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The restaurant was an outgrowth of Waters' interest in the possibilities of using fresh, locally grown ingredients, inspired by her 1965 visit to France, where she ostensibly went to study at the Sorbonne but was seduced by the cuisine. A trip to the south of France that spring, with its cooking based on fresh herbs, vegetables and olive oil, would prove especially influential, as would a visit to Brittany, where she ate fresh mussels and buckwheat crêpes and dined at a small restaurant in an old stone house that crystallized her sense of what good food could be. Waters was influenced less by grand Parisian restaurants that served a predictable menu than by more modest establishments whose chefs visited the markets each day and invented the meal on the spot. ''La cuisine du marchè'', market cooking, relies on improvisation and experimentation and puts shopping on an equal footing with technique.''Alice Waters & Chez Panisse'', Thomas McNamee, The Penguin Press, 2007. After Waters returned to Berkeley, she cooked for friends by combining French cooking techniques with ingredients grown nearby and in season, rather than imported or frozen. She and her partner, Paul Aratow, founded the restaurant in 1971 . Waters wrote in 1980: Since Waters was not prepared to run a commercial kitchen, she partnered with Aratow, a faculty member in comparative literature at the University of California who had lived extensively in France. Aratow was a 50% partner in the original restaurant. He planned the reconstruction of an old Berkeley apartment house, supervised the construction of the restaurant, managed the kitchen and "back-of-house" and was the original Chef De Cuisine . Aratow derived his extensive knowledge of cooking from the classic French cookbook, ''La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange'', which he translated into English years later (Ten Speed Press). Aratow sold his share of Chez Panisse after a few years when he moved to Los Angeles to become a film producer. The restaurant is located in the north Berkeley neighborhood known locally as the "Gourmet Ghetto". Housed in a converted apartment house, Chez Panisse (a name inspired by Waters' love of the films of Marcel Pagnol ) originally consisted of a single main dining floor serving a daily Fixed-price Dining menu and an upstairs cafe, originally more a coffee shop, but the extensive demand for seating meant that meals were served there also. Later the cafe was converted to a more restaurant-style room. It did not take reservations—serving a somewhat less expensive, more informal A La Carte -style menu, and with the restaurant's growing fame, has come to embody Water's original idea for Chez Panisse as a place to hang out with friends. Chefs who have worked at the restaurant and later struck out on their own include Paul Bertolli and Jeremiah Tower . Over the years, Waters' role at Chez Panisse has been that of proprietor, iron-willed visionary, and taster-in-chief, rather than chef or businesswoman. Biographer Thomas McNamee has characterized the restaurant's history as bipolar, with triumphs alternating with disasters leading to more successes. That cycle could be seen in a March 1982 fire that came within 10 minutes of destroying the building. But Waters, influenced by Christopher Alexander and his book '' A Pattern Language '', instituted a redesign that took advantage of missing wall that once separated the kitchen from the dining room. Today, the former is clearly viewable from the latter, and diners interested in the kitchen and its cooking are often invited in. Alice Waters is involved with Slow Food and the Local Food movement. She also is involved in the Edible Schoolyard Project, where elementary school children grow and prepare their own food in gardens and kitchens on campus. Famous diners at Chez Panisse include the Dalai Lama and President Bill Clinton . With the help of Alice Waters, filmmaker Werner Herzog cooked his shoe at Chez Panisse, eating it at the nearby UC Theater before the premier of the film '' Gates Of Heaven '', an event recorded in the documentary '' Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe ''. Chez Panisse is listed as the #20 restaurant in the world in ''Restaurant'' Magazine 's 2006 List Of The Best Restaurants In The World 1 and #40 on the 2007 list. It was awarded a one-star rating by Michelin in its guide to San Francisco Bay Area dining. 2 RESERVATIONS The restaurant books up before the cafe. A reservation needs to be placed up to a month in advance given this restaurant's renown and popularity, and a credit card must be provided to hold the reservation. There is one menu nightly, Prix Fixe , posted on their website the week before. CULINARY INNOVATIONS
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