkeley created a culture of innovation that made game-changing technologies possible; and how political activism on campus was a motivator for the farm-to-table food scene in the city of Berkeley. All episodes include audio from interviews from the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library.
“What Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse team did was probably the most radical gesture in restaurants and cooking in America in the last century. It’s important that it happened in Berkeley.” -Chef Christopher Lee
Episode 3, Berkeley After Dark, written and produced by interviewer Shanna Farrell, is about the connection between the history of farm-to-table eating and the campus community. Alice Waters helped pioneer the concept of eating local, seasonal, and organic food at her restaurant, Chez Panisse, located just a few blocks from campus on Shattuck Avenue. This grew out of her combined love of feeding people and political activism, evolved into a culinary revolution. And it couldn’t have happened without UC Berkeley. The intertwined history between campus and the community gave Chez Panisse an audience, and a workforce, creating a symbiotic relationship.
This episode includes audio from the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library, including: Christopher Lee, Narsai David, and Dylan O’Brien. Voiceover of Marion Cunningham’s interview by Amanda Tewes and Paul Bertolli’s interview by John Fragola. Supplemental interviews with Chris Ying.
Following is a written version of the The Berkeley Remix Podcast Season 4, Episode 3
Martin Meeker:
Hello and welcome to the Berkeley Remix, a podcast from the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. I’m Martin Meeker, Director of the Center. Founded in 1954, the Center records and preserves the history of California, the nation, and our interconnected world. This season, we’re bringing to life stories about our home, UC Berkeley, from our collection of thousands of oral history interviews. Please join us for our fourth season, inspired by the University’s motto, Let There Be Light: 150 Years at UC Berkeley. The third and final episode of this season, Berkeley After Dark, was produced by Shanna Farrell.
Narrator:
When you think of Berkeley, you might think of revolution. From the Free Speech movement, to Apartheid divestment, to recent protests on the UC Berkeley campus — the university has a reputation for fighting the power. But the university campus isn’t the only site of revolution in Berkeley. Just a few blocks away, Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto is home to a very different type of revolution — a delicious one. Take it from food writer Chris Ying.
Chris Ying:
What Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse team did was probably the most radical gesture in restaurants and cooking in America in the last century. [17:30] It’s important that it happened in Berkeley.
Narrator:
Chez Panisse is a legendary California restaurant that opened in 1971. It’s located in an iconic, A-frame style craft house, just a few blocks north of the UC Berkeley campus, on Shattuck Avenue. It was founded by Paul Aratow and Alice Waters, and she’s the one who made the restaurant famous. They had an idea that was both radical and simple: they wanted to serve food that was grown locally, organically, and sustainably – using classic French cooking techniques. They believed fresh, seasonal ingredients should be the star of any dish.This concept may not seem revolutionary now, but then, it was. This was the 70s – a time when canned vegetables were everywhere and tv dinners were king.
Christopher Lee:
It had such an enlightened approach…Alice’s vision…built upon French food with local ingredients. Her brilliance was to say, ‘Hey, we’re here in California and there’s all this wonderful stuff here. Use it! Cook with it!”
Narrator:
That was chef Christopher Lee, who recorded an interview with the Oral History Center in 2004. He worked at Chez Panisse for over ten years, learning how to cook in a way that highlighted California’s rich agricultural produce.
[kitchen sounds]
Narrator:
For Alice Waters, who founded the restaurant, eating is a political act. She’s written about this in her many cookbooks – 16, to be exact – and the memoir that she published in 2017, Coming to My Senses. Waters grew up in New Jersey, and arrived in Berkeley as a college student in the mid-1960s. She transferred from UC Santa Barbara during a moment of unrest. Again, this was Berkeley in the 1960s. Waters quickly got caught up in the Free Speech movement and started working for anti-Vietnam War politician Robert Scheer. Here’s food writer Marion Cunningham from our 2001 interview with her, as read by Amanda Tewes.
Marion Cunningham:
[Record voice over] I came to know Alice early on. She belonged to a group of people who were rebelling at the university, politically. They had an underground letter, a political letter. She was looking for a place, because these people had no money, and she was worried about how they were going to eat. That was the motivator.
Narrator:
Waters had traveled abroad to France during her junior year, where she learned about food and cooking. She’d gone to farmers’ markets and learned about the way that French culture approaches food. This experience inspired Waters when she returned to Berkeley. She wanted to bring the food she’d fallen in love with in France to her own community in the East Bay — and she wanted it to be accessible across barriers, especially financial ones. She began cooking dinners for friends, then circulating that underground political letter Marion Cunningham mentioned. Waters was looking for a place to build her vision. Chez Panisse opened in 1971, and it soon attracted other like-minded revolutionaries and chefs.
Paul Bertolli:
[Recorded voiceover] My nose led me there. I could smell really good stock being made. I could smell that there was something good going on – really good. It was the smell of the place that attracted me, mostly.
Narrator:
That was Paul Bertolli, James Beard award-winning chef and writer, from the Oral History Center’s 2004 interview with him, as read by John Fragola. Bertolli got his start in the Chez Panisse kitchen, before going on to be the executive chef at Oakland’s Oliveto. Bertolli says when Waters launched Chez Panisse in 1971, she put flavor first. She bought all her food in season, from organic farmers within 50 miles of the restaurant.
Chris Ying:
It was so radical and so different from what other people were doing, and so bold. It’s important that the legacy of radical thought and free speech that people associate with Berkeley really play a part in her being able to do that at Chez Panisse. The Bay Area is home to a lot of innovation because of that spirit.
Narrator:
That’s Chris Ying, food writer and co-founder of the late Lucky Peach magazine, as well as a Cal alum. We sat down recently to talk about Berkeley’s culinary legacy. When Chez Panisse started, people weren’t talking about where food was coming from or how it was grown. Most restaurants at the time relied on third party vendors that are typically delivered in bulk by distributors. They didn’t have direct relationships with the farmers who supplied their food. Now, Waters was trying to change all that. Waters cultivated individual relationships with some of the best producers around. Here’s Dylan O’Brien, who interned at Chez Panisse kitchen in the early 2000s while bartending next door at Cesar, a restaurant in the Chez Panisse family. He now owns of Prizefighter in Emeryville, California, a bar that’s just a short drive from Shattuck Avenue.
Dylan O’Brien:
That was such a cool experience because it’s such a beautiful kitchen that couldn’t exist in any restaurant that was built today. The incredible ingredients and the number of purveyors they worked with was totally mind-blowing to me that you know some guy would show up with a box the size of a shoe box with like the greatest persimmons that had ever been grown. They get lettuces from some guy who lives in the Berkeley Hills who just grows the coolest lettuces.
[musical interlude]
[kitchen sounds]
Narrator:
Great food needs an audience, and the people of Berkeley were there to provide. In 1970, undergraduate enrollment hit more than 18,000, bringing lots of hungry people to Berkeley. Here’s Paul Bertolli again, talking about taking advantage of the affordable midnight dinners that Waters ran for a few months in 1974, as read by John Fragola.
Paul Bertolli:
I came to Cal the same year that Chez Panisse opened. I ate there frequently. I remember when the menu was $4. I went to the midnight steak and red wine feeds.
Narrator:
Of course, to anyone familiar with Chez Panisse, these cheap student dinners might sound incredible. A meal there today could cost a hundred dollars per person, instead. So what changed? Chez Panisse served meals to students for next-to-nothing, until the restaurant lost so much money that Waters was forced to stop. But by then, the restaurant was attracting a different clientele – Parents of students, looking for a nice place to bring their children, and professors, in need of a place to either impress or unwind. These guests gave Chez Panisse a steady stream of customers with disposable income. Narsai David, a chef who has worked in the Bay Area since the 1970s, attributes the type of professionals that Berkeley attracts to the restaurant’s success. Here he is in a 2011 interview.
Narsai David:
Well, I think it’s a lot more than just food. I think in Berkeley, first you can’t escape the fact that you have a very, very liberal, very highly educated, very sophisticated town, with the history of the university and the Lawrence Lab up on the hill, and these businesses in West Berkeley that depended on scientists and technicians who had engineering skills and laboratory skills. There was a pretty sophisticated bunch of people around here.
Narrator:
Suddenly, Chez Panisse wasn’t just a restaurant with a unique approach to local ingredients. It was gathering attention as a fine dining establishment — filled with academic elites. Here’s Christopher Lee again.
Christopher Lee:
There was a joke at Chez Panisse that even the dishwasher had a PhD. It was kind of funny, because there were three bussers who were PhD candidates.
Narrator:
While the original mission of feeding hungry college students was shifting — that didn’t mean UC Berkeley’s campus community was being left behind. Fortunately, Chez Panisse’s location on the fringe of Berkeley’s campus meant there was a steady supply of student workers. Students needed to work to pay for their education at Berkeley. In 1975, tuition was free for Californians, but by the end of the decade it was rising sharply. Today, tuition costs almost 15 thousand dollars for undergraduate in-state residents and about 43 thousand dollars for out of state residents. On top of tuition, there are books, food, and housing to pay for — in a city where the cost of living is one of the highest in the country. Since the 1970s, students like Chris Ying and Christopher Lee have been drawn to Berkeley’s restaurants jobs where tips are often paid in cash, and there is free food before the start of a shift. Ying says he was also drawn to the late hours — perfect for a college student’s schedule.
Chris Ying:
I went to school until 3 or 4 and then went straight to the restaurant and worked all night.
Narrator:
And here’s Dylan O’Brien again, talking about his restaurant job when he was a student around the same time as Ying in the early 2000s.
Dylan O’Brien:
I was making $150 to $250 dollars in tips. I worked every Friday and Saturday night. My friends were out partying or going to the football game on Saturday, and I wasn’t because I’d go to work.
Narrator:
Narsai David also turned to restaurant work when he was a student at Cal in the 1960s.
Narsai David:
Through my college years, I worked at Hy’s Drive-in, at Mel’s Drive. I was working, I think it was thirty hours a week. It was a substantial thing; but I didn’t have any choice. I would send money home to my mother, even when I was working up here. There was no way I could’ve made it otherwise.
Narrator:
Berkeley’s growing restaurant industry has become a staple of student employment. And Chez Panisse was once again at the center of this change. Christopher Lee says Waters insisted on paying her employees fairly
Christopher Lee:
That was always one of Alice’s mandates; she wanted to offer people a livable wage, as a lot of places didn’t in the old days.
Narrator:
As a result, many student workers fell in love with the restaurant industry during their time at Cal. Again, here’s Chris Ying.
Chris Ying:
I started seeing Cal as not just a school. You start to see it as representative of something important, and how much of a role Berkeley played in food. As food became more important to me, it really gave me this deeper appreciation for where I was.
Narrator:
This growing appreciation for food and community helped launch the careers of other influential people in the food world around the country. Many of them opened restaurants nearby, bringing more eateries close to campus. San Francisco Chronicle journalist Herb Caen even coined a term: “Gourmet Ghetto,” in his column to describe the wave of restaurants opening on Shattuck Avenue that shared Waters’ socially conscious approach to food.
Narsai David:
He was joking about how only in a place like Berkeley could the word ghetto apply to something like food. The gourmet ghetto, in and about the environs of Chez Panisse, Shattuck, between Cedar and Vine.
Chris Ying:
As far as the influential Berkeley chefs, it’s Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower, Paul Bertolli, the people who often get credited as having started this California Cuisine movement. There’s so many players that descend from there, whether it’s Cal Petronelli, who was part of the Chez Panisse family or Steven Singer who has become a very important wine importer and a huge figure in the Berkeley world. Everything started with Chez Panisse though. Chez Panisse was the best and most important restaurant in the world that it happened to be down the street from us.
Narrator:
Chez Panisse’s radical impact is hard to measure. The concept of eating local, seasonal, and organic food, which grew out of Alice Water’s combined love of feeding people and political activism, evolved into a culinary revolution. Her restaurant changed the way that we think about food and how we cook at home. It launched the careers of renowned chefs like Paul Bertolli and Christopher Lee. It inspired countless chefs to model their own restaurants after farm-to-table eating, which is now cultural currency. And it couldn’t have happened without UC Berkeley. The intertwined history between campus and the community gave Chez Panisse an audience, and a workforce, creating a symbiotic relationship. This relationship continues today, evident when you walk into a restaurant near campus, after dark, long after the sun has set.
Martin Meeker:
This episode was written and narrated by Shanna Farrell with assistance from Amanda Tewes, Francesca Fenzi, and Oral History Center staff. The Berkeley Remix theme music by Paul Burnett and additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to The Bancroft Library. Interviews in this episode are from the Oral History Center’s collections. To learn more about these interviews, visit our website, listed in the show notes. I’m Martin Meeker and thank you for listening to the Berkeley Remix, and please join us next time.