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At Home at the Table
This essay originally appeared in Terroir Review on July 29, 2018
As a kid growing up in rural Pennsylvania, I had long dreamed of a life out West, shopping at farmers’ markets and hosting dinner parties featuring earthy Pinot Noir and picturesque salads with shavings of candy-striped Chioggia beets. My muse was the pioneering chef Alice Waters, whose books I devoured and whose legendary restaurant, Chez Panisse, I longed to visit.
At 33 years old, I finally got there. The meal was the centerpiece of a weeks-long motorcycle trip with my boyfriend, Winston, down the Oregon Coast, through the Mendocino Valley and across the San Francisco Bay. I expected some kind of palace in Chez Panisse, a château-like facade framed by yarrow blooms and sweeping oak branches. But as we walked down Shattuck Avenue, the street Winston grew up on, the entryway loomed into view and I found nothing palatial about it. A simple bouquet in a ceramic vase topped a vintage wooden side table in the entryway. Hung carefully from the north and south walls in the foyer were movie posters.
Waters named Chez Panisse after a fictional character, Honoré Panisse, from her favorite French films: Marcel Pagnol’s 1930s trilogy about life in the port of Marseilles. The characters aren’t nobility; they’re working-class townspeople who gather in waterfront cafés, sipping pastis and chit-chatting…
