It’s a long walk with a bag full of heavy bombs. Well not bombs exactly. But explosive bottles of Alex Hozven’s kombucha from The Cultured Pickle Shop in downtown Berkeley. Opening one involves several stages. You loosen the lid and tighten it again quickly as it surges. Lots more twists and hisses are needed to avoid an expensive gush of carbon dioxide. “You know you can’t take these on the plane,” she warns.
January is the perfect time to relive a trip to Berkeley, California, the cradle of American cooking. It’s where Hozven has spent nearly two decades fermenting, pickling and turning tea into kombucha with flavours that dance across your tongue, such as her apple and parsley blend. She isn’t a fan of kombuchas that only have a vinegary hit disguised with sugar. “There’s nothing delicate in it. It doesn’t make you think. it doesn’t make you hang out with the bubbles. It’s a sledgehammer. I don’t need any more sledgehammers in my life.”
She and her husband Kevin were farming in northern California 19 years ago when they started fermenting food. “Our son was born and I thought it would be a fun thing to do with him in a backpack. Which it wasn’t. They [children] just get heavy. And bored.”
Now lacto-fermentation has a growing and fanatical following.
I leave their small workshop down the end of a sleepy residential street and wonder whether it’s worth a pilgrimage to the epicentre of Californian cuisine. It has to be done. But this is California. There are no taxis. It’s shanks mare or bust. Eventually from a distance on the otherwise unremarkable street, I can see tourists taking pictures of 1517 Shattuck Avenue. On this beautiful warm day it’s late afternoon and the kitchen will close soon. I don’t have a booking. When I explain all this to the waitress, she uses that lovely phrase: “Not a problem,” and leads me to a free table. And just like that, I’m sitting down to lunch in Chez Panisse Café.
The arts and crafts house on Shattuck Avenue where Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971 looks like a cross between a music box Swiss chalet and a Shinto temple.
It was refurbished after a fire under one of the porches in 2013, which has given this middle-aged restaurant a bit of a face lift. The evening-only restaurant is on the lower floor. The cafe is upstairs.
They call it a cafe but it feels like a restaurant. The floor is parquet. Wall lights are louvred in dark wooden boxes. There’s butterscotch beige paint on the walls, ladder back wooden chairs and wooden benches with pancake thin cushions. There’s more timber than you could shake a sustainably forested stick at.
Lunch is two bookends of loveliness with a mediocre main, which reinforces my one golden restaurant rule. Never Order Pasta. Not even in Chez Panisse.
A starter of halibut comes as small cubed mouthfuls of raw fish cooked ever so slightly in their dressing of green coriander vinaigrette with lemon cucumbers. These aren’t cucumbers dressed with lemon but spherical babies that taste like cucumber but look like lemons. They cut into fun wedges the way the boring old long cucumbers don’t.
The hand-cut fettucine is fine but the carrots it comes with strike an unwelcome stewy note with the chanterelle mushrooms. It’s a dish that feels like being handed a heavy jumper on a hot day.
Then that glorious dessert. It’s a wobble of vanilla-speckled buttermilk panna cotta with peeled slices of white peach and a bookmark sized piece of almond biscuit with a grainy dusting of sugar. It’s trembling spoonfuls of tangy milk made fleetingly solid before they dissolve in your mouth.
There’s a polite “thank you for not using your phone or computer at the table,” notice which makes for an old-school atmosphere in the cafe. People talk to each other. At the end of their meal a handsome older couple stand up to leave. The woman makes a point of coming over to the waitress and punctuates each sentence with index finger and thumb. “As usual,” she says. “Every bite was delicious. Thank you.”
It’s become fashionable to take pot shots at Alice Waters. Younger (predominantly male) chefs get headlines when they tell her to up her game. We’re bored, the fickle food world says, with all that “put it on the plate” schtick.
But the truth is Chez Panisse is still a launch pad for chefs who go from this small house into the wider food world and beguile new generations. For me, the simple pleasurable food is not a problem, as they say in these parts. More than four decades of delighting people is no mean achievement.
Lunch for one with an Americano came to $56.11 (including a 17 per cent service charge).
THE VERDICT:8/10
The mother of modern restaurants does not disappoint. Chez Panisse accepts reservations one month ahead of the calendar date.
Chez Panisse Café, 1517 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, California, tel: +510-548-5049
Facilities: Small Music: Jazz Food provenance: Our produce – meat, poultry and fish comes from farm ranches and fisheries guided by principles of sustainability. Wheelchair access: No
So, Chez Panisse? Done. These three other are the top picks on my world-wide wishlist.
Yoshihiro Narisawa's presentation to the first MAD food camp in 2011 was so sketchily translated any non-Japanese speaker in the circus tent was lost. But the message was clear. At his Tokyo restaurant Narisawa is a fervent supporter of sustainable Japanese food. And that's seen him being awarded the crown of Japan's best restaurant. narisawa-yoshihiro.com
Reservations for Frantzen in Stockholm open 60 days in advance of your table. The tasting menu costs roughly €245. The restaurant used to be called Frantzen/Lindeberg until pastry chef Daniel Lindeberg departed the place in 2013 and left Bjorn Frantzen in charge. They have their own garden and the typical Nordic larder sometimes sprinkled with Asian touches. restaurantfrantzen.com. Their cookbook, with its technique for turning potatoes into edible stones by coating them in food-grade kaolin and lactose, is awe-inspiring.
Mugaritz sounds like an incredible restaurant. It sits in a remote area outside San Sebastian. It opens from April to December. mugaritz.com
