The garden that walked out of Chez Panisse

In 1971, Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in a Berkeley bungalow with a modest ambition: a community restaurant where friends could gather and eat. That is the National Endowment for the Humanities version of the origin story, and it comes with a useful detail. Waters was in her mid-twenties, had been a Montessori schoolteacher, and knew the restaurant might not make money at first. The grand theory arrived later. First came the room, the market, and the question of whether dinner could carry an idea.